Douglas Young has very mixed feelings about Bill Maher’s book.
Bill Maher has been a major political humourist for over thirty years. After a number of guest spots on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher ran on Comedy Central and then ABC from 1993 to 2002, and since 2003 he has hosted HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. He has also authored several books, the latest of which is What This Comedian Said Will Shock You, a collection of monologues from his present program, updated and edited.
Maher is a traditional liberal who is consistently libertarian on sex, drugs, and free expression (“I’m never for censorship”). While usually upsetting conservatives with his caustic wit, in recent years he has angered leftists as well. His new book claims “it’s not me who’s changed, it’s the Left, which is now made up of a small contingent who’ve gone mental and a large contingent who refuse to call them out for it. But I will.” In fact, echoing commentator and author Dennis Prager, Maher contends that “wokeism in its current form is not an extension of liberalism, it is more often its opposite,” and he compares “today’s Woke Revolution and Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution” for their mutual censoriousness and historical presentism.
Though Maher’s latest book has too many f-bombs, several sentences ending with a preposition, and at least one split infinitive, the Cornell English graduate’s prose is generally excellent and often quite funny, with each chapter covering a distinct topic. It is especially endearing to find an author not anchored to one political team. Asking, “When did liberals become the Fun Police?,” Democrat Maher sides with Republicans against helicopter parenting, censorship, educational indoctrination, canceling academically gifted programs for “equity,” seeing “racism” everywhere, racially segregated dorms and graduations and national anthems, “diversity quotas,” men competing in women’s sports, banning various Halloween costumes, and condemning folks for “cultural appropriation.” Indeed, Maher asserts that “Not everything is about oppression. Stealing natural resources from Indigenous peoples: yes, that’s exploitation.
But I swear, not one Beach Boy song resulted in any Hawaiian having fewer waves to surf.” Refreshingly, Maher also rebukes Israel-haters, defunding the police, the Covid lockdowns, “hormone blockers and genital surgery” for children, and over-regulation: “China sees a problem, and they fix it. They build a dam, we debate what to rename one.” Ridiculing leftist “Guardians of Gotcha,” Maher boldly notes that, “If Democrats had always policed morality as hard as they do now, they’d be down a lot of heroes: no FDR, no JFK or RFK, no LBJ, no Clinton, no Martin Luther King Jr.” Similarly, he observes that “J.K. Rowling used to be a villain to the Right because she wrote books about witchcraft; now she’s a villain to the Left because she has this crazy belief that there’s more to being a woman than pronouns and lipstick.”
Also rewarding is when Maher acknowledges complexity, like being a football fan who does not deny how dangerous the game is. Likewise, though all for gun control, he recognizes that sexual frustration and loneliness contribute to mass shootings, and he skewers Hollywood’s hypocrisy on guns: “It’s funny, Hollywood is the wokest place on Earth in every other area of social responsibility… But when it comes to the unbridled romanticization of gun violence: crickets. Weird, the only thing we don’t call a ‘trigger’ is the one that actually has a trigger.”
His critique of universities is superb: “Let’s get real about what ‘higher education’ in America really is: a racket that sells you a very expensive ticket to the upper middle class…. And yet, no one knows how to change a tire.” He also chastises the “emotional haemophiliacs” too many colleges produce, observing that:
the people who can’t take a joke now aren’t old ladies in the Bible Belt – they’re Gen Z at elite colleges. Colleges, where comedy goes to die. Kids used to go to college and lose their virginity – now they go and lose their sense of humour… Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry the Cable Guy have all in recent years. Stopped playing colleges. That’s right, a Jew, a Black man, and a redneck walk into a college campus and they all can’t wait to get the hell out.
Nor does Maher ignore today’s “panic porn” news media, Facebook, or Twitter, positing how “We all see it – groups of friends out together at a bar or eating in a restaurant and they’re all staring down at their phones. Imagine how rude that would be if, instead of a phone, you brought a magazine to the table and read it.”
Like comic Jimmy Failla’s recent book, Cancel Culture Dictionary, Maher knows that a “Twitter is Outraged” headline merely means “the same three people,” but the only press outlet he censures by name is Fox News – and with not one example of negligence offered. Still, Maher is the rare liberal with the guts to call out Muslim misogyny and intolerance, as well as declare how “We rewrite science now to fit ideology.” Accordingly, he asks the “body positivity” and “fat shaming” scolds, “Honestly, have you ever seen a fat ninety-year-old? At some point, acceptance becomes enabling.”
Unfortunately, the book’s funniest monologue satirizing American war-mongering is too promiscuously profane to be excerpted, but how touching that Maher humbly dedicates his book “For the writers” and has two pages of acknowledgments, sharing ample credit with his show’s wordsmiths.
Alas, as quick and savvy as Maher is, and though he agrees with conservatives on many more issues, he refuses to recognize how the totalitarian Left poses by far the biggest threat to personal liberty and reason. So he praises European socialism but ignores how badly it has eroded free expression. He envies how giving birth “in Finland costs $60,” yet forgets socialist countries’ way higher tax rates and lower quality healthcare. He hails U.S. federal government “programs that do work, like Medicare and Social Security,” albeit neglects to mention both are broke and we are $34 trillion in debt. Though he defends Western civilization and condemns the Left’s perverting colleges into indoctrination camps, he will not acknowledge that the oppressor v. oppressed mindset is cultural Marxism or that it is leftists who want to destroy Western culture and Israel. Nor will the fanatical atheist confirm the many Judeo-Christian reasons why Western countries are the planet’s most free, democratic, and successful. Nor does his book concede the profound religious differences between enlightened Israel and its too often barbarian enemies. For someone who prides himself as always logical and factual, Maher’s critiques of the Right come off as far more emotional than rational – he just tosses primitive insults based on outmoded stereotypes, such as dismissing Ayn Rand with jokes but no substance. Plus, while he routinely castigates “Republicans,” he rarely labels left-wingers “Democrats.”
Adept at highlighting others’ double standards, he appears blind to most of his own. So he deplores white liberal self-flagellation while ridiculing “white lameness,” “A lame, white f#@&ing loser,” and Caucasians in general in ways he never does with other races. Similarly, he is appalled that most states let juveniles marry – right after he defends rock star David Bowie giving a fifteen-year-old booze and drugs and then taking her virginity. But that is okay because the girl “was a more-than-willing partner, and he was a gentle and knowing lover.” I see. In the same sexual vein, the reader learns it is cool when hip Democrats like JFK and Clinton commit adultery, but disgusting when Donald Trump does it.
Likewise, Republican Presidents “Reagan, W. [Bush II], and Trump all ran up huge debt,” but Democratic Presidents Obama and Biden get a pass for together running up far more debt. Maher furthermore lumps the late talk radio king Rush Limbaugh with a list of supposed right-wing censors who got him fired from his ABC show when Limbaugh defended his rival at the time. Maher repeatedly makes sweeping assumptions with no evidence, as when he states that “The best thing you can do for the Earth is to not have kids,” citing Thomas Malthus’s long-discredited 18th century theory “that population grows exponentially but water and food do not.” However, the last fifty years of capitalist prosperity around the world has enabled us to produce more food than we need, despite major population increases.
Other factual misstatements abound. Maher extols marijuana while ignoring the avalanche of recent studies documenting its harm, and he claims “‘states’ rights’ is always code for taking away rights” despite all the states that have legalized weed, the lottery, same-sex marriage, abortion, and parental choice schools. He further asserts that “the police attract bullies like the priesthood attracts paedophiles” despite most officers being honourable amidst such dangerous work and data revealing a tiny minority of priests to be paedophiles. He also claims career criminal George Floyd died from “murder” by police, forgetting his massive overdose of fentanyl and methamphetamine. And today’s public school teachers apparently do not even get “a living wage.” Really, Bill? Have you missed all their recently reported salaries (and with summers off), especially in big cities where teachers’ unions prevail?
The book reserves a special venom for “Chreeestians,” particularly “Republican Catholic moralizers who pine for a return to the Middle Ages,” about whom the book bizarrely asserts, “Clearly, your side is winning.” Yet he gleefully reveals that the percentage of Americans “who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular,’ has risen from 5 percent in 1972 to 15 percent in 2005 to 32 percent today. You’re welcome.” Maher appears so enraged at Christianity that I suspect he was emotionally scarred by religion growing up, and he at last confesses, “I have nothing against Catholics, except my entire upbringing.”
Perhaps the top reason he abhors Republicans is because he has drunk the whole pitcher of climate change Kool-Aid. But who is he to insist we dramatically downsize our energy consumption, considering his rich lifestyle? Though he admits the hypocrisy of climate warriors flying private and using gobs of energy, he blithely writes that we all would if we could. Huh?
Maher has a severe case of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), actually stating that President Trump does not read, and neither did Reagan nor Bush II. Really? Even after the exhaustively investigated Mueller Report found zero collusion between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and Russia, the comic remains convinced that the Russians somehow got Trump elected. Furthermore, Trump is “the worst president ever,” but Maher cannot be bothered to tell us why.
The author continues to contend that the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot was “a right-wing coup” that involved “killing cops” despite being history’s first “insurrection” without a single gun and the only one where the sole person killed was an unarmed, petite female Trump supporter shot by a Capitol cop. Yet Trump is the terrible threat to democracy: “George W. Bush was not my idea of a good president, but I never worried that he was going to lock up his political opponents.” But while Maher cannot name one political prisoner during the Trump administration, a slew of January 6 protesters has languished in jail for years without trial, and did Trump not leave the White House in 2021? Meanwhile Maher’s party tries to strip Trump’s name from the ballot and imprison him on bogus political charges – in the name of saving democracy. This is because Trump is somehow just too dangerous for never conceding his 2020 defeat. But when did Hillary Clinton concede her 2016 loss?
The book’s only credible observation about Trump deserves attention:
Here’s one way to explain Donald Trump: in an age dominated by the professionally offended, we secretly envy the man who’s able to speak his mind with complete abandon, never concerned about the repercussions and never apologizing for it. Whereas the rest of us really live two lives… Trump’s enduring popularity with his fans is largely because Americans are so sick of politicians who are ‘inauthentic’.
To his credit, Maher bemoans how “The twenty-first century in America has been a political nightmare because the partisan hate has reached a fever pitch.” He also is big enough to allow that “there’s ample crazy on both sides,” and he concurs with comics Kat Timpf and Jimmy Failla’s recent books that it is awful how “Both sides like to cancel people they don’t agree with.” Most commendably, Maher even pleads that “we need to find a way to love and respect each other again.”
So how ironic that Maher continues to be a notable purveyor of political hatred with his new book’s crude, stereotypical insults at half the country while ignoring most of the hate coming from his own party. Though excoriating Trump for supposedly pushing “the wrong lessons of life: be quick to anger, never let go of a grudge, see the worst in people,” is that not describing Maher?
Despite declaring “nobody likes a snob,” this comic’s cultural classism may explain why the Ivy League-educated, rich liberal really prefers big government Democrats. You see, “Americans are dumb.” We are so thick that “we have to figure out how a country can solve any problem if so many of its people are so intractably, astoundingly, mind-numbingly stupid… This country just might be empirically, verifiably too f#@&ing dumb to continue as an ongoing enterprise” since “the median voter is a white person in their fifties who didn’t go to college.” He even favourably quotes Meryl Streep’s character from The Giver: “When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong.” And Maher is pro-democracy? At least he does not hide his rank elitism: “I know, gross – who would date someone who works at McDonald’s?” He especially recoils with disdain at those he sees as less educated, low I.Q., Christian, and Republican. Sighing that “You don’t even need a high school degree” to serve in Congress, he sneers that Colorado Republican “Lauren Boebert didn’t get one, and she sits on the Budget Committee. If she wasn’t in Congress, she could probably get a shift at a truck stop, dusting the jerky.”
Ploughing the same snotty furrow, “A job in Congress is just so much better than racking the weights at CrossFit, which is what [Georgia Republican U.S. Rep.] Marjorie Taylor Greene did before she set her crazy eyes on the prize.” You see, “Republicans try to out-hillbilly each other” since the “vernacular that the Republican base understands” is “nursery rhymes.” Worse, the GOP is actually “the party of Putin” since Republicans like Russia for being so white. Got it?
Acting like a sour, severely constipated version of Thurston Howell III, Maher dismisses red states as “flyover states,” and boasts, “They don’t hate us – they want to be us… We have orchestras, theater districts, world-class shopping and Chef Wolfgang Puck; they have Chef Boyardee.” Just like how “Back in the day, flying was a joy” before it got ruined by having to share planes with all hoi polloi.
But Maher’s most complete contempt is for southerners since we are “the Waffle House states,” supposedly the only ones guilty of slavery, and we now have “voter suppression” despite our spiking voter turnout rates, especially among minorities. Furthermore, he finds a new “art museum in Bentonville, Arkansas” to be absurd because it is “five hundred miles away from the nearest person who would ever want to look at art.” As for Dixie’s elected officials, “I know it’s counterintuitive, but apparently the governor of Florida reads.” Lamenting our partisan divide, he informs us, “In some families, even siblings have stopped speaking to one another, which makes it hard to get laid in the South.”
To be fair, who thinks Maher likes any part of what he berates as “this hateful, spiteful country”? Whatever his prejudices, he is often just mean. For instance, despite having fun when Texas’s junior GOP U.S. senator was enough of a good sport to come on his show, Maher now thanks him by asserting “everyone who’s ever worked with Ted Cruz hates him.” Worse, he blatantly gaybaits that South Carolina’s Republican U.S. senator and confirmed bachelor “Lindsey Graham would volunteer for the anal probe.” Maher may pronounce how “no one can do hate like a right-wing conservative,” but his raw rants sure fooled me.
What This Comedian Said Will Shock You is certainly very readable, thought-provoking, and often humorous, and it is especially endearing when a prominent member of the chattering class has the courage to satirize both sides of our poisoned partisan politics, however unevenly. But as compelling and amusing as Maher’s commentary can be, there is an ugly anger clothed in cartoonish arrogance that makes the comic’s cries for tolerance ring hollow. Perhaps I just take him too seriously. This book can be enjoyable, but understand it does not hold all its targets to the same standard of fairness and decency – not remotely. There are plenty of pearls in this book, but you have to wade through a whole lot of mud to reach them.
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Dr. Douglas Young is a political science professor emeritus who taught government and history for over 33 years and whose essays, poems, and short stories have appeared in a variety of publications in America, Canada, and Europe. His first novel, Deep in the Forest, was published in 2021 and the second, Due South, came out in 2022. His most recent book, This Little Opinion Plus $1.50 Will Buy You a Coke: A Collection of Essays, was published in 2024.
Good review!
It baffles me that so many conservatives speak glowingly of Maher. If he had a personal mantra, it would be “we’re not doing communism right!”
Observe Maher in the future: He’ll be this generation’s version of John Cleese, completely oblivious to the inimical effect of his actions on the cultural commons today.
Most of these types wake up about the time they hit the far side of fifty or sixty; wisdom hits them, sometimes, or at least the cognitive dissonance does. Looking back over the course of their lives, they see what they lost, what the effects of their actions were…
Maher played his role in tearing things down, and cheerleading for the wreckers like Clinton and Obama. He was all for the program, until the actual effects and bills came due.
We’re talking about social accounting, in the thread below this one. Maher is a perfect example of why we need such things, and how failing to account for negative and positive effects in society creates massive distortions.
How much money has Maher made, tearing down social fabric? Will he ever be billed for that? Should he?
Strikes me that a lot of our problems stem from just this sort of “unbillable activity” that never hits back home for the causative actors, until it’s too late.
I’m reminded of that pastor where I once lived, a guy that was getting way too high off his own supply of altruism-induced endorphins; he brought about a massive change to his own community via “doing good” and bringing in homeless shelters and feeding sites… Population of the homeless skyrocketed, a lot of the locals who weren’t parishioners got pissed, the church took a lot of hits, and when I left, there were huge fights about the damage that the homeless he’d attracted were doing to the businesses and quality of life in the neighborhood.
Last time I was through there, you’d be hard-pressed to recognize the nice little community that existed in that area back during the 1990s. The place is wrecked; the church is literally a burnt-out boarded-up ruin, and from what I have heard from a guy I knew who’d lived there from childhood, things really are as bad as they look. He moved his family out, and to this day, loathes that preacher’s guts.
Maher has always reminded me of that same sort of supercilious asshole, the one who wags his fingers at you for “being a bad person”, yet doesn’t even begin to comprehend reality or why you hold the common-sense beliefs that you do. They’re also generally blind to the actual effects of their idiotic ideas and policies. I guarantee you that Maher would have been a major cheerleader for all those liberal “justice-involved” people that committed crimes in Portland and Seattle, as well as advocating for their lenient treatment. His ilk never get past the initial thrill the get, sticking it to the normies that understand cause and effect; they live in their own little delusional dream world, where drug addicts peacefully sleep off their addictions and somehow become upright citizens.
What’s the problem with John Cleese?
There are two grammatically regular cases where English ends sentences with prepositions:
1. When the preposition is actually being used as an adverbial particle that gives a verb a distinct idiomatic meaning: “Sit down and shut up.” “All you hungry children, now eat it up!”
2. When the preposition occurs in a subordinate clause, or in a question, in which its object is displaced to the beginning of the clause, leaving the preposition stranded: “This is what I was looking for.” “Who are you talking about?”
So I’m not convinced that criticisms on that usage are merited.
I know of some ‘traditional’ Democrats who are pleased by Bill Maher’s criticism of the extreme Woke. The same traditional Democrats that acknowledge that Biden is ‘slightly senile’ but would never, ever, vote for Trump.
When people say that politics in the USA is polarised they understate the problem. Rather imagine two camps separated by a deep gorge with no ‘middle ground’ available. Bill Maher’s works may be endearing… but in a polarised world the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy, so don’t look for any assistance from Bill.
Bulldog Drummond – “what is wrong with John Cleese” – nothing much now is wrong with John Cleese now, but in his youth he helped (with ridicule) pull down traditional society.
I am reminded of the conservative historian Paul Johnson – who said that whatever he did now he could not make up for the harm he had done at the New Statesman in the 1960s.
Even Winston Churchill facing the union power that was destroying British industry, had to face the uncomfortable truth that as a young man he had helped create that terrible union power by supporting the 1906 Act.
bobby b – yes Bill Maher helped create the leftist cultural domination he now deplores, and on economic matters he has not really changed his opinions, he wants ever more government spending, taxes and regulations.
Take him to the border of Minnesota and South Dakota and he will say that Minnesota is the better governed State – and that makes Mr Maher the enemy of ordinary people.
If he was really the conservative that some people think he is – he would not have a gig with a major television network.
He wants to conserve the progressivism of his youth. Unfortunately for him, most of the Left have progressed beyond that philosophy and into the next progressivism.
I’ll give John Cleese a pass. He’s actually talented.
Bill Maher on the other hand…🤮
John Cleese does not deserve a “pass” due to talent. The talented can be just as wrong and destructive as anyone else… Actually, more so, when they put that talent to malign use.
The thing that Cleese did was help tear down the already-tattered norms and customs of British life. He mocked things, made others feel that they were worthy of mockery as well, so that many well-known cultural features of British life from his youth were driven into extinction. Now that he’s older, he looks around and wonders “Where did it all go?”
Well, John, let me tell you… When you started pulling out keystones of the public commons, a lot more than the ones you ridiculed came down. Some, I’ll grant, could have used a bit of pulling down and rebuilding, but… You never once paid heed to that which you were destroying, and never did a damn thing to try and replace that which you were helping tear out.
The real problem with people like Cleese and Maher is that they’re incredibly shallow people, facile court jesters that make mockery of things that they really and truly do not understand. They’ve no appreciation or affection for the things they mock; they’re living embodiments of the feckless fence-rippers Chesterton warned against.
Hell, I enjoyed Monty Python when I was a kid; loved watching it on PBS. But, when I went back to it as an adult, and did a bit of juxtaposition between the Britain of then with the Britain of now, and listened to the waily-waily-woe of one Mssr. John Cleese about how it had all changed beyond recognition…? Without a single solitary whiff of self-awareness, as to his role in it all?
You just have to be sad, observing the whole thing. It’s quite like one of your dogs that delighted in tearing apart one of their stuffy toys to get at the squeaker inside, and is then all sad that they don’t have their favorite toy, any more.
John Cleese and his ilk? They got the squeaker, all right. Now they’re sad about what that cost them. Dumbasses.
If you want to know what’s wrong with John Cleese right now, follow him on Twitter. I unfollowed him a few months ago. I don’t remember offhand what he said and don’t want to look it up, but the usual thing that annoyed me is that he despises Trump and his voters, i.e. he’s the usual shallow, smug liberal who thinks regular people are “muppets,” as elite Brits often describe normal people. When you’ve been rich and famous for most of your life, it’s easy to fall into that pattern.
Update, I looked at his Twitter, too much to quote, he really is one of those people.
Don’t know about John Cleese now, but wrt his youth: it is true that he helped pull down traditional society; but it is also true that, if he could do that with ridicule, then it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Somebody was going to do it, eventually.
Snorri Godhi said:
I don’t agree with this line of thought, at all.
It’s odd how people will discount the effect of things said and mocked, saying “It’s just words…”, but when you go out and examine whether or not that’s actually true? T’aint so, McGee.
I was on the periphery of a sad incident in my youth, where there was another young person being made the object of derision and abuse. He was an easy victim, being both socially inept and eager to please, wanting to fit in. It didn’t happen overnight, but his abusers eventually broke him. If you’d known him before, as I did somewhat, and then after the period of the most intense abuse? You’d have seen what amounted to a Golden Retriever sort of person turned into something more akin to a pit bull, a vicious hateful person you wanted nothing to do with. When he finally snapped, it was an ugly affair for all concerned, and he wound up “going too far” and damn near killed one of his abusers. Which he wound up with a criminal sentence for, effectively ruining his life. The guy he crippled wasn’t too much better off.
So, yeah… Words have effect. Cleese made a lot of traditional British social customs and mores look ridiculous, so people abandoned them in job lots… If the cool kids were mocking them, they couldn’t have value, they weren’t worth emulating or keeping. And, so… Chav culture took over, ‘cos nobody was making fun of that, now were they?
It’s often not only a case of mocking something, it’s also a case of what you don’t mock, because… Whatever. Imagine a modern-day Monty Python mocking Islam, or any of the other multi-culti BS features of today’s sensibilities. Can’t do it, can you? Because, if you did something like that, someone would come for you in the night with knives.
There weren’t any such defenders of the things that Monty Python safely mocked, now were there? So… Here we are.
Words lead to actions, and there’s no such thing as “mere words”.
William H. Stoddard
There are two grammatically regular cases where English ends sentences with prepositions:
I’m not sure I understand the distinction between the two points — they all just seem to be phrasal verbs — the bane of all ESL students. However, I certainly don’t think a preposition is a bad word to end a sentence with, and I certainly don’t think it a sin to willfully split your infinitives. You’ll find both in abundance in Shakespeare.
These rules, AFAIK, were just arbitrarily added by rather pompous Victorian grammarians who wanted to pretend that English was a Latinate language rather than one of those grubby germanic ones.
So I entirely agree with you. There is such a thing as bad grammar, but there is also such a thing as perfectly acceptable grammar that the rather pompous look down on. Though such grammarians are far rarer than they were in the past. English grammar is, after all, descriptive not prescriptive. In fact the idea of something like Académie Française for English seems distinctly tyrannical and in opposition to the very idea of “the rights of a free Englishman.”
Fraser:
I don’t think the second case is one of phrasal verbs.
If I elicit the answer “I came with Jane” by asking “Who did you come with?” rather than “With whom did you come?” the “with” is the head of a prepositional phrase: “with Jane,” “with whom,” or “[with] who.” That phrase modifies the verb came/come and thus has adverbial force; but it’s the phrase “with Jane” (etc.) that is bonded to “came” as a whole; there is not a phrasal verb “come with.” What you have there is a stranded preposition.
The “rebels” (hardly rebels – as they had a lot of power even then) said they were rebelling against a generation of “Fascists” or “Nazis”.
It did seem to occur to them that the generation they were viciously mocking and ridiculing were the people who had fought the Nazis – and often carried the scars (both physical and mental) of that war.
Snorri suggests that the old generation allowed themselves, and their society, to be destroyed by mockery and ridicule – and perhaps they did, but to grab the young by the throat and smash them against the nearest wall (which they had physical strength to do – as, unlike their children, they had spent their lives in hard physical work) would have been against their culture.
The older generation (the “Great Generation” – the people who had defeated the Nazis only to find themselves mocked as Nazis) came from a culture of civilised debate – they did not how to react to Saul Alinsky (and so many others – for Mr Alinsky himself is just one example) trained young people who laughed and screeched and danced about.
And now that young generation (generations – for there have been several generations now) of leftist activists have near total power – they control the universities (including the sciences), they control many of the courts (they are the judges), they control the civil service and the independent agencies, and, yes, they control Big Business, the vast Corporations, as well.
And, as we now see, the new masters are perfectly happy to use physical force.
If you are a serious problem for them (for the leftist activists who now control most institutions) you will find the now paramilitary FBI or the ATF smashing down your door in the early hours of the morning – and if you make a move to defend yourself and your family (perhaps not even knowing who these attackers are – as you wake up to screams and to men waving rifles about) you will be shot dead.
Perhaps i should clarify WHY i blamed ‘traditional British society’ for letting itself get ridiculed by John Cleese et al.
I did not mean that ‘they’ should have censored Monty Python; I meant that they should have laughed it off. And let’s admit it, it was funny; and it was a double-edged sword. (The same could be said of the Italian movie, Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto.)
Witness how the Dead Parrot skit was brilliantly used by the Tories to ridicule the EU; or pretty much anything about the People’s Front of Judea.
Snorri – you have a point, a strong society, a society that understood its own fundamental principles, would not have been undermined so easily.
This is where I disagree with the late F.A. Hayek – who argued (from his interpretation of certain 18th century Scottish thinkers – whether his interpretation of them was correct or not is another debate) that people did not need to understand basic principles – things just evolved (socially evolved) without any need for people to understand even the basics of the culture.
The late F.A. Hayek could not have been more WRONG – as, if people do not understand the “whys” of their culture, the basics of it (not every detail – but the fundamental principles) they will not be able to argue for it, or really resist any attack upon it.
Someone who says they support X or believe in X – but when asked WHY can only say “that is the way we do things here” (or some such) does not really believe in the thing at all, and will collapse when mocked or otherwise attacked.
The decline of Western society (and Western cultural institutions) did not really start in the 1960s – it just became obvious then. It really started a long (a very long) time before the 1960s – so what was left by the 1960s was a hollow shell, based on little more than habit – a culture (society) easily destroyed, because it was long undermined, long absent an understanding of the reasons behind its customs, so lacking true beliefs.
It had not always been so – once many Western people had been able to explain WHY they supported the customs and institutions, not explain every detail, but explain the basics, the fundamentals.
What had been clear to the supporters of liberty and civilisation of, say, John Bright’s generation – had been forgotten (the “whys” were not passed on) by most people long before the 1960s.
Paul Marks said:
I very much want to agree with you, but I would submit that a large part of the problem is that there was never a point in history where people consciously “understood” the whys and wherefores of their civilization or even their culture.
I’d about guarantee you that were we to take a time machine and go back to ask questions, what we’d find is that there was about as much understanding of the “why” of things at any point you’d choose to examine, as there is today. Which is, effectively, zero.
Nobody thinks about this crap, nobody notices it. Which is a point that I’ve harped on continually, but seemingly without people really paying attention to the implications of it all.
We do not teach anyone much of anything about “how it works”; we don’t even teach them to go out and examine things for themselves, to try and figure out why people are doing what they do. The vast majority of our managers and leaders all think that things happen because they write a memo, or send an email; they never leave their offices to go out into the actual environment and see what the hell is going on, what is motivating people to do what they’re doing.
Because we don’t teach people to think in these terms, damn near all of our “social initiatives” fail, because nobody really bothers to examine or analyze what the actual environment is telling people to do, what behaviors are rewarded, what are punished, and what perverse incentives there are in the real world which militate against these grand “initiatives”.
If you sit down and examine the majority of these things, you start to realize that the real problem is that the people coming up with 99.9% of this BS are completely at a loss as to how things actually work. “We must increase test scores in the schools!!!”, and then they set these metrics that have the teachers do nothing but focus on raising the test scores by gaming the system and teaching the test… End result? Bored kids with no academic skills or interests; the love of learning has been beaten out of them by rote repetition of the wrong sort. So, having done that, without ever going out and trying to figure out what was going on in the first place to create the issue, they put in place a bunch of “fixes” that did anything but, and which actually incentivized lying by the teachers and administrators, as well as conditioning the kids to actually hate school…
It isn’t that these things were somehow “forgotten”. They were never known in the first damn place, because nobody ever saw fit to try and study them, or give them the least value.
I guarantee you that were you to sit down 90% of the people we have “running things” today, and give them a practical test of “how to get something done”, the vast majority would be staring at you like a cow in a calculus class… Because they really, truly do not understand how things work. At. All.
This isn’t new, either… The elites in Rome destroyed the yeomanry in the countryside by keeping them continually called up for the legions, which led to the destruction of the Roman Republic’s social fabric, and its replacement with that which was the Imperial system. Same thing is going on today, in different ways, but for the same damn cause: These issues are like water to a fish, the sort of thing that nobody considers or thinks about, at all. It’s not studied because nobody pays attention to it in the first place.
Kirk – I respectfully disagree.
I hold that there was a time when ordinary people understood basic principles (certainly not every detail – but the basics) of society.
For example, Alfred Roberts (the father of Margaret Thatcher – and an ordinary shop keeper and local councillor) used to give talks (good talks) on these subjects as recently as the 1930s – and Grantham was a typical town, there were people like Alfred Roberts in most towns- although, I admit, far fewer (even in the 1930s) than there had once been.
In the United States most people in the 19th century understood basic things – for example that money should be a real commodity (not the whims of government and the bankers) and that Income Tax meant the intrusion of government into every once private area of your life.
President Grant was not some sort of freak – he was very much “everyman”, he restored gold money and got rid of the Federal Income Tax because most people in the 1870s understood WHY it was necessary to do these things.
Just as there were many books in the 19th century (and centuries before) books written, by and for ordinary people, explaining why such things as the family (married mother and father and children – and the extended family of their relatives) and voluntary associations (adult fraternities) were vital in a healthy society.
The average person did once know the basics – they really did.
The question is – how was this knowledge lost?
And how can it be regained?
Saying it “evolved” (the Hayek dodge) is not helpful – people do things because they choose to to do them (humans are free will agents – not mindless robots as Hayek seems to have assumed), and they choose to do things, and not to do other things, because they are convinced by evidence and argument – YES people also have savage emotions, but they can learn (they must learn – if civilisation is to survive) to use their reason to control their passions.
“Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions” and “You can not get an ought from an is” (that this-is-morally-wrong-so-I-ought-not-to-it”, which is how a sane person operates, should be rejected) are two of the most evil (yes evil) statements ever written by a philosopher. They are most certainly NOT the “Scottish Enlightenment” – they are the rejection, the savage and total rejection, of everything it stood for – and the rejection of everything that every basic pro liberty constitutional document (including the Great Charter of 1215 and the American Bill of Rights of 1791) stands for.
David Hume was wrong – horribly wrong (the two statements I cite above can only lead to the destruction of civilisation – to madness and evil), Aristotle, who presented humans as beings – as PEOPLE who can use reason to control their passions and to find moral truth, was correct.
Philosophy, including political philosophy, starts from what used to be called “the nature of man” – David Hume and fashionable philosophy (including the pet philosopher of the World Economic Forum) de facto deny that human beings, PEOPLE (free will moral agents), even exist – they deny the human soul (in the Aristotelian sense) the “I” – it is rather too mild to say “they are in error” although they are in error.
Just a few days ago I ran across this video about the demise of Received Pronunciation, a side effect of the sort of cultural shift brought about by the likes of Cleese .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIAEqsSOtwM
Alan K. Henderson – the cultural norms that started to openly fall apart in the 1960s, had been undermined for a very long time indeed before the 1960s, undermined by the failure to pass on cultural knowledge (the reasons why we did some things and did not do other things).
Most people no longer knew WHY the cultural practices were important – there had been a time when most people did know the arguments for the basics (the fundamentals), but over time fewer and fewer people understood these things
By the 1950s we, in the Western world, really were living in a Hayek style culture where people followed certain practices without knowing the reasons for what they did and did not do – and (of course) such a society is incredibly flimsy, it will collapse as soon as it comes under serious attack – even attack by ridicule and mockery.
If a child asks their parent (or other person in a position of authority) “why do we do this?” or “why do we not do that?” and the only answer is “because we do that here” or “because I say so” the death warrant for that society has already been written.
People also get “shell shocked” by events – their reason (including their moral reason – if it is not trained) may break down and their emotions-passions (such as a desperate desire for “help” even if it is not really help at all) may take over.
For example, if the American government had in 1928 announced it was going to steal all privately owned monetary gold and violate all contracts, public and private, there would have been a Revolution.
But after years of terrible suffering in the Great Depression (itself caused by the Benjamin Strong New York Federal Reserve Credit Money expansion of the late 1920s – and by the insane reaction to the inevitable crash of 1929, when, for the first time in American history, Real Wages were not allowed to adjust to a Credit Money crash – thus meaning mass UNEMPLOYMENT for year-after-year) most people were prepared to accept what they would not have been prepared to accept before.
Suffering is a weapon – it can be used to undermine reason (including moral reason) – and the international establishment are counting on terrible suffering to break down resistance (mental resistance) to their plans for tyranny.
Once people stop reasoning, once they are acting on their emotions (their passions) they are already mentally slaves – and will become political slaves of some tyrant or group tyranny.
The Classical philosophers understood this very well – and so do, alas, the modern international establishment (the difference being that the Classical philosophers fought against it, and the modern international establishment welcome it – they encourage it, it is one of their main weapons).
This bloke is well on the way to being a Conservative – he just can’t accept the truth. Does not compute…
Paul Marks said:
Paul, with respect… I don’t think you’re at all correct about “these things” being well-understood and widely known “in the past”. Because, the evidence is pretty damn clear that they weren’t.
You’re talking about the sort of things that Benjamin Franklin published in his various almanacs, the things written about by Horatio Alger, or any of the usual lot of “self-help” types like Balthasar Gracian down the millennia.
The sort of thing that I’m talking about isn’t the idealized “things ought to work like this”, but the actual minutiae of the various Skinner Boxes we march through in succession, each and every day… The ones nobody notices, because they’re so ubiquitous and so totally unquestioned.
I’ve railed on this issue before, but apparently to no avail. The reality is that there are thousands of little Skinner Boxes out in the real world, set up by the environment and “the authorities” with all their fruitless attempts to modify behavior that don’t actually work… These are things that nobody pays attention to, because they just… Are. You navigate them, every single waking hour of the day, not realizing the impact, or what they’re teaching you about the environment you live in.
You have to be aware of it all, before you start taking notice of it. Consider the local traffic patterns, for example: What are the things that contribute to that intersection having as many accidents as it does? What are the behavioral cues implicit in the surrounding environment that the drivers are responding to, encouraging them to do stupid things like pull out in front of oncoming traffic? What effects have there actually been, from the road department’s efforts?
There’s an intersection not too far from where I live that has had incessant “accidents” since I was a kid in high school. It’s down to crappy design, forced on it by the terrain, but a bigger part of the problem is that the highway department is staffed by people that look, but who are unable to actually observe. They keep adding and changing the signs, doing this, doing that… And, none of it works. Eventually, they’ll get enough dead bodies there that they’ll decide to totally redesign that part of the road, but until then…? Nothing works.
What they’ve missed, I fear, is that all the signage is massively confusing to anyone who doesn’t live around here, and who doesn’t “know” that intersection well enough not to take things for granted. The way it’s set up, it actually encourages people to take the risk of popping out in front of oncoming traffic, because you can easily fool yourself into thinking that you’ve got a good view of that, when you really don’t. So, people take the risk, get t-boned, and it’s a fairly regular thing.
Very counter-intuitively, I’d strongly suggest that a fix would be to put up a wall or something such that you’d lose that imperfect view of traffic entirely, and thus not take the risk of popping out in front of someone. You have to look at the signals that the environment is actually sending the person in the situation, and if those signals are not clear…? They’ll do what you don’t want them doing.
Nobody evaluates things out in the real world in terms of “Yeah, OK… We want them doing this, and we don’t want them doing that… So, why are they still doing what we don’t want, and not doing what we need them to?”
The usual response is to write still another memo, or preach a homily about it, or whatever. The reality is, there are a dozen damn things out in the environment that are telling the people “Yeah, this thing they say they don’t want you doing? It’s got all these great things going for it, and you’ll have fun…”, while that other thing? The environment is actually actively dissuading people from doing it, because “not fun” and “no visible benefit, just some old tosser telling me it’s good that I’m doing it…”
You want to understand why the fertility rates are so damn low, these days? Go out and look at each and every environmental cue the fertile are getting, from what cars are affordable, how expensive it is to raise kids, and how much of a pain-in-the-ass it is for them to do it.
It’s like a family I know… Mom and Dad and all the aunts and uncles are down on the one daughter to give them more grandchildren, but… What are they actually doing to make it easier, besides give the daughter a ration of crap about it all? Do they help with the baby, in any real way? Nope. Do they offer any financial help? Nope; vacations are way more important.
You want grandchildren, folks, you’d better be modifying the environment to encourage the parents to actually, y’know… Have them.
This is the sort of thing I’m talking about when I say that the powers-that-be don’t know what they’re doing, or how to make things happen in society. They pronounce from on high, the way Margaret Thatcher’s father did, but they never notice the thousands of little things in daily life that discouraged people from taking up their values. This stuff is precisely why none of that BS ever worked, and why “nobody remembers it”. The fact was, it didn’t address the realities of things, and the people that it was meant to “influence” were hearing the words and seeing the fact that those things being talked about weren’t based in reality. I mean, OK… You want people to work hard and be responsible? Sure, great idea: Why are you rewarding the irresponsible with welfare and more money for having out-of-wedlock children? What’s the incentive structure, there? What behavior is the environment you’ve created actually encouraging?
Pious homilies and good intentions ain’t nowhere near enough. You have to go dig into why people are making the choices they are, and then try to work out what the behavioral cues are.
It’s the same level of idiocy present in the US military’s recruiting efforts, these days. Gee, all these white guys who used to flock to the colors ain’t showing up, any more… Wonder why? Oh, yeah… We’re “emphasizing opportunities for the oppressed”, and calling them racists that don’t belong. Also, we’ve got a fifty-year history of prioritizing promotions for non-whites, at the expense of whites, so… Yeah, that’s finally caught up with us, and we’re seeing the results of father and grandfathers telling their sons not to bother with a military career, ‘cos they’ll never be promoted on their own merits, just judged and held back because of something some other guy with about their skin tone did a couple of centuries ago…
This is why things are breaking down. The morons in charge have no more idea of how things really work than your average cow understands about the chutes in the slaughterhouse.