An advertisement in a recent edition of the British Medical Journal caught my eye. It was for a Senior Adviser, Access, placed by the International Planned Parenthood Federation, one of those many organisations that live and breathe and take their being in the large no man's land between government and charity.

Like every applicant for every job these days, the applicant "will be an exceptional leader and strategist" and will "have excellent interpersonal skills" - that is to say, he will at the very least be plausible and manipulative. The advertisement goes on to say that "CVs will not be accepted", presumably on the grounds that past performance is no guide to future performance.

None of this startled me. It was the beginning of the final paragraph that did so, the first sentence being the only one in the whole advertisement to be in heavy type:

Applications are particularly welcome from candidates openly living with AIDS/HIV.

The next sentence read:

IPPF is committed to equal opportunities and cultural diversity.

It would, of course, take an entire book to uncover all the layers of deceit, moral cowardice and double or multiple standards contained in these words. I can make only a beginning.

What is a person "openly living with HIV/AIDS?" Does it mean someone not only infected with HIV or suffering from AIDS, but trumpeting it abroad? Or can it in include someone living with a person of that description, and trumpeting it abroad?

Let us assume that the first of these meanings is the one that is meant. There is surely something very peculiar about the particular welcome to be given by the IPPF to such people, not because one wishes such people any harm, but because one does not see anything particularly virtuous or worthy of particular welcome in their affliction. Is it the openness that is particularly welcomed, or the HIV/AIDS, or the combination of the two? That is to say, if a person kept the fact that he had HIV/AIDS to himself, would he not be a particularly welcome applicant?

You might remember that there was a time within living memory when a lot of effort went into persuading people that AIDS should be regarded as just another illness, albeit one with its own characteristics, clinical and epidemiological - which, indeed, it must have had in order to be a recognisably different illness in the first place. As it happens, this was a point of view that accorded completely with my own from the very first, and I therefore had no difficulty accepting it.

So why, if AIDS is just another illness, do we never see an advertisement particularly welcoming applicants living with syphilis/general paralysis of the insane, or cancer/secondaries, or hepatitis C/hepatoma, or any number of others that one could think of?

The fact is that the advertisement demands doublethink of us: that we accept simultaneously that AIDS is just one disease among others on the one hand, and that it is completely and categorically different on the other. We are expected, in most cases rightly, to perform this mental operation without even noticing it. And we do so, because we are accustomed to doing so.

Let us now turn briefly to the weasel word "particularly", or "particularly welcome". What does it actually mean? How particular is the "particular" of particularly welcome? What effect on the final choice of candidate for the job will the particular welcome have? If it has none, why include it in the advertisement? In what sense, then, is the welcome particular? Extra tea and biscuits?

On the other hand, if it has some actual effect on the choice, in what sense can the IPPF then claim to be an equal opportunity employer? That all opportunities are equal, but some are more equal than others?

Whatever sense (not much, outside of apartheid states) can be given to the term "Equal opportunity employer", it surely cannot mean the giving of what amounts to sheltered employment to people with certain favoured or designated diseases. And this is so even if the only other meaning of the term is the random selection of employee from the list of candidates, if not from the electoral roll or from the population of the entire world.

I will pass over in dignified silence the juxtaposition of people living openly with HIV/AIDS with the commitment to cultural diversity. For even if HIV/AIDS is contracted largely through activities that are associated with subcultures, I doubt that this is what is meant by encouraging cultural diversity.

Let us briefly consider cultural diversity from another angle. What it means in this context, I think, is "Anyone from anywhere, provided that he or she accepts our ideas". It cannot really mean anything else, because the successful candidate is supposed to have, in addition to the other qualities I have mentioned, "a sound understanding of sexual and reproductive health and rights, research and evidence based programmes".

I am no anthropologist, but I do not think it is necessary to be one to know that "sexual and reproductive rights" (of which the IPPF calls itself "a leading advocate") are not, and never have been, human universals, recognised in all times and all places by all cultures. Let us suppose that we uttered the phrase "sexual and reproductive rights" to David Hume (let alone Genghis Khan): what would it mean to him?

This is not to say that I am against such rights: only to point out that you cannot advocate them and fail to discriminate against people, quite likely of another culture, who do not recognise them.

So the advertisement placed in the BMJ by the IPPF is a typical modern utterance of a certain kind: one that wishes to convey virtue without the difficult work of actually being virtuous. It has the moral seriousness of Messrs Podsnap and Veneering in Our Mutual Friend. It would be just as amusing as that fiction, if it were not rather a symptom of a deep malaise in our culture: the corruption of language.

First posted at The Social Affairs Unit.

Naively, no doubt, I had rather supposed that babies and bars didn't mix. I was wrong: In Brooklyn, it seems, they do. In Park Slope, where pricey strollers dominate the streets, they can also be found in drinking establishments. One, Union Hall, caused an uproar when it banned strollers from the premises in 2008. Nearby Double Windsor has split the baby, as it were, with its rule: No babies in the bar after 5 p.m.

Of course, I can imagine what the defenders of taking babies into bars might say. What is your evidence that bars are bad for babies? Has there ever been a controlled study of the question published in the New England Journal? Is it not possible, even, that bars are good for babies' cognitive development - all that social interaction and linguistic stimulation, etc.?

The argument might continue: Bored mothers are bad for babies, and bars keep boredom at bay. Babies are too young to remember any bad language they might hear or recall any unseemly scenes they might witness. Besides, the onus of proof is on those who want to forbid, not on those who want to permit.

This is sophistical, of course. The real reason that people take babies to bars is that they do not want to admit that the existence of their offspring imposes inescapable obligations on them, and that a baby closes off some of their options. They cannot, or at least ought not to, be footloose and fancy free any more. They are not Peter Pan: They have to grow up.

But it is not only in the bars of Brooklyn that babies and young children are inappropriately to be found. An air traffic controller recently gave his young son and daughter a go at controlling the air traffic at JFK.

Splendid as this might be from the point of view of the child's brain development and hand-to-eye coordination, it is not altogether reassuring for passengers, even though this incident passed without mishap. I remember a Russian pilot who gave the control of his airliner to his son and it crashed, killing all aboard: Though it must be admitted by anyone who has flown an Aeroflot internal flight, especially in the good old days, that it didn't take a child at the controls to make disaster likely.

Some art galleries now cater to children, not in the reasonable and welcome sense of setting aside a special room for them, but by giving them puzzles and toys to play with directly under a work of art, allegedly connected in some way with that work of art.

Now everyone must be in favor of inducting children into the marvels of civilization, but surely not at the cost of turning art galleries into playgrounds, or giving them manuscripts from, say, the Pierpont Morgan Library to color in. There is a time and a place for everything, and it isn't necessarily here and now.

In fact, we are a little confused about the place we should give children and the control we should exercise over them. Sometimes we treat them as if they were already fully adult, capable of exercising proper choice over everything. I often see mothers solicitously asking their 3-year-olds what they would like to eat, which no doubt makes for a quiet life in the short-term, but in the long establishes a childish pattern of eating. Mothers of old who made their children eat their hated greens were not just sadists.

At other times, we treat the world as if it were nothing but a vast trap waiting to ensnare children. Roman legionaries seemed ill-equipped for battle by comparison with modern children going for a bike-ride.

So we veer - I almost said drunkenly - between neglect and overindulgence. We are unsure whether babies are adults or adults are babies. Especially in Brooklyn.

Originally published in the NY Daily News.

The ideas behind neurocriminology are not entirely new. Johann Lavater (1741-1801), a Swiss pastor, thought that you could tell criminality from a man’s face; Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a German anatomist, from the bumps in his skull. Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), an Italian doctor and criminologist, thought the same of a variety of physical stigmata; Karl Pearson (1857-1936), a British mathematician and militant socialist, thought that it was all in the genes, as did H. J. Eysenck (1916-1997), the British psychologist.

But let us leave aside the unlikelihood of neurocriminology shedding much light on why the rate of indictable crime in Britain rose nearly 4,000 per cent between 1900 and 1997, or why the homicidal attack rate should have increased by at least 1,000 per cent since 1960: what are the practical conclusions that are likely to be drawn from neurocriminology?

Some of them are very nasty indeed. They include sterilisation (once carried out by eugenicists); other surgical operations against people’s will; and an indefinite extension of state interference in people’s lives in the name of crime prevention.

Nor does neurocriminology, in logic, suggest merciful treatment of murderers who kill because of defective frontal lobes. Until such time as the defect can be repaired (which is likely to be never), it suggests extermination rather than mercy as the logical response.

The association between a condition of the brain and crime is never likely to be more than statistical at best. Indeed, a more definite relationship is virtually impossible. This means that there can be no one-to-one correspondence between the state of a person’s brain and his social or antisocial conduct. And this in turn means that there is a severe problem with false positives and false negatives.

Murder, even now, is a rare event, such that if a person with a certain kind of brain condition were a hundred times more likely than someone without it to commit a murder, he is still unlikely ever to kill. Thus, under neurocriminology’s direction, large numbers of people would be subjected to onerous and intrusive interventions without benefit to themselves or to society — only to the people administering the intervention. And, of course, many people who go on to commit murder would be missed by it in any case.

When one considers the difficulties in the comparatively straightforward task of screening for breast cancer, which has caused many women to undergo procedures that have done them no good, the scale of the problem for neurocriminology becomes obvious.

Of course, this would not deter incipient totalitarians, such as our politicians. Indeed, neurocriminology will be music to their ears.

It will also be music to the ears of criminals, actual and potential, whose sense of personal responsibility it will further erode. “It wasn’t me,” will be the cry, “it was my brain.” Such understanding will not be extended to the police, the jury or the sentencing judge.

Paradoxically, then, neurocriminology will serve to increase the very criminal mindset that it aims and claims to detect and prevent.

First published in The Times.

In some ways, things have never been better for Europe. When my father was born, in 1909, his life expectancy was 49; if he had been born today, his life expectancy would be approaching 80. The increase in wealth and standard of living has been startling. In 1960, Sicilian peasants still slept with their farm animals, and my working-class patients remembered sharing lavatories with other households. In France, the years in which it lost its colonial empire are known as les trente glorieuses, the glorious thirty, when the French economy grew so fast that absolute poverty was eliminated and the country obtained the best infrastructure in the world. Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder after the war really was a wonder, transforming a country that U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. wanted to keep forever in a state of rural pre-industrialization into the largest exporter of manufactured goods in the world.

Yet for all this success, there is a pervasive sense of doom. Prosperous and long-lived as never before, Europeans look into the future with fear, as if they have a secret sickness that has not yet made itself manifest by obvious symptoms but is nevertheless eating away in their vital parts. They are aware that, in Chinese parlance, the mandate of heaven has been withdrawn from them, and that in losing that, they have lost everything. All that is left is to preserve their remaining privileges as best they can; après nous, as a mistress of Louis XV is said to have remarked, le deluge.

The secularization of Europe is hardly a secret. Religion’s long, melancholy, withdrawing roar, as Matthew Arnold put it, is a roar no longer, and hardly even a murmur. In France, the oldest daughter of the Church, fewer than 5 percent of the population attend Mass regularly. The English national church has long been an object of derision, and the current Archbishop of Canterbury succeeds in uniting the substance and appearance of foolishness and unworldliness not with sanctity, but with sanctimony. In Wales, where nonconformist Christianity was the dominant cultural influence, most of the chapels have been converted into residences by interior decorators. Vast outpourings of pietistic writings molder on the shelves of secondhand booksellers, which themselves are closing down daily. In the Netherlands, some elements of the religious pillarization of the state remain: state-funded television channels are still allotted to Protestants and Catholics respectively. But while the shell exists, the substance is gone.

Perhaps it is Ireland that offers the most startling example of secularization because it was a late starter. Late starters, however, are often apt pupils; they catch up fast and even surpass their mentors. When I first went to Ireland, the priest was a god among men; people stood aside to let him pass. No respectable family did not count a nun among its members. As for the Archbishop of Dublin, his word was law; the politicians might propose, but he disposed.

In the historical bat of an eyelid, all that has gone, beyond any hope (or fear) of restoration. It would hardly be too much to say that the Church is now reviled in Ireland. I suspect that if you performed a word-association test using the word “priest,” it would more often than not evoke a response of “pedophile,” “child abuser,” or (at best) “hypocrite.”

The extremely low birth-rates in Spain and Italy, the lowest recorded in any modern society, suggest that the populations of these traditionally Catholic countries do not pay much attention to the teachings of their Church. Recently in Belgium, I saw an old convent where the remaining nuns were all in their eighties and would never be replaced. When they die, their convent will presumably be turned into luxury apartments for unwed professional couples with no children.

God is dead in Europe, and I do not see much chance of revival except in the wake of catastrophe. Not quite everything has been lost of the religious attitude, however. Individuals still think of themselves as being of unique importance, but without the countervailing humility of considering themselves as having duty toward the author of their being, a being inconceivably larger than themselves. Far from inducing a more modest conception of man, the loss of religious belief has inflamed his self-importance enormously.

Continue reading here.

Love thy ego as thyself. —Leonard Peikoff

My copy of The Concept of Benevolence by T. A. Roberts, in the series New Studies in Practical Philosophy, was deaccessioned from a university library. The librarian took advantage of the fact that it had not been borrowed since October 17, 1977, only four years after its publication, to disembarrass his institution of yet another book so uselessly cluttering up the library shelves. It was carefully endorsed with ugly withdrawal stamps to reduce its resale value to an absolute minimum. Perhaps the librarian was a follower of Ayn Rand, the apostle of selfishness, who did not want youth corrupted by stray thoughts of altruism. Going from the loan history of the book (and from my casual observations of British youth), there was never much danger of this, but it is always better to be safe than sorry and therefore to treat selfishness as if it were an endangered species.

Ayn Rand was never, in fact, much appreciated or very influential in Europe; at the height of her fame in America, where her books sold by the million, her name was not one to conjure with on the other side of the Atlantic. She was much read by middle-class young Indians of the time, however, as well as by Americans, and she is now coming back into fashion globally. I confess that enthusiasm for her is to me utterly mysterious, and the excellent new biography by Ann C. Heller does not clear up the mystery but, rather, deepens it.[1] Able and gifted people (not the least of them Alan Greenspan) were captivated both by her writings and her person, but the picture of Rand that emerges from Ms. Heller’s book is all the more damning because the biographer is obviously fair-minded and, indeed, something of an admirer of her subject.

Clearly, Rand was a most remarkable person, admirer and detractor must agree. She was born in St. Petersburg in 1905 into a middle-class Jewish family that hovered uncertainly between prosperity and persecution, but that nevertheless managed to penetrate into the higher echelons of Russian society. (Vladimir Nabokov’s sister was a childhood friend of Rand’s.) The Bolshevik Revolution deprived the family of everything. They fled to the Crimea in the hope that the advancing White armies would restore their fortunes, but, with the final victory of the Reds, they returned home, to live—like everyone else—in sordid and oppressed penury. At the age of twenty-one, Rand (alone of her immediate family) managed to escape to America.

There, with a determination truly admirable and heroic, she transformed herself into a writer. Although she wrote in English, and her two most famous books are American in subject matter and location, she remained deeply Russian in outlook and intellectual style to the end of her days. America could take Rand out of Russia, but not Russia out of Rand. Her work properly belongs to the history of Russian, not American, literature—and nineteenth-century Russian literature at that.

Rand’s virtues were as follows: she was highly intelligent; she was brave and uncompromising in defense of her ideas; she had a kind of iron integrity; and, though a fierce defender of capitalism, she was by no means avid for money herself. The propagation of truth as she saw it was far more important to her than her own material ease. Her vices, of course, were the mirror-image of her virtues, but, in my opinion, the mirror was a magnifying one. Her intelligence was narrow rather than broad. Though in theory a defender of freedom of thought and action, she was dogmatic, inflexible, and intolerant, not only in opinion but in behavior, and it led her to personal cruelty. In the name of her ideas, she was prepared to be deeply unpleasant. She hardened her ideas into ideology. Her integrity led to a lack of self-criticism; she frequently wrote twenty thousand words where one would do.

Rand believed all people to be possessed of equal rights, but she found relations of equality with others insupportable. Though she could be charming, it was not something she could keep up for long. She was deeply ungrateful to those who had helped her and many of her friendships ended in acrimony. Her biographer tells us that she sometimes told jokes, but, in the absence of any supportive evidence, I treat reports of her sense of humor much as I treat reports of sightings of the Loch Ness monster: apocryphal at best.

A passionate hater of religion, Rand founded a cult around her own person, complete with rituals of excommunication; a passionate believer in rationality and logic, she was incapable of seeing the contradictions in her own work. She was a rationalist who was not entirely rational; she could not distinguish between rationalism and rationality. Of narrow aesthetic sympathies, she laid down the law in matters of artistic judgment like a panjandrum; a believer in honesty, she was adept at self-deception and special pleading. I have rarely read a biography of a writer I should have cared so little to meet.

Continue reading here.

Listen here.

A Canadian university recently asked me to deliver its annual John Kenneth Galbraith Lecture, named for the economist who for much of my youth was the most famous member of his profession in the world. His books sold by the million and were available everywhere in cheap paperback editions; titles such as American Capitalism and The Affluent Society were known to almost all educated people. A teacher at Princeton, Cambridge, and Harvard, he was the editor for a time of Fortune and the American ambassador to India. He was also the first economist to be widely known on television, not least through his sparring with William F. Buckley, Jr. (a close personal friend). His omnipresence as the voice of economics was both the result and the cause of a whole climate of opinion.

As is commonly the way, a reaction set in. Galbraith, who lived from 1908 to 2006, grew not only old, but old hat. His Keynesianism appeared outmoded in an era of unprecedented growth and prosperity apparently brought about by adherence to economic theories very different from his. No one believed any longer that demand management—the governmental regulation and, if necessary, provision of the demand for goods and services within the whole economy—was the way to combine prosperity with social justice. Rather, the market’s invisible hand and unconscious wisdom would lead us into the sunny uplands of expanding wealth and diminishing poverty.

But recently, there has been a reaction to the reaction. No sooner had Lehman Brothers collapsed than the printing presses started to roll out copies of Galbraith’s book on the debacle of 1929, The Great Crash. In fact, it couldn’t be printed fast enough, paperback books being affordable even in times of crisis. Galbraith was the hero of a recent PBS documentary extolling the value of big government. And demand management à la Galbraith is now back with a vengeance, of course. If the improvidently indebted but now impecunious private citizen won’t spend and thereby expand economic activity, the improvidently indebted but infinitely expandable government will do it for him.

Continue reading here.

A 460-page report by Britain’s official, Orwellian-sounding “National Equality Panel” reveals that economic inequality in Britain has increased despite the intense social engineering of the last decade that was ostensibly designed to reduce it. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is an unreconstructed egalitarian (though not to the extent of forgoing his own income and pension provisions, which the law permits him to do), reacted to the report by saying that “we have much farther to go.” We shall always have much farther to go, presumably, until we somehow achieve perfect equality. An interventionist politician’s work is never done.

The report, however, contains interesting information, suggesting a far more subtle approach to the question of wealth and poverty than Brown’s. For example, it listed the average net household wealth in Britain by religious affiliation. The figures were as follows (I convert into American dollars):

Muslim: $68,000

None: $224,000

Hindu: $337,000

Christian: $361,000

Sikh: $371,000

Jewish: $684,000

These figures conclusively demonstrate what statist social reformers have long sought to deny: that Britain, despite its obvious and pervasive class structure, has long been a very open society (though, thanks to those social reformers, it is becoming increasingly sclerotic and bureaucratically maladministered, thus making social mobility more difficult). The figures show that neither concentration of wealth nor prejudice—provided that they are not enforced by law or absolutely monolithic and universal, which was never the case in Britain—can prevent the ascent of a social group if it has a mind to ascend.

Most Jews in Britain are the descendants of East European immigrants about 120 years ago who were both extremely poor and despised by the majority of the local population. (Another important group is the descendants of refugees from Nazi Germany who arrived in Britain with nothing but their human capital.) The Jews’ ascent to relative wealth and social prominence started immediately, notwithstanding the prejudice against them, at a time when the concentration of wealth in a few hands was much greater than it is now. Nor, of course, did they become rich at anyone else’s expense: no one had to grow poorer (except relative to them) that they might become richer. They created their own wealth, and wealth for others; they were the beneficiaries of an open society.

The Sikhs arrived en masse some 60 or 70 years after the Jews. For the most part, they, too, arrived with little or nothing. Prejudice against them existed, though perhaps was less severe than that against the Jews, for by then such prejudices had ceased to be respectable. They are now the second-richest religious group in the country, and provided the social engineers do not succeed in stifling the initiative of people altogether, it seems to me likely that in another 30 years or so they will equal the Jews in both wealth and social prominence.

The position of the Muslims is interesting because those of Pakistani origin mostly arrived at the same time as the Sikhs. But even among the Muslims, there are important disparities. Those of Pakistani origin have an average net household worth of $157,000, while those of Bangladeshi origin have an average net household worth of $24,000. The Bangladeshis arrived later than the Pakistanis, so perhaps the figures are not directly comparable, but still they suggest that deep differences are at work.

Overall, the figures demonstrate that, in an open society, cultural attitudes and characteristics are of enormous importance with regard to a group’s prospects in that society. Of course, it is no easy matter to change cultural characteristics that are not propitious for economic and social ascent; but the first step, surely, is to destroy the illusion that salvation lies in the hands of political and bureaucratic entrepreneurs whose only effect is to make society sclerotic and thereby transform class into caste.

Originally posted at City Journal.

Ever since the World Wildlife Fund adopted the panda as its trademark I have felt slightly uneasy, even guilty, about zoos. Should all those splendid creatures really be confined to small cages or enclosures and exposed to the idle, junk-food-consuming gaze of the general public as they sleep or pace up and down for lack of anything else to do (the animals, I mean, not the general public)? Whenever I pass a zoo, I begin to half-remember lines from William Blake: tygers burning bright, all heaven in a rage because of the robin redbreast being in a cage, and that kind of thing.

The other day, for reasons both complex and far too boring to be related, I found myself at a loose end in the afternoon in a suburb of Edinburgh in which that city’s zoo happens to be located.

I am glad to say, canny honorary Scotsman as I was for the day, that I got a fifty percent rebate on my entry ticket because the weather was foul — snow everywhere — and the vast majority of the animals being of tropical origin (rather like the populations of many European inner cities, in fact), they had retreated indoors into their centrally heated quarters in which, however, they were not easily visible to visitors. Only the Patagonian sea lions disported themselves happily in their ice-covered pond; even the polar bears, by now no doubt accustomed to the superior comforts of their native regions brought about by global warming, had retreated indoors.

I don’t know how many chimpanzees most zoos have, but Edinburgh seemed to have quite a lot. I counted nine, at the least. They are subject to the detailed research of primatologists there, because as we know, man (at least his DNA) is 99 percent chimpanzee, and therefore observing chimpanzees closely will tell us all about ourselves. Man is also 98 percent mouse, of course; though metaphorically speaking, he is 100 percent rat.

Anyway, as I gazed at the chimps eating their leeks — which, rather to my surprise, they seemed to prefer to everything else — I was subject to a sudden illumination. One of the chimps, a female, was 48 years old according to one of the boards giving information about the whole troupe. She was in fine fettle from the look of her, by no means geriatric or in need of a walking/climbing frame. But chimpanzees in the wild have a life expectancy of only 15 years; a mere seven percent of them live to be 40.

In fact, I had already noticed that the life expectancies of all the animals in the Edinburgh Zoo were about double those in the wild, and that set me thinking. Captivity is good for animals, at least for those that can be kept in it.

Now it is a self-evident truth that all animals are created equal and endowed by their creator with unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But it takes little thought to know that of these three rights, that to life must be primary, for without it the others are null and void. It is perfectly obvious that you can’t be free or pursue happiness if you’re dead.

This surely means that, if you are an animal lover, you should try to reduce any animal that you see in the wild at once to captivity, at least of the Edinburgh Zoo variety. Failure to do so is de facto condemning that animal to an early grave. The animal will be better fed, have fewer parasites, and be sheltered from the bad weather if you capture him. Above all, he, or it, will have much better health care than in the wild. Indeed, in the wild animals are even worse off than Americans without health insurance.

What would Blake write now, knowing this?

A robin redbreast in the wild
Gets a Democrat all riled.

First appeared at Pajamas Media.

The news from Haiti is always terrible; when there is no Haitian news, it does not so much suggest that the news is good as that the long, slow catastrophe that is Haitian history is merely continuing as usual. But this week’s apocalyptic earthquake makes Haiti’s recent past seem almost like a golden age.

No one who has been to Haiti ever loses his interest in the country. It is one of those places that, because of its history, because of its culture, because of its torments, captures the imagination and never lets it go. You respond to it not with tough, but appalled love. The American writer, Herbert Gold, summarized the country in the title of his wonderful memoir of his experiences there: The Best Nightmare on Earth.

By now it is a commonplace, a piece of received wisdom in every country, that the devastating consequences of the Haitian earthquake are not those of a natural disaster alone, but of a natural event interacting with extreme poverty. The causes of the poverty itself are a matter of deep ideological contention. What is beyond dispute is that so many buildings collapsed because they were so flimsily constructed in the first place.

That Haiti was a slow-moving disaster even before the earthquake was visible—obvious, in fact—from a height of 35,000 feet. When you flew from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince, the border was as clearly visible as on any map, a straight line drawn on the earth’s surface: on the Dominican side, verdant, on the Haitian side, brown, bare as a desert. It’s difficult to imagine now, but Haiti was once deeply forested; but 98 percent of the tree cover is gone, leaving eroded hillsides with gullies down which the rain torrentially washes whatever soil is left.

Perhaps this explains why one of the themes of Haitian naïve painting (one of the glories of Haitian culture) is lush forests inhabited by sleek African animals and exotic birds. The inheritance spent, the painters indulge in reverie, romanticizing the past, retreating into what Jung would call the collective unconscious. Writers have responded differently. The increasing desperation of Haiti is traceable in its twentieth-century literature. Gone is the gentle satire, the bourgeois refinement and gentility of the works of Fernand Hibbert; the situation calls for holy rage, savage denunciation.

A Nigerian journalist once said of his country, “No known system of government works in Nigeria.” This is even truer of Haiti. It’s often claimed that Haiti’s desperate situation is the consequence of outside interference—principally American, of course—plus recurrent, often bizarre, dictatorship. But Haiti’s neighbor, the Dominican Republic, has suffered similar disadvantages; yet it prospers. Moreover, descriptions of Haiti after the American occupation of 1915 make clear that the country received many benefits from it, whatever the attendant humiliations. As with other forms of external help, however, the occupation’s benefits proved temporary and ultimately fruitless.

Nor does voluntary assistance seem to do much better. It’s estimated that 10,000 voluntary organizations operate in Haiti—one for every 800 residents—but the effect, globally speaking, has been minimal, whatever good work each organization does individually. The whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Disaster relief is, of course, something completely different. No one can remain unmoved by the pictures of Port-au-Prince after the earthquake (the situation outside the capital remains unknown, but one can imagine). Everything that can be done should be done: the financial resources necessary are, comparatively speaking, tiny.

But because of the very problems that contributed so much to the disaster in the first place—appalling infrastructure, absent administration—such relief will be difficult to provide efficiently, without the absurdities of supplies accumulating where they are not useful, and not reaching the places where they’re desperately needed. Terrible as the Haitian army was, and often harmful as its role was, its deliberate and total dissolution in 1994 may now be a severe handicap, an unintended consequence of a good intention.

And after the immediate crisis has passed, what? International administration? Restoration of national sovereignty under a government incapable of governing? More aid that results in little but corruption and infighting? Laissez-faire? The mind reels.

Originally posted at City Journal.

Stalinist-style social engineering is not quite dead. Indeed, it flourishes. In France, a controversy has broken out about the admission policies to the grandes ecoles, the elite tertiary educational establishments such as the Polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration that, since Napoleon’s time, have provided France with much of its business, government and cultural elite.

Admission to one of the grandes ecoles more or less guarantees the student a prosperous subsequent career. Entry is by competitive examination; and it has long been a proud boast of France that such entry is by ability rather than by social connection or political prominence, for talented young people from poor homes are given a state subsidy that allows them to attend. The openness of the grandes ecoles to talent from wherever in society it comes is taken as one of the great achievements of the French Revolution.

But the purely formal nature of equality of opportunity that the grandes ecoles exemplifies has recently come under attack led by no less a personage than the President of the Republic who, though nominally conservative, argues like any left-wing demagogue.

The students at the grandes ecoles are in fact overwhelmingly from the comfortable middle or upper-middle classes. They do not represent the French population in the demographic sense at all; a child from the 16th arrondissement of Paris is far more likely to pass the entry examination than a child from the concrete wasteland that surrounds Paris. M. Sarkozy, taking populist advantage of this unsurprising fact like any unscrupulous politician, is supporting a proposal that 30 per cent of students should be taken, ex officio as it were, from poor backgrounds.

One way to achieve this ‘target’ is to change the nature of the entrance examination, which emphasises, among other things such as science and mathematics, modern languages (essentially English) and a knowledge of general culture such as history and literature.

Middle and upper-middle class children are at an unfair advantage, according to M. Sarkozy and other supporters of the proposal, because their parents are much more likely to be able to send them abroad for linguistic holidays than are poor parents. (My observation of my French nephews and nieces leads me to doubt whether such linguistic holidays are quite as advantageous as they are supposed to be.) So it would only be fair and socially just to suppress mastery of modern languages as a criterion for entry to the grandes ecoles.

What is true of languages is even truer of general culture, for it is obvious that children of cultivated parents have an enormous advantage over others: and cultivated parents tend to be of higher social class also. Therefore, the requirement that students should have general culture should also be suppressed.

This kind of reasoning was subject to the mockery of a historian, Sebastien Fach, in the pages of Le Monde, which are not generally known for their light satirical touch. Imagine, said Mr. Fach, the time a few years hence when social reformers have had their way, and the French national soccer team is no longer selected only from the best players in the best professional teams in the league, who are demographically unrepresentative of the population as a whole. Think of all the other people who play football in France: can they not run and do all the other things that the best professional players can do? Why should they be excluded from representing their nation? Why not women, children, the aged? A truly democratic team.

Mr. Fach rightly points out that while it would be quick and easy to lower the standards of the grandes ecoles, it would be slow and difficult to improve the standards of the secondary schools serving children from poor homes, and thereby giving them a better chance of admission to the grandes ecoles. Like any good politician, Mr Sarkozy opts for the line of least resistance, the soft option.

By far the most interesting fact to emerge from the debate is that the proportion of children from relatively poor homes attending the grandes ecoles declined precipitously in the first half century of France’s existence as a full welfare state: from 29 per cent in 1950 to 9 per cent in mid 1990s.

Of course, it is possible that, during this period, the proportion of children from relatively poor homes in the population as a whole also declined, although it is unlikely to have declined by two thirds, as the proportion of children from poor homes attending the grandes ecoles has done; one still say, therefore that at the very least the welfare state, one of whose justifications was the need to equalise opportunities, has failed signally to do so. If anything, the reverse. One might, if one were inclined to conspiracy theories, construe the welfare state as the means by which the middle class ensures that their children face no competition from clever children of the lower class.

The heart of the problem lies in the unassailability of the term ‘equality of opportunity,’ and the unthinking assent it commands. I was once asked on Dutch TV whether I was in favour of it, the interviewer assuming that I must be so in spite of all my other appalling opinions; and when I said that I was not, and indeed that I thought it was a truly hideous notion, his eyes opened with surprise. I thought he was going to slip off his chair.

Only under conditions reminiscent of those of Brave New World could there be equality of opportunity. But, of course, the very unattainability of equality of opportunity (in any sense other than that of an absence of formal, legal impediments to social advance) is precisely what recommends it as an ideal to politicians such as President Sarkozy, and indeed to most other western politicians, virtually irrespective of their putative political stripe. The fact that, reform notwithstanding, there are always differences in outcomes for different groups or classes of human beings in any society means that there is always scope, in the name of equality of opportunity, for further interference and control by politicians and bureaucrats. Not permanent revolution (to change the communist metaphor from Stalinism to Trotskyism), but permanent reform is the modern western politico-bureaucratic class’s route to lasting power and control.

Why anyone should want lasting power and control is to me a mystery: I suppose it must be the answer to a deep and insatiable inner emptiness.

This article first appeared at Frontpage.

The Government has lavished unprecedented sums on the NHS but it is still difficult for patients to see the same doctor twice. From the point of view of those working in the service (some 1.6million people), an important result of all this expenditure has been the creation of an increasingly Soviet atmosphere, where fear, lies and a nomenklatura reign.

A friend, who works in a hospital not far from the one in which I worked until my recent retirement from the NHS, sent me a copy of the monthly newspaper published by his NHS trust. I fear to name the trust because those who work there might be suspected of 'treason'.

The newspaper, distributed to thousands of staff whether they want it or not, is in colour. Its production must cost a fair bit. Its model seems to be the Soviet Monthly: happy, smiling workers, everything getting better and better.

The chief executive appears in 11 photographs. This compares with six photographs of doctors, one not named, and none of them appearing twice. This helps to explain why the NHS now employs 400,000 more people than it did ten years ago: after all, a nomenklatura needs its apparatchiks.

One of the doctors photographed is praised for his 40 years of devotion to a particular speciality. What the caption does not mention is that the unit to which he devoted much of his working life has just been closed.

I was reminded of a phrase in the memoirs of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich: 'The celebration of a great cultural event, like the closing of a theatre.'

One of the photos of the chief executive shows him with the winner of the trust's talent competition, a nurse, to whom he presented the £500 first prize. Second prize was £200 and there were several third prizes of £100. The caption does not mention the source of the prize money.

The chief executive was also shown hosting the annual staff awards. 'More than 200 guests attended the event and were treated to a red-carpet arrival, a three-course meal and live music.'

Again, what is not mentioned is who paid for all this. If it was the trust, most taxpayers would regard this as a misuse of public funds.

Two items in the newspaper sound like something from Mao's Cultural Revolution. The first describes Eight Steps To Improving Privacy And Dignity and the second highlights Nine Promises To Patients. The latter was a contribution to National Customer [note, not Patient] Care Week. This, of course, was quite distinct from what is called 'the launch of the Trust's new branding'.

The Nine Promises were paraded on 'giant banners' outside the hospitals. They were made to the public by management, without the consent or knowledge of the staff. One of the promises - 'I will go the extra mile' - amounts to a lie, at least where junior medical staff are concerned. They are not allowed to work more than 48 hours a week.

The Eight Steps To Improving Privacy And Dignity throw a lurid light on recent past practices. For example, one of the steps is that 'patients are assisted with meals where needed'. One might have supposed that helping frail patients to eat was a basic nursing duty. The fact that it is put forward as a new step suggests either that the trust has neglected patients badly, or the management is ignorant of what goes on in its own establishment.

Another step is that 'gloves are used as per infection control guidance'. This is elementary hygiene, not respect for privacy. Yet another step is that 'patients will be called by their preferred name' - which suggests that patients are currently humiliated by being called by their first names, or even by diminutives of their first names.

Patients should routinely be addressed formally until such time as they say 'Call me Bill' or 'Call me Betty'. The question 'How do you wish to be addressed, Mr Smith or Joe?' is not a neutral one: it intimidates people into an informality they don't want.

But we are told: 'Patients support "respect" campaign.' The evidence for this is that a woman called Betty W, aged 88 and not dignified by a title, said she found staff friendly, polite and respectful. Another patient said: 'The staff have always respected my privacy.'

We are not told whether their experiences are representative of patients as a whole and they do not mention the campaign, much less 'support' it. The article is, in effect, a propagandistic lie. The trust for which I worked put out similar propaganda but staff members were too afraid to protest.

The whole country is drowning in this kind of propaganda. Its function is to make the world safe for the looters of the public purse, who have brought about our current crisis at least as much as the bankers, and probably more.

First published in the Daily Mail.

The Yemen is the poorest country on the Arabian peninsula. It is also increasingly home to Al Qaeda militants.

From these two facts Mr Brown appears to have drawn the conclusion that the Yemen is home to Al Qaeda militants because it is the poorest country on the Arabian peninsula.

The answer, according to Mr Brown, is therefore more aid to the Yemen: more community centres, perhaps, or ping-pong tables, à la Moss Side in Manchester or Toxteth in Liverpool. Give those Al Qaeda chappies a social security system and something to do when they are unemployed and they will stop sending the sons of rich Nigerian bankers to blow up planes over Detroit. 

Naturally the President of the Yemen Ali Abdallah Saleh was delighted by Mr Brown’s hint of further financial assistance. In fact he almost rubbed his hands with glee. “It’s a step in the right direction,” he said, “that will allow the mobilisation of international support for the Yemen to combat unemployment and reduce the effects of poverty.”

The problem with such aid, however, is that (to quote an adage attributed the late Lord Bauer), it is the means by which poor people in rich countries give money to rich people in poor countries. THERE isn’t a single Third World country that foreign aid has rescued from poverty, let alone from unemployment and terrorism, but there are many, many Third World presidents, potentates, ministers, generals and civil servants who have had very large foreign bank balances thanks to it. 

There is no reason to think that the Yemen, a faraway country of which Mr Brown knows nothing, will be any different. A glance to a country not very far away, Kenya, is instructive. The Western world is paying Kenya to try to imprison the Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, though there is no reason why Kenya should do so other than for the money. 

There are no prizes for guessing what is happening: the pirates are winning their cases, the prosecution alleging that it does not have enough money to bring forth a good case and the defence, no doubt supplied with pirate money, is able to pull out all the stops. Kenya is therefore demanding more money from the West, which finds itself in a bidding war with the pirates: and thus the West has done what most people would previously have thought impossible, namely corrupt Kenya even further.

In any case Mr Brown is by now a rather unconvincing saviour. If I were a Yemeni I would be shaking in my shoes at the prospect of his arrival as saviour. The situation might be bad in the Yemen but there is no situation that Mr Brown cannot make worse, usually at great expense (though only at that of other people). Of Mr Brown it might be said that he left scarcely any problem ignored and tried to solve none that he did not worsen. 

His record is truly appalling. He sold half of our country’s gold reserves at a quarter of what they would fetch now. He turned Britain’s pension provision from the best in Europe to the worst. He increased government expenditure enormously without anything to show for it except a vast debt. He claimed to have abolished the business cycle not long before the worst economic crisis since 1929. 

He claimed Britain was best-placed of European countries to emerge from the recession and it is now the only one not to have done so. From the point of view of economics he is the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. Having encouraged a credit boom in order to mislead the population into supposing that it was prospering (he did absolutely nothing to prevent the British from becoming the most personally indebted people in the world), he turned on the bankers with ferocity.

You might have supposed that while the bankers were being irresponsible all those years it had nothing to do with him, the mere Chancellor of the Exchequer. On the contrary, he was basking in the bankers’ praise. His favourite banker and also his economic adviser, Sir Fred Goodwin of the Royal Bank of Scotland, turned out to have been the worst of the lot. 

MR BROWN helped to ruin Lloyds Bank, a sound bank until he encouraged its merger with HBOS, thus all but expropriating three million shareholders. There are two fundamental problems with Mr Brown. The first is an insensate urge to do good combined with a lack of imagination or wide experience of life and a complacency about his own abilities, his disastrous record notwithstanding. He takes on problems – for example, Africa – that have baffled far more able people and imagines he can solve them. 

The second is a gross overestimate of the right of his Government to interfere in his enthusiasms: yesterday Africa, today the Yemen. On the premise that about 25 per cent of UK adults voted some years ago for his predecessor, he thinks he has the right to take money from your pocket and bestow it where he pleases, including upon the Yemen, where one would hardly have to be provided with great foresight to know that it will be at best lost, at worst turned to some very bad purpose.

Yemen, beware! Mr Brown is coming to save you. 

Originally posted at the Daily Express.

Until she was well into her 80s, my mother used to make New Year's resolutions. I am not sure whether this indicates that hope, effort or self-deception spring eternal in the human breast. Or perhaps all three at once.

I look at my desk, and then around my study. Honesty compels me to admit that they are not only a mess, but that they have always been a mess. I sincerely wish it were otherwise.

I am only too aware that tidy people are more efficient, and get more done, than untidy ones, to say nothing of the esthetic side of the question. How often have I been driven to the very brink of despair (including briefly suicidal thoughts) by an inability to put my hand to a document that I know is somewhere in the many piles around me!

From Jan. 1 this coming year, all will be different. I shall answer all my correspondence as it arrives and will not let it accumulate unanswered, let alone unopened, like an invasive plague from outer space as described in a pulp science fiction novel.

It may be, if the past is anything to go by (and we have little else to guide us), that for a day or two I keep to this resolution. Not only will everything that comes through my door have my immediate attention, but I will file it away in such a fashion that I shall have no problem in putting my hand on it in the future when I need to do so. Never again, I congratulate myself, will I be reduced to a fit of screaming, or worse still to asking my wife (which she will take, and I will mean, as a semiaccusation that she is responsible for its loss), in my attempts to locate it.

But then, of course, something will come between me and my resolution: a deadline, for example. However much I would like to be tidy, a deadline that I have to meet is more urgent, more important and - at least in the short term - more lucrative. After all, I can always catch up with the resolution after the deadline has been met.

But that is the problem with New Year's resolutions: One can no more comply with them intermittently than a woman can be a little bit pregnant. They are like jealous gods who will brook no deviation from the ancient propitiatory ceremonies. They allow no compromise; they are absolutist in their demands. They are like Old Testament prophets.

To change the metaphor slightly, New Year's resolutions are like eggs. Once broken, they are irreparable. In my case, I never resolve to be tidier than last year, which would not be very difficult, really. I always resolve to be tidy, absolutely tidy, which is impossible. A miss being as good as a mile, I take my revenge upon the resolution once I have broken it, and become even worse than I would have been without it. If I cannot be perfect, at least I can be perfectly dreadful.

Does there come a time in life when we wake from the dream of self-improvement, when we can accept with a good grace that our character, our habits and our tastes are fixed, and that this must be true of other people as well as of ourselves? One of my recurring New Year's resolutions is to remain calm, polite and good-humored in the presence of opinions that not only differ from mine but (what amounts to the same thing) are either stupid or wicked.

The problem is that no one seems willing to meet me halfway. So it is not really my fault if I cannot stick to my resolution.

(Originally appeared in the NY Daily News)

There are few sights more melancholy than that of uncompleted buildings on which all work has stopped. Such buildings conjure up the spectre of a civilization that has collapsed even before it flourished.

Since everything in Dubai is on the most expansive scale – the largest, the swankiest, the most gilded – its de facto moratorium on further construction is likewise on the very grandest scale. Motionless cranes hover over vast buildings at all stages of construction, from mere hole in the ground to iron-and-concrete skeleton and near completion. Even thousand-foot towers that require only a few more sheets of finishing cladding are left incomplete.

To adapt (very slightly) the lines of Percy Bysshe Shelley: My name is Rashid Al Maktoum, bling of blings: Look on my works, ye Vulgar, and despair! I looked out of my window and, of 12 buildings I saw under construction, work was continuing on just two – and those the smallest of them.

When work on skyscrapers stops, the entrails of these vast edifices are exposed to the gaze, and somehow seem frighteningly fragile to support the immense weight of what they are supposed to eventually contain. One never takes the lift in such a building with quite the same insouciance as one did before. The marble, the steel, the glass of many colours with which the buildings will be covered seem but a veneer to conceal a deep inner shoddiness of rough concrete, cement and breezeblock. The veneer of civilization that covers man's eternal savagery seems several layers thick by comparison.

Will the sand reclaim Dubai as the jungle once reclaimed Angkor Wat? Despite a fall in property prices of more than 50 per cent within a week or two, the official line is that the “fundamentals” of Dubai's economy are strong and recovery will be swift. But what are the fundamentals of an economy built on confidence, celebrity, spectacle, dream, fantasy, illusion and debt, to say nothing of an infinite supply of cheap labour from India, Pakistan and the Philippines? The latter, at least, seems secure for the foreseeable future.

Driving around Dubai, one wonders how anyone could have failed to see the crash coming. Scores of completed buildings, offices and apartment blocks alike, stood empty. It is not that their occupants had gone, driven out by the crisis: They were never occupied in the first place. No man with eyes in his head and one or two very simple economic principles in his mind could have supposed that the only way for property prices in Dubai to go was up. Debt and investment are by no means always symbiotic.

Even as a shopping destination – Fly, Buy, Dubai was long the city-state's national slogan, its equivalent of Liberté, égalité, fraternité – Dubai has fewer and fewer attractions. One of the problems with free trade is an increasing equalization of prices, of goods if not of labour, throughout the world; the shoddy and trivial glamour of designer labels can be had for the same price everywhere.

Why, then, go to Dubai? To an astonishing extent, the city is dependent on the excellence of its airline, Emirates. No one who had the choice would fly anything else; all North American and European airlines, by comparison, are wretched. And the airline is very profitable, if official figures are to be believed. (Some claim the profits are subsidized by preferential landing fees at Dubai, though this is also denied.) At the very least, the airline poses an interesting challenge to those who say that, under any circumstances, a state-owned company cannot be efficiently run or provide good service.

Continue reading here.

Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform. In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy. Like Pol Pot, he wanted to start from Year Zero: before me, nothing; after me, everything. By their very presence, the raw-concrete-clad rectangular towers that obsessed him canceled out centuries of architecture. Hardly any town or city in Britain (to take just one nation) has not had its composition wrecked by architects and planners inspired by his ideas.

Writings about Le Corbusier often begin with an encomium to his importance, something like: “He was the most important architect of the twentieth century.” Friend and foe would agree with this judgment, but importance is, of course, morally and aesthetically ambiguous. After all, Lenin was one of the most important politicians of the twentieth century, but it was his influence on history, not his merits, that made him so: likewise Le Corbusier.

Yet just as Lenin was revered long after his monstrosity should have been obvious to all, so Le Corbusier continues to be revered. Indeed, there is something of a revival in the adulation. Nicholas Fox Weber has just published an exhaustive and generally laudatory biography, and Phaidon has put out a huge, expensive book lovingly devoted to Le Corbusier’s work. Further, a hagiographic exhibition devoted to Le Corbusier recently ran in London and Rotterdam. In London, the exhibition fittingly took place in a hideous complex of buildings, built in the 1960s, called the Barbican, whose concrete brutalism seems designed to overawe, humiliate, and confuse any human being unfortunate enough to try to find his way in it. The Barbican was not designed by Le Corbusier, but it was surely inspired by his particular style of soulless architecture.

Continue reading here.

Honesty has many enemies, and sentimentality is one of them. It has invaded our courts.

In the trial of the Liverpool and England footballer Steven Gerrard, the Scottish ex-footballer and ex-manager Kenny Dalglish testified that the accused was a humble man who had remained true to his roots. Well, Uriah Heep was humble, and the Kray twins were true to their roots, so even as a character reference this was of doubtful value. But the question in any case was not what kind of man Gerrard was, but whether he had attacked someone without lawful excuse. We can only hope that his humility and truth to his roots had nothing to do with his acquittal.

Judges at murder trials are now required to sit through victim impact statements by a close relative or friend of the murdered man or woman, and then, as they are specifically enjoined to do, ignore it altogether in their sentencing. It must be an exquisite torture to them, for two reasons: first, it is precisely the purpose of the law to remove highly emotional considerations from the administration of justice, and second, the inevitable emotional kitschiness of the statements themselves.

They invariably involve eulogies of the deceased: his lovely smile, his infectious laugh, his long eyelashes etc. They are very similar in this respect to the self-descriptions of people in the personal columns of newspapers or on internet dating sites. No doubt this is inevitable: the genre itself, which should not exist, calls it forth.

This official promotion of sentimentality — a sop to a public so ill-served by the criminal justice system — serves to obscure an important elementary truth about murder: that it is not heinous because it extinguishes a lovely smile or a playful sense of humour etc, but because it is the unlawful killing of someone. It is not permissible to kill the humourless and unsmiling ugly whom no one will miss.

Our policemen now go in for this sentimentality too, at least in their public pronouncements (in private, they are more robust). They pay nauseating, unctuous tribute to the victim of murder, as if he fell in devotion to a cause, or they say that such and such was a senseless murder, as if there were sensible ones of people who deserved it. Sometimes, they say that a murder took place in the course of a robbery that went tragically wrong — instead, presumably, of going happily right.

They seem like the mother of a youth who had just been convicted for the 250th time (meaning, if he were averagely competent at evading the police, his 5,000th offence). Interviewed on the radio, she said, "He's a good boy, really."

(Originally posted at Standpoint)

Continue reading here.

One of the most extraordinary episodes in the intellectual history of the twentieth century—if, indeed, something that lasted half a century or more can properly be called an episode—is the moral and sometimes material support given by much of the western intelligentsia to the Soviet tyranny, a tyranny that made all previous tyrannies seem relaxed, liberal, and almost amateurish by comparison. Men who found the slightest circumscription of their own freedom intolerable raised hosannas to the most systematic and concerted abrogation of personal liberty yet attempted; many were those who strained at gnats to swallow a camel.

No doubt the explanation for this phenomenon is psychologically and sociologically complex. A commonly cited factor that supposedly contributed to it was ignorance of the real situation obtaining in the Soviet Union: intellectuals were therefore able to project on to the Soviet Union their utopian fantasies unconstrained by any appreciation of the sordid realities. This explanation, however, is entirely false.

I mean no disrespect to the brave and colossal labors of figures such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest, nor do I deny the scope of their actual historical effect upon the opinions of the Western intelligentsia, when I say that they added nothing whatever of deep moral significance to the material that was readily available in the west in the 1920s and 1930s, and that could and should have enabled people to form a proper moral judgment about the Soviet Union and its “experiment,” and this at the very time when it was doing its worst. Everything about the Soviet Union was known at the time; the problem was that nothing was believed.

Let us take the Ukrainian famine as an example. The dust jacket of Robert Conquest’s book The Harvest of Sorrow, published in 1986, says that that it “will register in the public consciousness of the West a sense of the darker side of the history of this century,” and so, no doubt, it did. But more than half a century earlier, in 1934, the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who could hardly have been suspected of anti-Soviet prejudice or bias because he went to Russia actually intending to emigrate, hoping that his second child would be born a Soviet citizen, published a book called Moscow Winter.

It is a very barely fictionalized account of what Muggeridge saw in Russia: so barely fictionalized that, when he published his autobiography thirty-eight years later, he felt able to lift whole passages almost verbatim from it, save for the names of the characters. The book has not, so far as I am aware, been reissued as it was written, probably because it contains passages that are unpleasantly anti-Semitic in tone. The first chapter devoted to the Ukrainian famine begins:

The class war hung over the North Caucasus and over its population like a heavy cloud; filling the fields with weeds; killing off cattle and horses; and spreading famine and trouble everywhere. Under the direction of the OGPU, the Red Army ravaged the country. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were exiled, and thousands shot. Everything edible except some millet and potatoes was requisitioned by the government. These potatoes were counted over one by one like jewels.

Continue reading here.

Leanne Shepherd and Lucy Jarrett, both 32, are close friends. They work as police officers, but on different shifts. For a long time, they babysat for each other, an arrangement that suited them perfectly and enabled them to continue their careers. The authorities recently told them, however, that their arrangement was illegal. If they did not desist, they would face prosecution.

Why? Because they exceeded the permitted time to babysit without having received professional training in such matters as resuscitation and child psychology. Moreover, the state considers their mutual babysitting a potentially taxable economic benefit. It does not matter that the arrangement was entirely reciprocal and voluntary. British citizens may no longer make such private agreements among themselves.

One of the nastiest aspects of this little story is that the authorities were alerted to the two women’s terrible crime by one of their neighbors. An increasingly intrusive state engenders an increasingly nasty population of secret informers.

First posted at City Journal.

Listen here.

A single case sometimes shines a lurid light on an entire country, and the case of Fiona Pilkington does just that for contemporary Britain—both its population and its officialdom. A coroner’s inquest was recently held in the case, two years after the events in question.

On October 23, 2007, Pilkington, a single mother of low intelligence, used gasoline to set fire to her car, with herself and her 18-year-old, severely handicapped daughter inside. They both died in the conflagration.

The reason that she killed herself and her daughter was that local youths had abused them for years. They taunted her and her daughter for hours on end, standing and shouting outside their home, pelting it with bottles and stones, and repeatedly intruding into the garden. Pilkington, who was inoffensive, shy, and retiring, called the police a total of 33 times, but they did absolutely nothing, though they knew what was going on. The local chief of police issued an apology at the inquiry into the affair. If he had meant it, of course, he would have immediately resigned his post.

The deep spiritual sickness of contemporary Britain is evident in the following comment on the inquiry in the liberal newspaper, The Guardian: “Although much of the abuse centred on the taunts about the children’s disabilities, police failed to recognise it as a hate crime rather than simple antisocial behaviour, which would have made it a far higher priority.”

In other words, the seriousness of an offense committed in Britain now depends upon who the victim is. If a person is not of an identifiably protected group, he or she is not entitled to police intervention against abusive stone- and bottle-throwing youths. He is not entitled to protection at all.

The Guardian’s article appears to accept that such behavior, so long as it targets a member of an unprotected group, is merely undesirable—“anti-social” rather than obviously criminal. The rule of law is fast evaporating in Britain; we are coming to live in a land of men, not of laws.

(originally posted at City Journal)

Whenever a government minister offers the British people increased choice within a monopoly public service such as the NHS, he acts as if he were an absolute monarch who, from the sheer goodness of his heart, was conferring an inestimable benefit upon the ignorant and impoverished peasantry. He forgets that he is, or should be, a servant of that very peasantry, and is soon himself to sink back into (often well-merited) obscurity.

Andy Burnham is the latest of a succession of health secretaries to offer the British public increased choice: this time of general practitioner. Those of us in the medical profession who recall the fiasco of the choose-and-book system, introduced without any preparation and even less thought a few years ago, and those of us who live in areas where there is a natural monopoly of general practice, might be excused a hollow laugh.

A cynic might even suggest that reforms are introduced not so much to improve services, as to keep the Department of Health busy: for without a major reform every 18 months or so (just before the last one can be shown not to have worked), what would there be for it to do? The one indisputable advantage of the NHS is that it employs a lot of people.

The first thing to say about Mr Burnham's proposal is that it takes for granted that choice is, always and everywhere, a good thing, and that more choice will solve most of our problems. Is this so?

In medicine, choice presents disadvantages as well as advantages. It is a very crude view of the professions that sees them in the same light as owners of convenience stores. Every government since Mrs Thatcher's has appeared to take a proto-Marxist view that they are conspiracies against the laity, constituted to extort the maximum money from the rest of the population; and while there is an element of truth in this, it is very far from being the whole truth. Professions have standards internal to themselves; and, ideally, it is not only because he is paid to do so that your doctor has an interest in your welfare, nor does that interest increase in proportion to his pay.

A doctor is more an adviser to his patients than a provider of what they want. A patient may take his doctor's advice or not as he sees fit, but he has no right to demand what the doctor does not think advisable. In my view, the doctor has an inextinguishable duty to be paternalistic, to concern himself not with the wishes of the patient alone, but with his interests. When this is lost sight of, you end up with stories like the death (and come to that, the pitiable life) of Michael Jackson.

At least 50 per cent of British GPs have been threatened or assaulted by a patient in the past 12 months, and it is a fair bet that the principal cause of this was the failure of the GPs to do exactly what their patients wanted. The fact is that patients are not always the best judges of their own interests, and doctor-shopping, going to different doctors until you get what you want, not infrequently ends in drug addiction and unneeded and dangerous procedures, to say nothing of wasteful expenditure.

There was a famous cartoon in Punch in the 1920s, in which a man asks an obviously rich surgeon at his club what he operated on Jones for. "A hundred guineas," replies the surgeon. "No, I mean what did Jones have?" asks the man. "A hundred guineas," replies the surgeon. And I hesitate to quote a man so terminally ignorant and arrogant about matters medical as George Bernard Shaw, but he had a point when he said that if you pay a man to cut off your leg, he will. Drug addicts will gravitate to those who prescribe most drugs – what William S Burroughs, in his book Junkie, contemptuously called "the writing croakers".

But of course there are great advantages as well as disadvantages to choice. Not all doctors are technically competent, let alone clinically wise. And it is in the nature of human nature that some people do not get on well together. A good relationship with your doctor is not only pleasant, but often strongly therapeutic. To have to consult a doctor whom you dislike, or even detest, is not good medically, although recently the Government seems to have solved this problem by the simple expedient of making it extremely difficult for a patient to see the same doctor twice (even in hospital).

Being able to choose a doctor, then, will be a great advantage to sensible people. They will exercise their choice with discretion, realising that the best doctor is not necessarily the most pliable doctor. He is the one who will do his best for you, not what you want, and therefore you trust him.

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A few comments: 

1) No favors need be done Saudi Arabia -- none. Saudi Arabia sells oil to whomever pays the market price. End of story. There is no more need to do any favors for Saudi Arabia, or for the Al-Saud family, than there would be to offer the man who owns the gas station down the street all kinds of special favors -- babysitting, cleaning his house, working on his oldest child's college application -- because as long as you pay for the gas, you get the gas.

2) Saudi Arabia is, despite the trillions it has taken in since 1973 alone, economically weak and helplessly dependent on oil revenues. It is also dependnent on continued access to Western education, Western medical care, Western technology, Western everything. The West, on the other hand, and the advanced East, are dependent on nothing that Saudi Arabia has to offer except for the oil that it must sell. And ideally, the Western world will start to impose much higher taxes on gasoline and oil, prompted in the main by legitimate worries over global warming, and recognizing the need to make the price of oil and gasoline reflect the real cost of that oil and gasoline (which should include, at a minimum, the several trillion dollars spent in Iraq and surrounding Middle Eastern countries).

3) If Americans were banned from working or visiting Saudi Arabia, if all Westerners were so banned, if all non-Arabs or even all non-Saudis were so banned, no one would be hurt except the Saudis.

4) Since 1973 various groups of Western hirelings -- beginning with former ambassadors and intelligence agents stationed in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab states, and ending with academics, journalists, businessmen of every kind - have been promoting two ideas, both of them wrong and easily shown to be wrong.

The first is that Saudi Arabia is our "staunch ally" when it is Saudi Arabia that has financed not only Al Qaeda, but a dozen other terrorist groups, and that through its support for mosques and madrasas world-wide, in Dar al-Harb, and for Wahhabi imams in formerly less extreme mosques, in such places as West and North Africa (why, just the other day an article in the Algerian El Watan deplored the distribution by the Saudis, in Algeria, of French-language Qur'ans  with the text accompained by Wahhabi-flavored commentaries). Saudi Arabia is the most dangerous of all Muslim countries, paying for campaigns of Da'wa, and Muslim missionary activities all over the world.

The second is the notion that the Saudis do us favors either by keeping the "price of oil down" or by investing in the Western world. The Saudi pricing in OPEC -- and by and large the Saudis are no longer able to move prices very much, because their own production is less easily ratcheted up or down -- is determined only by the calcuylation of what given price, at a certain given time, will maximize current revenues and the value of the oil reserves. This requires a constant recalculation of how elastic demand for oil is, the political climate in the oil-producing nations that might make them more, or less likely, to impose their own taxes on the use of oil, and if so, by how much, and so on. Saudi Arabia does not now, and never has, done the Western world any favors through its attempt to control prices. It has always had one goal: to maximize its own rofits.

And what about the Saudi hioldings in U.S. dollars? That too is not based on any desire to help the American economy, but only to maximize the value of Saudi holdings in dollars. Too precipitous a letting go of such assets would cause problems with all dollar-denominated assets (and the oil contracts are in dollars).

Saudi Arabia is the most dangerous enemy the Western world has. Prince Al-Turki is one of those who is attempting - with whatever group of Western speechwriters he has working for him -- to fool the unwary.

But every day, the ranks of the unwary diminish.

It's late in the day for "Saudi" Arabia.

The government, apparently, is thinking of installing closed circuit television cameras in the homes of the 20,000 worst behaved families, or rather households, in Britain, so that they are under surveillance twenty-four hours a day.

I have a better idea, in fact a far better idea: instead of the 20,000 households, government ministers should themselves be under twenty-four hour video surveillance. The tapes should be broadcast daily so that we, their constituents and paymasters, can see and hear what they are up to.

The reasoning is obvious. I grant that the 20,000 households whose members behave badly can and probably do cause a lot of misery; no one is more opposed to bad behaviour than I. But a few government ministers can cause so much misery that the misery caused by the 20,000 worst households pales into insignificance by comparison.

Even in these days of a surfeit of ministers, surveillance of them would be considerably cheaper than surveillance of 20,000 households. Furthermore, the small amount of information gathered would make it easy to analyse, comparatively-speaking, and therefore to act upon. To take an obvious example of the benefit such surveillance could have secured if it had been employed in the past: does anyone suppose that, if Mr Brown had been under such surveillance, he would have sold Britain's gold reserves in the way that he did, or that, had he done so, he would now be where he is?

But let us turn from the realm of satire to the realm of reality: not so very far to travel these days, as it happens, and getting less far every day. Indeed, one could run a competition along these lines: invite contestants to send a satirical proposal for a social policy. There would be two prize-winners: the contestant whose proposal was adopted by the government first, and the contestant whose proposal was adopted by the government last. Thus, both realism and imagination would be duly rewarded.

The 20,000 psychopathic households (a number, of course, plucked from the air, like most government numbers) are by now no strangers to the wonders of CCTV. T