Category: Zombies

Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations was a best-seller when it was first published in 1979, and it stands as one of the most distinctive works of social criticism and commentary of the last three decades. Lasch used the term narcissism, a psychological term based on a myth, “as a metaphor for the human condition”. Analyzing culture through a psychological, diagnostic metaphor is an experimental venture. Many writers fail. The bookstores and libraries are filled with half-baked social theories dressed up in medical jargon. And, of course, narcissism has become one of the catchphrases of popular psychology, with literally hundreds of self-help books mentioning narcissism in some way. Lasch’s ideas stand out from a mass of inferior material.

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Theodore Dalrymple has published a few couple interesting essays in City Journal over the last interval.
For soccer fans, especially Manchester United fans, Strange Hero-Worship, a slap at the mass grief over the death of soccer genius, playboy (alcoholic, promiscuous, and violent) and celebrity, George Best. This one goes into the strange mass grief demonstrated at the death of celebrities and the obtuse complicity of the media in the routines and rituals of celebrity worship.
For the theatre crowd, Truth vs. Theory, which looks at the long-running question of whether William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote all the plays credited to him, and uses that question to expose something about the cult of professionalism and technocracy. Almost every writer who believes that some of Shakespeare’s plays were written by Bacon or Marlowe find it impossible to believe that a man with an Elizabethan grammar school education was knowledgeable about so many things, frequently skeptical of learned opinion, and was able to speak wisely about the human condition. He points out that Shakespeare was aware of Galen’s theory of the humours, and apparently dismissed it although it was accepted by ancient, medieaval and Renaissance physicians. That brings him to Orwell and to Eliot at the end – read it.
I am starting to appreciate Dalrymple. (I have mentioned him in two early entries – search his name to follow up). Some writers say he is a hard-headed conservative who sees the decline of culture. Others say that he is a cranky conservative, pining for the mythic pastoral England, like Eliot, Tolkien, Lewis. Others say he is more like Orwell, a radical, cynical critic of the way modern capitalism traps people in an economy that turns us into robots, and a culture that entices us to value ourselves as hedonist consumers and unheralded celebrities. (This isn’t exactly what Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote in a book review in the New Statesman, but his reading of Dalrymple goes in that direction).

In the local newspapers in Winnipeg, we have had a run of stories in the last few years about whether schools are doing enough to prevent bullying (I’m putting a caveat on that link. The Wikipedia entry summarizes the theories about bullying but it doesn’t evaluate them, and it tends to dramatize the problem – which what this entry is about). I am not going to argue that real bullying should be tolerated. I am arguing that people are being dishonest or gullible about the alleged crisis. We are seeing people promoting a crisis for their own purposes, and we are seeing these fears resonate with adults who then demand, in essence, that the government take steps to make everyone – even other children – treat their children nicely. We are witnessing adults trying to convince themselves and other adults that they are concerned, loving and respectable parents.
The concern with bullying is relatively new, and the language used to discuss it tends to be dramatic. In England the new Children’s Commissioner used the occasion of a teen-on-teen homicide as a platform for advocacy against bullying, as reported in Children’s czar warns of huge leap in bullying in the Observer, the magazine of the Guardian. This surely is a rhetorical mistatement. Children have not become intrinsically more violent or aggressive in the last two generations, and it hard to detect any changes in society that would have made children more violent aggressive – unless you believe in the evil powers of comic books, pulp fiction, satanic rock, television, violent toys, and video games.

Continue reading “Kidocracy”