I’ve always viewed idealism as a form of laziness, and a form of stupidity. Watch out for anybody who subcribes to a set of ideas. Watch out for anyone with spotless, un-variegated opinions. Watch out for anyone who becomes emotional when challenged.
For instance, here’s Burchill, at it again, insulting people with whom she disagrees and calling it journalism. No issues with the insults, but what is reliably tedious is her chronic inability to examine, never mind challenge, her own biases. I’ve never once seen her do this – she is always 100% breezily convinced.
Her real problem is that she’s simply not that intelligent.
The empty-headed Burchill lurches from one simplistic and derivative ideas-set to the next. And, every time, she’s utterly convinced by her new ideological baubles. Her literacy has always managed to disguise the reliably-facile content of her second-hand ideas.
With Burchill, tabloid shock value will always take precedence over analysis, or nuance.
Burchill is someone who thinks “edgy” insults are a substitute for originality. I doubt if she’s ever had a genuine opinion about anything. With Burchill, you know exactly what you’re going to get – comedy right wing group-think schtick, a sort of a literate version of a UKIP-voting cabbie. She’s only “controversial” if you are naïve enough to think she’s thoughtful enough to really mean it..
The contrast with someone I respected – a genuine working-class curmudgeon to Burchill’s performing monkey routine – Mark E. Smith of The Fall – is instructive. With Smith, nothing was safe. Left wing, right wing, sooner than be typecast or cornered, he’d attack them all.
As a young person, seeking to make sense of the world, and in consequence vulnerable to the comforting certainties of various neat bigotries, The Fall’s relentless and indiscrimimate jeering initially was challenging, but it was an essential example. Smith simply had no sacred cows. He lost audiences, not only because of the grindingly-tuneless nature of the band’s oeuvre in their best period (’70s and ’80s for me, before the drink and the speed destroyed him), but also because of his scoffing refusal to hop onto any modish “youth” or PC group-think bandwagons.
I often thought there was more of Smith in these lyrics from “2 x 4” than he cared to let on:
He was agin the rich
He was agin the poor
As was noted in this article:
“Smith’s politics were indistinct, precisely because of his ‘working class weird’ class formation, I’d say, along with a dose of punk contrarianism. He was certainly not on the left in any straightforward or committed way, though equally not on the right. At various points he expressed support for both right and left wing causes and figures, as well as criticism of both.”
That cussedness and idealistic cynicism is why I so admired The Fall.
I’ve always viewed too much consistency as the hallmark of fraudulence, or stupidity, or both.
I’ve never believed in consistently “good people” and “bad people”. My support for anything is generally provisional, and heavily qualified. With exceptions of course – consistency is a trap. With notable exceptions, I perceive that the world cannot permanently be neatly divided into “good” and “bad”, but merely into those who are good now but who probably will be bad later. And conversely.
I’m always aware that some of the people I despise today I may have to support tomorrow. And conversely.
I remember the opening line of an undergrad essay I wrote aged 18 or 19:
“The accelerating polymorphism which logic invites seeks to anaesthetise angst by offering an ultimate truth as a resting place.”
Intellectually, as my younger self suggested, you cannot ever find a vantage point, and you should not seek that. If your ideas are becoming too orderly, or too comforting, or if you find yourself fitting in too much, check your IQ.
It’s perhaps the central conundrum of philosophy, and, in the wrong hands, is of course prey to ideological degeneration, pace Heidegger’s forest clearing (die Lichtung). At some point, most of us are wrong. The trick is never to be permanently wrong. Among many other newspapers and journals, I subscribe to both The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, and, amidst the common-sense, both of them write perma-biased bollocks, for differing reasons.
Persistent doubt, persistent opposition, regardless of consistency, is the mark of a free mind.
Smithy got that. Burchill, a shallow performing monkey for the middle classes, never will.
Disjecta 