Our Contemporary Sanctimony Puts the Victorians to Shame
Quite often these days I receive emails asking me to consider the environment before I print them. They are quite right of course: my study is already horribly littered even without print-outs of more emails.
But this, I suspect, is not at all what they mean: they mean the Environment with a capital E, in the Mother Earth, Gaia, or Pachamama sense of the word, a sense that always makes me feel slightly queasy, as Wagnerian opera does. If people really care about the environment, why don’t they campaign against rock music in public places, a vastly greater threat to civilization than a mere rise in global temperature and sea levels could ever be?
Now that you’ve got me going on the subject of contemporary sanctimony, how about this for a provocation? I received today an email from a very large and successful firm of lawyers asking me for my opinion in a medico-legal case. Appended to the email (after the obligatory bit about the environment, the whales, the dolphins, and the worms) was the following nauseating statement:
Out partnership is committed to eliminating discrimination
and promoting equality and diversity in it own policies and
procedures. This applies to the firm’s dealings with
employees, clients and other third parties.
Now it used to be alleged against Dickens that his characters were mere one-dimensional caricatures, that for example such grotesque hypocrites as Pecksniff or Podsnap could not possibly have existed in reality. But reading the statement reproduced above, who would now venture such an opinion? Who would dare laugh at the Victorians for their prudery and their bowdlerism? Is it only in sexual matters that a man can be a hypocrite?
Just wait until we have to pay for ugly people to get a cosmetic makeover so they have the same ‘fair’ chance at a mate as their ‘beautiful’ counterparts. Oh sure, that little thing known as genetics will come into play and little Johnny will have to get a nose-job just like mommy’s but it all ‘evens’ out in the end.
People are so damned pathetic. Seriously.
Future generations will be able look idly back at our PC culture and laugh themselves silly. But it takes a really perceptive mind to see, now, the true nature of the atmosphere we all breathe in everyday. Dalrymple is one of the few great minds that is helping people like me rid ourselves of the PC mind-set. The great Kathy Shaidle would be another, with an honourable mention to the man who brought conservative, Christian males back into fashion: The brilliant Andrew Klavan.
Dr. Dalrymple:
“I received today an email from a very large and successful form of lawyers asking me for my opinion in a medico-legal case.”
Well, certainly one can imagine only very few instances where any good at all can come from lawyerly communications, so perhaps your “pump” was already “primed” as soon as you saw who it was that initiated the correspondence, yes?
“Appended to the email (after the obligatory bit about the environment, the whales, the dolphins, and the worms) was the following nauseating statement:
Out partnership is committed to eliminating discrimination
and promoting equality and diversity in it own policies and
procedures. This applies to the firm’s dealings with
employees, clients and other third parties.”
How perfectly dreadful…one shudders to think what the character of the main body of the offending “e-document” was.
“Let us remind ourselves that a statement such as the one attached to the lawyers’ email did not get there spontaneously; someone, and quite possibly some committee, had to write it and decree that it should be appended to all the emails that the company sent. Indeed it probably took many sessions over breakfast or lunch to hammer it out.”
I think that this is what lawyers do that fits under the heading of “Billable Hours”. You might consider yourself fortunate that you weren’t subjeceted to the results of the inter-office e-memo “Poetry Slam”. “Barristers’ haiku” is a concept that would send most right-thinking people heading for the hills.
“What, actually, does it mean?”
Four-hundred dollars an hour or so, if it’s from a half-decent firm, I should think. Other than that, not much else at all.
“If he were living today, now that we have made so much progress, he would say:”
…what,(the first few dozen times I heard it, I mistook for how a Yorkshireman says: “Howdy”),now I know to be the modern United Kingdom’s unofficial motto:
“P!ss Off!”
Highest Regards;
Who actually believes anything anymore ? Isn’t the deception the spawn of the lie?
I used to puzzle over the phrase “Iam the light and the truth” when I was studying the Life of Jesus; but no longer. His utterance is so profound as to be revolutionary.
Advertising has perfected the deception to an art form.
As a teenager, I always laughed and wondered at the foolishness of the Victorians. How hard they worked to destroy their own happiness! Such extremes!
I wonder what future generations will brand us. I wonder how much of the opposition literature will survive. And I wonder what future generations’ follies will be.
Delia wrote:
“Just wait until we have to pay for ugly people to get a cosmetic makeover so they have the same ‘fair’ chance at a mate as their ‘beautiful’ counterparts.”
Now, that really got me thinking . . . do you think we can get Dear Leader to pay for, you know, ‘male enhancement’ for those who want it?
Just think of what that will do for male self-esteem!
PC is the new religion.
The U.S. once was a more plain spoken society, back in the day when the population was more rural than urban. Platitudes and PC speech didn’t work well with those folk.
Now we have this Byzantine thing going on in our culture and language where obfuscation has become high art. The President ducks and weaves during a Fox interview and his supporters applaud his oratory skills. Hidden in his meanderings are truth and substance but they don’t care, he’s their guy.
Obama promised common sense, Thomas Paine style, but can’t deliver because he’s a wordy, nerdy lawyer. Equivocating is what he does.
There are too many lawyers and not enough farmers. Back in my youth, my father would sit me down and tell me to stop beating around the bush and give him the truth, because for him, being intentionally confusing was akin to lying. Certainly not an indicator of higher intellect as so many seem to think so today.
There is no honor these days. No “a man’s word is his bond” because who the hell know what he just said?
Considering the point to which common courtesy and general friendliness have degraded, I sus[ect that many people are putting all their energy into appending “I heart Gaia” claims on their emails and have nothing left when it comes to actual constructive behavior within their communities. Why it’s almost like environmentalism, diversity, equality, etc., are all about the people expressing the claims, and not about the reality of those issues. Is that cynical?
Mercy is Ruth, so what’s the problem? The unusual thing about the English speaking world is that we name our children in foreign languages rather than our own (Hebrew and Greek usually), in most cases.
I have been aware of this pomposity for some decades now, and I recall a wonderful article that mentioned the phrase Conspicuous Compassion. One has to have read Veblen’s treatise discussing various modes of consumption in the service of ego to fully appreciate the play on words.
It seems that once liberals declared sex to properly be a fully public and mandated activity, all of that american Puritanism was sublimated into things like recycling, diversity, and compassion.
For me the ultimate expression of this mindset is the bumper sticker “Mean People Suck.”
Well the Victorians used to have free access to cocaine and opiates, heroin was over the counter, and cannabis was in the pharmacopoeia. We have come a long way eh?
Change your mind about the drug war yet?
My favorite example of the trite and meaningless is the whole ribbon thing that inexplicitly still continues. “My red ribbon is in support of AIDS research; my pink ribbon is for breast cancer; my other red ribbon (alternate color lime) is for Mothers Against Drunk Driving…” This is so important, as otherwise someone might mistakenly assume you want people to get AIDS, have mastectomies and drive drunk (prefereably all at the same time).
WRJonas has hit it perfectly. People use PC expressions constantly that they don’t actually believe. And they know we know they don’t believe it. And we all continue to pretend. It would be as fun as Alice in Wonderland if there weren’t so many damnable lawyers making money from it.
Surely you jest, Doctor! You think that Rock music is a bigger threat to civilization than Rap? Granted, contemporary Rock Music is tripe, but I digress. Any kind of music played at an obnoxiously loud volume is a problem, but that is a symptom of widespread indolence and stupidity, not a cause. The bigger problem is clearly the abundance of stupid people in public places, like the US House of Representatives, for example. If I favored ineffective laws, I would suggest that we pass a law that said “No one of low intellectual capacity may be within 500 feet of public office.”
Is it possible that by appending such a statement, they were merely showing compliance with some “Equal Opportunity” law?
All university & jobs applications have a similar statement on them these days, not so much self-congratulation, I think, as some sort of fig-leaf against discrimination suits…
The conflating of show with substance has reached its present zenith with the occupant of the White House.
At the beginning of my film class last summer, the far-left professor explained that her syllabus’s policy against on discrimination among her students also extended to anything that happens outside the classroom. It stunned me how she didn’t consider it a possible overstep of her authority.
It seemed that a lack of humility, coupled with self righteousness and arrogance, led her to a peculiar brand of tyranny for what Thomas Sowell rightly put as “Cosmic Justice”.
The whole point of PC is to help you make decisions… well, actually to make all the decisions for you because you aren’t really capable of doing it yourself. It is the same in any totalitarian system. People that think are a danger to those systems; you never know what conclusions they might come to. Read George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” wherein he asks the reader to pay attention to what politicians are saying and make them answer honestly about same.
I’m not going to suggest conspiracy here but there’s another supporting element and that is advertising and public service announcements. I’ve never owned a TV but radio is bad enough. Try counting the number of announcements/adverts that deal with diseases you might have… or a loved one… or, as a last throw of the net, you might have had a silent heart attack. The thrust of these is that you don’t know how dangerous it is, or it is beyond your capability to make a decision and you need “expert” help or, you need not to consider ‘taking’ care but letting ‘us’ take care of you. It is a very minute segue from there to PC and government being the main source of all your well beingness.
Ever counted how many times “experts” are cited in advocacy articles and announcements? Ever asked yourself, “Who are these experts and what makes them expert?” Somewhere in the coal shuts of my mind I remember someone saying that an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less. Frankly, I wouldn’t even give them that margin.
As one Shakespearean peasant/loon said to the other: ‘What will we do after the revolution? First, we’ll kill all the lawyers’.
You unfortunate Americans are suffering from the ultimate PC joke, President Obama. How many sheeple voted for the non-white chappy so that they could feel good? I would think lots of them. We in Quebec had the same phenomenon when the Parti Quebecois was swept into power with lots of Anglo votes. In no time at all legislation was passed against public use of the English language and the hand wringing and gnashing of the teeth of the feel gooders was a joy to behold.
“If he were living today, now that we have made so much progress, he would say: ‘Equality and Diversity. Not unholy names, I think?’ ”
Brilliant!
How about “Here’s little Transformative, and our youngest is Empowerment. We’re going to name the next one Solidarity.”
Word.
“Here’s little Transformative, and our youngest is Empowerment. We’re going to name the next one Solidarity.”
Three babies? Politically-correct Gaia-worshipping “progressives” stop at one, if they absolutely MUST procreate.
“Does it mean, for example, that the lady who cleans the offices at night after the partners have gone home, will henceforth be paid the same as the partners?”
No you twit, it means that the company has a policy of hiring people based on relevant qualifications and not eg. skin color, religion or sex. It means exactly what you thought it meant, before you decided to twist it up into something you could get self-righteously indignant about.
Paul #25,
“Our partnership is committed to eliminating discrimination
and promoting equality and diversity in it own policies and
procedures. This applies to the firm’s dealings with
employees, clients and other third parties.”
Strike two words, and it means what you claim it means.
But those two words make it a hopeless contradiction indicating a completely different mindset from what you describe.
I enjoy your writing, and appreciate your illumination of societal pathologies.
EV
#25 Paul — No you twit, it means that the company has a policy of hiring people based on relevant qualifications and not eg. skin color, religion or sex.
If that’s what they meant, genius, they would hand you a piece of paper saying so if you applied for a job. Or perhaps you would see it on the careers page of their web site. But as an addendum attached to any and all emails it’s fluffery intended to keep their name from being impugned easily, very much in the same vein as Preparation H having a “do not take orally” warning label.
No animals were harmed in this posting. G.L. Alston insults all posters on this web site equally without regard to race, creed, religion, sex, socioeconomic status, or hygiene.
Pretty good piece. I printed it out and read it. It wasn’t good enough to save, so I printed three more copies and threw them all away.
I’m doing my part for the Environment. Cellulose is an excellent carbon sink. It takes months or even years to decompose. In the meantime, they keep growing more trees and cutting them down, fixing more carbon from the atmosphere.
G.L. Alston @ 28: Har!
1. Avoid profanities or foul language unless it is contained in a necessary quote or is relevant to the comment.
2. Stay on topic.
3. Disagree, but avoid ad hominem attacks.
4. Threats are treated seriously and reported to law enforcement.
What the hell is left to say?
31. Iben_Hadd,
LMFAO!
On the assumption that Dr. Dalrymple copied/pasted the post-script thought from that email into this blog posting, I noticed there are at least 2 typos in it that leaped right out of the page to me. If I’d been the recipient of the email, I’d immediately have trashed it. Any law office wanting my business had better be able to spell and write a sentence: that’s what I’d be paying them for.
Fail.
Diversity has gone too far when we have an incompetent in the white house whose sole achievement, if it can be called that, is the color of his skin. That is all. There is zero, zip, no other achievement in his life whatsoever. He has a brown or mulatto skin color, pretended to be an “African American” (which he is not) and speaks reasonably well, although for someone with a Harvard education, his utterings are quite a moderate performance, and have become boring with repetition, exposing the narcissism at the heart of the beast.
#34 Beej:
“Any law office wanting my business had better be able to spell and write a sentence: that’s what I’d be paying them for.”
May I remind you, sir:
“Out partnership is committed to eliminating discrimination
and promoting equality and diversity in it own policies and
procedures. This applies to the firm’s dealings with
employees, clients and other third parties.”
Thus, they will not engage in “Spellism”, and you can therefore take your vile HATE elsewhere, you despicable Grammarian Fascist.
Paul #25
“…it means that the company has a policy of hiring people based on relevant qualifications and not eg. skin color, religion or sex…”
That’s what they meant by “eliminating discrimination”.
But what do they mean by “promoting diversity”? In practice it means that if you’ve already got 6 asian guys in a company of 10 people then you’re going to hire the black lesbian woman instead of another asian guy, and qualifications be damned. You’re going to do it even if you like to pretend that you won’t (“we only consider ethnic diversity in choosing between equally qualified candidates”) because in practice the question of diversity is always measured by results. If you’ve got 50% asians when their ratio in the populace is 20%, you’ll be judged guilty of institutionalized racism with no chance to defend yourself or to appeal. So each division of the company is careful to maintain the proper racial balance within its employees, to avoid the appearance of racism. Of course, it is quite racist to hire people based on racial quotas, but the appearance of being non-racist is more important than actually being non-racist.
As for “promoting equality”, that has no meaning at all. If you think they mean “promoting equal opportunities”, then that’s already been covered by “eliminating discrimination”.
So this is the doctor’s point – we mindlessly repeat our Politically Correct beliefs, never thinking of what they mean, or that #3 directly contradicts #1, and #2 has no meaning at all. We prefer to appear non-racist than to be non-racist.