the vice of ignorance

i am wary of ignorant do-gooders. There is something very dangerous about rosy-tinters who think the best of everyone, who, indeed, think that everyone is a precious wonderful snowflake, but who have little experience of life beyond the cloisters of the upper middle class. i’m sure that such ignorant rosy-tinters occasionally do some good, more or less by accident, but i am nevertheless deeply suspicious of ignorance. Ignorance can take many forms. An intelligent and educated man, judging things he has never, even in the most distant way, experienced, will be as ignorant as a chav dismissing Shakespeare as ’shite, innit’.

My battle against the rosy-tinters has been long and gruesome. It’s not that i even have much experience of the grimmer side of life, having spent most of my 32 years living in relatively quiet areas. But i seem a magnet for violent crazies; i only have to sit in public - in a bus station, say - for half an hour for (to take one example) a man to sit next to me and advise me that he’s just been released from a 9-year prison stretch, hasn’t slept in 3 days, was fighting the night before, and will almost certainly go back to prison soon. i guess that whereas my more typically middle class friends would instantly get up and leave, or sit there frozen with terror, i always enjoy talking to the crazies, and i assume they are far from unique.

Some of my friends automatically dismiss my gorier anecdotes as so wildly implausible, betokening such a dark and cynical view of humanity, that i must be lying. Indeed, they so take this for granted that they don’t even need to accuse me, they just smile forgivingly, as if any tale of human violence or meanness is a priori unrealistic. We do not, after all, live in Somalia.

So Theodore Dalrymple, having drawn his knowledge of humanity from his work as a psychiatrist in a prison and an inner city hospital, writes of a posh literary dinner:

On my right sat a man in his late sixties, intelligent and cultivated, who had been a distinguished foreign correspondent for the BBC and who had spent much of his career in the United States. He said that for the last ten years he had read with interest my weekly dispatches—printed in a rival, conservative publication—depicting the spiritual, cultural, emotional, and moral chaos of modern urban life, and had always wanted to meet me to ask me a simple question: Did I make it all up?

i wonder how anyone could live in the west, and not nod at Dalrymple’s seemingly inexhausible fund of appalling anecdotes.  But, it seems, there is no one as capable of living in their own private dreamworld as a good liberal. Later, at the same party, on the subject of punishment (which all of the good liberals were opposed to, of course, on the assumption that a murderer or serial rapist or child abuser needs counselling sessions and kindness, and will then miraculously transform into the shining beautiful being we all truly are, praise God! - rather than, for example, using their liberty to go out and kill again):

I said we should look closer to home, to the fact that, with the single (and admittedly important) exception of murder, crime rates in Britain were now higher, and in some cases much higher, than in the United States: and that the chief failing of our criminal-justice system was not its excessive harshness or its liability to wrongful imprisonment but its patent failure to enforce the law or to protect citizens from the most blatant lawbreaking. The result was that for untold numbers of our compatriots life was a living hell.

I briefly outlined my reasons for saying so: the vast numbers of people—thousands and possibly tens of thousands—who have told me about their lives, which are dominated by the possibility, or rather the high probability, of violence and other criminal acts being committed against them, and who quite rightly felt themselves to be totally unprotected by the police or by the courts.

Opposite me was a well-known pacifist, a man of the highest principle, who was by no means a puritan, however, at least with regard to food and wine. His shiny cheeks radiated bonhomie and self-satisfaction at the same time, and he spoke in the plummy tones of the English upper middle class.

“You know funny people,” he said, leaning slightly toward me across the table.

i find the self-righteousness, pomposity, and utter ignorance of such people both bewildering and despicable. i have no objection to someone choosing to know nothing of vicious ghetto life, but to then make a career out of pontificating about the evils of the police and the prison system, and the essential goodness of all criminals, is a shameful and base parasitism. i have as yet met not a single liberal who has any experience of life outside of their safe middle class world, a world safeguarded by the police.

Certainly, one reason England has gone to the dogs under Nu Labour is to do with the systematic assumption that criminals need kindness - preferably by just letting them go free - and that the police are fascist oppressors whose powers must be severely curtailed with bureaucracy (an average of 40 forms must be filled in for each arrest made; the police,  understandably, are now reluctant to even record a crime, let alone make an arrest), piffle about Human Rights (which seemingly extend to the criminal but not the victim and certainly not to future victims), and all the fashionable and worthless notions that have seeped like slow poison out of academia, from the ’teachings’ of cretinous filth like Foucault, and have now infected society as a whole.

i loathe liberals. They do not care about human beings. They care about the glow of self-righteousness they enjoy when pontificating about oppressed minorities. i despise Feminists, who are without exception grubby career-whores and apple polishers desperate to climb the corporate ladder, while mouthing the usual Party Line about patriarchy and ’social constructs’. They regard, say porn or erotica, as a great evil, worthy of their red-faced screaming, but not the quite genuine mistreatment of women in Saudi Arabia. These people are staggeringly ignorant, because ignorance is the only way to maintain their posture of perpetual arrogance, in which they are the great defenders of humanity against ‘patriarchy’. They know nothing and their posturings are likewise of no value.

So, another gory anecdote from Dalrymple. Read this and think of the pacifist drawling “you know funny people”:

Her life had been that of the modern slum dweller: three children by different fathers, none of whom supported her in any way and the last of whom was a vicious, violent drunk. She had separated from him by fleeing with their two-year-old to a hostel for battered women; soon afterward she found herself an apartment whose whereabouts he did not know.

Unfortunately, sometime later she was admitted to the hospital for an operation. As she had no one to whom she could entrust the child, she turned to Social Services for help. The social workers insisted, against her desperate pleas, that the child should stay with his biological father while she was in the hospital. They were deaf to her argument that he was an unsuitable guardian, even for two weeks: he would regard the child as an encumbrance, an intolerable interference with his daily routine of drinking, whoring, and fighting. They said it was wrong to pass judgment on a man like this and threatened her with dire consequences if she did not agree to their plan. So the two-year-old was sent to his father as they demanded.

Within the week he and his new girlfriend had killed the child by swinging him against the wall repeatedly by his ankles and smashing his head.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Making a Difference…In my OWN Life.
• Let’s be kids
• TO BE or TO DO - Part 2
• Police chief’s killer sentenced to life in prison