Friday, January 08, 2021

Henry Farrell, self-exiled Irishman who abandoned one church for another –Catholic for Rational Action– spouts Orwell. 

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to … exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink."

 Terry Eagleton

As far as ideas go, twentieth-century Britain imported them largely from Central European Jewish émigrés like Hobsbawm himself. Wittgenstein, Namier, Eysenck, Popper, Melanie Klein, Isaac Deutscher, Isaiah Berlin: One can imagine the Neanderthal condition of modern English culture without these brilliant blow-ins and carpetbaggers. Much the same happened in the literary arena, as the heights of "English" literature were effortlessly monopolized by a Pole (Joseph Conrad), three Americans (Henry James, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) and five Irishmen (Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett). The Irish were expected to write most of England’s literature for it, such being the burdens of empire, as well as supplying them over the years with rents, cattle and cannon-fodder.

Farrell's responding to the fascist Hawley, who's been dumped by Bertelsmann. Hawley calls it "Orwellian", being thrown over by globalists. He can publish with Regnery. But I'm sure Farrell is happy Trump's been thrown offline and his supporters even more underground.

12 years ago Farrell was happy to entertain arguments for social Darwinism by economic policy, and his favorite literary critic ranks Shaw over Shakespeare. Henry loves Truth.  He lies to himself before the rest of us.

Moralists hate ambiguity; they refuse to learn how to read it, or they're incapable, and need the rest of us to be as purblind as they are. They don't defend free speech; they defend the power of the sovereign, and the authoritarianism of fiduciaries.

I'm done with links. Farrell has a tag.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comment moderation is enabled.