What I've read, listened to and watched while under house arrest

I am too lazy at the moment to write this post in paragraphs, so it will instead take the form of a list. This suits me well as I am a compulsive list-maker. I love nothing more than to make lists of my favourite novels, sonatas, television programmes, biographies etc. And I am always making lists of ideas -- for stories, essays, works of music. Occasionally the ideas do come to something, but the purpose of the list is to sort trough my wayward thoughts. Yet it is often futile: the act of list-making can instead make the obsessive aspect of my personality more pronounced.

• Beginning with several stories by Sir Walter Scott... First, his short stories: Chronicles of Canongate and the Keepsake Stories. Two Drovers was the best of these. Surgeon's Daughter had an excellent beginning, but Scott's sole attempt at leaving the continent was strangely plain. The Keepsake Stories were an okay diversion, but I doubt I'd ever read them again.
• Rob Roy and The Talisman. Rob Roy is a great novel, the best of Scott. The Talisman I was reading for the second time. It is not quite as profound as Rob Roy but the cantankerous, impassioned King Richard is one of Scott's best creations, and the opening scenes in the desert, then the hermit's cave and the secret monastery -- utter magic! If I had to recommend one Waverley novel to someone, I think the Talisman would be tit. It may not be his best, but it has the virtue of a compelling beginning (Scott can often take some time to get going), an exciting plot, and no Scots dialect.
• Ivanhoe -- I rewatched the extraordinarily good 1997 BBC adaptation, then reread parts of the original novel. The adaptation is of a sort no British television channel does any more: a serious, largely faithful adaptation of a classic novel. No concessions to modern political agendas, no sex scenes, no crude dialogue. It was rather violent, but I'm still a boy at heart, and so I love big, gory battles.
• Bong Joon-ho films. The three I watched keep you glued to the screen, though I can't say I enjoyed Parasite -- I almost want to say I felt worse for watching it -- and I found Snowpiercer confused and ultimately meaningless. Okja was by far the best. It had a virtuous protagonist, unlike the other two films in which not one character was the slightest bit admirable. It is bleak at the end, but also shows heroism: the little girl fails to save all the 'superpigs', but she can save the one superpig she loves. In this era's focus on systemic issues we easily forget that these personal acts of bravery, however small and insignificant they may seem in the Grand Scheme of Things, are the foundations of a healthy, loving civilisation.
• John Christopher's Death of Grass. Wyndham without the cosiness. Even bleaker than Day of the Triffids, Darwinian.
• I began reading Balzac's Father Goriot but my goodness was I bored. For some reason, I have never had any luck with any sort of French literature. I do not think I am prejudiced against the nation. I love its music from Perotin to Messiaen. But its literature has always defeated me. I have made so many abortive attempts: Camus, Hollebecque, Rousseau, Proust, Rabelais, Dumas. I finished Candide, but only because it was so short. I was going to say the only French writer I like is Simon Leys, then I remembered he was from Belgium. I do quite desperately want to try Hugo, but there are still so many unread books on my shelf...
• Rewatched Chernobyl. One of the few great television shows/films about how Communist societies operated. Absolutely frightening. It is amazing to me how even those who were alive during the time of Soviet Communism (not me) have largely forgotten the era. Nazism is still at the forefront of our memories, often the first example people use for comparisons. It's horrors are still vivid. This should, in a just and enlightened society as we aspire to be, be true for Communism too.
• Manzoni's The Betrothed. This is a grand, brilliant, expansive historical novel, up there with Scott. The Italian's consider one of their best literary works and are incredulous that the rest of the world mostly ignores it. I quite agree. It may be, alas, too Christian and too virtuous for modern tastes. One of the great moments in the novel is a Christian conversion. Fundamental to the story is a belief in the importance of marriage and religious commitment. It has many horrors,and it has much evil and much complexity, but goodness, beauty and honesty wins.
• Samuel Johnson's Prayers and Meditations have been a wonderful discovery. As far as I can tell the book hasn't been published in full since the 19th century. They are Johnson's personal prayers and thoughts, on his many vices, his indolence, his failures, his ambition, his old age, his impending death, his wife's death, his deep and occasionally controversial faith (he was an Anglican and so many reading the book thought his prayers for the dead amounted to heresy). I indulgently purchased facsmilies of the original manuscripts published by Yale some decades ago. There is no feeling more exhilarating than leafing through such facsimiles, seeing the author's original handwriting, the way his thoughts are organised, the way these things changed over the years. As an idle soul I share most of Johnson's worries, so beautifully expressed. His prayers and meditations give me great comfort, and encourage me to reform.
• My interest in Patrick O'Brian is fizzling. I enjoy the novels, but as a diversion, sort of like reading Wodehouse -- a sweet which I ingest in small quantities. I have lost even the urge to finish an O'Brian novel, though I do enjoy reacquainting with the characters of Jack Aubrey and especially Stephen Maturin, even if that means just dipping into books. I wanted to be obsessed about these books in the way so many others are, but alas.
• Carl Dreyer's films have been the most important 'lockdown' discovery for me. Four of them are masterpieces -- I'm almost tempted to say they are by themselves the four greatest films of all time: The Passions of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath, Ordet and Gertrud. Vampyr is also a great film, but it is a bit too experimental and incoherent to rank with the others. It has some of the greatest moments in cinema but it is not quite the sum of its parts. Most of his earlier films (pre-Joan of Arc) have their merits, but they compare poorly with his later masterpieces. There is a soul, a slowness, a pathos, a sincerity, a silence, quite unlike any other films. It is everywhere: in the script, the way the camera moves, the lighting, the strange way people converse. The film I recommend to begin with is Day of Wrath, about 17th century witch trials. One of the most remarkable things about it is the way that everyone, including the witches, believes in witchcraft. It is not a simple tale of persecutors vs the persecuted.
• I was underwhelmed by Citizen Kane. I still don't know why.
• I tried reading Plato's Republic again. I still have little tolerance for philosophy. I don't dismiss it, I just can't read it. I always end up opening Boswell's Life of Johnson and am happy to find common sense, vividly and memorably conveyed.
• Oh Mozart, how I adore his operas. But I have tried in lockdown to listen seriously to his other works, and find most of his symphonies inferior to many of his contemporaries, ditto his piano sonatas. The only luck I had was with his concerti, which are most certainly great music.
• Anton Reicha is a new discovery for me. I love his wind quintets, but most brilliant of all is his 24 Preludes and Fugues. If you can find a recording, well worth it. The fugue has so much potential as a form but has not been developed in the same way sonatas and symphonies have. We are still too attached to the Bachian model. Reicha offers a fascinating alternative.
• I am listening to more and more Josquin. This is my favourite motet at the moment.
• I listened to all of Arthur Sullivan's operatic version of Ivanhoe. It is, I'm afraid, a failure. But it is a very good failure. It works only if you already know the story of Ivanhoe, and even then some of the best bits of the story are necessarily absent. The music is a bit of a potpourri; sometimes it works, sometimes it feels like there is too much of an affectation. The best music is when he goes for simpler and melodic -- i.e. more like G&S. For 'grand opera', there are better composers. Yet I had a blast listening to it. Sure, it was melodramatic, rather confused, anachronistic, musically inconsistent -- but if you love Ivanhoe, Merry England and Arthur Sullivan, it is one hell of a treat.
• Sofia Gubaidulina is my favourite living composer. I had high hopes for her John Passion, which I thought might be her magnum opus. But I found it drawn out, overly dramatic, more gesture than music, and with few of the really compelling motifs that usually characterise her work. I may be entirely wrong about it -- goodness knows how often a work I thought terrible on first listen I end up loving. What I do like very much is her work 'The Rider on the White Horse' which is adapted from the Passion.
• Grace Davidson's recording of the first book of Dowland songs is mesmerisingly beautiful.
• I am revisiting Buffy for I think the fifth time. There is nothing more comforting resubmerging oneself in old favourites. I am, I'm afraid, one of those insufferable creatures who believes Buffy to be one of the great artistic achievements of the modern era. Not much competition, I confess, but to my mind it is up there with Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, the Waverley novels, and many of the other great fictions which began as entertainment and developed into something so wonderfully profound. The last seriee of Buffy declined a bit in quality, but so do some of the endings of great novels -- the last chapter of Robinson Crusoe comes to mind. Consistency is not, in fact, a mark of greatness -- quite the contrary.

There are many more things, but I think the list is long enough for now...

Suicide of a Civilisation

I am constantly astonished by the self-harm modern societies keep inflicting on themselves. Those who rule us -- in most of politics and the media, and in various cultural establishments -- seem to have become bored of their ceaseless metaphorical self-flagellation and have instead decided on a kind of enforced collective seppuku.

We have become a culture that destroys rather than creates. We have a Rousseauian fantasy that if only we can just shed the sins of society we will be purer, freer and happier. We believe that our society -- Western civilisation broadly -- bears a highly disproportionate responsibility for the world's injustice and cruelty. So when we see the most horrific and enthusiastic violence and looting in our own societies, we say we deserve it. We even call this kind of meaningless violence 'protest'. It is a perverted sort of religious morality converted into a secular collective morality: if you beat me, I will stand there and ask for more beatings; if you steal my car, I will go into my house, rip the television off the wall, and offer it to you as well. 

And so when thugs and activists start burning down cities across America, destroying the livelihoods, if not the lives, of every type of American, we consider it progress. We are suicidally mad. I was deeply moved, like many others, watching the black St Louis Police Chief, almost with tears in his eyes, asking incredulously, 'can we make some sense out of this?' 

Why am I, an Englishman, scribbling a blog post about this? Well, inevitably the same madness has spread to here. The great London chamber music venue, Wigmore Hall, is streaming a concert every day from inside an empty hall. I wouldn't miss any of them, so addicted am I not merely to music but to that glorious hall, in which I have spent so many happy consoling evenings. When I tuned in to today's concert, I was firstly greeted by a message on-screen announcing two-minutes of silence 'to voice our support for the end to violence and inequality against black communities'. Quite why they thought this was appropriate or relevant is beyond me. Quite why anyone thinks these 'protests' have all that much to do with George Floyd's brutal death is beyond me. 

The US police force seems to me to be quite a corrupt, militarised and incompetent institution in many places. Ours is not necessarily better, though it's problems are different. Racism does not seem to be the primary problem so much as a general failure to police with proportion and consent. But for all the ills of the police force, this nationwide riot is more dreadful. It is a collective mass orgy of violence parading through American cities. It is the greatest threat to civilisation: barbarism. 

Yet the same people who think a handful of gun-carrying Republican protesting outside a state capitol building -- where no one gets hurt -- is a grave threat to democracy, who think if we don't socially distance many millions will die -- the same people think these riots are progress. No matter how many police are injured, no matter how many people beaten up, how many livelihoods destroyed, how many businesses smashed up, how many missiles thrown, most of those on the left will say this not the fault of the rioters, but of 'us' -- they may even encourage it. 

If these riots were committed by a combination of thugs and right-wing activists with their own grievances, what do you think the response would be? It would be described as terrorism -- and justly so. There does not seem to many of us left who abhor and fear violence, whatever the motive. There are few of us left who understand that destruction in itself does not produce any good, only create new evils. Why would anyone want to show solidarity with these rioters?

Lockdown and now the enthusiastic support for these evil riots. Two of the most blatantly destructive events in my life time. They will be ruinous for many, if not most. Just mad, horrifyingly mad.

House Arrest: Writing

In the midst of this mad lockdown I have done a fair bit of reading -- though, interestingly, not much more than usual. I think I have a natural limit with reading. I certainly can't do it all day (which I can playing music), and perhaps not even all evening, unless my mind is particularly clear. What I am doing more of is listening to music (and possibly playing a bit less), and I am watching films, which I usually seldom do; yet I'm not watching any television series, which I usually do.

I am perhaps writing less, but this has much to do with becoming fed up of receiving no responses for submissions to publications. I am beginning to realise that Samuel Johnson was quite right to say that no one but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money. Writing an essay is not an inconsiderable labour. It is not like writing a blog post, which at the very most takes an hour (and this doubtless shows). An essay can take a day to write; and a serious essay about a subject, rather than a mere opinion piece, can take significantly longer -- weeks, months, even a year, depending on the difficulty of research.

Say you spend two weeks thinking about, researching and then writing an essay. You then finish it, and spend a few more days reflecting and making the odd adjustment. Then you start sending it to publications; how long this takes can vary greatly. I keep a list of publications that I like and which I know accept unsolicited submissions. This list is not long, maybe 30 publications in total. If I write something, I go over the list and submit the piece to those publications for which it might be suitable. Complications arise, however: some publications do not accept simultaneous submissions, meaning you have to wait for a response from them before you can submit the essay elsewhere. I have waited months for a response before; in many cases I am still waiting.

I have gone through this process maybe twenty, perhaps thirty times, and four times have I been successful. One time I was told my piece was being considered for publication, then several months later I got another email saying thank you, but no. Usually I get no response; and if I do get one, it tends to be a long time after submission. Sometimes, having months to reflect on an essay, I realise it wasn't as good as I first thought; then I am glad it was never published.

One time I submitted a short story to a publication under my real name, and was fairly swiftly rejected. Some time later I resubmitted the story to the same place under a pseudonym which implied me to be a woman from an ethnic minority background. It was swiftly published. I have only tried this once, so it is hardly evidence in and of itself, but I have heard of so many similar examples that I suspect there is a pattern. In fact, I have stopped submitting to literary and political publications unless they are explicitly not left-wing. It just doesn't seem worth the effort.

I haven't written much, then. I am thinking of writing a book. I might not be able to get it published, but I might nonetheless be able to self-publish it, and maybe a few curious people will read it.

I am constantly amazed that anyone seems to have a writing career. Then I read their writing and I am even more amazed. Of course I don't aspire to anything as daft as a writing career, or indeed any career for that matter. In this mad post-lockdown world, I can't honestly say I aspire to anything worldly. Certainly nothing ambitious.

The Two Metre Rule

In the middle ages, church music mostly used a 3:1 metre (think waltzes). Music with a 4:1 metre -- what we erroneously call common time, but was in the middle ages known as tempus imperfectum cum prolatione imperfecta -- was usually considered of lower sort, often shunned. As the Latin title indicates, music in four was considered imperfect, music in three perfect -- owing in part to its association with the Trinity.

For some reason we increasingly do not divide by three. Music remains something of an exception, with most music still usually divisible by either 4 or 3, though 4/4 has undoubtedly become the default time signature. Two, three and four seem to be the most natural divisions for man. Any higher than that is of significantly less use. We think in threes and twos, and so to have any system that would deal only in threes, or only in twos, would be a very limited system -- and indeed it is.

We still have an imperial system which allows for measurements in threes as well as twos, and people still use it informally, even if officially it is, at the very least, not encouraged. Imperial measures are drawn form the body and the environment and the history of a people, not imposed on us artificially from above. An inch is more easily comprehended than 2cm, an ounce more tangible than 50 grams, and six feet more real than two metres. I'm not even sure what a metre is, an abstract term which is only useful poetry or music. Even then, it isn't a measurement in itself but rather a category of measurement -- imabic pentametre and compound time, for example.

The stupid -- and it turns out arbitrary -- two metre rule seems to symbolise the state we are in. This lockdown is foreign to English constitution. It is only natural, then, that it is employed in the measurements favoured by European despots and statist busybodies (guess, if you do not already know, which revolution introduced the metric system to the modern world...)

It is another symbol of our loss of liberty, just as ineffective face masks are symbolic gags. Keep two 'metres' away from each other at all times; cover your mouth with a mask; do not gather together in groups of any number, publicly or privately; do not spread misinformation online; do not attend church; come out at 8 o'clock every Thursday to applaud 'our NHS', then go back into your homes and do not come out.

On Not Applauding

I'm not an enthusiastic applauder of anything. I've often wondered if the custom of applauding in concerts is overdone. For some music, applause seems an entirely inappropriate response. Why, at the end of Messiaen's L'ascension, say, is not silence a better and more meaningful response? There are few things more annoying than the person who, inattentive throughout much of concert, stores all his energy for the end of the concert when he applauds the instant the final note has sounded, if not before, and often shouts several 'bravos!'  Applause is often a self-satisfying activity, not an act of gratitude. It serves a similar to function to laughter at those appalling comedy shows: to show that one fits in, that one is part of the good, intelligent and correct class in society.

Applause which is spontaneous is worthwhile. A one-off show of gratitude for health service staff, arising from the people (not from government initiative), would be fine and good. A regimented weekly 8 o'clock North-Korea style show of appreciation for 'our NHS' is another matter. It is all the more distasteful given the current situation. We are under house arrest. We have shut up the country for something that is comparable to a severe influenza outbreak of a kind for which there is precedent in recent history. We have plunged ourselves into a recession. We have lost much of our liberty. We have clearly developed the precedent and are developing the infrastructure for tyranny. We are depriving many of the old of their final months by confining them to their homes; and we are depriving many more of the old of their dwindling number of healthy months, where they are still able to travel and enjoy life; this lockdown may hasten their health decline, and mean their few more years on this earth may be of a much inferior quality.

And what do we do? We don't debate. We don't hold government and advisers to account. We barely even quietly question. We cannot participate in most kinds of free public political action. Moreover, we cannot even attend church, not even to pray privately. Instead, we go out every week at 8 o'clock, one of the few sanctioned times we are allowed to leave our homes, and we applaud. We applaud ourselves, we applaud our society, we applaud our institutions, none of whom deserve it. And if someone doesn't join they are a Bad Person, liable even to be named and shamed by their aspiring state-informant neighbours. If we were actually grateful for our health workers and shop workers and delivery drivers we would not be doing something so vain as applauding. A more appropriate response might be stomping, or even a stern silence, and an impassioned cry for a fair wage, an end to the wage-cutting conditions-lowering immigration still going on now, a call for an end to chain shops, no more buying from Amazon which people selfishly continue to do unnecessarily, it has to involve people not merely demanding that the 'government take action', but that consumers change their behaviour.

And if you really care about the conditions and pay of these workers, you would not support this lockdown, which will quite probably usher in an era of worse healthcare, spending cuts, lower standard of living, wage cuts, cuts to welfare, cuts to culture, cuts to local government. Most of us will be poorer. And some will be poorer than they ever imagined. I hope it will not be me; I hope that I am well enough insulated from it. But when one reads the stories of those in the Great Depression, one realises how quickly a modest middle-class prosperity, which seemed, barring a few bumps, to be a certainty, becomes a distant dream in a new horrifying reality.

This is what may become of us. We are told, smugly, that we live in an information age. Yet what good has it done us?! This crisis has shown how useless access to information is if no one is curious enough to use it. Now you can easily find all sorts of stats and opinions. Yet people are not interested.  The wealth of knowledge is of no interest to them. They simply listen to the Boris Jong-son's People's Government and his comrades around the developed world. They don't seek out evidence, they don't question. They simply accept: governments say a lockdown will save us, they accept it. Nay, they applaud it! In other contexts this might be called jingoism. The stifling and shaming of dissent (on the rare occasions it is publicly expressed), the thoughtless march to a 'war on COVID', the regimentation of daily life, the loss of liberty. Over a disease which, as the wise Professor Johan Giesecke has said, is a mild disease, comparable to past severe flus, with an actual death rate of around 0.1%. Regardless of what countries have done in response, their actions seemed to have had little effect on the total number of deaths. Let us stop applauding and instead dissent. Call for debate, call for parliament to return, and call for an end to this mad policy of lockdown.

Evidence of COVID-19 Overreaction

Here is a list of links (which I will keep updating) that show why our reaction to COVID-19 is worrying, to put it very mildly, and also to demonstrate, for when this is all over, that the fact of our dangerous overreaction, with its likely immiserating and authoritarian consequences, was already known. If we don't acknowledge this, and instead choose to believe that our overreaction is what made COVID-19 a relatively mild pandemic, then we will have learnt nothing, and will readily surrender our liberties in the face of other fears and manipulations the government presents to us. We cannot and should not be persuaded by the post hoc fallacy that the government will have saved our lives by stripping us of our liberties. I will forever hold Boris Jong-son and his People's Government in utter and total contempt for what he and they have done.

Links (in no particular order):

Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, on the flawed science that governments have been using to justify their radical COVID-19 measures:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsExPrHCHbw&t=361s

And here is the text of the open letter he wrote to Chancellor Merkel:
https://swprs.org/open-letter-from-professor-sucharit-bhakdi-to-german-chancellor-dr-angela-merkel/

Lord Sumption on the legal perils of a 'lockdown' and the possible dangers to liberty: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/there-is-a-difference-between-the-law-and-official-instructions-j9tthqnrf

University of Oxford research suggesting that large minority of the country may already have been infected with COVID-19: https://www.ft.com/content/5ff6469a-6dd8-11ea-89df-41bea055720b

'John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine and professor of epidemiology and population health, as well as professor by courtesy of biomedical data science at Stanford University School of Medicine, professor by courtesy of statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) at Stanford University.' He warns us that we are 'making decisions without reliable data':
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/

Virologist and infectious disease specialist Dr Pablo Goldschmidt:
https://www.clarin.com/buena-vida/coronavirus-panico-injustificado-dice-virologo-argentino-francia_0_yVcmJ4RM.html

Neil Ferguson, of Imperial study infamy (the study which seemed to frighten the government into taking these emergeny measures), criticised for flawed research:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/28/neil-ferguson-scientist-convinced-boris-johnson-uk-coronavirus-lockdown-criticised/

Retired professor of pathology and a former NHS consultant pathologist John Lee: 'How deadly is the coronavirus? It's still far from clear':
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think/amp

Government setting up an anti-'misinformation' 'specialist unit':

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52086284

R.R. Reno is First Things questioning the shutdown:
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/03/questioning-the-shutdown

Evidence that Italy has recurring problems managing influenza outbreaks (particularly among elderly):
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971219303285

Professor Sucharit Bhakdi on the actual nature of the threat from COVID-19 and our hysterical and damaging response:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBB9bA-gXL4&list=PLO8heR1nSoznRyBQSVD3LZ82iztFBismZ&index=9&t=8s

Simon Jenkins: 'Why I’m taking the coronavirus hype with a pinch of salt':
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/06/coronavirus-hype-crisis-predictions-sars-swine-flu-panics

Peter Hitchens on the folly and danger of shutting down Britain because of this 'PanicDemic':
https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/03/peter-hitchens-is-shutting-down-britain-with-unprecedented-curbs-on-ancient-liberties-really-the-bes.html

Evidence of police sounding and acting like agents of the state: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-i-stopped-a-family-of-six-out-shopping-in-morrisons-ndw93mw7n

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/shepherds-bush-green-police-coronavirus-lockdown-a4396806.html
https://www.itv.com/news/calendar/2020-03-26/humberside-police-creates-online-portal-to-report-people-not-social-distancing/
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-lockdown-police-defend-using-drone-footage-to-catch-hikers-11964636

https://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/health/coronavirus/residents-asking-northants-police-arrest-neighbours-disobeying-coronavirus-lockdown-2519241

https://web.archive.org/web/20200330154413/https://twitter.com/PoliceWarr/status/1244163251799195649?s=20

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/mar/29/stephen-kinnock-targeted-by-police-for-visiting-father-neil

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-will-ignore-some-crimes-as-officers-fall-victim-to-coronavirus-8c0ptwk5z
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8163209/Police-dump-black-dye-blue-lagoon-discourage-Instagram-selfies.html
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/03/27/snoopers-charter-police-invite-public-report-coronavirus-rule/

Sweden taking a different and more sensible path:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-elderly-in-lockdown-and-children-in-school-help-sweden-pursue-herd-immunity-r705m76dd

Lord Sumption on our hysterical reaction to COVID-19:
https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/03/lord-sumption-speaks-against-hysteria-driven-government-policy-.html

Brendan O'Neill: 'Dissent in a time of COVID':
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/03/23/dissent-in-a-time-of-covid/

Only 12% of corona-deaths in Italy were directly caused by COVID-19:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200324214448/https:/www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/have-many-coronavirus-patients-died-italy/

NYT: 'For Autocrats, and Others, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power':
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/world/europe/coronavirus-governments-power.html

Novelist Frederick Forsyth: Is the virus really as bad as we're being told?

https://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/frederick-forsyth/1264336/coronavirus-latest-UK-death-toll-boris-johnson

Dr John Ioannidis interview:

https://youtu.be/d6MZy-2fcBw

Theodore Dalyrimple on the uselessness and indeed perils of modelling:

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-meaningless-of-the-covid-19-models/

Coronovirus and the Cult of Expertise:

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/03/coronavirus-and-the-cult-of-expertise

Britain has “painted itself into a corner” with no clear exit strategy from the coronavirus epidemic and needs to reconsider herd immunity, according to a senior government adviser:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/boris-johnsons-coronavirus-adviser-calls-for-a-way-out-of-lockdown-rd58g6tc9

Simon Jenkins: Was I wrong about Coronavirus? Even the world's best scentists can't tell me:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/02/wrong-coronavirus-world-scientists-optimism-experts

COVID lockdown may cost the lives of cancer patients:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-lockdown-will-cost-the-lives-of-cancer-patients-6p78hlrbt

Lord Sumption: the cure is worse than the disease:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-lockdown-we-are-so-afraid-of-death-no-one-even-asks-whether-this-cure-is-actually-worse-3t97k66vj

Government contemplates banning exercise (and Opposition Leader supports it):

https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.sky.com/story/amp/coronavirus-health-secretary-matt-hancock-reveals-hes-lost-people-to-covid-19-as-he-warns-outdoor-exercise-could-be-banned-11968942

Has Sweden found the right solution to coronavirus?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-response-sweden-avoids-isolation-economic-ruin/

Nearly 3,000 influenza patients are admitted to ICUs in 2018/2019:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/846879/Adult_Seasonal_Influenza_Critical_Care_Guidance.pdf

Past severe influenza outbreak:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5440785/amp/Killer-flu-outbreak-blame-42-spike-deaths.html

One in five dental practises risk collapse, patients with serious problems not getting treated:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/one-in-five-dental-practices-going-down-the-tube-jwzpc0lgt

A Nation Under House Arrest

Rome was not built in a day, but apparently a police state can be built in a week. We no longer can travel freely, are subject to an 'emergency powers' act which gives police unprecedented enforcement power, suspends trial by injury for death inquests, weakens protections for the vulnerable (now only one doctor's signature is required to detain someone under mental health laws, or to sign off on a death), we cannot open businesses, we cannot attend mass, we cannot attend any social events or ceremonies, we cannot gather at all in public grounds. We cannot protest; we may no longer be able express dissent publicly without being considered a danger to public safety. No one is safe, and we must keep two French Revolutionary metres away from each other at all times. We are now even ordered to stay in our homes, with very few exceptions. 

An entire nation under house arrest. We may not face the same punishments (yet), but our liberties are no longer much greater than those of a resident in Pyongyang.

I have written a letter to my MP (Julie Marson) and received no response. I have searched the internet for evidence of her opinions on the emergency powers act and have found only uncritical, unthinking support. There are some brave dissenters in parliament, who have at least placed some checks on the government, and who have managed to remove at least one egregious aspect of the bill (the possible enforced cremation of the dead), but it is not much, and Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson must be feeling mightily powerful right now.

Other countries have not found it necessary to respond with such self-destructive madness. Japan, which is in some ways as England was, did not initiate a lockdown. They took sensible measures and precautions, but have kept most work and travel and public events operating. Despite having COVID-19 in the country for months, their incidence rate remains less than a thousand. Are they simply a more decent people, not as selfish, filthy and uncivilised as we have become, more likely to take sensible precautions, to be considerate of others? Does that explain it, or is it that the disease may not be the Big One it has been presented to us as. Both are probably true.

I hear you say, but what about the experts? I do not necessarily think we should 'follow the experts', a fairly empty phrase. For one thing, experts are not a homogeneous group. And for another, just as in the mass of mankind, the minority of experts may be more right than the majority. We have had spectacular errors in medical science before: lobotomies, pathologising of homosexuality, eugenics, thalidomide. Economic experts are usually more wrong than they are right, and produce forecasts which are about as unreliable as a trabant. The recent UK Supreme Court decision showed that judges, for all their learning, may show little understanding of, or cannot be counted on to uphold, the constitution of this country. And social science expertise is often useless. There is no psychological opinion that was not better and more truthfully expressed by Samuel Johnson, no sociological study as insightful as the great novels. And does anyone who studied women's studies or media studies actually have a deeper understanding of the female sex or the role of the media? In both cases, their education has probably misguided them as to the truth. And let us not get started on military experts, responsible for so many blunders and idiotic ventures.

To be ruled by experts is a mad system -- no successful country has ever tried it. Rule by an aristocracy, rule by a monarch -- even rule by the demos is preferable to rule by experts.

Now, we should pay much closer attention to the advice of medical experts, and consider it much more seriously, than that of most of the experts listed above, but they are not infallible, and their expertise is not beyond the reach of a curious and sceptical mind. Even those of us essentially ignorant in matters of medicine can at least look at the COVID-19 statistics in various countries and ask sensible questions. Why does Germany have such a low death rate from the virus? Why Italy such a high rate? Why is South Korea so low? From where should we draw our conclusions? Are these people dying of COVID-19, or did they have the virus but die of something else? How many healthy people have died from the disease? When you start to look into it one starts to suspect it is bad, but not let-us-shut-down-everything-and-hope-for-the-best bad. A 3% death rate seems too high as an estimate. Germany's death rate is only 0.3%. South Korea has done extensive testing and records a death rate of 0.7%. Italy's death rate (9%) does not like the rule. Maybe they are only testing the most severe cases, as I've seen suggested, and their culture of living with elderly relatives, though otherwise noble, will doubtless have made them more vulnerable than others to this virus.

Let us not, then, let experts think for us. Be informed by them, but not ruled by them. And do not be so quick to follow expert 'consensus', or to identify apparent homogeneity among experts (which is usually only apparent). Do not let opinions become commandments. An expert is not an expert is most things, and sometimes not even in those things peripheral to his studies. Especially when he enters the realm of social and governmental policy, we all have a duty to be informed by his advice, but also to question it. This is not like trutherism -- a comparison I have heard made -- which is a denial of something that happened and is clearly and accessibly documented. Rather, this is a questioning of something that has not and may not yet happen, of forecasts and measurements which are abstract -- and which are not one mere incident but a collection of thousands of incidents from which only partial and uncertain conclusions can be made.

As a result of our actions, we face grave societal damage. We see the fragilitities of our economy and moreover the fragilitities of a global system. To cope, we have loaded ourselves with an economic burden which we will have to pay for at some point in the future. How on earth are we going to it? Thousands of mortgage payments postponed, potentially millions of workers not producing anything yet getting paid 80% of their salaries, while the pound falls in value and the economy almost comes to a halt. We could be sacrificing our economic future. Ruin could await us. We don't have the strong social, communal and religious institutions to cope with such an outcome.

What's worse, the traditions of this country no longer have any hold. Who, except for a few eccentrics, even know what habeas corpus is anymore? Who knows of the 1689 Bill of Rights? Who knows anything about Peel's police? I am now finally resigned to the fact that I do not live in a free country. A country that does not know its past cannot be free, even one whose past was so glorious that the long deformed shadows can still be seen in its sunset years. But the sun is finally setting. Those of us aware of what has been lost will have to try to carve a small corner of this island for ourselves. We will never have much wealth, though we will have another kind of wealth, for we will know the value of things that do not come with price tags. We may face many dangers and many attempts against out liberty, but we may still be able to hold onto a tiny portion of this world and live a life in the sun; free, meaningful, dutiful, beautiful, contented, not vulnerable to the madnesses of this society. And what madness we see before us! The entire country, having lost all sense of proportion, and preferring the draconian extremes of China to the more effective moderation of Japan, shut itself down over a virus which does not kill the young (and seldom the healthy it would seem), and whose fatality rate is likely well below 1% -- and even then, so many deaths are 'with COVID-19' but we do not in fact know whether the virus was the cause.

It really is quite extraordinary. We have now seen men of action, authoritarian government, militarised police, enforced morality, government-provided social security on the most astonishing scale (greater than even I, not unsympathetic to socialist economics, support), and I worry that we may like it. As society around us collapses thanks to our reaction to this crisis, will we finally forget liberty and cling to the protecting bosom of the modern state? We have not quite established tyranny, but we have set a precedent which it could easily use to establish itself.

Boredom

Sir Walter Scott in his Journal wrote, "Few men, leading a quiet life, and without any strong or highly varied change of circumstances, have seen more variety of society than I—few have enjoyed it more, or been bored, as it is called, less by the company of tiresome people." Could it be this is why Scott can spend so much time writing about details which often bore other people? Even I, a fairly devoted Scott reader, can find him a bore at times -- though an entertaining bore.

It is this word "bore" which interests me most. The emphasis on "bored" is Scott's. Scott probably italicised it because it was still a novel word, and therefore still retained its old definition of making a hole through something. I suspect the new definition -- as in something which is tiresome -- corresponds to the tedium of the industrial age, a tedium not caused by an absence of something but rather something boring, i.e drilling into you so severely as to create a hole into which is filled tedium. Is boredom then a modern phenomenon, particularly to an urban age, and perhaps even an agricultural age? Am I a terrible Rousseauian optimist for wondering whether boredom is in fact possible in a state of nature?

Certainly it seems more possible in a highly developed society with bureaucracies, earpiece-wearing businessmen, impersonal large-scale retail, background music, smartphones and social media -- contrary to conventional wisdom, I think smartphones, instead to eliminating boredom, in fact create more boredom: it is the bored person who idly sits there on his phone; he would be a lot less bored were he to do something like go for a walk; instead he scrolls and scrolls and scrolls, his boredom only occasionally alleviated by the sight of something novel, and then he scrolls some more trying to find another relief.

For my own part, I can only recall experiencing boredom when it has been imposed on me. I think of retail work, or when I would be stuck in a seminar with dull unthinking peers, or the dreadful slowness of a school detention. I'm never bored at home. There is always a book on the shelf, and if I've run out of new books, good: I enjoy re-reading even more. There is always an instrument to play, paper (or, admittedly, a computer) to write on, thoughts to entertain. There are always places to walk -- a woods nearby, with my favourite rodent, the squirrel. Like Scott, "I cannot remember the time when I had not some ideal part to play for my own solitary amusement."

Must Rereads

Those of us who bury ourselves in books are often unhappy creatures desperate to find consolation. We don't merely find it in fictional worlds, but also in reasons and explanations which help to order our chaotic thoughts and instincts, to loosen neurological knots, to reconcile contending passions.

At least, this is the intellectual explanation. The other, perhaps more truthful, explanation is that reading is an addiction. How many of us buy far more books than we have time for? How many of us flick through dozens of books in one evening, never settling, never content, always look for some new novelty, some new bit of knowledge? How many of us fetishise the book itself -- the paper, the foxing, the newspaper cuttings and shopping lists used as bookmarks, the cover, the leather (if we're so lucky), the inscriptions, the smell from the decades marinading in the damp houses of peculiar antiquarians?

I keep many books. Though I feel I must confess that most I keep for reasons other than the writing. I like certain editions, say, or I have fond memories of purchasing the book in some dreadfully unwelcoming bookshop. The genuine test of whether a book is worth keeping is whether or not one re-reads it. By this measure, I suspect I could cull my library to fifty books, if that (with the exception of some reference and textbooks). And I doubt this number would expand much over the rest of my life.

One often sees lists of 'Must Reads', but never 'Must Rereads'. Yet the former would provide a much more interesting and rewarding selection. It would be less vulnerable to fashion, a far more honest assessment of what books people actually find meaningful.

I'll give you my list in a moment. But I feel the need to write a quick preface. When I reflect on the books I love, I feel some guilt. There are many 'Great Books' I have read, and often found interesting, but am entirely unable to love. I see how much other people adore them, how much joy and insight they find, and my inability to understand this can almost feel as if there is a part of my soul missing. One particularly notable example is Dickens. I can see the beauty of his novels. I am attracted to their language. Yet I feel like I'm in some sort of dream where I'm trying to swim in the ocean, but for some reason I cannot penetrate the water's surface.

There are also books I adore which are not generally respected. Sometimes they are books dismissed as genre-fiction or even children's- or boy's-fiction. One example of the latter is Ivanhoe, one of my favourite stories, which even in its time was regarded as a sort of boy's adventure story, a costume drama, one of Scott's less probing works, and is now almost unread (with the exception of Tony Blair, who I believe claimed he kept it by his bedside, though that is not an endorsement I necessarily welcome). I love the story. I genuinely think it profound and full of virtue. (I will at some point write an essay about Scott, why he is of the 'great unreads', and what makes the Waverley novels so compelling.) But there is a part of me which feels guilty for loving this adventure story and being bored stiff by, say, Vanity Fair. One likes to pretend that things like literary stigma don't matter in the end, but truthfully most of us are vulnerable, at least to some extent, to a sense of intellectual inadequacy.

Anyway, off the top of my head here's my list of Must Rereads, in no particular order (and like on Desert Island Discs, it goes without saying that any Must Reread list includes the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare):

Robert Burton -- The Anatomy of Melancholy
Samuel Johnson -- Rasselas
Samuel Johnson -- Essays
Samuel Johnson -- The Vanity of Human Wishes
James Boswell -- The Life of Samuel Johnson
Walter Scott -- Waverley Novels (not yet read them all)
Walter Scott -- Journal

Daniel Defoe -- Robinson Crusoe
G.K. Chesterton -- St Francis of Assisi

G.K. Chesterton -- The Judgement of Dr. Johnson
Jerome K. Jerome -- Three Men in a Boat
Miguel de Cervantes -- Don Quixote
Eugene Vodolazkin -- Laurus
St Augustine -- Confessions
John Kennedy Toole -- A Confederacy of Dunces
Tomasi di Lampedusa -- The Leopard
Tobias Smollett -- The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
M.R. James -- Short Stories
Simon Leys -- The Halls of Uselessness
C.S. Lewis -- Out of the Silent Planet

Aldous Huxley -- Brave New World

Lewis Carroll -- Alice in Wonderland

Daniel Defoe -- A Journal of the Plague Year

Charles Ives -- Memos

Malcolm Bradbury -- The History Man

The Analects of Confucius

Walter M. Miller -- A Canticle for Leibowitz

Vikram Seth -- An Equal Music

Jorge Luis Borges -- Short Stories

(One notable book series I may have to add is the Aubrey-Maturin novels, the first of which I have just read. I feel compelled to read them all, and I suspect I will end up rereading them too.)

James O'Brien asks an irrelevant question

I must confess that I do on occasion listen to James O'Brien's LBC programme. Possibly for the same reason that I read the Guardian every morning. He represents the predominant worldview, a worldview with which I have no natural sympathy, and so it seems especially important that I study it. O'Brien is an effective and persuasive political commentator. He nearly always finds a way to catch his enemies out (though he also has the rather craven habit of asking his allies superficial or 'prompting' questions, the sort of questions where the interviewee smiles and replies, 'I'm so glad you asked me that question, James...')

One question he often asks Leave supporters is, which EU law would you like to be rid of? This has proved extremely effective, and it suggests a lack of sense and judgement of those calling in than they cannot quickly and easily dismiss it for the fallacy that it is. Rather, they indulge his question, either speaking in empty political slogans or by describing the most obscure and ridiculously trivial of EU regulations. They all remind me of the miserable man in one of Chesterton's essays who (seemingly unknowingly) repeats all the empty opinions he has read in the newspaper -- in a 'blaze of catchwords' -- as if they were their own deeply-held beliefs.

Neither the listeners calling in nor Mr O'Brien realise that the question is irrelevant. There are many United Kingdom laws I oppose, but that does not mean I want to end parliament. It takes the most unjust and intolerable of laws to make people oppose a governmental institution. Most of the time people tolerate bad law, blunders, even corruption, so long as the political machinery keeps working and some good, at least, is done -- and moreover some bad is avoided. Opposition to the EU is down to a lack of faith in the process. It does not matter much whether the laws are good or bad; a majority of people don't care for or about the system that produces them.

It matters how a thing is done. It matters whether a shop is noisy and ugly, even if it supplies all the goods one might need. It matters how your boss treats you, even if he pays you well. It matters where your house is located, even if it's the most splendid and comfortable of houses.

People voted for the European Union because of various prejudices (and here I use the term in a non-pejorative sense as literally a pre-judgement, almost an instinct), and they are trying to justify their decision postjudicially, as it were, by the economic and empirical standards that their opponents have imposed. You would have had a hard time asking a Roundhead soldier or a proud Saxon which specific law(s) he opposed. The differences are deeper, necessarily rooted in generalities. The Brexit vote was a proxy vote for many things, an opportunity for those with various grievances to dissent. It never was about specific EU laws or regulations. It was about home, affections, tribes, loyalty, political fidelity -- things which you either 'get' or you don't. If you forced me to live with someone else's family, I may get to live in a mansion, I may be ten times better off, I may have more freedom, but nonetheless I would much rather return to my own family. It would be hard, if not impossible, to give an empirical reason for this, but that doesn't make it any less true. The only people who would not rather return to their own family are those who have fallen out with their family, or whose family is broken and even unloveable. Perhaps this is how many people feel about Britain. I may even sympathise with them. But what I think is wrong with Britain is also wrong with the EU, probably more so. And besides, it's very hard to change a institution as enormous and as fundamentally misguided as the EU. Britain is smaller, has the great fortune to be an island, and has a political tradition worth building upon. We will not be 'great again', but we can be a modest, decent and ordered nation if we alter our course.

The Tyranny of Silliness

If one wades through the popular YouTube videos one will quickly notice a common theme: silliness. Each one features fast, jerky shots (usually with some sort of inane music in the background) of a person making a silly expression or gesture, and adopting a daft tone of voice, as if they were entertainers having a nervous breakdown on some dire children's television programme.

One can take random examples from the 'trending' section of YouTube to illustrate this:

Or

When most people look at or listen to recordings from the 1940s, say, they think the people sound silly. The pitch of the male voice is too high, the enunciation too precise, the accent too plummy. Yet modern man and woman hears their own absurd, graceless speech and think it is normal. Of course, it is not so much silliness they identify in the voices from the 1940s, but rather their own discomfort. The old voices sound silly to moderns because those old voices were serious. They were learned, hierarchical, dignified, from a time which was far more serious. When moderns laugh at these voices it is a laughter to alleviate unease. Indeed, the tyranny of silliness we face is a result of the fear of the serious, the discomfort one might experience in the presence of seriousness and serious people, and therefore feeling entirely out of place. The brain spasms, and a trite phrase, 'yolo' or 'lols' perhaps, is ejaculated; the phone is removed from the trouser pocket or handbag, and the person exits the world and enters their unholy sanctuary of social media, comforted by its triviality and silliness, which requires nothing of them but laughter and likes.

Of course, while they are patently silly to many around them, they do not consider themselves silly. They have almost reverted to a semi-animal state where they are not fully self-conscious. One example of this phenomenon is pop music. In the typical pop music video, a person in daft clothing, spouting the most uninspired and crude lyric (which they think is meaningful), will bop about nonsensically, usually with a very glum look on their face. It is this glumness which is most revealing. They think they are serious, or at least the very least not silly. One of the most obvious features of most popular music (so obvious most people seemed to have missed it) is its complete lack of a sense of humour. It has gone through eras of flared trousers, psychedelic t-shirts, ripped jeans, tracksuits, oversized 'bling', pseudo-hooker outfits, mohawks, mullets, and worn it all with a straight face. The most frightening thing about the tyranny of silliness in which we live, is that the silliest people take themselves seriously, and moreover they are taken seriously by most others. The pop star is an idle, he or she is revered; any semi-literature, uninformed pronouncements made on a political or moral issue are considered to have weight.

As I wrote here, we really do live in an inverted age.

A wandering Harper, scorn'd and poor...

I recently bought a collection of Sir Walter Scott's poetry, and am in awe of the very first poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. One of Scott's remarkable qualities is his sympathetic descriptions of characters. Even his great fictional antagonists are hard to entirely hate. His most successful characters are often those unlike himself, usually low down in the social hierarchy: the wise mendicant Edie Olchitree, the servant Caleb Balderstone -- one of the great comic inventions, the swineherd Gurth and the jester Wamba. Of course, Scott was a Tory and in no way trying to undermine the social order; on the contrary, with his characters he was defending the idea of a social order and the virtues and even freedoms it allows for. He may have been sympathetic to its flaws, but it's clear he saw a social order as essential. I've heard it said that the Reform Bill is what finally caused him to give up the ghost. Rather an exaggeration, of course, but it contains an element of truth.

The description of the minstrel's performance before the Duchess is without a doubt one of the greatest descriptions of what it is like to be a solo performer: the nervousness, the thrill, the momentum, how the music comes through one almost mysteriously, so essential to us has this music become. The description is all the more astonishing for the fact that Scott confessed to having not much of an ear for music. From his memoir of his early life (found in Vol. I of Lockhart's Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, 1839):

With music it was even worse than with painting. My mother was anxious we should at least learn Psalmody; but the incurable defects of my voice and ear soon drove my teacher to despair. It is only by long practice that I have acquired the power of selecting or distinguishing melodies; and although now few things delight or affect me more than a simple tune sung with feeling, yet I am sensible that even this pitch of musical taste has only been gained by attention and habit, and, as it were, by my feeling of the words being associated with the tune.

Anyway here is the description from the introduction of The Lay of the Last Minstrel:

And, would the noble Duchess deign
To listen to an old man's strain,
Though stiff his hand, his voice though weak,
He thought even yet, the sooth to speak,
That, if she loved the harp to hear,
He could make music to her ear.  

The humble boon was soon obtain'd;
The Aged Minstrel audience gain'd.
But, when he reach'd the room of state,
Where she, with all her ladies, sate,
Perchance he wished his boon denied:
For, when to tune his harp he tried,
His trembling hand had lost the ease,
Which marks security to please;
And scenes, long past, of joy and pain,
Came wildering o'er his aged brain--
He tried to tune his harp in vain!
The pitying Duchess praised its chime,
And gave him heart, and gave him time,
Till every string's according glee
Was blended into harmony.
And then, he said, he would full fain
He could recall an ancient strain,
He never thought to sing again.
It was not framed for village churls,
But for high dames and mighty carls;
He had play'd it to King Charles the Good,
When he kept court in Holyrood,
And much he wish'd yet fear'd to try
The long-forgotten melody.
Amid the strings his fingers stray'd,
And an uncertain warbling made,
And oft he shook his hoary head.
But when he caught the measure wild,
The old man raised his face, and smiled;
And lighten'd up his faded eye,
With all a poet's ecstasy!
In varying cadence, soft or strong,
He swept the sounding chords along:
The present scene, the future lot,
His toils, his wants, were all forgot:
Cold diffidence, and age's frost,
In the full tide of song were lost;
Each blank in faithless memory void,
The poet's glowing thought supplied;
And while his harp responsive rung,
'Twas thus the Latest Minstrel sung.

Sir Roger Scruton has Died

For me, his writings on beauty and art were the most important. He put a name and a description to something I knew was lacking in my life. It felt like I finally awoke from the world when I discovered beauty. I will confess I do not have the discipline, and possibly not the intelligence, for Sir Roger's more philosophical works, but I cherish essays like this one on dancing:

All young people need to dance, and – unless social convention forbids it – they need to dance in ways that put their sexuality on display. Put a group of young people together in the presence of rhythmical music and they will begin to move in time to the music, and to use the music to coordinate their movements. They might arrange themselves face to face, body to body, throwing arms and legs about in imitative movements. Nowadays, however, those movements rarely involve dance steps; they are not learned but spontaneous; and the dancers tend to avoid contact with each other, since there is no agreed convention as to what form their contact should take. 

In order to set young people in motion in this way it is necessary to overcome their awkwardness. Their fear of conversation, lack of small talk, and generally clumsy manners, are the natural result of the education to which they have been exposed, which is directed to removing all ideas of elegance, distinction or grace from their behaviour, those old fashioned virtues being judged elitist and politically incorrect. But still, young people need to dance, and this result can be brought about, provided the music is loud enough to make conversation impossible, and provided the pulse is regular enough to jerk the body into reflex motion, like the legs of a galvanised frog. The best music for this purpose is not music produced by a band, since bands like to be appreciated and listened to, and will adapt what they play to the mood of their audience. The best music for the purpose is produced by a machine, perhaps only with the faintest hint that a human being had some part in its creation. Hence has arisen the new phenomenon of DJ music, in which the music is not created by the person who controls it but extracted from a variety of pre-packaged computer sounds, and used as a means to manipulate the movements of the crowd. Music becomes an instrument of crowd control, in the hands of a person whose position is justified by no talent that could conceivably excuse such a dangerous allocation of power. 

Once the young people have been jerked into motion in this way a vestigial desire for partnership is naturally aroused, since the music suggests sexual motions and sexual union. Hence they will tend to pair off, so as to pulsate face to face, not usually looking at each other and certainly not speaking, but acutely aware, nevertheless, of each other’s bodies, as things replete with movement and governed by the machine. Their bodies become sexual objects, voided of personality, since personality is a relational idea, and no relation exists on the dance floor except that between bodies. Hence, when this kind of dancing happens, it is very disturbing to see children or old people joining in: the first because it transgresses the boundaries of the sexually permissible, the second because it excites our sense of the undignified and the shameful. 

The spectacle I have described is related to dancing in something like the way a group speechlessly scoffing hamburgers in the street is related to a formal dinner party. It places a social void where our shared humanity has in the past been displayed, enjoyed and exalted, and it presents animal functions in the place of personal relations. Unfortunately, just as bad money drives out good, so does bad dancing drive out the older kind from any occasion where dancing is required. Weddings, hunt balls, village fêtes, the May Balls of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges – all the places in which elegant and sociable forms of dancing would in the past have been fundamental to the meaning of the event – are now dominated by the DJ, and by the conversation-stopping music that has no virtue beyond its galvanising pulse.

Read the full essay here.