Wolfe: Sincere, But Sheer, Literature

“There were five standard tests for a scientific hypothesis. Had anyone observed the phenomenon – in this case, Evolution – as it occurred and recorded it? Could other scientists replicate it? Could any of them come up with a set of facts that, if true, would contradict the theory (Karl Popper’s ‘falsifiability’ test)? Could scientists make predictions based on it? Did it illuminate hitherto unknown or baffling areas of science? In the case of Evolution… well… no… no… no.. no… and no.

In other words, there was no scientific way to test it. Like every other cosmogony, it was a serious and sincere story meant to satisfy man’s endless curiosity about where he came from and how he came to be so different from the animals around him. But it was still a story. It was not evidence. In short, it was sincere, but sheer, literature.”

– Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech (pp. 27-28)

Dalrymple: Extreme Nastiness

“If history is indeed but the record of extreme nastiness, then we have nothing to learn from it except that we, who of course are people of unalloyed good will, must do things—everything – differently in the future. The moral reflections of people in the past were nothing but a fig leaf for their own misbehavior on a grand scale – sheer hypocrisy, in fact. In the words of Doctor Johnson, they discoursed like angels but behaved like men, and they honored every one of their precepts more in the breach than in the observance. In the absence of any religious conception of Original Sin (by comparison with an historical conception of a foundational injustice, such as the Tasmanian genocide), by means of which the imperfectability of man could be accepted, without at the same time absolving him of the need individually to strive for virtue, either perfect moral consistency or complete amoralism becomes the standard of judgment.

Whether amoralism or moral perfectionism is chosen as the standard, one great advantage accrues: it frees us from the weight of the past. Free of any inherited taint, we have not only the right, but the duty to work everything out for ourselves, without reference to what anyone else has ever thought. We are moral atoms in motion through a vacuum, to whom the past means nothing, or at least nothing positive or worthy of emulation, or even maintenance. It is rather something to be avoided at all cost, lest it infects one with its crimes and follies.”

– Theodore Dalrymple, In Praise of Prejudice

Faulkner: The Race Problem in the South

“From the beginning of this present phase of the race problem in the South, I have been on record as opposing the forces in my native country which would keep the condition out of which this present evil and trouble has grown. Now I must go on record as opposing the forces outside the South which would use legal or police com­pulsion to eradicate that evil overnight. I was against compulsory segregation. I am just as strongly against compulsory integration. Firstly of course from principle. Secondly because I dont believe it will work…

And I would say this too. The rest of the United States knows next to nothing about the South. The present idea and picture which they hold of a people decadent and even obsolete through inbreeding and illiteracy – the inbreeding a result of the illiteracy and the isolation so that there is nothing else to do at night – as to be a kind of species of juvenile delinquents with a folklore of blood and violence, yet who, like juvenile delinquents, can be controlled by firmness once they are brought to believe that the police mean business, is as baseless and illusory as that one a generation ago of (oh yes, we sub­scribed to it too) columned porticoes and magnolias. The rest of the United States assumes that this condition in the South is so simple and so uncomplex that it can be changed tomorrow by the simple will of the national majority backed by legal edict.”

– William Faulkner, “Letter to a Northern Editor”

Arendt: The Ideal Subject

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thoughts) no longer exist.”

– Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (p. 474)

Arendt: No Fear, No Hope

“Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgment: the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope.”

– Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (p. 446)