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2020-11-29 f
YOU CAN'T SAY THAT I
“a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms.”

The Age of Cant

These days, you must hold the right opinions and express none of the wrong ones—or else.

Cant, or humbug, is far worse than hypocrisy: for if by hypocrisy, we mean a failure to live up to our professed moral ideals, most of us are hypocrites, and thank goodness for it. A society in which everyone lived up to his moral principles unswervingly would be intolerable, regardless of whether those principles coincided. Apart from the fact that no mesh of such principles could ever be fine enough to catch all of life’s infinitely variable exigencies, a person of no moral weakness whatever, while perhaps admirable in the abstract, would be an uncomfortable, even frightening, person to meet. It is good not to be a liar; but never to lie is to be an unsocial being, with as much feeling as an automaton.

Without hypocrisy, there would be no gossip; without gossip, there would be no literature and precious little conversation. The dose of hypocrisy necessary to maintain social intercourse is a matter of judgment, for while many individual instances of hypocrisy are reprehensible and properly the subject of adverse comment, and some instances are beyond the pale, hypocrisy is as necessary to human existence as love or laughter. We should never forget La Rochefoucauld’s dictum that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue: but at least he knows that there is a difference. The only effective way to eliminate hypocrisy entirely from human affairs is to have no moral standards.

Cant is more destructive than hypocrisy because it is harder to expose and because a humbug deceives himself as well as others, while a mere hypocrite retains some awareness; he is a rogue rather than a villain. Cant is the vehement public expression of concern for others, or of anger at an opinion casting doubt on some moral orthodoxy that is not, and cannot be, genuinely felt, its vehemence being a shield for insincerity and lack of confidence in the orthodox opinion.

... I think that we live in an era of cant. I do not say that it is the only such age. But it has never been, at least in my lifetime, as important as it is now to hold the right opinions and to express none of the wrong ones, if one wants to avoid vilification and to remain socially frequentable. Worse still, and even more totalitarian, is the demand for public assent to patently false or exaggerated propositions; refusal to kowtow in such circumstances becomes almost as bad a sin as uttering a forbidden view. One must join in the universal cant—or else.

... Leaders in cant are not inquirers after truth but seekers of power, if only the power to destroy, which is often a delight in itself. Cant is the weapon of the ambitious mediocrity, a class of person that has become much more numerous with the extension, but also dilution, of tertiary education. Such people believe that social prominence is their due.

... One swallow doesn’t make a summer, but unfortunately, there is more than one swallow. Consider the cases of Germaine Greer and J. K. Rowling, now the objects of obloquy and excommunication for having dared to utter a truth so obvious that it would not long ago have been derided as a cliché—namely, that sex-change men are not women simpliciter. Their wealth and fame have protected the two women to a large extent from the consequences of their outspokenness, though Rowling, for example, has had to endure being disowned by actors and actresses who owe their good fortune to her creations.

For those neither famous nor in a position to ignore their own economic interests, and who do not wish to be martyrs to an outcry by the canting Twitterers, fear of repercussion has now entered into anything that they say about an increasing number of subjects. Even conversations in private are constrained, due to fear of denunciation to the relevant authorities. As the Soviets and the Nazis found, private denunciation was one of the pleasures of totalitarianism. (read more)

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