Back in Venice

"He who has truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue." 

John Ruskin. But he can fear censorship by Facebook or Twitter.

John Ruskin said it in The Stones of Venice, a book I still haven't read. I shall start by reading quotations from it on Goodreads.

I am in Venice again, ten months after I spent six days here. I decided today that I find it repulsive.

Even though it has comparatively few tourists, which is the reason I flew over when I have a lot to do. Though there are quite a lot more than last July. It will be much better tomorrow though when the weekenders from Bavaria and Austria go home. 

Ruskin's theme was that Tyre, Venice and England were the three great maritime empires and the first two were merely memories. 

Before Margaret Thatcher (to whom I was opposed at the time) most people would have said England's day was over too. Now I don't think that is true but it is very clear that Europe, though never richer, is in a relative decline which seems likely to be terminal. 

The treason of the intellectuals

I agree with this by Charles Moore in the Telegraph today.

 

'People are a bit puzzled about what “levelling up” is. Given the desire of voters in places like Hartlepool for it to happen, urgent answers are needed.

'I think I have hit on one. Abolish the insistence on a university degree for any job in the public service, perhaps for any job at all. The professions will say they need people with well-trained minds to become doctors, barristers, investment bankers and top-grade civil servants. They do. But what makes them think they will necessarily find more such minds emerging from our bloated university system than from graduates of the “University of Life”, whom they could train themselves?

'Nowadays, policing and nursing are graduate professions, with the result that they disdain the bits the public most value and make entry from poorer areas harder. Even those wandering the richest “olive groves of academe” are not necessarily the better for it. Three years of anti-Brexit prejudice and “decolonising” curricula at Russell Group universities (plus debts of £30,000) may instil lasting bitterness and render alumni unfit for useful employment. Of course, people should go to university if they want to. But why should jobs be specially reserved for them?'

Far too many people go to university in many rich countries, because there are so many more jobs for brain workers rather than manual workers. (There are exceptions though, like Switzerland and Japan.) The biggest problem this poses is the apartheid that separates graduates from non-graduates. This is very true in Romania.

“The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants"

“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”

Albert Camus

"The older I get, the more I'm convinced the greatest form of 'activism' is raising decent children."
Zuby, a British rapper who took a First at Oxford

"I always regretted that M. de Charlus never wrote anything. Of course one cannot draw from the eloquence of his conversation or even of his correspondence the conclusion that he would have been a talented writer…Nevertheless I believe that if M. de Charlus had tried his hand at prose, to begin with on those

Jung on Covid

It is becoming more and more obvious that it is not starvation, it is not microbes, it is not cancer, but man himself who is his greatest danger: because he has no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating in their effect than the greatest natural catastrophes.

C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, acknowledgements to Pelle Neroth Taylor.