Theodore Dalrymple:

But what made him a truly tragic figure was not his physical handicap (of a type that many – perhaps most – of us will experience if we live long enough) but his insistence on dressing like an adolescent in jeans, a flowered short and basketball shoes, with a single, large gold earring and a Keith Richards coiffure circa 1970, except for its greyness.

Here was a man who had not (as Mr Blair would no doubt have put it) moved on. He was caught in adolescence as flies were once caught in amber. And this was a tragedy not only for him as an individual but, on the assumption that he was far from alone but rather representative of a social trend, for society as a whole: for as everyone knows, having once been adolescent themselves, adolescence is a time of extreme bad taste and what might be called conformist rebellion, or rebellious conformity. It was a tragedy for him as an individual because it made him dream an impossible but also worthless dream; it was a tragedy for society because it made immaturity the highest good.

When I was in my early twenties, I had long hair that reached below my shoulder blades, which I often wore in a ponytail extending out through the back of a baseball-style cap. I preferred wearing XL shirts rather than the mediums which would have fit me. And as silly as it looks to me now, I did favor worn, tattered jeans. To be fair, I worked in my family’s newspaper distributorship, where most of the non-office work was the type to get your hands and clothes dirty. While we weren’t “working-class” (assuming such terms haven’t long-since lost whatever usefulness they once had), we simply rarely had occasion to go around in business casual.

I remember one day, walking out of a mall, where I had been collecting payment from one of our client stores. (Yes, this was before electronic billing, back when malls still had bookstores which sold newspapers.) There were a couple of old men perched on one of the benches outside the entrance. As I walked past, one said to the other, in a stage whisper (or perhaps they were both just hard of hearing), “The youth of today!” I thought I could hear their neck tendons creaking as they shook their heads disapprovingly. For a moment, I wondered if it wouldn’t be funny if I walked over and politely explained to them that, yes, while I may look shocking to their sensibilities, I was nonetheless working a full-time job while helping to raise my girlfriend’s three-year-old son, and isn’t that sort of responsibility what’s really important? I didn’t, of course; I just drove off and left them to their bitter reminiscences.

Recently, we were in a country club for a dinner and meeting, where the guest speaker was my former philosophy professor. One thing I noticed, because of its incongruity, was how many people, the men in particular, were wearing running shoes with their jackets and slacks. Judging by my own father’s experience with fallen arches causing swollen ankles, I assume this reflects the need for ease of mobility. When walking is difficult enough due to aching, arthritic joints, why compound the misery by forcing your feet into uncomfortable dress shoes for vain appearance’s sake?

While it may be true that society collectively promotes and rewards immaturity, it nonetheless doesn’t follow that one can diagnose Peter Pan-syndrome at a mere glance. Whenever Dalrymple seems to lack inspiration for an essay, he resorts to curmudgeonly ranting about how we’re all going to hell in a handbasket because grown men wear jeans and tattoos aren’t just for sailors and prison inmates anymore. It’s an unfortunate reminder that being shallow is hardly exclusive to youth.

Samuel Loncar:

I am outraged at some injustice. The injustice is real, maybe even written on the face of a person mocking another culture or ethnic group. My blood rises, and I reach for my judgment, my condemnation, then pause. I reflect. Have I ever wanted anything that would make another person feel the same way about me? Yes, okay, sure, I admit to myself. But that’s not the point, I tell myself. Is it not? What would have helped me to see my own error? What would have spread more goodness: someone enraged, shouting at me because of how bad I was? Or something else?

Just that movement of the mind, of the soul, of the frail human heart, softens our impulse to spread anger and rage in the name of justice. It might lead to a different judgment, or none at all. I can’t say how it will or should play out for other people. I can say its very practice will reduce the regret we’ll have every time we undertake the harrowing exercise induced in the beginning of this essay. It will make us kinder, more understanding, and, crucially, more just in our dealings with injustice.

I read this admirable essay earlier this week, and I returned to it several times after. I had been far too busy to organize my thoughts about it, but then, as if on cue, the Roger Scruton hit piece in the New Statesman appeared, resulting in his dismissal from his unpaid position as the chairman of a British architectural commission.

It’s very easy to be outraged by the whole sordid affair. Scruton is an exemplary man, writer, and philosopher. A journalistic nonentity named George Eaton blatantly misrepresented Scruton’s statements for the purpose of getting him fired and was crass enough to gloat about it on social media afterward. The sheer vindictive pettiness of it all, the refusal of the left to tolerate a prominent conservative’s presence even in a largely symbolic capacity and the cowardly capitulation of a Tory government, is nauseating.

But I have to admit there was a time when I would have unthinkingly considered someone like Scruton a bigot for opposing conventional left-wing pieties. I could have easily been part of the group of people cheering Eaton on, competing to impress my peers with my witty put-downs. If I had been aware of the underhanded tactics involved, I’m sure I could have easily rationalized those as necessary for the greater good, but it’s even more likely that I would have been securely ensconced in what we now call a filter bubble, where I would have never encountered anyone pointing them out to begin with. If my every stupid remark and callow judgment had been frozen in social media amber for public display, I too would look like an awful person. Blogger, critique thyself.

“Yes, okay, sure, I admit to myself. But that’s not the point, I tell myself. Is it not?” Here, too, it’s easy to blow past the acknowledgement of the obvious in order to return to the serious business of being angry at injustice. It’s easy to rationalize once again why this injustice is serious and deserves an appropriate response, rather than a lot of vapid relativism on how none of us are perfect. A practical response might be to acknowledge one’s own powerlessness in such matters and focus on the quotidian details of one’s own garden instead. It’s certainly healthier than fuming impotently. But even that might only be a way of avoiding the point. I might be just mature enough to recognize that there’s no use in being enraged about things I can’t do anything about, but if I believed for a moment that I could do something…well, I’d probably be just as angry and self-righteously vindictive as the next guy.

So, then — do I want to take the time to contact just one of the many people I saw on social media exulting over Scruton’s firing and attempt to explain, patiently and kindly, why he or she is mistaken to feel that way? Of course not. Like I said, I’m busy and tired and barely have enough time to read and write for pleasure as it is. Why would I want to devote any of my limited free time to a likely-fruitless conversation? And yet, I do find that even the idle thought of doing so seems like a better use of my imagination than indulging in fantasies of seeing the wicked receiving their comeuppance. Maybe that’s something.

What helped me to see my own errors? It was, and is, a cumulative process. There are rarely any thunderbolts of enlightenment, just a gradual, barely-perceptible dawning. I think that a significant factor was that I can’t recall ever being humiliated for being wrong. I was either fortunate enough to never say anything stupid in front of someone who could have made a brutal example of me, or fortunate enough that they chose to pass over my stupidity in graceful silence. I was allowed to outgrow errors at my own pace, I suppose, maybe even allowed to forget having made them and thus preserve a fragile sense of confidence and dignity. Perhaps one of the worst things about social media is the way it forecloses on the possibility of that productive forgetting. Your errors are forever as loud and fresh as the moment you made them, with vengeful enemies devoted to rubbing your face in them. Perhaps it’s better if errors are simply allowed to outlive their usefulness and then slink off to the woods to die alone and forgotten. That’s offensive to the progressive notion of history as a cumulative elimination of error and injustice, of course, but funny enough, that’s one of my own errors which died of natural causes.