Happy Friday #9

A few thoughts at the end of the working week

Image: Shutterstock

If you have been kind enough to read even two or three of my articles you may well have come to realize that I like to put things into an historical context. In fact, it’s not that I like to, more that I have to, to try to get at the true sense of something. It’s a compulsion.

Past. Present. Future. These three dimensions of time seem to me to complement one another, even to the extent that the sainted T.S. Eliot so beautifully yet simply articulated in the opening three lines of Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.

This remains true across time because we humans remain human. We are the same bundles of flesh and blood, neurons and synapses, hopes and fears, that we were throughout all of the yesterdays that have always lighted fools the way to dusty death. Which is why, not least, Shakespeare’s works remain so current: his genius was the ability to express the unchanging nuances of human existence.

Yet, today, there are strenuous attempts to overthrow this reality. Today’s experiment is an attempt to invent a new human - quite literally if you go along with some of the promotion of ‘transhumanism’ that the World Economic Forum promotes. But that can only happen if aspects of the existing form is, in today’s parlance, cancelled. Zygmunt Bauman wrote about it over 20 years ago:

[P]resent-day men and women differ from their fathers and mothers by living in a present ‘which wants to forget the past and no longer seems to believe in the future’. But the memory of the past and trust in the future have been thus far the two pillars on which the cultural and moral bridges between transience and durability, human mortality and the immortality of human accomplishments, as well as taking responsibility and living by the moment, all rested.¹

Those who seek to reinvent humanity can ultimately only achieve their goal if the past is comprehensively undermined, which explains why we are subjected to a reinvention of language that might even have shocked George Orwell. The three slogans of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth …

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH²

… are surely matched in their contrariness by the proposition that all truth is subjective (a statement easily disproven by, for example, inviting persons who believe they can fly to test the hypothesis by jumping off high buildings) and the denial of objective sexual identification (men with wombs, women with prostates and so on).

But let’s not get too intense - after all, this is Happy Friday. Rather, this reminder that being born with male genitalia makes one a man comes from the pen of the genius Spike Milligan in his book Puckoon.

The hero, Dan Milligan, is reluctantly cycling through the Irish countryside unwillingly in search of a labouring job because his wife has insisted that he do so. It’s a hot day and he comes across a churchyard and the priest, Father Patrick Rudden. Dan and Father Rudden are smoking their pipes when Dan ventures his enquiry …

‘Well, Father,’ he began, puffing to a match, ‘well, I’ - puff, puff,puff - ‘I come to see’ - puff, puff - ‘if dis grass cuttin’ - job’ - puff, puff - ‘is still goin’.’
The enquiry shook the priest into stunned silence. In that brief moment the Milligan leaped onto his bike with a ‘Ah well, so that’s the job gone, good-bye.’ The priest recovered quickly, restraining Milligan by the seat of the trousers.
‘Oh, steady Father,’ gasped Milligan, ‘dem’s more than me trousers yer clutchin’.’
‘Sorry, Milligan,’ said the priest, releasing his grip. ‘We celibates are inclined to forget them parts.’ ‘Well you can forget mine for a start,’ thought Milligan. Why in God’s name did men have to have such tender genitals? He had asked his grandfather that question. ‘Don’t worry ‘bout yer old genitals lad,’ said the old man, ‘they’ll stand up for themselves.’³

Q.E.D. 😊

If you have been, thanks for reading.

1. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity (2000). The inset quote is from Debord, Guy Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1990)

2. Orwell, George. 1984 (1949)

3. Milligan, Spike. Puckoon (1963)