Theodore Dalrymple: Ancient And/or Modern
Theodore Dalrymple: Ancient And/or Modern « Sigmund, Carl and Alfred
To believe or trust in the wisdom of crowds just because crowds are composed of many people and two heads are better than one seems to me absurd; but equally it is wrong to reject an opinion merely because it is held by a crowd. We are condemned, or privileged, or both, constantly to have to make up our own minds about things: to be nonjudgmental, as the cant word has it, means not to participate fully in or of human life. And what most people probably mean when they describe themselves (almost always in a self-congratulatory way) as being nonjudgmental is that they are uncensorious - other than about people who are censorious, of course. An inadequate vocabulary can be pregnant with consequences.
An article in the French leftish-liberal newspaper, Le Monde, for 15 September, drew attention with evident unease or even mild disapproval to the results of a poll conducted in France by the fine arts magazine, Beaux Arts. To the question of whether it is more important to safeguard the treasures of the past or to promote creativity, the respondents replied by a very large majority that the former is the more important. The article implied that, pace the advertisement, forty million Frenchman can be wrong.
Of course, France is in a slightly unusual position by comparison with many other countries. It is by far the most visited country in the world, with 70 million tourists annually; more than twice as many Frenchmen now live by tourism as by agriculture. And it isn’t French modernity that people come to see: it is the French past (together, of course, with the pleasures, comforts and conveniences of the present, in which the country is by no means deficient).