Here is another Latin-based expression that’s in danger of being murdered by misspelling: per se. The phrase is used to mean in itself or by itself, often in the context of a negative.
RIGHT:
I don’t have a thing against magnolias per se, just the one in my garden. (Guardian)
The spelling “per say” gets c. 600K Google hits, though most are articles pointing out the mistake.
The example I’ve just come across is from E E Holmes’s otherwise well-crafted Gateway ghost-comedy-thriller series.
WRONG:
There’s no official probation, per say, in Durupinen law.
From book 4 in the series, Whispers of the Walker (Kindle version).
Wikipedia defines OPEC as an intergovernmental organisation which attempts to coordinate the petroleum policies of member countries. In practice, most consider OPEC to be a cartel, trying to maximise profits by agreeing production quotas.
Is it helpful for a cartel to have a leader? Economics tries to answer this question using game theory, but it’s not clear how helpful that approach is. Conditions prevailing in the real world are typically too complex to be captured by current game-theory models. Simple psychology suggests the answer is: yes, having a leader makes it easier to coordinate behaviour.
Roughly speaking, OPEC countries’ petroleum represents about half of the global total, and Saudi Arabia controls about a quarter of that. By comparison, the next biggest members in terms of production, Iran and Iraq, each generate about a tenth of OPEC’s output.
Saudi Arabia has no formal leadership status. OPEC’s chief executive from 2007 to 2016 was Abdalla Salem el-Badri, a Libyan. Yet in practice Saudi Arabia seems to play a dominant role in OPEC’s decision-making. It is therefore sometimes said to be OPEC’s “de facto leader”.
de facto here means:
- actual or in practice, while not corresponding to the legal or formal framework
(More examples of usage at dictionary.com)
In a recent Reuters article, de facto appears to have got Chinese-whispered into defector:
OPEC’s defector leader is focused on reducing global oil stocks
D’oh! Interestingly, six months earlier, Reuters was still getting it right.*
* In the earlier article, Reuters spells the phrase “de-facto leader”. Hyphenating compound modifiers is usually desirable, as it helps to avoid ambiguity. When, as in this case, the modifier is a foreign phrase, a hyphen seems superfluous.
Celia Green:The recent peak of civilisation, centred on Western Europe, from which we are in the process of declining, was the highest that the world has known. At its height, it encompassed scientific and philosophical ideas which had not previously been formulated. However, in doing so, it brought about its own downfall. In both science and philosophy it came too close to areas of thought which the human race wishes to avoid. Consequently, it became necessary to plunge back into an intellectual dark age, and this is a process which the human race has already brought to quite an advanced stage in the present century. [...]
In these circumstances, the European mind took refuge in a social and intellectual revolution. The social revolution was designed to make it impossible for individuals to think, or express inconvenient thoughts. It should be made impossible for anyone to have time to think unless he performed this function as a paid agent of society. Society, naturally, would know how to select in favour of those who thought in approved ways. While the social revolution has been fairly obvious, the intellectual revolution (or the abolition of dangerous thought) has attracted little attention. But the fact remains that in all operative fields of thought the human race has involved itself in positions from which, on their own terms, no advance is possible.
from The Decline and Fall of Science
A difficulty with analysing the ideology underlying current culture is that much of it is covert. This makes it harder to criticise, which may be the intention.
Occasionally, someone gets more explicit. This may not be in the relevant person’s best interests but can be informative.
As an example of what is wrong with contemporary academia, consider the following assertions recently made by an Oxbridge academic in a newspaper article. (I have paraphrased to prevent identification, as I have no desire to generate negative attention for the person concerned. More deserving of disapproval are those who adopt similar attitudes, or are complicit in allowing such attitudes to become influential, but who take care not to reveal their own position in print.)
Universities have political significance.
The election of Donald Trump and the rising dominance of the Right provides an incentive for increased efforts in activism.
Many have queried the white bias on campus which presents bourgeois reading lists under cover of “neutrality”.
The question “What should be done?” is on everyone’s minds.
We must scrutinise our teaching materials. There are excellent schemes which attack class bias in academia. It is our responsibility to implement them.
There is no such thing as an apolitical classroom. We must realise that not taking a stand, or presenting a guise of neutrality, is equal to complicity.
We must agitate and organise so that our students speak up, make the world a better place, and do not become complicit in its evils.
Now many may like the idea of fighting against right-wing, or other ideologically incorrect, ideas. The question arises, however: is campus a suitable place for this?
The purpose of universities is (or should be) to consider ideas by reference to whether they fit with the facts, or are helpful in understanding reality; not by whether they fit with some principle of morality or other belief system.
Note the writer’s assertion that there is no such thing as neutrality. The ostensible effect of this is to undermine the argument I just made against activism on campus. If neutrality is not possible, or its apparent presence is a deception, then one cannot complain about its absence. This may of course be the motive for making the assertion.
“We must agitate”, says the writer. In other words, it is not enough that certain viewpoints may only be discussed as positions to be rejected — we must make it unpleasant for anyone who tries to argue in favour of such viewpoints.
If you want to know why the principle of free speech is being eroded, in universities and elsewhere, part of the answer is clearly: because many ‘academics’ consider it irrelevant.
500 years ago today Martin Luther published his 95 Theses, an event that set off the Reformation.
Luther — in this, and other publications — noted that the ideals of the Church had become corrupted. Corruption had happened gradually, involving a succession of distortions, each of which by itself may have been regarded as convenient and acceptable.
The net effect was that key concepts, such as repentance, which originally meant one thing had come to mean something quite different.
Luther’s observations of corruption were on a local scale, but the deterioration in the Church’s standards was global. A huge number of functionaries were operating within a system that had abandoned the standards which made that system meaningful. Many of them must have been aware of deterioration, but thought it was not in their interests to draw attention to it.
Indocte et male faciunt sacerdotes ii, qui morituris penitentias canonicias in purgatorium reservant.
Ignorant and wicked are the doings of those priests who, in the case of the dying, reserve canonical penances for purgatory.
It did not take genius to write an uncompromising attack on the defects. It did, however, require honesty and courage.
Today there are parallel defects in the modern equivalent of the Church’s intellectual edifice: the universities. We need an analogous critique of deterioration. We need a return to earlier principles. Indeed, we may need something deserving of the term ‘revolution’.
Authorities are bewildered, heads of institutions try threats and concessions by turns, hoping the surge of subversion will collapse like previous ones. But none of this holds back that transfer of power and property which is the mark of revolution and which in the end establishes the Idea ...
When people feel that accretions and complications have buried the original purpose of an institution, when all arguments for reform have been heard and have failed, the most thoughtful and active decide that they want to be “cured of civilization”.
... The priest, instead of being a teacher, was ignorant; the monk, instead of helping to save the world by his piety, was an idle profiteer; the bishop, instead of supervising the care of souls in his diocese was a politician and businessman ... When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence
Some critics have suggested that the libertarian position regarding future generations is: “I don’t care”. But libertarianism does not reject moral responsibility towards others. It rejects the notion that the government should enforce such responsibility.
Feeling responsible towards one’s own descendants, and others who share a proportion of one’s genes, appears to be a hard-wired human attribute. Aggregating responsibility-towards-descendants feelings may be what has traditionally generated interest in the position of future members of a society.
Prior to the welfare state, and to the development of social justice ideologies, public actions motivated by responsibility towards descendants did apparently take place. The Victorians built bridges that were designed to last for hundreds of years, though there was often no obvious incentive for doing so.
After decades of welfare state – and rhetoric about preserving resources for the future – we seem to be behind the Victorians in terms of investment in the long-term future.
It is not in any case clear how a society could have a motive to behave more responsibly towards its future members than is generated by innate responsibility feelings towards descendants. Because the elite produces arguments for why one should feel responsible? People’s choices will still reflect what they perceive to be their own interests.
One can, however, see how hard-wired concern for future generations might be negatively impacted by policies. The existence of state medical and education systems, purporting to cater for everyone, means that each individual has fewer resources available to devote to interest in his descendants. The reallocation of resources means he is liable to assume that responsibility towards descendants has also been reallocated – without this assumption necessarily being justified.
Compared to aggregated individual actions, it seems collectivised action is likely to be less motivated by interest in the future, not more. Collectivised action is subject to ‘democratic’ control, and voting is notoriously conducive to short-termism.
“Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns.
But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents.
There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.”
Christopher in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans
Manners are flouted and customs broken. Foul language and direct insult become normal, in keeping with the rest of the excitement ... Printed sheets pass from hand to hand and are read with delight or outrage — Listen to this! Angry debates multiply about things long settled.
A curious levelling takes place: the common people learn words and ideas hitherto not familiar and not interesting and discuss them like intellectuals, while others neglect their usual concerns — art, philosophy, scholarship — because there is only one compelling topic, the revolutionary Idea ...
Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence
As an illustration of my point that ‘trash’ can be entertaining, so long as it doesn’t have ideas above its station, consider another product from the Amazon stable, Preacher. This is based on a graphic novel series from the 1990s, and has been cleverly adapted for the small screen. Provided one’s expectations are low — as mine usually are these days — it is an enjoyable romp and doesn’t leave too much collateral brain damage in its wake.
There are two main problems with most movie and TV products currently coming out of the Anglophone world.
(1) They are dumb, and suffer from cartoonisation. (By this I mean the process by which something that starts out not being a cartoon is transformed into something that has most of the qualities of one.) Watching them is liable to make one’s IQ level drop several points, at least temporarily.
(2) They contain ideological subtext at an intensity level that is irritating.
Oasis is based on The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber, author of The Crimson Petal and the White. The latter was turned into a BBC television series in 2011 which, while relatively low on defect (1), collapsed under the weight of the other problem. The viewer was made more aware of the currently fashionable model of Victorian society (dark, hypocritical, perverted, etc) than of the psychology of the characters.
Scheduled publication date for new article on website:
Sunday 3 September.
An article, on the topic of scapegoating, is in preparation.
Meanwhile please enjoy the following.
Wrong:
Carefully strained to create a delicious, silky texture, it’s free of fat, reduced sugar, but high in protein.
Better:
... it’s free of fat, has reduced sugar, but is high in protein.
Or:
... it’s free of fat, reduced in sugar, but high in protein.
(label, Arla Foods’ “Skyr” Icelandic-style yogurt drink)
