(if you want to be happy in the twenty first century)

“Try anything once, except for incest and Morris dancing.”

I have always believed it was Sir Thomas Beecham who said this as it has the ring of his cheery cynicism about it. Unfortunately there is no evidence of where or when he said it and contemporary books about him fail to mention it. It is otherwise attributed to the composer Sir Arnold Bax, the writer Lawrence De Garde Peach and the record producer Walter Legge. The last named entered fully into the spirit of the thing by marrying the formidable soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. As always with famous quotations there are some absurd attributions such as the porn star Linzi Drew who was rather obviously born (in 1958) at a time when the quotation was already well known.

But, whoever said it, the remark is very likeable. The sentiment that, prima facie, one should welcome new experiences but that there must be some exceptions seems a good start in the search for happiness. And the list of exceptions in the quotation is delightfully short compared with the list of any known religious or ethical system. The bathos which equates incense and morris dancing is worth a smile – though most versions substitute “folk” or occasionally “country” for Morris. I think it is a remark worthy of analysis and development. If Sir Thomas said it the musical context is fairly obvious. He was considerably less likely than the likes of Gustav Holst or Ralph Vaughan Williams to knock on your door asking you to sing the songs your grandmother taught you. He believed in a cosmopolitan high culture, not in populism or folkery. He said of brass bands, for instance, that they were all very well in their place which was ” . . . outdoors and several miles away”.

For a political theorist there are other reasons to be suspicious of anything folksy because the encouragement of folk tradition can be demeaning and manipulative. This was never more clear than in Stalin’s 1912 work The Problem of the Nationalities in which the Georgian future dictator lays down policy for a possible Soviet empire. The republics are to be encouraged in their costumes, dances, folk tales and so on while the “commanding heights” of economic and military power belong to a Communist Party in Moscow. (One sequel: you could watch subsidised local dance troupes performing to empty auditoriums in all fifteen republics of the USSR and I did in several.) There is also a European Union version of this which promises the encouragement of national cultural practices while trade and law are matters for Brussels. No, thank you; I have always said: my culture is not defined by the big ship sailing through the alley-alley oh nor even by Shakespeare, but by ways of doing things, the English constitution and a firm rejection of continental legalism, étatisme and philosophy.

But it is one thing to say that folk dancing can be part of a sinister intellectual conspiracy, another to say that it is intrinsically bad. Reader, I was whooping round the church hall, “stripping the willow” only a few weeks ago. Note that more dances in English church halls are Irish, Scottish or even American than distinctively English and “stripping” is certainly done more often in Scotland than in England. The consequences of incest are invariably bad, those of folk dancing not so. There is thus an important open question about the candidates for the status of things you should never do. I am being ethical here. There is a long list of things I would never do which includes getting a tattoo, having a pet, going on a cruise, going to a pop festival and so on, but I would not issue a general ethical prohibition on these things. My ethics are Utilitarian and consequentialist and the examples I will give are examples in the proper sense – they all exemplify deeper attitudes hostile to the good life. I have five minor and two major accompaniments for incest. The minor cases first:

TAKING WINE SERIOUSLY

Wine is a wonderful adjunct and catalyst to many of the great pleasures of life such as conversation, dining or looking at the view. But it is not itself the point. Even if you were to develop a sophisticated palate which could detect the very finest in wine would that add to the pleasure of the thing – or would it be just a way of feeling falsely superior? But “fine” wine is simply a con so far as most people are concerned. Having held a number of blind tastings and wine quizzes I can report that almost nobody actually prefers an expensive champagne to a good Cava nor a vintage Margaux to a decent Rioja. Even the rare sophisticated palates have to admit that the world has changed. Thirty years ago Jancis Robinson was predicting that within France the unfashionable regions which were prepared to import (largely Australian) science to improve their wines would end up producing better stuff then the grands vins who stuck with the mysticism of “terroir” and climate and my blind tastings would suggest this is correct. More nonsense, I would suggest, is talked about wine than even art and religion. In any case being precious about wine rather than relishing whatever is in the glass that’s put in your hand is indicative of prissy, uptight attitudes that make it very difficult to enjoy life.

ASKING IF THEY KNOW WHO YOU ARE

I have always thought that nothing marks you out as a dim idiot than demanding, “Don’t you know who I am?” Think of the logic: if they do know they are probably even more likely to to arrest you or refuse you service or whatever the issue is and if they don’t your telling them isn’t going to help you much. Of course, I am not merely prohibiting the question, but the preoccupation with status that goes with it.

My favourite example of this is Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, who is said to have got into an altercation with a gamekeeper while out with his dogs. Didn’t the chap know who Adams was? Yes, he did: “You’re that daft c*** who writes books about rabbits”.

PERSONALISED NUMBER PLATES

On second thoughts there is something that signals “I am an idiot whom you should avoid” even more than the above.

GRAFFITI

Lying on the death bed you should at least be able to console yourself that you never scribbled on anybody’s walls. Graffiti, in the contemporary rather than the original sense, represent an aspiration to make your mark by being annoying. It is even worse if aspiring to be “art” and can only lead to an even more annoying and pointless debate about the nature of art.

CARAVANS

I was seriously tempted to place owning, sleeping in and driving caravans in the inner sanctum of prohibited activities, but then wondered if I was losing my sense of perspective. Nothing makes me want to command a mortar battery more than walking along a beautiful stretch of the English coast and coming upon a giant litter pile in the form of a caravan site. It’s even worse than being stuck behind one on a country lane. In France I have watched the Dutch turn up in caravans complete with their own food and drink and offer not so much as a Bonjour to anyone else. If you really can’t afford proper accommodation, tents are fun.

But those are mere minor prohibitions compared with the two things you should seriously never do:

SOCIAL MEDIA

There is a widely accepted definition of social media which says they are, ” . . . . interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.” How good does that sound to a classical liberal or a classical economist? How good did it sound when I was at Stanford University in the 1970s and excited speculation about the “information revolution” was the main topic of debate. Better informed markets. More democracy. More widespread debate. How could communication be bad?

But as so often in the centuries since the so-called Enlightenment the assumptions about human nature turned out to be wildly wrong. Homo so-called Sapiens: those would be the ones who like to hate each other, to tell ridiculous lies, to believe ridiculous lies,to bicker, to feud, to show off, to put others down and so on. Social media allow the worst of humanity to express itself in a cheap and cowardly way. People who would not stand up in a meeting and say something venomous or come up to you and say it can express themselves electronically. I remember my wife, a head teacher, pointing this out about the late night, “full bottle”, form of self expression. People who were “nice as ninepence” if they met you could be appalling about you on social media. She always told herself what she told children: if someone is nasty to you it’s all about them, not you. If people were really rude about her she would predict revelations of debt or marital breakdown or both and was nearly always right. I have been “reviled” on social media after something I said on the radio, but I never read any of it and didn’t know it existed until much later. What a waste of life: perhaps not quite as bad as incest, but much commoner.

DEMONSTRATING THE GOODNESS OF YOUR HEART

Nothing has aroused my contempt more in recent years than watching footballers “take the knee”, kneeling on the ground for a few seconds at the beginning of a match in order to show that they believe that “black lives matter”. It is the ultimate in cheap gestures and a substantial number of those who made it set off in late 2022 to play in a World Cup in Qatar, a competition placed in an entirely unacceptable society by an entirely corrupt organisation where up to 8000 workers have died (of course, we don’t know how many) in building the stadia for the competition. If you want to make a gesture, I felt like screaming, then boycott Qatar. It’s a magnified form of contempt which I also feel for those of my generation who went on “demoes” in the fairly safe knowledge that there would be no real costs to that either. Sometimes even in old age they show a pride in having blocked up the streets and wasted police resources despite freely admitting that the causes for which they demonstrated were entirely wrong.

For anyone who aspires to be rational actions are to be judged on their consequences and not on their conformity to someone else’s conception of the good. Being good is no good – you have to do good. And being rational you should be against expensive gestures just as much as cheap ones, even if they are more worthy of respect. Too much of human history has consisted of self-flagellation and crawling up Croagh Patrick on your knees or (even worse) systematically abstaining from life’s pleasures. The decline of religion has (disappointingly) not led to any greater rationality. People are forever doing ridiculous things, for example to “save the planet”, which will achieve no such effect. This almost ubiquitous irrationality involves two broad fallacies.

The first is the fallacy that sympathy is a virtue. As much discussed and generally approved by eighteenth century philosophers sympathy is the sharing of other people’s emotional responses. But clearly a powerful recipe for human unhappiness would be a prescription that because somebody is unhappy everybody has to be unhappy. I overheard somebody in 2022 saying that he had lain awake all night in a mood of “impotent rage” about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Whereas I had slept soundly in the knowledge that if Mr. Putin wished to obliterate me he would, though it probably wouldn’t happen on that particular day. There is no point in impotent rage or impotent misery or impotent sympathy. Other people’s problems are other people’s problems unless you can actually do something about them. There is war in Urbania and famine in Ruritania, but you should enjoy your tennis match and your drink down the pub. Pay no attention to that muddled Dr. Donne because you are, for certain important purposes, an island. On the other hand the form of sympathy you should cultivate is the ability, free from jealousy, to enjoy other people’s pleasures and successes.

I suppose I will have to call the second part by it’s currently fashionable name: it is “virtue signalling”, saying “who I am”, generally being on the “correct”, fashionable side of things. I am entirely immune from this being massively incorrect and unfashionable. In fact, if I thought it was sensible to protest against things I disapproved of then I would be shouting and creating banners all day every day such is my disapproval of the contemporary world. I don’t do this but I do try to make people feel better if I can sometimes. This can usually only be done effectively on a small scale in a context you know and understand; in other words, charity begins at home.

Lincoln Allison January 2023