Cracking up with the Egg Man

The Evening Standard's 'Free Speech' campaign is a yolk... I mean *joke*.

Previously: False friends
Tone-deaf tributes and overly-simplified obits were unfair on Matthew Perry but even worse for addicts in recovery who might read them.

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It’s a short edition today but there’ll be a longer one tomorrow with my review of Nadine Dorrie’s definitely-not-fictional new book.

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In a column reminding readers of the Evening Standard’s Freedom of Speech campaign, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief Dylan Jones says “Free speech is the least valued but most important cause today”.

That’s a curious claim given the British press seems to bang on about little else; in the last week alone, we’ve had:

Philip Johnston in The Daily Telegraph suggesting “tolerance towards the intolerant…” — he means those who don’t accord with his newspaper’s editorial line — “… could prove to be the end of our way of life”; Yasmin Alibi-Brown arguing the opposite position in the i paper (‘Free speech has become a privilege of the ruling class’); Andrew Doyle playing his favourite tune for UnHerd (Liberals have forgotten what free speech means); and The Daily Mail are howling in celebration that the King’s Speech was “a victory for free speech”.

It’s only Wednesday and this has been a light week.

Newspaper columnists would be really stuck for things to write if it weren’t for the ongoing “free speech crisis” — the unsolvable, intractable, and largely fictional war without end. What makes the Evening Standard’s campaign so choice, however, is that its proprietor, Evgeny Lebedev aka the Baron of Siberia, has access to the most expensive speech possible — a seat in the House of Lords — and hasn’t spoken there in the 19 months since his maiden speech.

Even how Jones uses his amplified speech as Evening Standard editor is mortifying. Let’s take a look at his latest column. He begins:

Words, as we know, no longer mean what they used to. Some have been realigned, some reassigned, and some of the peskier ones have been banished, presumably for good. Some new words have appeared out of nowhere, and some older ones are now almost unrecognisable. “Blessed”, for instance, is now little but a fatuous Instagram cliché, usually accompanying a photograph of a saturated sunset or a particularly expensive meal (over-filtered and carefully cropped). It is meant to express a feeling of satisfaction with one’s lot but is actually an expression of the exact opposite: you don’t see many Instagram posts of the Wembley section of the North Circular at rush hour in the rain, with “Blessed” nestling underneath.

That’s a paragraph buttered with the smugness of the ex-GQ editor; it appeals to the reader to join in with a kind of unthinking chin-stroking self-satisfaction. Words have always evolved. That’s the nature of language and why etymologists and dictionaries exist. ‘Blessed’ was hijacked by hippies long ago and Jones’ notion that the Christian idea of the word is the original one is just wrong.

Blessed comes from Middle English (‘blessen’) which drew from Old English (‘bledsian’) and Northumbrian (‘bloedsian’) which was taken from the Proto-Germanic verb ‘blodison’ (to mark with blood) which itself came from ‘blotham’ (blood). So the root of ‘blessed’ is probably sprinkling blood on pagan altars. I can now picture the ghost of some pagan priest raging that Dylan Jones has so debased the language.

Later in the column, there are two words that should always serve as a warning that you are dealing with a pub bore — “these days”. Across the sweep of human history, old bastards have always found a way to object to young people. At least Socrates wasn’t as repetitive as Jones when he complained that “children now love luxury… have bad manners, contempt for authority… show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise”.

Jones moans:

Language moves so quickly these days that it unsurprisingly gets lost up its own fundament. A while ago I was helping a company relaunch their website, which involved a lot of meetings with a bunch of digital natives who were old enough to know better and who had started to drink their own Kool-Aid. 

At one of these meetings, I had to bite both my lips when the person in front of me said, without a hint of irony, they were going to “solutionise” a problem. This was a genuine case of someone literally not knowing what they were talking about. 

He’s as blind to irony as the doofus consultant kid about whom he’s sneering. Anyone who’s been in that kind of ‘creative’ meeting has talked bollocks at some point; it’s an inevitability. And there’s Jones replicating that cluelessness with a sentence including the buzzphrase “digital natives” and the classically incorrect jibe “drinking the Kool-Aid” (that drink’s bedevilled marketing team will never shift the blame for the Jonestown massacre onto the real culprit — Flavor Aid).

The next part shows Jones’ absolute commitment to “literally not knowing what [he is] talking about”. He continues:

… of course, the real issue of the day is the way in which words have become weaponised. “Tolerance” is now treated with abject suspicion because it can supposedly excuse abhorrent beliefs. 

While “political correctness” has for some time obviously been a term of abuse. Martin Amis used to say that, at its grandest, political correctness was simply an attempt to accelerate evolution. He said while he was intolerant, he was a lot less intolerant than his parents, while his children would be even less intolerant.

“PC seeks to get things done right now,” he said. In a heartbeat he made a case for political correctness which in my eyes transformed the phrase completely. But usually it’s the other way round, as words have become bullets. 

That’s some very sneaky phrasing. “Martin Amis used to say that…” implies that Jones heard him say this himself; that they were awfully good pals. Actually, the line that he quotes — butchers, really — comes from ‘Don Juan in Hull’, Amis’ essay on Philip Larkin for The New Yorker, in which he writes:

P.C. begins with the very American — and attractive and honorable — idea that no one should feel ashamed of what he was born as, of what he is. Of what he does, of what he says, yes; but not ashamed of what he is. Viewed at its grandest, P.C. is an attempt to accelerate evolution. To speak truthfully, while that's still O.K., everybody is "racist," or has racial prejudices. This is because human beings tend to like the similar, the familiar, the familial. I am a racist; I am not as racist as my parents; my children will not be as racist as I am. (Larkin was less racist than his parents; his children would have been less racist than he.) Freedom from racial prejudice is what we hope for, down the line. Impatient with this hope, this process, P.C. seeks to get the thing done right now--in a generation. To achieve this, it will need a busy executive wing and much invigilation. What it will actually entrain is another ton of false consciousness, to add to the megatons of false consciousness already aboard, and then a backlash.

Jones is part of the backlash that Amis wrote about; that’s why he quoted so narrowly.

The Standard’s pompously described ‘Free Speech Inquiry’ began in August with a comment piece from its proprietor. Lebedev explained that he had been speaking to such diverse voices as white North-American controversialist academic Stephen Pinker and white North-American controversialist academic Jordan Peterson. He claimed that the state of the nation is “the Catholic Church versus Galileo; Stalin versus Trotsky… a modern McCarthyism with the same ability to abuse and destroy”.

Last week, Lebedev wrote an encomium about Elon Musk, who he described as “a humanist and a free speech champion”. He went on to describe the X-owner and perennial Tesla twat as “a deep thinker”, in a way that only a man paddling around in the shallow end of serious thought could. Musk is a man who promotes fascists and anti-semites of all stripes on his social network and launches lawsuits whenever he encounters speech about him to which he objects.

In his piece, Jones lists people the Standard has featured in its ‘free speech’ crusade so far; they are all writers and public figures with huge personal audiences and access to national newspapers and broadcasters. This is a silence so deafening that it could have been used by the CIA to smoke Noriega out of his palace. He goes on:

We weren’t attempting to present alternative opinions, simply to draw attention to the fact that it isn’t possible to have alternative opinions.   

The overdose of irony here should come with a prominent health warning. Jones’ boss — a KGB officer’s son with a peerage — is one of five proprietors who dominate the British press (along with the Murdochs, the Rothermeres, Reach, and whichever moneyed sociopaths takeover the Telegraph). The space for alternative opinions in the British media is extremely limited and the Overton Window of ‘acceptable political opinion’ shrank to a cat-flap years ago and is vast narrowing to a mousehole.

That Jones began his editorial with an ignorant rant about changing language and a Principal Skinner ‘no, it is the children who are wrong’ anecdote indicates where a lot of the ‘free speech’ complaints in the British press come from: Establishment figures — some of whom were once seen as radical and rebellious in their youths — hate that their kids and their kids’ friends don’t think like they think or keep quiet about it.

The irony-drenched cherry on top comes at the conclusion where Jones complains:

We expected to be attacked on social media, although for me the most disappointing comment came from some anonymous buffoon who immediately accused us of being right-wing, because ‘free speech’ is an illiberal conceit. 

Not that kind of free speech, idiots.

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