The Last Blush
R.I.P. Embarrassment - My English Traits - Chapter 60
"Blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions."
Charles Darwin
“The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.”
William Hazlitt
Say what you like about Winston Churchill but you can’t call him a hypocrite.
You can quite justifiably call him a tyrant, a warmonger, a genocidal maniac, a racist and a white supremacist. You can rightly call him an opinionated, bombastic, pompous, egotistic, self-aggrandizing, heartless and conceited bigot and fabulist who ensured he would be regarded as the greatest Briton of all time because he himself wrote the history that would make it credible. Which he freely admitted to doing in his typically frank, candid and guileless way: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
When he lied, as in his fabrications about his adventures in the Boer War, he did it so fluently, seductively and persuasively that it was always — as he and every artist would claim — necessary for the improvement of the truth.
But he wasn’t a hypocrite. He meant what he said and did what he said he meant. When he deliberately starved some three million people to death in Bengal he justified it unabashedly by saying it was the fault of the Indians themselves “...for breeding like rabbits.”
He admitted to hating people with “slit eyes and pigtails.” People from India were “...the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans.” He freely confessed that he “...did not really think that black people were as capable or as efficient as white people.”
More trivially but just as tellingly, he unashamedly called his favourite grey racehorse “Colonist”. It achieved thirteen victories and won him nearly £12,000 in prize money.
For all of that he never disassembled, he never retracted, he never qualified and he never apologised. Nor was he ever obliged to clarify a statement or justify his behaviour. He got away with it simply because he was so blithely unembarrassed by the searingly honest callousness of his words and actions.
I’m picking on Churchill not because the blunt facts of history haven’t of themselves damned him to perdition. I’m picking on him because his sublime lack of embarrassment has, in the past seven or eight years, finally been adopted as the default setting of political discourse around the world.
If Boris “Letterbox” Johnson, Donald “Kung Flu” Trump and the other great populists of the early 21st century weren’t the first to deploy it, it was undoubtedly the two of them and their ilk who did the most to resuscitate and normalise Churchill’s shameless technique for leading their electorates down the garden paths that brought us to the particularly thorny pastures of the present.
It is the same immunity to embarrassment that now allows politicians and pundits from Tel Aviv to Washington to London to Pretoria to Kyiy to Moscow and back again to lie so convincingly, sincerely and unashamedly through their teeth.
And it’s the unblushability of the majority of Americans, many Europeans and a disturbing number of the English that blinds them to the hypocrisy of sending bombs to kill the same Gazans who are supposed to be grateful for the food parcels that land on them in less than equivalent numbers.
Goebbels deserves as much credit as Churchill does, of course. All the while in the background I can hear the former saying, “If you’re going to lie, lie big.”
This is well rehearsed. My point is simply that, since the death of embarrassment, to say one thing and to do another is no longer an inexcusable moral impropriety. Reneging on your promises, saying something without meaning it, contradicting your previously articulated beliefs, principles or commitments, or cynically distorting yesterday’s self-evident truths — these no longer have to be excused, explained away or apologised for as unfortunate errors of self-contradiction, poor judgement or blamed on an unreliable memory or a sloppy briefing.
Quite the contrary.
Without the impediment of embarrassment, hypocrisy has become a commonly accepted, widely deployed and extraordinarily powerful strategy for winning the votes of, well, hypocrites. It works by reassuring unembarrassable people with double-standards that they’re fully justified in doing the opposite of what they espouse. It turns out that they constitute the significant majority of most electorates.
Say one thing and do another. Almost everyone else does.
The normalisation of hypocrisy by unembarrassability occurred to me while reading Christopher Ricks’ marvellous little book, Keats & Embarrassment.
The story of how I came to be reading it is itself embarrassing. So I will skip over the embarrassment of telling it simply by thanking the wonderful Kate G. for bringing it to my attention and kindly giving me her dog-eared copy of it.
Class is telling. The most admirable part of the English version of it — perhaps the only admirable part of it — is being true to your word in matters of social and interpersonal etiquette. Kate has all of it in spades.
In 19th century England, Keats was by no means the only poet, artist, writer or scientist to be fascinated by embarrassment. Darwin wrote a thesis about blushing. Keats’s fellow poets and other early Romantics, notably Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley, were equally fascinated by it — the body’s autonomic, tell-tale response to approaching the boundary that divides the agreeable from the disagreeable, the acceptable from the taboo and, especially, allurement from disgust.
Keats is notable for seeing the embarrassment of blushing as a transcendent form of honesty; as a kind of gateway to both aesthetic, emotional and sexual fulfillment if you could freely admit to the embarrassment of being embarrassed.
“The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.”
John Keats
He was living in the right place at the right time. In Victorian England, one of the most prudish societies in history, embarrassment could be provoked by embarrassment itself, where the blush of one individual could readily redden the faces of others in a social circle of mutual shame.
A vestigial remnant of the embarrassability of the English survives in the habitual, repetitive and but now entirely nugatory use of the word “sorry”. Perhaps one in a thousand articulations of it are meant to convey an actual apology. The rest have come to mean everything on the spectrum from an abrupt “But…” through “I couldn’t disagree with you more” to “Get the fuck out of my face.”
Habits die hard.
Poetry, art, literature, music and sex aside, I learned from Ricks that people who blush easily are regarded as more trustworthy and empathetic than those who don’t, and that people in Western societies are far less prone to blushing than they were a century ago. Which seems to me to provide compelling evidence that blush-proof hypocrisy has been on the rise for some considerable time, and that right now we’re harvesting the bloody fruits of it.
I was digesting this at the same time as I was trying to understand how Churchill, in his notorious speech at Harvard University in the dead centre of World War II, could have confessed to the barbarities of Empire with such unblushing candour:
“I don’t see why we shouldn’t try to spread our common language even more widely throughout the globe. …the power to control language offers far better prizes than taking away people’s provinces or lands or grinding them down in exploitation. The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”
Winston Churchill, 1943.
This extract from his address had been bothering me for some years. Apart from his candid admission that the point of the British Empire was to take away people’s provinces and grind them down in exploitation (which most of his Harvard audience at the time would have understood as perfectly natural and evidently unremarkable) it struck me as just a little unsettling that my personal colonial legacy, in the shape of my great-great grandfather, a cutler who arrived with the British expedition to the Cape in 1807, was informed and conditioned largely by the same ambitions and interests.
Which in turn, when I became aware of it in my early twenties, occasioned the startling epiphany that my teenage war-hero fantasies would place me on the battlefield not alongside Biggles, Harry Flashman or Horatio Hornblower, but fairly and squarely in the monstrous non-fictional moulds of Douglas Haig, Cecil John Rhodes, Robert Clive and Edward John Eyre, the most notorious bullies, brutes and butchers of Empire.
I blush to think.
Judging by the amount of time and effort that has recently been applied to excising the egregious second sentence from the transcript, viz: “...far better prizes than taking away people’s provinces or grinding them down in exploitation…”, it appears to have been bothering a lot of other people too. A recent search revealed that virtually all references to it have now been scrubbed from public view, clearly by people still capable of blushing.
The most notable redaction of it is to be found - or not to be found - in the transcript of Churchill’s speech by The International Churchill Society. Nothing to see here, we must suppose.
https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1941-1945-war-leader/the-gift-of-a-common-tongue/
Yes, it’s almost as if in the past few years it had finally dawned on the digital redactors charged with bleaching the blemishes out of British history that Churchill’s “power to control language” had the same goal of continuing to take away people’s provinces or land and grind them down in exploitation. You simply couldn’t say it out loud in these wokish days. Which isn’t to imply that with enough resources and ingenuity you couldn’t take away people’s provinces or land and continue to grind them down in exploitation in a much nicer, kinder, more efficient, less bloody and more politely English manner.
Enter the BBC World Service, Churchill’s “Empire of the Mind'' incarnate.
With 318 million viewers around the world it is the living embodiment of his “power to control language”, where “language” refers not to English per se, but to the use of the world’s most commonly understood tongue to shape the thoughts and feelings of its vast and influential audience.
The BBC is now producing 120 hours of brain-numbing and spine-softening radio, internet and television output every day, or five whole days’ worth of information in just 24 hours. The depth, breadth, scope of its editorial choices would require a thesis of several volumes to analyse.
But its purpose is crystal clear, which is to serve the political, commercial and cultural interests of the UK — and those of the Western world by extension — in the most unashamedly cynical, embarrassingly sententious, brilliantly curated and profoundly hypocritical way.
Watching it is the contemporary equivalent of being sat in a classroom of seven year olds circa 1959 while an ageing spinster with a sweet voice, a charming smile and brain-dead eyes explains how and why the map of the world became so wholesomely and necessarily pink. Hour after hour after hour. Day after day after day. Relieved only by Jesus, cricket and picnics on gingham every Sunday under the ancient oaks.
But look at this little penguin. Aren’t they so cute!
Believe me. I watch way too much of it. But if you can’t, don’t or won’t, at least watch this:
https://shows.acast.com/the-owen-jones-podcast/episodes/medias-israel-bias-exposed-by-new-report-its-findings-are-un
Aka, gaslighting for experts.
There’s a brief postscript to this that requires a whole new chapter. It’s a question I’m struggling to answer.
How is it that we can be horrified by the bloody brutalities of Gaza without being embarrassed that our taxes in pounds, dollars and euros are paying for the prurient thrill of witnessing them? Yet, but, and all the while we can still be embarrassed by a loud, squelchy but entirely accidental fart on the tube to Vauxhall? Or by the accidental exposure of the nipple of a breast-feeding mother on the bus to Golders Green?
Embarrassment lives on. It’s just that it’s been pushed out of sight and mind, locked behind closed doors in our antiseptic bathrooms and the bedrooms to protect the oh-so civilized sensibilities of our BBC (read Western) culture.
We’re going to need another word for hypocrisy.