Let us all rebuild the respectable society

The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 10/18/2008 | Charles Moore

[mojito]

....Looking back today, through the smoking ruins of a political and financial culture which thought it had abolished the business cycle, I can see that we were co-opted into a form of social order which was dying. Job, saving, marriage, sucking up to potential lender: we were made to prove that we could be trusted in order to gain the privileges that trust brings. In a word, we were made respectable.

As hard times return, could respectability return, too? Should it? Ever since the Romantic movement began more than 200 years ago, no concept has taken harder knocks from great minds.

Respectability has been seen as life-denying, repressive, hypocritical, and very, very boring. It conjures up words like "Rotary", "doilies", "net curtains" and "Sunday best". (Indeed, that last phenomenon was so deeply respectable that it is now extinct.)

Harold Pinter once explained that his plays were about "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet" - the nasty truth behind the respectable bourgeois facade. Clever, iconoclastic Mr Pinter CH CBE. But I'm afraid my petty-bourgeois reaction is simply to get that horrid weasel out into the garden and hasten back to the cocktail cabinet for a stiff whisky.

Let me make the case for respectability. In our post-Romantic world, the most important entity is thought to be the individual, the ego. The child's cry "Look at me!" has become the slogan of adult life. That is what celebrity culture is.

Respectability opposes this.

[mojito]

A fine idea. However, looking at the comments attached to this article in the Telegraph, we're a very long way from realizing it.

[Jeff Head]

http://www.jeffhead.com/joeplumber.htm

[raybbr]

A fine idea. However, looking at the comments attached to this article in the Telegraph, we're a very long way from realizing it.

Yeah, it's kind of ironic coming from a nation that won't let its people defend themselves and is allowing Sharia law it infiltrate its judicial system.

[Dudoight]

Actually, I was surprised at the positive comments as to Moore’s nostalgia. Yeah, though, those days are gone forever.

A mortgage is entitlement whether you can afford it or not!

[Erik Latranyi]

A fine idea. However, looking at the comments attached to this article in the Telegraph, we're a very long way from realizing it.

The concept of "respectability" has been destroyed by leftists who must can no longer debate issues, but must denigrate and destroy their opponents.

Leftists have eliminated the concept of "truth" and "facts" and replaced these with gray shades of innuendo and opinion.

If a leftist agrees on a fact, it undermines their "relative morality" world where right and wrong are only used against opponents while fellow leftists are given a psychological expanation and pass for any transgressions.

Hypocrisy is reserved for those who attempt to adhere to a moral code while those without morality can commit any act they see fit as long as they are loyal to the liberal agenda.