The Critic May 2021

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PHYSICIST, PHYSICIAN, LINGUIST, ENGINEER, and — besides much else — life insurance actuary, Thomas Young (1773-1829) has been called “the last man who knew everything”. At the bicentenary of his birth, the Science Museum suggested Young “probably had a wider range of creative learning than any other Englishman in history”. Posterity, however, has better remembered the specialists. Two centuries on, combining Young’s breadth and depth has become impossible. Even polymaths have not the hours in the day to know it all. The ideal of the Universal Man is beyond us, but the Duke of Edinburgh strove throughout his life towards being the ideal of a Royal renaissance man. Democracy these days tends to endorse less holistic thinkers — wide-ranging interest and enquiry no longer seems to be compatible with the…

IN HIS FORMER ROLE as a Vice President of Pepsi Cola, the recently appointed BBC Director-General, Fizzy Timmy, promoted weight gain, hepatic steatosis, cirrhosis, heightened cholesterol and triglyceride levels, insulin resistance, leptin resistance, type 2 diabetes, expanded belly fat, heart disease, pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, endometrial cancer and an exciting gamut of dental and gingivitic problems. Alongside Fizzy Timmy’s roster of ills, the achievement of the Corporation’s highest earner Gary Lineker is modest: hardened and narrowed arteries, cardiovascular disease, scurvy. As an ambassador for Walkers’ Crisps (including the excruciatingly embarrassing Salt and Lineker) he should surely have done better than that. Nonetheless this smiley duo gives us a loud hint of the direction the BBC is going in. Junk food and junk drinks breed junk telly: “reality” shows which have…

SLAVES AND SOURCES Lisa Hilton (April) dates the “own voices” movement to 2015 but it is much older than that. In 1992 the director of the powerful Canada Council for the Arts threatened to withhold funding from any project that gave voice to a culture of which the applicant was not a member. Some writers protested: “I reject the idea of cultural appropriation completely,” said the Trinidadian-Canadian novelist Neil Bissoondath. “Stop. Now!” Timothy Findley insisted. The Council retreated. But the offence of cultural appropriation is a corollary of the policy and philosophy of Multiculturalism; it rebounded and got Robert Lepage into hot water in 2018. Cultural appropriation has been the order of the day since imagination and mimicry evolved. What has changed is selective cultural sensitivity and identity politics. Blackface…

ONE OF THE FEW LEGAL concepts I remember from my student days half a century ago is remoteness of damage. To take a simple example, if you run Germany’s largest electricity generator you might expect people to accuse you of contributing to global warming by pumping out greenhouse gases. But you wouldn’t expect to be sued by a Peruvian farmer whose home town in the Andes is at risk of being flooded by melting mountain glaciers. And yet that’s exactly what is happening. In response, the electricity producer, RWE, argues that there is no chain of causation: other factors contribute to climate change and the Peruvian Andes are simply too remote. But what appears at first glance to be an outlandish claim is being taken seriously by judges in Germany,…

PCSO CONNOR FREEL WAS PATROLLING the streets of Mold, North Wales, when 19-year old Declan Armstrong and his friend pulled up on bikes on the opposite side of the road. The teenager shouted: “Is it a boy or a girl?” at the PCSO, twice. Freel, who is transgender and had previously said in an interview that “no-one suspects I was born female”, reported the incident to colleagues as a hate crime. Hate crime is a descriptor applied to a crime where the perpetrator demonstrates hostility towards certain characteristics of the victim, including “gender reassignment”. North Wales Police referred the case to the Crown Prosecution Service. Armstrong, who has Asperger’s, was charged with a transphobic hate crime — specifically, using abusive or insulting words with intent to cause harassment under the…