Professionalism
What the reactionary Englishman gave the world, and the revolutionary Frenchman has been trying to take away, is our “Anglo-Saxon” tradition of voluntary association. I should mention that Old French was used by these new Englishmen to convey the voluntarist terms: words like address, majority, minority, and parliament. But I will leave such details, perhaps, to a future Idlepost. For the world has been around for longer than England and France; and the terms ideologue, and doctrinaire, will meanwhile give some idea where I am going.
I was present for the French revolution, at least in American journalism. I was a copy boy in the Toronto Globe & Mail at the time, around 1969, that the executives of that paper resolved that all new hires must have a journalism degree or equivalent. Previously, all they needed was ability. More broadly, across the continent and around the world, the journalistic trade was, as the first profession, about to be turned over. Like its parallel, which is cheerless paid sex, it could be avariciously professionalized. Today, almost everywhere, this trade has become “professionally” devoted to shoving stupid ideas down people’s throats, in the trite, professional way.
It is not a trade any more, except for the few amateur operators who write things like blogs, and have managed to avoid arrest. Canada, where the entire mass media is under paid, Liberal-party direction, is among the most extreme examples.
Yet it is not only journalism, which we could probably do without. Medicine has also been converted from a trade into a “profession.” Not only have professional qualifications replaced ability as the standard for entry into a medical career. It is now five years since the medical men (and even women) acquired dictatorial powers in law. Or were you not at home during the Batflu “pandemic”?
No longer do doctors give advice we may blissfully ignore; having come to our back doors, as other tradesmen. Indeed, you are summoned to see them, and wait interminably in their “clinics.”
Rather than exhaust gentle reader with particulars, I will idly place this idea with him, as part of my mischievous writing “trade.” The reason both journalism and medicine have become leftwing and “evil” — to use the Old German word — is that the respective trades have been made into (very well-paid) professions.
Capitalism was not to blame. That only became a word, the negative for socialism, when the timeless business of trade was professionalized by the “Marxists” (i.e. commies and perverts).