'A Troublesome Error, a Pernicious Foppery''

Let’s be grateful to our troubled age for making it necessary to revive such formerly dormant words as cant and foppery, so as to avoid the more precise but less polite bullshit. For foppery, the OED offers among its definitions “foolishness, imbecility, stupidity, folly.” It’s one of those words I’ve never heard spoken but I happened on it again in Act I, Scene 2 of King Lear. Edmund speaks: 

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.”

 

Humans are the excuse-generating species and newspapers still publish astrology columns. It’s easier to blame the stars for our troubles than our own “foolishness, imbecility . . .” I’m pleased to see that one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, also uses foppery in connection with astrology:

 

“For what matter is it for us to know how high the Pleiades are, how far distant Perseus and Cassiopeia from us, how deep the sea, &c., we are neither wiser, as he follows it, nor modester, nor better, nor richer, nor stronger for the knowledge of it. Quod supra nos nihil ad, nos [what is above us does not concern us], I may say the same of those genethliacal studies, what is astrology but vain elections, predictions? all magic, but a troublesome error, a pernicious foppery?”

 

The OED on genethliacal: “relating to the forecasting of a person’s character and future life and circumstances, based on the relative positions of the stars and planets at birth.” Burton uses foppery earlier in the Anatomy, in his introduction titled “Democritus Junior to the Reader”:

 

“So are we fools and ridiculous, absurd in our actions, carriage; diet, apparel, customs, and consultations; we scoff and point one at another, when as in conclusion all are fools, ‘and they the veriest asses that hide their ears most.’ . . . [T]hat which he hath not himself; or doth not esteem he accounts superfluity, an idle quality, a mere foppery in another: like Æsop’s fox, when he had lost his tail, would have all his fellow foxes cut off theirs.”

 

Theodore Dalrymple uses the passage from Lear quoted above as the epigraph to Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Ivan R. Dee, 2001). He quotes Edmund’s words again in articles published in the British Medical Journal and The New Criterion, both in 2007, and in a speech he gave in Michigan in 2014, when he glossed them like this:

 

“This passage points, I think, to an eternal and universal temptation of mankind to blame those of his misfortunes that are the natural and predictable consequence of his own choices on forces or circumstances that are external to him and outside his control. Is there any one of us who has never resorted to excuses about his circumstances when he has done wrong or made a bad decision? It is a universal human tendency.”

 

Edmund’s words show up again in Chapter 4 of Dalrymple’s Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality (Encounter Books, 2015). In this context he notes: “Instead of astrology, however, we believe in psychology, of whatever school—and call it progress.” It takes a deft writer with a strong memory to repeatedly quote an evil fictional character to good purpose.