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Wrong Side of History Newsletter #61

Good morning, people, and Eid Mubarak to my Muslim subscribers; and Happy Akitu to any Assyrians, not to mention a Happy New Tax year to my fellow Brits (if you ever wondered why it starts on April 5, it’s to do with Feast of the Annunciation).

The substack is about to pass 40,000 subscribers, so thanks to everyone who has shared and recommended. I will be away in Holy Week (Saturday 12th until Easter Sunday), visiting Westmorland as I still insist on calling it, and while posts have been scheduled I probably won’t reply to many comments.

I finally finished my series on Christopher Caldwell’s book, an eight-part epic which was a mix of a review, history and my own thoughts. I didn’t quite mean it turn out almost as long as the book itself, but there you go.

I wrote about the ubiquity of hubs and about Britain’s most underrated king, James I/VI (free for all)

The Black Death series will return soon, but one of the advantages and disadvantages of my set-up is that there is no deadline pressure. Meanwhile, the Black Death is actually back in Britain, the first time since 1918, although it’s perfectly treatable. Still, I wouldn’t want to get it.

I also discussed the power of fiction, a response to the Netflix series Adolescence, about the 158th person to write about the subject and a week late. Incidentally, I think that the main impact of showing Adolescence to teenagers will be to drive down future fertility even more, by making childrearing seem even more worrying than it already is.

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Elsewhere, Conor Fitzgerald also wrote about the subject and how the moral panic is really about teenage boys rejecting progressivism.

The utility of this discussion for governments and activists everywhere is not that this will help get phones out of schools, but that it will give a second wind to these attempts to reign in inconvenient political speech on the internet. Some groups are more in need of this kind of control than others. This is the heart of the matter; the idea of Adolescence as a call to action has been embraced because it presents a chance to interfere with and oversee the inner lives of the demographic that Progressives are worried about the most - quiet, smart young white men.

I do worry that we’re heading towards a South Korea-style gender gap in politics, which seems very unhealthy.

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Ian Leslie also wrote a good piece on the subject:

Thorne’s shallow engagement with the complex topic of young male dysfunction mirrors the behaviour that his show imagines teenage boys to be engaged in: sucking up the internet’s most dazzling and lurid content without applying scepticism or critical thinking to it. The same goes for critics and commentators who have gushed over his show. There’s much to admire about Adolescence, including the incredible performance of Owen Cooper, and the show’s daring formal innovations.

But ultimately it is clickbait as much as it is realistic human drama or reportage. It uses the murder of a young girl as its fissile material without being interested in either the murder or the girl. The stabbing is neither shown nor described in detail and remains distant, unreal, disembodied. We learn nothing about Katie, except that she could be a bit of a bitch. Thorne has described TV as an empathy box, but in this show, only the boys are allowed inside.

Last week I went along to the Kiln theatre in Kilburn to watch Ian talk to Tom Holland about his new book on the Beatles, which I look forward to reading.

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Fitzgerald also wrote about the fate of the Irish language in a multicultural Ireland, and the prognosis isn’t all bad.

There is a link between “poshness” in a local Irish sense, and Irish language education. This not new, but it is not always easy to quantify or point to in the data. The article you’re reading was prompted in part by a comment by a parent I know from an affluent part of Dublin noted that a new Gaelscoil in their area was draining admissions away from more prestigious existing schools, because the parents saw it as a refuge from “non-nationals”.

When I mentioned this online other people had observed the same trends, and it seems likely that Gaelscoileanna, with a perceived record of high academic achievement, will come to occupy a place in modern Irish life similar to that occupied by faith schools in the UK.

The increased uptake of education through Irish isn’t limited to rich people and predates our era of mass inward migration. But it's hard to believe the current popularity isn’t in some part a reaction to (that is to say, against) the changing demographics of the country and a wish to preserve some elements of uniqueness in the face of it. It will therefore accelerate as demographic change does.

Interesting development, and ironic considering the old language’s historical association with rural poverty. It’s good to have something that makes you exclusive; this is a problem for the English, who created globalisation and therefore have no way to resist it.

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If you’re a regular reader, you’re probably bored to tears with the issue of clannishness, but this piece by Chris Bayliss is worth a read:

The easiest way to describe the Mirpuris is that they are Muslim Punjabis who were geographically isolated in remote, mountainous areas for many centuries, at the peripheries of a succession of empires and states to which they owed varying degrees of loyalty, including the Delhi Sultanate, the Kashmir Sultanate, the Mughals, a period of time under Afghan and Sikh domination, then British India and independent Pakistan.

To the extent that the Mirpuris were ever loyal to these powers (and they generally were to the Muslim rulers and to the British), they retained a strong degree of local autonomy in terms of how they ran their own affairs. They were functionally independent almost by default due to the geography they lived in. And geography was critical to their social development; it was remote yet in proximity to hostile populations.

Bayliss also wrote a good article about multiculturalism, and how its proponents really have little interest in other cultures. They’re ‘parochial cosmopolitans’, as a friend of mine called them.

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James Marriott on the normie doom loop

Silicon Valley venture capitalists looking for promising entrepreneurs to back sometimes speak of seeking out “high variance individuals”, erratic non-conformists who may be personally difficult but whose difficulty is often a sign of exceptional aptitude or insight. Such characters are powerfully selected against by many modern British institutions.

More relevant perhaps is the common observation that when start-ups mature they face a problem I have seen described as the “normie doom spiral”. After a certain level of expansion, companies are compelled to hire more and more “normies”: competent and responsible types who keep things ticking over and staff the company bureaucracy. But these people start hiring in their own image. The organisation becomes less tolerant of variance and thus less innovative, leading to decline. “Normie doom spiral”, I suggest, is not a bad diagnosis of what ails modern Britain.

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Robert Colvile on our totally insane carbon emissions policy

A large part of the problem is, as the above suggests, energy prices and charges — which are being made worse by Ed Miliband’s desperate dash to decarbonise the grid by 2030, irrespective of the costs. But as I’ve pointed out before, we’ve also designed our entire net-zero system to count emissions in the UK only. So if that British Steel plant shuts down, and we start importing from China or India, it counts as a carbon win even if their steel is produced using the dirtiest coal on the planet and with none of the green levies we apply here.

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African borders are not randomly drawn by colonialists

However, to make concrete and compelling territorial claims, Europeans had to learn facts about on-the-ground realities. This is the core premise of our alternative theoretical account, which helps to explain why border formation in Africa was in fact a dynamic and protracted process that took into account local features. This insight rejects a second common idea about colonial African states: the borders (most of which have persisted to the present day) are largely as-if random.

‘To systematically test our theory, we performed two empirical exercises. Collectively, they yield an unambiguous finding: Africa’s borders were not drawn in a random, haphazard way. History and geography were much more influential than most people realize—and certainly more than anyone has previously shown across a broad sample.

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Tove K on why leaders are delusional.

It seems that Akawe was fearless because he was irrational. He was prepared to cut the chances of survival for his sons through killing their mother, because he felt like it. The same way, he was prepared to cut the chances of survival for himself (and thereby his sons, since sons of killed men were targets themselves) through killing men that other people didn't dare to kill.

The very irrationality of this man made him capable of defying the balance between aggression and vengeance. He was fearless in a way that people weren't used to, so people weren't readily prepared to counter him. For that reason it took them time to join forces against him. Time he could use to impregnate and maltreat women. Eventually he did recognize that people were after him. For that reason he followed Helena out of the rainforest with the white people, and then joined another Yanomamö group, unrelated to his previous killings.

These were hunter-gatherer tribes but imagine, she wonders, if a totally delusional narcissist ended up in charge of the world’s most powerful nation?

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David Coates on the fascinating case of Lord Denning

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Are women more left-wing, asks Louise Perry.

I want to propose a subtly different explanation for what we’re seeing. Women are not more Leftist, per se. Rather, the specific variety of Leftism that is currently riding high is extremely well suited to feminine preferences. That does not mean that a new style of Right wing feminine politics couldn’t displace the current one. Nor does it mean that men and women can never be aligned on politics – really successful political movements tend to succeed because they work in both masculine and feminine registers.

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A powerful New Yorker account by Gideon Lewis-Kraus on South Korea’s population implosion:

Portents of desolation are everywhere. Middle-aged Koreans remember a time when children were plentiful. In 1970, a million Korean babies were born. An average baby-boomer classroom had seventy or eighty pupils, and schools were forced to divide their students into morning and afternoon shifts. It is as though these people were residents of a different country. In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand. A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly. About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary. Every Korean has heard that their population will ineluctably approach zero. Cho Youngtae, a celebrity demographer at Seoul National University, said to me, “Ask people on the street, ‘What is the Korean total fertility rate?’ and they will know!” They often know to two decimal places. They have a celebrity demographer.

‘Outside of Seoul, children are largely phantom presences. There are a hundred and fifty-seven elementary schools that had no new enrollees scheduled for 2023. That year, the seaside village of Iwon-myeon recorded a single newborn. The entire town was garlanded with banners that congratulated the parents by name “on the birth of their lovely baby angel.” One village in Haenam, a county that encompasses the southern extremity of the Korean peninsula, last registered a birth during the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

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At Compact, Jacob Savage on young white men writing fiction

‘Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).‘

And finally

A paralysed man stands again after receiving ‘reprogrammed’ stem cells/ Truly, we live in an age of miracles.

‘I was a high-flying HR boss... now I’m homeless in Philippines jungle and fighting for life with a rotting foot: Brit’s life unravels after being stabbed by girlfriend, infected with Mpox and lured into botched exorcism - as he begs UK for help’. The Daily Mail really is second to none.

European countries are still trading with Russia. Once upon a time it wasn’t that common to trade with countries you were at war with; during the long war between the Dutch and Portuguese, the Dutch still sold their enemies shipping insurance, bizarrely.

Texas v California – the race for high speed rail. Exciting news if it happens.

I’ve been getting into the BBC series Uncanny, and especially interested in the idea of ‘time slips’ mentioned in an interview with Stewart Lee. Has any subscriber ever had one? What explains Bold Street in Liverpool?

Marginal Revolution on the stupidest policy of recent years.

Did the current war lead to a baby boom in Israel?

Curiously enough, I recently read Harald Jähner’s Aftermath, which describes Foehrenwald displacement camp in Bavaria which; from September 1945 it became exclusively Jewish, mostly eastern Europeans who had come to Germany after hostilities ended.

Within these 15 streets, all with American names, a contemporary described ‘a regular Eastern Jewish shtetl life came into being’, with law courts, health service, kosher kitchen, synagogue and newspaper, Bamidbar or ‘desert’, and the first post-war Jewish theatre. It also lots and lots of children, with the highest Jewish birth rate in the world, a signal perhaps that high fertility is related to a desire to survive against hostile enemies - one reason why other first world countries cannot replicate Israel’s fertility.

A thread on medieval studies – medieval history is probably the area with the biggest gap between young academic elites and the the interested general public.

In Britain, carbon emissions from New Zealand grown apples are 32% lower than apples grown domestically, including emissions from shipping.

Leaving X for Bluesky has limited the reach of progressive organizations, apparently I’ve become pessimistic again about Twitter, because of the sheer amount of slop on offer. Substack notes actually seems like the best these days.

Some fun Puritan names: Fly-Fornication Richardson, Stand-Fast-On-High Stringer, Fight-The-Good-Fight-Of-Faith White Hope-For Bending (not sure this one sounded as intended…), Safely-on-High Snat, Obadiah-bind-their-kings-in-chains-and-their-nobles-in-irons Needham.

‘Two RAF engineers have been convicted of vandalising the Newbury Paddington bench. The judge told them the fictional bear ‘promotes integration and acceptance in our society... your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for.’ What a country.

In other British values news, three Bulgarians found guilty of spying for Russia. ‘Dzhambazov and Ivanova lived together as a couple and worked in healthcare jobs, but also ran a Bulgarian community organisation that provided courses on “British values”.’

Spot the side of the street run by the Labour council in Birmingham versus Conservative-run Bromsgrove. Will Lloyd’s recent piece about Birmingham is worth a read.

RIP Oleg Gordievsky, anti-communist hero.

I had a lovely time visiting ‘Mercia’ recently, one of my favourite parts of the world. I found this heartbreaking map of bereaved families from the First World War.

Lovely Ledbury

How ’Railway-based modernization (in Europe) increased separatist mobilization and secession.’ The telegraph and newspaper helped create modern nationalism; the television, arguably, undid it.

Rod Dreher’s Live Not by Lies is now a film

Houston, then and now. They couldn’t even the Luftwaffe either!

We should have named the overground lines after London’s hidden rivers. Great idea.

Some 25 per cent of Britain is now ‘disabled’. ‘If true, the British state in the last decade has created more disabled people than two world wars did, combined.’ And from the same account: The debt on the student loan book is larger than the entire national debt of Portugal.

New Twitter account tracking the British judiciary And this thread on the Sentencing Council.

What if Studio Ghibli directed Lord of the Rings?

And a great thread on recent moments in British politics reimagined.