It's been a long, cold, lonely winter

Wrong Side of History newsletter #60

A happy spring morning to you. We’ve just seen the first rays of sunshine in months here in England, and it’s reminded me just how much I hate winters in northern Europe (maybe I just need to spend some time in unforgiving heat to appreciate it).

Since my last newsletter, I’ve continued writing my series on the plague, with parts three, four and five here. When the series is finished, I will add an extra post with a reading list and a round-up of some of the best and most helpful comments.

I wrote a three-part piece about following in my father’s footsteps in Vietnam – here, here and here.

I wrote about the plan to give children the vote.

I visited Germany, and wrote a two-part piece (here and here) on the beautiful rebirth of old Dresden. The new-old Frankfurt also looks nice. Meanwhile, Mosul is rebuilding as before the devastation of ISIS, which is lovely to see, but have they not studied Donald Gibson’s bold designs for Coventry city centre? I also visited the restored Berlin Palace, where there is a nice scale model of the city from 1900 before everything went wrong in Europe.

I also wrote about Germany’s problem with lone wolf attacks, about the firewall surrounding the AfD, and how the country’s – and the continent’s – leaders have made all the wrong calls. I wrote about how Europe’s leaders are completely deluded in their belief that they can rouse their countries in times of danger.

I wrote about the phantom border between old east and west Germany, which probably has more to do with Protestantism than communism.

I asked why Britain is not giving support to Canada, and why we equate Israeli lives as being more valuable than Palestinian. I also looked at the Reform Party’s divisions – and polling does show supporters are unhappy about it. I also wrote about Elon Musk’s prodigious sperm.

I also continued the series on Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, which will conclude next week. Part Four and Part Five here.

Finally, I also appeared on Alex Kaschuta’s podcast. Thanks to everyone who has shared the substack with friends - it’s almost at 40,000 subscribers, which is exciting.

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Elsewhere, Will Solfiac on the false dichotomy between ethnic and civic nationalism

“Civic nations” grew around strong ethnic cores that anchored the state, even if this fact was not emphasised explicitly (and often in fact it was emphasised explicitly). It was this underlying ethnic identity that allowed them to build a civic identity which outlying minority groups could assimilate into. “Ethnic nations” looked to the state just as civic nations did, it was just that in most cases the state they envisaged did not currently exist, therefore their national movements had to use non-state markers of identity or the memory of their historical states or kingdoms.

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Kristian Niemietz on whether woke was hip or socialist

‘Wokery turned out the way it did, because it reflects the character of the modern Left. Leftism is hipsterism, and this is what hipster subcultures do: they gatekeep access while engaging in internal status competitions. Hipsters do not want all and sundry to join their subculture, because if everyone does it, it ceases to be hip. They have steep status hierarchies, with late converts ranking lower than early adopters (i.e. those who already did it “before it was cool”)… I predicted in 2014 that wokery would get more and more extreme over the coming years, because of intra-Left status competition. That is precisely what happened. Until now.

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Katja Hoyer on German peasants:

Another way of looking at it is that it’s especially the ‘common man’ (and the common woman) who feels that democracy in its current application is no longer working for them. The AfD, against which Steinmeier’s argument was directed, has become the ‘poor people’s party’, as a journalist aptly put it in an analysis of voting results in some of the country’s most deprived regions. According to this, in both East and West, the AfD would have won the election in February if only poor regions had been allowed to vote. Of course, the anti-immigration party also has many middle-class and wealthy voters, but whichever criteria you apply – wealth, class, education status or income – they get voted for disproportionately by the ‘common man’.

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Luka Ivan Jukic on Europe’s last Latin-speaking kingdom:

Latin was and had been its official language effectively since its Christianisation. Its fiercely patriotic nobility saw it as nothing less than the country’s mother tongue. Indeed, it was essential to their functioning as a noble estate as it was the language through which they administered their counties. These were akin to their own mini-noble republics, occasionally gathering in a general noble diet at which great nobles were represented in the upper house and counties through representatives in the lower house. The language of all these institutions, of the laws, rights, and privileges that underpinned them, was Latin.

I like Hungary a lot, but Latin would be a lot easier than its baffling national language.

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Samuel Rubinstein on one of the eye-opening books I’ve ever read - Alan Macfarlane classic 1978 study The Origins of English Individualism.

The witches of Essex, he noted, were strikingly different from their continental counterparts: with no talk of covens or group meetings, they were a distinctly individualistic menace. In the introduction to The Origins, he describes the experience of moving from a 17th-century English diary to an anthropological survey of the contemporary Himalayas. Most works on pre-modern English society proceeded from the assumption that there wouldn’t be too much of a difference between the two: England was supposed to have been a ‘peasant society’, characterised by immobility, early and universal marriage, intergenerational households, and a value system according to which the kin-group was always more significant than the individual. It was supposed to be analogous in its outlines to the ‘peasant societies’ of the 20th-century Himalayas. But not everyone saw it that way, and Macfarlane embarked on his ambitious historical project of debunking the myth of English ‘peasant society’ emboldened by a remark of F.W. Maitland’s, to the effect that England had ‘long ago’ chosen her ‘individualistic path’.’

It’s interesting how so many studies of human society have been undertaken by British men raised in the former colonies. The natural curiosity of the Anglo.

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N.S. Lyons produced two great pieces recently, first on the end of the long 20^th century

Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism. Adorno, who set the direction of post-war American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of a latent “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man to xenophobia and führer worship. Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community entirely, labeling it as disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who dared cherish as special his own homeland and history as a dangerous “racialist.” For such intellectuals, any definitive claim to authority or hierarchy, whether between men, morals, or metaphysical truths, seemed to stand as a mortal threat to peace on earth.

Secondly, on love of a nation.

What angered people about the two CEOs’ comments was that – like so many of today’s elites – they displayed no sense of loyalty or obligation to Americans as a nation. A nation is not a corporation. A nation is a particular people, with a distinct culture, permanently bound together by a shared relationship with place, past, and each other. A house becomes a home through relationships with the family that lives in it, a connection forged out of time and memory between concrete particularity of place and the lives of a specific group of people present, past, and yet unborn. We can say this house is home because it is our home. In much the same way, a country becomes our homeland because it is ours – and the we of that “ours” is the nation, which transcends geography, government, and GDP.

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Gerry Lynch on a similar subject, on modern progressivism’s 1989 moment.

Ultimately all societies are sustained by visions; when people lose faith in those visions, then politics and culture shifts, sometimes dramatically. For well over a decade now, people have been losing faith in the worldview that many progressives seem to assume is the only rational one, because they’re asked to believe in stuff that often doesn’t work as advertised and sometimes is literally unbelievable.

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Peter Hurst on why children are unhappy.

There is a huge amount of evidence that exercise is beneficial for our mental health, especially among adolescents. Adherence to 24-hour movement guidelines among adolescents is related to lower odds of suicidality in older boys. Replacing 60 mins daily sedentary behaviour with light activity at ages 12, 14, and 16 associated with 12-16% lower anxiety scores at 18. After adjusting for socio-demographic factors, greater frequency of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity is associated with lower depression symptoms.

PLP is a great believer in the mantra ‘be not solitary, be not idle’, as am I. He doesn’t agree with Jonathan Haidt’s phone theory of misery, although he agrees with him about the loss of play; many people think the evidence about phones doesn’t hold up, although my instinct is that they’re probably not good for adolescent wellbeing.

On that note, teens are getting happier, compared to their 2020 peak. That was the year of lockdown, of course, but there may be something of a vibe shift happening too; radical progressivism is linked to mental ill-health and anxiety.

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The paradise of fools is coming to an end, writes James Marriott

Indeed, those who imagine themselves the most fearless critics of modern civilisation are often its most coddled children. America’s new antivaxer health secretary Robert F Kennedy — the amateurish, purposeless scion of a modern American aristocracy — is a perfect symbol of the decadence of the attitude. Kennedy’s carelessness is a function of his pampered insulation from anything resembling real life.

Similarly, my fashionable corner of east London (I am something of a local anomaly) bristles with casual anti-science faddists. Glow-faced trust-fund babies fritter their unearned cash on crystals, alternative remedies and “non-western” medicines, scorning the medical system that has made them among the healthiest people in the history of the world.

Marriott cites the anti-vaxxers as a group insulated from the consequences of their own silly ideas, although this could be extended to include a lot of different beliefs.

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A touching piece by Paul Morland on Germany, from where his family fled in the 1930s.

My family’s roots go back a long way in Germany. When the Nazis came to power all the boys in my father’s class had to examine their origins and it was to father’s great pride that as far back as he could go, they were all Germans. They came from small provincial places in the north like Dassel and Lemgo and moved to larger towns like Essen and Offenbach.

Even after the horrors of the early years of Third Reich, from which most of my family escaped, they still remembered the positives. My maternal grandmother, cowering at home with two small children during the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, recalled a ring on the bell and when she opened the door a slit, the policeman shouting out to his colleagues “Niemand zu Hause” (nobody home).

My father spoke fondly of how his school mates supported him against Nazi teachers and how the whole school atmosphere was helped by a devoutly Catholic and quietly anti-Nazi headmaster.

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Charles Amos, the heroically eccentric libertarian who recently defended cousin marriage, on how to be an ethical meat eater.

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Matthew Syed on the mindset of airline investigation.

I couldn’t help thinking of Alphonse Chapanis, a Yale-educated psychologist who was involved in one of the seminal moments in the early history of aviation. He was the man commissioned by the US army air forces in the 1940s to investigate a string of accidents involving the B-17 bomber (the Flying Fortress). These aircraft had been belly-flopping onto the runway when pilots inadvertently pulled the lever to retract the wheels rather than the one to lift the flaps. It looked like incompetence (to use the word brandished by Trump last week), and Chapanis felt an inner voice urging him to castigate these men and dismiss them from service.

But he resisted this urge and looked a little deeper. And he discovered that the two levers — with such critically different functions — were identical and side by side in the cockpit. He realised that these errors were caused not by incompetence but by poor ergonomic design — under pressure of a difficult landing (and associated cognitive overload) even talented pilots were at risk of pulling the wrong switch. So Chapanis designed a fix — a little wheel shape attached to one lever and a flap shape to the other. They now had an intuitive meaning easily grasped under pressure, and accidents of this kind disappeared overnight.

But the lasting significance of Chapanis’s work was not just about the importance of ergonomic design but the imperative of reserving judgment on incidents until a thorough analysis is conducted. For as this cultural tradition strengthened throughout the postwar period, pilots, air traffic controllers and other professionals came to realise not only that they would not be unfairly blamed in the event of an accident but that they could report their errors and near misses, conferring yet more learning at the level of the system. I still think the most beautiful thing about aviation’s safety culture is that the cardinal sin is not to make a mistake (since we all do) but to fail to report it.

It’s a wonderful cultural norm - I often wonder if it could be used in other contexts or if the urge to CYA is too strong. Apparently the recent crop of stories about plane crashes is probably just the result of attention bias, which is just as well, as I’m a nervous flier; I also worry about the competency crisis.

Meanwhile, there is exciting train news about upcoming continental destinations, although direct London-Bordeaux and Barcelona trains would be the dream. There are quite a few nice high-speed rail projects in the works globally, including Canada, the Baltic states and Vietnam. There are also some new high-speed trains in France.

Can men and women be friends? asks Alice Evans. Evidence from over a trillion Facebook connections.

The new British Right. Tag yourself. I suppose I’m Britain’s oldest Sensitive Young Man.

Thread on the rot in the national church. Sam Bidwell was also mentioned in this Charlotte Ivers piece on how quite small Twitter accounts can change the national and international discourse. Max Tempers, the anonymous poaster who helped to re-raise the grooming gang scandal over New Year, also broke the story of the government’s Motability scheme, a scndal which is now being discussed everywhere.

BBC propaganda seems to have really ramped up recently. I wonder what’s going on?

Irish-Americans, including 257 Irish-born individuals, have received over 58 per cent of the 3,464 Medals of Honour (up to 2009).

More prison guards in trouble. Add them to the list!

Tom Holland’s exciting book news.

Some fun architecture ideas from Grok. I did my own art nouveau football stadium.

Alcohol deaths have surged since lockdown in England and Wales. Meanwhile, French bars are dying.

Another native Canadian turns out to be white. This was the subject of one of my first Substack articles.

Irish-born population living in Ireland and abroad by county/state in 1870/71. Lancashire had a larger Irish population than 23 or Ireland’s 32 counties, which today explains why Liverpool is different.

Thread on Hijab Day, formerly International Women’s Day. I appreciate it’s all well-meaning inclusitivioty, but ironic considering the communist origins of IWD.

That deeply annoying cartoon about experts. I will write something about the cartoons of our age at some point.

Since we may be heading a ‘coalition of the willing’ with France in Ukraine, here’s a list of all the wars we’ve fought side by side with the Frenchies.

‘Black Britons built Stonehenge. You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over? Black Britons built Stonehenge.’

The city of Austin reduced rents by 22 per cent with this one weird trick – building houses. Auckland, meanwhile, built 43,500 new homes, and rents went down 28 per cent relative to peers.

The story of the Paris theatre taken over by migrants does have similarities with a rather controversial French novel.

A lesson in not being conformist. French arrogance plays a protective role.

US Aid News in Britain.

Sweden isn’t ‘the rape capital of Europe’.

More ‘it’s a free country’ news from Britain, this one with the chilling phrase ‘Someone has spoken to us about your social media posts’.

Holocaust denial is the most evenly believed conspiracy theory. Presumably it’s due to Democrat-voting minorities balancing right-wing extremists.

Who is the biggest peddler of lies on ‘X’ – someone asked Grok. As the great man might put it – wow!

A real photo of a sunset on Mars

‘About 1 in 10000 births have spinal muscular atrophy, a deadly disorder that's a leading genetic cause of death among children But a new drug has made it possible to save these kids, and it may allow them to live totally normal lives. Test subjects show no signs of the disorder!’ Truly, we live in an age of miracles.

Liverpool once had its own version of Piccadilly Circus. More decline visuals from the former second city of Empire.

Football clubs classified along a political left-right axis and a socio-economic proletarian vs elitist axis. I seem to remember years ago a poll found that, among English football fans, Queen’s Park Rangers supporters were the most right-wing, which surprised me, since back then neighbours Chelsea were obviously more right-coded (and that’s a gentle way of putting it).

Picturesque football ground locations. I imagine that Dumbarton's must be Britain’s most beautiful.

Finally, I didn’t know this: 2.5 million Mills and Boon novels were used to tarmac the M6.

Have a good day, wherever you are - and thanks for subscribing.