Sunday West 37

Windrush, Glastonbury, Blackadder and the British love of animals

Greetings, and apologies for the long gap since the last newsletter. The main reason is essentially calculated laziness: they take a surprising amount of time compared to a regular article, and don’t attract anything like as many new subscribers. But I think they’re worth doing and the plan from now on is to make them every two weeks or so. I also welcome any suggestions below on what to write, and what otherwise would improve your ‘customer experience’.

Since the last Sunday West, I have written on the coronation, I wrote about the NatCon conference, and spoke there too.

I wrote about the British obsession with animals, on the Tory government’s bizarre decision to increase immigration after Brexit, on the space for a populist Right party, on Blackadder, on Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of our Success, on the difference between Irish-Americans and Irish-English,on the myth of the Windrush, on scaling up Glastonbury’s ruthless immigration policy, and a two-part post on the decline of the French language.

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Elsewhere, another brilliant N.S. Lyons article, on why rule by nerds is unstable.

Whether an academic, a journalist, a financial analyst, or a software developer, a member of this Virtual class makes his living—and, indeed, establishes his social and economic value—by manipulating, categorizing, and interpreting symbolic information and narrative. “Manipulate” is an important verb here, and not merely in the sense of deviousness. Such an individual’s job is to take existing information and change it into new forms, present it in new ways, or use it to tell new stories. This is what I am attempting to do as a writer in shaping this article, for example.

Members of this class therefore cannot produce anything without change. And they cannot sell what they’re producing unless it offers something at least somewhat new and different. Indeed, change is literally what they sell, in a sense, and they have a material incentive to push for it, since the faster the times are a-changin’ in their field, or in society, the more market opportunity exists for their products and services. They are, fundamentally, merchants of change.

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I hugely enjoyed Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall, about the history of East Germany, which I will write about soon. She now has a substack.

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James Marriott on the populism of the centre.

As the BBC declines (the Today programme’s audience shrank by 12 per cent last year), the corporation’s patient, painstaking, flawed attempts at balance are being replaced by the more immediate emotional attraction of a less complex centrism. The political scientist Rob Ford described to me the “sugar-rush” appeal of tribalism. Faced with the Frosties and chocolate biscuits served by O’Brien, the BBC is stuck patiently trying to feed its listeners the disagreeable vegetables of original reporting and contrasting opinion.

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Ellen Pasternack on our Children of Men society.

The Children of Men illustrates a vicious cycle that traps ageing societies. As populations grow older, the average person’s interests become more bound up in the short term, and it becomes harder to gather political willpower for investment in the future. As a result, fewer children are born, worsening the situation.

This is not to say that the old are more selfish than the young. Anyone of any age can have a hypothetical interest in the good of humanity; in addition, everybody has an interest in their own wellbeing. It just happens that the younger you are, the more your self-interest will automatically line up with the long-term investments needed for a flourishing society.

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Always worth reading, the SW1 Forum on who is behind opposition to the Rwanda policy. This substack is a hugely useful guide to the organisations pushing Britain’s political direction — subscribe, read and send to your most influential friend.

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Eric Kaufmann on the fallacy of composition.

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A very interesting post by Lawrence Newport on why so many people in Britain are being attacked and even killed by dogs.

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Niall Gooch on The Buffy illusion and police officers who aren’t strong enough to take on the crims.

Consider the famous tennis Battle Of The Sexes in January 1998. Venus Williams, then ranked 22nd in the world and well on her way to becoming one of the greatest women’s tennis players of all time, was beaten 6-2 in a single-set exhibition match by Karsten Braasch, a journeyman pro ranked 203 in the men’s game. Braasch was thirty at the time (already old for a tennis professional) and well past his peak, having never ranked higher than 38 in the world. He had never made it beyond the third round of a Grand Slam and occasionally smoked on court, whereas the 17 year old Williams reached at least the last eight of every Grand Slam in 1998 and ended the year as world number five. Nevertheless, Braasch’s sheer physical advantage in power and speed meant a comfortable victory. In 2016 the Australian women’s football side were beaten 7-0 by an under-15 boys’ team.

Relatedly, from Rob Henderson’s substack:

Sex differences in muscularity translate into the average man being stronger than 99.9% of women. The sex difference in upper-body muscle mass in humans is similar to the sex difference in lean body mass in gorillas, the most sexually dimorphic primate.

Niall also wrote about cricket’s institutional racism report, while Charlie Peters covered the same charge being levelled against the police.

My feeling is that, if any organisation is declared by a senior manager to be institutionally racist, then everyone who worked there at the time, by law, should have to state that on their CV and LinkedIn page. And obviously any charitable status or taxpayer funding should be withheld, because we shouldn’t be supporting racist organisations — unless of course senior managers don’t actually think that, and are just saying it to signal their ideological purity.

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This was a few weeks back, but Louise Perry’s speech and article at NatCon is very much worth reading. I have a piece about her piece in the pipeline.

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This was also a while back, Dominic Sandbrook’s amusing homage to Stanley Baldwin.

One day in the late Twenties, during his second spell as Prime Minister of the greatest imperial power on the planet, Stanley Baldwin fell into conversation with a stranger on a train. A stocky, pleasant-looking man in a tweed three-piece suit, the very picture of middle-class ordinariness, Baldwin had never been very gregarious. Perhaps, as the train pulled out of the station, he was already poring over his government papers. Perhaps he had buried himself in a volume of his beloved Wordsworth, or in one of his cousin Rudyard Kipling’s short stories. Perhaps he was sitting back, eyes closed, dreaming of his native Worcestershire. Or perhaps he was frowning over The Times crossword, pen in hand, as he sometimes did in the Commons when a debate was dragging on.

Then his neighbour in the first-class carriage leaned over and tapped him on the knee. “You are Baldwin, aren’t you?” the man said. “You were at Harrow in ’84.”

The Prime Minister nodded. The man sat back, satisfied. Then, a minute or so later, the man leaned forward and tapped him on the knee again. “Tell me,” he said affably, “what are you doing now?”

I’ve finally got around to reading his book White Heat, which is as good as everyone says. This extract illustrates a very Sandbrookian theme, on the conservatism of most young people in the 60s.

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Brian Klaas on why we love true crime.

One of the core insights of evolutionary psychology is the fact that our minds were fine-tuned to navigate a world that is rather unlike the one we now inhabit. Humans lived rather differently for the last 300,000 years compared to how we live today. But our minds evolved to live in that world of human society and culture, not this one. 

And in that world, there was a premium on paying attention to dangerous, threatening situations, because they could kill us. The risk of getting eaten helps to focus the mind. Those who didn’t pay attention to potential danger were more likely to die.

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An interesting post by Ron Henderson on the five personality traits, intelligence, and particular traits like ‘vulnerable narcissism’.

Vulnerable narcissists are sometimes called “covert” or “hidden” or “shy” narcissists. They are prone to shame, humiliation, and depression. Unlike grandiose narcissists, vulnerable narcissists score highly on neuroticism and are more unhappy than average. They are prone to envy and denigrate others and their accomplishments. People who score highly on vulnerable narcissism crave status and recognition, but are often disappointed when they achieve it. They are extremely sensitive to insults and really don’t like being belittled. They are also more likely to lash out at others or seek revenge if they feel they are not respected. I call them a wolf in sheep’s clothing, because you often don’t know when you’re dealing with a vulnerable narcissist. Vulnerable narcissists are good at concealing this aspect of themselves, whereas grandiose narcissists let people know who they are up front. Interestingly, unlike with grandiosity, there are no sex differences in vulnerable narcissism.

In other words, half the people in the media.

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Finally, Conor Fitzgerald has produced some great posts recently, including this on why Irish liberals fell out of love with England, or at least stopped pretending to love England to bash their own country (and this is not just because he mentions me favourably and I’m some sort of vulnerable narcissist). Conor consistently writes about Ireland in an interesting and insightful way.

I’ll be back in the old country again in October, inshallah, if any subscribers want to meet for a coffee. Otherwise thanks for subscribing, and have a good week!