Sunday West 40

Bond, crime and whining masculinity

Greetings, fellow earthlings. This week I wrote about the new centrist James Bond, even if I used the W-word in the headline (sorry), and about the great American exodus which featured in Helen Andrews’ Boomers.

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Elsewhere, Ross Douthat mentioned my Bond piece in a characteristically insightful article about how American progressivism has been more effective in Canada and Britain.

To the extent that these complaints capture an Anglosphere reality, I think you can identify several different points that might explain what Canadian and British conservatives are seeing.

The first is a general tendency of provincial leaders to go overboard in establishing their solidarity and identification with the elites of the imperial core. Both Ottawa and London can feel like provincial capitals within the American imperium, so it’s not surprising that their leaders and tastemakers would sometimes rush to embrace ideas that seem to be in the American vanguard — behaving, as the British writer Aris Roussinos puts it, like “Gaulish or Dacian chieftains donning togas and trading clumsy Latin epithets” to establish their identification with Rome. By contrast in continental Europe, in countries that are under the American security umbrella but don’t share as much of our language and culture, the zeal for imitation feels a bit weaker, and “anti-woke” politics that double as anti-Americanism feel more influential.

The second point is the role of secularization and de-Christianization, which are further advanced in the British Isles and Canada than in the United States. The new progressivism is not simply a new or semi-Christian substitute for the former Western faith, but the rhetoric of diversity-equity-inclusion and antiracism clearly fills part of the void left by Christianity’s and especially Protestantism’s retreat. So it would not be surprising for an ideology that originates in the post-Protestant precincts of the United States to carry all before it in post-Protestant Canada or Britain, while meeting more resistance in the more religious regions of America — and not just in the white-Christian Bible Belt but among the religious-conservative minorities whose rightward trend may be keeping the Republican coalition afloat.

Then the third point is that smaller countries with smaller elites can find it easier to enforce ideological conformity than countries that are more sprawling and diverse. Once a set of ideas take hold among the cognoscenti — progressive ideas in this case, though it could apply to other worldviews as well — it’s more natural to conform, and more difficult to dissent, in the cozier precincts of Westminster or among Canada’s Laurentian elite than it is in the American meritocracy, which spins off more competing power centers and dissenting factions.

Many plants thrive in new soil far from where they came, free of the parasites they co-evolved from; coffee in South America is sometimes cited as a good example. Likewise, many viruses prove more effective in populations without any prior resistance. It also doesn’t help that Britain has a less confrontational culture, more generally, which allows conservatives here to use diffidence as a mask for cowardice. When Tories say they don’t want an American-style culture war, what they really mean is ‘where are the surrender papers? My train for the country residence leaves soon.’

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On the new Bond, Simon Evans writes:

The new Bond is not an example of ‘retconning’ (short for ‘retroactive continuity’) – that is when publishers edit older books to make sense of errors, inconsistencies or awkwardness, created as often by authorial carelessness as changing tastes. This is more a kind of software upgrade, a nudge that realigns legacy characters with modern mores, under which they can proceed safely into contemporary fiction.

This technique applies a palatable glaze to problematic texts and gnarly, ornery heroes and keeps them morally acceptable, not least to publishing houses staffed entirely by easily spooked humanities graduates who score 11 on neurosis and agreeability, and three on historical perspective.

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Incidentally, Canada is an especially fascinating case, which I’d like to write about at some point. No other country went through the 1960s cultural revolution with such force, and changed so much, and no country has embraced the recent stage of that revolution with such enthusiasm. It’s pretty funny that it’s the only country which actually claims to be committing genocide, although the recent story about the Church’s ‘mass graves’ is rather less amusing. After dozens of bombings and acts of vandalisms against churches in revenge, it turns out there are no graves.

Helen Andrews, again, wrote a very good piece about this, and a similar issue in Australia, last year.

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At the ever-excellent Works in Progress, Anya Martin on Houston’s urban renewal.

Houston is rarely held up as an example of good land use planning. The Texan city, as recently as a few decades ago, famously had a downtown area consisting largely of car parking. But over the last 25 years, without the rest of the world noticing, things have been quietly changing. Downtown is no longer just a giant car park. The city has become a little more walkable. Pleasant rows of townhomes have appeared in the suburbs, alongside amenities like new parks, restaurants and entertainment, and light rail. Housing has remained remarkably affordable and accessible, even as the wider economy boomed and the population rose drastically. …

For city authorities, another lesson is that you get what you plan for. Some, especially within the UK planning context, treat urban sprawl as something that developers inevitably push for, perhaps in response to public demand for car-centric lifestyles. But the Houston example shows that some of the most famously car-centric urban environments in the world are often a direct result of the planning policies imposed by local governments. Set large minimum lot sizes, open space requirements and parking requirements and you will get sprawl. Take them away and you get a much more natural pattern of development, with denser urban cores. 

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Ian Leslie discussing the seductive lure of narrative.

In Metahistory, his classic work of historiography, Hayden White argued that historians are always drawing on literary forms, like tragedy or comedy, whether they realise it or not. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if you’re a historian you have to be aware of it; otherwise the story writes you rather than the other way around. Moralising narratives are particularly potent. Historians of the British empire are currently substituting one simplistic narrative for another in popular books.

In a sense, Cort was an easy target for Bulstrode because he didn’t have a story of his own; he was narratively undefended. If Cort is less well known than Watt or Priestley that’s because neither his life or work have been moulded into a story; other than his innovations, Cort left barely a trace behind. He wasn’t a flamboyant character, but one of those diligent, determined, curious tinkerers on whom the Industrial Revolution was built (in my book CURIOUS I call them “thinkerers”). His innovations probably emerged from years of slow, sooty experimentation, without any eureka moments or dramatic breakthroughs.

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Mary Harrington on the online Right becoming pathetic.

It’s a solid rule of thumb that every political movement, once it goes mainstream, will degrade to its stupidest imaginable form. I was there in the 2000s when “social enterprise” was all set to re-order commerce to the public interest, and have since watched in dismay as it’s become the stupid, shallow, venal “woke capital” scam we all know and detest. In turn, something similar is afoot today within the subculture that’s emerged over the last decade or so to critique the class-blind overreach and biology denialism of liberal feminism.

It's really far more noticeable, and if you’re a Twitter user, muting ‘body count’ will improve your experience infinitely.

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Caitlin Flanagan on heroic masculinity.

When a gunman attacked the Covenant School, an elementary school in Nashville, in March, only 14 minutes lapsed between the first 911 call and officers on the scene taking the shooter down. The Nashville chief of police, John Drake, spoke to the press often on that day and the days that followed. He spoke in the language of data and facts—but also in the language of human beings trying to understand this great evil.

About a week after the shooting, Drake spoke again. First he thanked everyone who had helped, including the cops who had entered the building first, and were also at the press conference. And then he talked about a memorial service he had attended with other members of the force:

“As I sat in a church Saturday, and I watched students from Covenant School take flowers down to the altar, literally I’m in tears. And the other first responders, police officers, firefighters are in tears. And I look at these kids, and they look at us and say, ‘Thank you for your service.’ And they believe that their classmate is going to Heaven, that they’re in a better place and they’re not hurting. The ones that was hurting the most was us.”

Almost overcome, he said that the thing he always tells new recruits, men and women alike, is “No one ever said it would be easy, but they said it would be worth it.” And then he turned to the cops: “I’m totally proud of these men.”

What if we showed that speech to boys? What if we didn’t repeatedly tell them that we want to know their feelings and that we want them to be unashamed to cry, but instead showed them that everything is possible for a man—even a straight chief of police? If you think that boys, even ones raised in liberal places and by liberal parents, aren’t deeply interested in the testimony of this kind of man, then you haven’t been around boys very much.

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Tory MP Danny Kruger has a book out this month, and is interviewed by Will Lloyd in the New Statesman.

Kruger is someone who lives out his beliefs. He has always been a Tory. He said his parents, the South African novelist Rayne Kruger and Prue Leith, the Great British Bake Off judge, “modelled an amazingly successful way of doing family”. There are happy, yelling children (he has three) everywhere in his cottage. Wilcot, where the roofs are thatched, the sheepdog sleeps outside the inn, and the red telephone box looks hysterically well maintained, was somnolent on the bright summer morning I visited. Kruger suggested he might ride through on a horse, as William Cobbett did here in Rural Rides (1830). The wood pigeons in the beech trees looked better fed than some people on London buses.

The state of Wilcot is not the state of the nation. Covenant is full of unsettling statistics about Britain. The “shameful” caseloads faced by public-sector professionals: “One or two hundred prisoners to one prison officer; a dozen elderly or disabled people to one care worker.” Or this: “A quarter of the adult population is on antidepressants.” Kruger likes a mournful first-person plural pronoun: “We are polluting the sources of life… We inhabit a pornworld… We have been taught that we have nothing to live for beyond ourselves.”

I like his description of George Osborne as ‘a very able Whig’ and Boris Johnson as someone who had ‘a real reluctance to alienate people he might be having dinner with’.

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Louise Perry on the fun trade-off.

At a societal level, we can be rich, or we can be communitarian. I don’t think we can be both – at least, not for long. The Baby Boomers came closest to enjoying both simultaneously, but only because they were born during an ideological changing of the guard. They enjoyed the high trust, family-centric culture cultivated by their parents and grandparents, and then got to enjoy the youthful rejection of all of that culture’s downsides.

But that’s a trick that can only be pulled once. Historian (and Baby Boomer) Jon Lawrence is kidding himself when he tries to have it both ways:

‘[W]e should read the widespread nostalgia for community as powerful evidence that people want to find a way to reconcile personal freedom – the right not to have to conform to the expectations of strangers (or indeed of family) – with a deeper sense of social connection.^⁠’

I have bad news on this front: those things are irreconcilable. You cannot promote a culture of optionality, and then also expect people to choose you when you become a dull and onerous option. You cannot buy solitude when it suits you, and then try and buy back company when it does not, because company of the sincere and intimate kind cannot be bought.

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And Conor Fitzgerald on the right to be misinformed.

Their problem with Misinformation is as much with the people who spread it as the thing itself. Technocrats by their nature are people who have suppressed their own views and precisely calibrated them in order to successfully manoeuvre through organisations their whole career. They’ve gotten where they are by attending working groups, committees and think tanks that weren’t easy to get invited to. Making alliances with like minded people in corridors. In the darkness of bedrooms and home offices, getting really good at learning facts, passing exams and making presentations. Now here are all these apes, who have never so much as put together a powerpoint slide, getting their big dirty paws all over our nice clean machine, upending it, turning it inside out - brazenly! In front of everyone!

Thanks to everyone who has subscribed. On a final note, I wrote a while back about starting a series of salons on the Western Canon, and the first one should be taking place in London next month. Will send details when all is confirmed.