Sunday West 42

The return of the War on Terror era

Good morning, folks, although it obviously doesn’t feel that way at the moment. The news has been dominated by the horrific mass murder in Israel and the aftermath — war in Gaza, who knows what in the Middle East and inevitable violence in western Europe.

Since the last round-up I’ve written about the bizarre multicultural history now being taught, with part two here, and on how Warsaw’s Old Town was rebuilt after the war to look exactly how it did before (unlike Coventry).

I also wrote about the different meanings of multiculturalism, on why liberals and conservatives go for the same sort of neighbourhoods, on 13 Wasted Years, on what post-liberalism means, on the US crime explosion after George Floyd, on decolonisation academics cheering the murder of Israelis, on the end of based Poland and the first signs of its multicultural future – which will be speeded up now the centre-Left is in power. I wrote about the Reverse Floyd Moment, on the immense burden some Arab countries have had with refugees, and on the repaganisation of the West.

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I’m about to hit the 20,000 subscriber mark, so a particular thanks to all those who have recommended to friends. Still in the lead is DaveW with 17 referrals, followed by James Thompson with 13 and Stephen Wigmore with 5. Four others – Henry Jeffreys, Henry George, John O’Flaherty and Daniel Comyn, have recommended two each.

I’d be interested in what people think will improve their ‘customer experience’ of reading. I plan to make this newsletter every two weeks (I know I keep on saying that), but would be interested in whether things like a round-up of reader comments would be welcome, as some other substackers do. I’d like to, but the only question is time, as I have to admit I’m knackered. I’ve also tried out a podcast with another substacker, which I think could be good, and which all the large-follower substackers seem to have, but again it’s whether I could have the time.

Also the first Canon Club took place last week — thanks for those who came, I thought it was great fun and I will post the video in the next few days. The second Canon Club event should be happening this year, on Wagner (the composer, not the Russian paramilitary group). If anyone can recommend a venue in London which can hold around 100, let me know; the last place was great, but I think it would be too small.

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Elsewhere,  and annoyingly, ConHome’s William Atkinson has written a very good piece on the same subject I have been working on, the decline of Tory Arabism. He does link to one of my pieces, though, so I forgive him.

At UnHerd, Aris Roussinos also wrote this brilliant article on a similar subject.

Palestine could just as easily be a Right-wing cause, a cautionary tale about the perils of mass immigration. The root of the Palestinian tragedy was, after all, the influx of Jewish migrants, many of them desperate refugees, which altered the country’s demographic balance irrevocably, and of which the establishment of the Jewish state was the natural historical result. Such a reading would easily lend itself to conservative fears over unchecked immigration, and as demographic anxieties become the central driver of European political discontent, younger Rightists could well, like the Nouvelle Droite of the Seventies, find themselves making sympathetic analogies with the Palestinian predicament. In Germany, AfD voters are the only voter bloc not to favour Israel over the Palestinians (though Germany’s dark history of course makes the country a special case). Indeed, the same demographic concerns are the precise reason the One-State solution, along with mass non-Jewish immigration, is unpalatable to the vast majority of Israelis, as it would erode the hard-won Jewishness of the Jewish state.

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Freya India on AI girlfriends.

But it isn’t just unrealistic beauty standards that worry me. What’s even more sinister is the unrealistic emotional standards set by these apps. Eva AI, for example, not only lets you choose the perfect face and body but customise the perfect personality, offering options like “hot, funny, bold”, “shy, modest, considerate” and “smart, strict, rational”. Create a girlfriend who is judgement-free! Who lets you hang out with your buddies without drama! Who laughs at all your jokes! “Control it all the way you want to,” promises Eva AI. Design a girl who is “always on your side”, says Replika. 

How can we compete with that? Already women in relationships complain about porn-addicted partners who aren’t satisfied with actual intimacy. Now we’re facing a future where guys could get addicted to emotional validation elsewhere, sneaking away for some of that unparalleled devotion. Worse, what about young boys who grow up with this? Whose first sexual experience is chatting with AI women who never say no, never argue, never have original thoughts or an identity of their own—and then they try to date a real girl? There’s already all these men on Reddit raving about how their AI girlfriends never argue, complain or get bored of them, while real girls continually disappoint.

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At Konstantin Kisin’s substack, James Orr on conservatism.

It is inevitable that a hierarchy of social regard will then emerge.  Indeed the conservative will argue that such hierarchies should be celebrated if a society is to motivate future generations to emulate the contributions of their forbears to its flourishing.  ‘Take but degree away,’ observes Shakespeare’s Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, ‘untune that string, / And hark what discord follows.’  Attempts to remove the gradations are in reality attempts to dissolve the order on which any society depends. No program of social engineering can dissolve the basic facts of human psychology or prevent the radically uneven distribution of human aptitudes in a given environment from crystallising itself into a hierarchy of honour.  Moreover, as anyone who has lived in a socialist society can attest, every revolution brings a new aristocracy in its wake.  The dissolution of one hierarchy simply ushers in a more arbitrary stratification, one more pernicious and difficult to dislodge for being cloaked in the illusion of equality. 

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Superforecaster Jonathon Kitson now has a substack on geopolitical issues, which will be worth reading. His first post is on Taiwan.

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After the recent murders of two progressive activists in the US, Rob Henderson wrote about luxury beliefs and their effects.

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In the American Conservative, a real epic by Steve Sailer on immigration to the San Fernando Valley.

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I visited the Beamish Museum in April, and noted a poster on the wall of their recreated Victorian school which showed the conscience clause, an important legal protection against parents who didn’t want their children instructed in the religion of the school. It makes me wonder what rights a modern parent has against their children being indoctrinated with things like Pride or other overtly progressive events. Setting aside practising Christians who say they have biblical views on homosexuality, what about people who don’t have any moral objections to same-sex relations but just see it as overtly political and quasi-religious and a bit, well, leftie?

James Murray and Eric Kaufmann wrote about an interesting idea: can being anti-woke be protected by law?

In recognition of both those risks and that importance, cases are starting to be brought before the English employment tribunal that seek protection for speech and belief which might be described as “anti-woke”. The most high profile such case was that of Maya Forstater, who established that gender critical beliefs and an absence of a belief in gender identity are “protected philosophical beliefs” for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010. This meant that she could not be discriminated against for holding or (to a certain extent) manifesting them. Gender critical feminists are both cultural liberals (favouring free speech and objective truth) and cultural conservatives (privileging traditional understandings of gender and words such as “woman” or “mother”).

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Guy Dampier on Arabofuturism.

Whilst HS2 lumbers on, its further branches ruthlessly pruned away, much of it buried in tunnels to avoid the wrath of rural NIMBYs, all promise dissipated, the Saudis have proposed and are now building an entirely new state-of-the-art city for nine million people. NEOM sounds like something from an architectural student’s fantastical end of year project, but it’s real. 

That Arab ambition has already been made visible in Dubai. Whilst Britain floods reclaimed land to protect birds, Dubai conjured the Palm Islands out of the sea, building an instantly recognisable palm tree shape into the waves and filling it with luxury hotels. Nor is it alone: across Dubai new buildings have sprung up, designed by Western architects but full of vernacular Arab details, like mashrabiya screens. A new style has been conjured into being, combining the flowing curves and minimalism of modernism with geometric Islamic intricacy and detailing.

I’m not going to lie – I would LOVE to see Neom. Not sure I’d actually like to live there, though.

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Christopher Caldwell on the scale of the migration crisis.

The number of migrants who arrived in the UK in boats last year – 46,000 – looks like small potatoes in comparison with refugee flows in the Mediterranean. What is going on in Lampedusa now is a civilisational rather than a conjunctural problem. It is tied up in the West’s misplaced priorities and warped threat assessments.

Lampedusa was once an imperial frontier, a place where the free world and the third world were in communication. It used to be an asset for the free world; now that is less certain. Viewed by posterity, the invasion of Libya launched by Barack Obama, Nicholas Sarkozy and David Cameron in 2011, which opened a corridor for the large-scale trafficking of migrants, will probably be seen to have posed a larger threat to the ‘European way of life’ than the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin last year.

I’ve long come around to the idea that the overthrow of Gaddafi was a foreign-policy error of gigantic proportions, worse even than the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

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Ian Leslie on zero-sum v non-zero sum thinking.

This helps to explain Trump’s rise. We can think of him as the first zero-sum president of modern times. Until he came along, presidents of either party told the JFK story. They stressed the unity of the American people, and framed their policies - whether tax cuts for the rich or higher welfare - as good for all Americans. Trump came along and said, hey, there are winners and losers here, and you want to be a winner, right? If you were a working-class Democrat who had seen both income and status shrink while others got rich, this message had a visceral appeal.

I wonder if non-zero-sum thinking might be an especially WEIRD trait, and America is just becoming less WEIRD.

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John Gray reviews Bronze Age Pervert:

The adolescent quality of BAP’s ideal is a point of contrast with his intellectual mentor Nietzsche. Whatever his other personal limitations – aside from the commercial sex from which he contracted syphilis as a student, Nietzsche was practically an incel – the philosopher did have a direct acquaintance with war. A medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), he contracted diphtheria and dysentery on the battlefield, permanently weakening his already uncertain health. The experience confirmed his lifelong hostility to militarism, and when he glorifies war it is most often a mental conflict to which he is referring.

Nietzsche regarded the civilisation around him as thoroughly decadent, but he was well aware that he was a living example of that condition. When he wrote of superhuman inner strength, it was as someone who suspected he was incurably spiritually diseased. Here the contrast with BAP is particularly instructive. 

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Thanks for subscribing, everyone. I will be in Japan towards the end of next month, if any subscribers would like to meet for a coffee.

Also I went to the ballet this week for the first time.

I was there to see Black Sabbath, Britain’s second greatest band of all time. I will be heading to Birmingham at some point soon to write something about the birth of heavy metal, so any subscribers from Brum who’d like to meet, let me know.

Goodbye, and have a good week!