Sunday West 46

Flying, housing, the Sopranos and God

Good morning, and I suppose Happy New Year, this being the first newsletter of 2024. The days are getting longer already, and spring will be here soon - St Brigid’s Day comes next week.

Since the last newsletter I have written about:

The rise of the New Theists. In the past few years there has been a growth in social science studies showing the benefits of religion, and this has come just as observance and belief have plummeted. But can you fake it til you make it, meme yourself into belief? (I think yes.)

The Best is Over. Twenty-five years after the Sopranos first aired, a conservative interpretation of the show.

On my fear of flying. (Free) I just don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t be scared of being 30,000ft in the air, in a metal can weighing 180 tons and moving at 600mph.

Finally, this week’s piece on London’s housing crisis, part one, two and three.

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We had the second ever Canon Club event this week, with Paul Lay giving an excellent talk on Richard Wagner - I will post the video when I have it. More events will follow, and we will be setting up a mailing list. In the meantime there is a Twitter account. Please contact me if you know of a venue or speaker who might be suitable; the speakers get the vast bulk of the ticket sales (yes, we will pay you), but if we get funding we’d like to employ someone to make the Canon Club their job.

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Elsewhere, I watched Mr Bates v The Post Office this week, which was compelling stuff and made me feel intense middle-class guilt for my relatively comfortable existence. Subpostmasters make the most sympathetic victims, hardworking, self-employed people working hard and providing a vital service to the community - only to be screwed over by the system and machine. A genuinely astonishing story. In Compact Dan Hitchens writes:

It is dangerous to generalize from one instance. But the Horizon case is at least a parable of the perils of outsourcing. Fujitsu, which provided the bug-ridden software to the Post Office, is certainly a successful contractor. Since 2012, the firm has won 197 government contracts worth a total of £6.8 billion ($8.7 billion), according to the consultancy Tussell. The Post Office work has been especially lucrative—indeed, the contract was recently renewed. But how has it been fulfilled? As early as 1998, a government aide described Fujitsu’s then-nascent Horizon system as “hugely expensive, inflexible, inappropriate, and possibly unreliable.” Wallis interviewed an early employee who was shocked by the incompetence he witnessed: “Everybody in the building,” he claims, “knew that it was a bag of shit.” When Fujitsu had originally bid for the contract, it came bottom in eight out of 11 categories. But the government thought it was the best value for money…

In a quaint, idealized image, the state is meant to be a sort of wise patriarch, nurturing society and its institutions while firmly correcting injustices. What Britain has is an absentee dad, who has little idea what his children are up to, but occasionally turns up to splurge large amounts of cash.

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Harvard’s James Hankins on diversity statements.

Let me take, as an example, the popular DEI slogan “Diversity is our strength.” This states as an absolute truth a belief that, at best, can only be conditional. When George Washington decided not to require, as part of the military oath of the Continental Army, a disavowal of transubstantiation (as had been previous practice), he was able to enlist Catholic soldiers from Maryland to fight the British. Diversity was our strength. On the other hand, when the combined forces of Islam, under the command of Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik, besieged Constantinople in 717, diversity was not their strength. At the crisis of the siege, the Christian sailors rowing in the Muslim navy rose in revolt and the amphibious assault broke down.

Since most societies have usually been at war or under the threat of war for most of history, public sentiment has ordinarily preferred unity to diversity. Prudent and humane governments have usually tolerated a degree of pluralism in order to reduce social discord, but pluralism as such has not been celebrated as a positive feature of society until quite recently. In fact, diversity is a luxury good that can be enjoyed only in secure, peaceful societies. Even in such societies, it has to be weighed against other goods (like meritocracy) that will have to be sacrificed if it is pursued as an absolute good. An indiscriminate commitment to “diversity,” bereft of any loyalty to unifying principles, is the mark of a weak or collapsing society.

I began seeing ‘diversity is our strength’ signs in London around the mid-2000s, and it struck me as something that seemed obviously untrue; otherwise why would you need to say it? A lot depends on the composition of the group, but most of the evidence suggests that, all other things being equal, greater ethnic diversity will weaken group cohesion, and neither does racial diversity equate to ideological diversity - quite the opposite, and the fact that universities are now installing Test Acts to ensure academics agree rather proves that point. But then my view on this subject is quite well known.

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On a not dissimilar subject, Janice Turner on the Michaela controversy.

It began with one child praying at lunchtime on their blazer, because prayer mats aren’t allowed. Other kids joined in until there were around 30, with those who prayed chiding those who didn’t for their weaker faith. The same dynamic was observed by the author Ed Husain while studying at Tower Hamlets College, when Islamic Society members guilt-tripped Muslim girls who didn’t cover their heads, until one by one they adopted the hijab.

When it was clear this was sowing division, Michaela’s governors voted 11-1 to ban prayer rituals. And although this applied to every faith, an aggressive social media campaign spilled into the real world: glass bottles were thrown over the fence, teachers threatened, police called to a bomb hoax. An online petition reached 16,000 signatures.

Katharine Birbalsingh has clearly done a very good job at the school and it would be worrying for Britain if Birbalsingh Multiculturalism is defeated; the consequences of this would be very bleak indeed.

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Steve Stewart-Williams on who is more prone to conspiracy theories, liberals or conservatives. It’s both.

That, at any rate, is the conclusion of a fascinating recent paper by Adam Enders and colleagues, looking at the relationship between conspiracy theories and political orientation.

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I love those genre of tweets where people make piles of all the ‘banned books’ in their state and it’s stuff like To Kill a Mockingbird or Nineteen Eighty-Four, which clearly aren’t being banned in any real sense. Sometimes this is classical liberals misunderstanding what offends progressives, but I also think there is a greater demand for the narrative that ‘conservatives are becoming as intolerant as wokeists’ than there is supply, when I don’t think it’s true that conservatives are behaving censoriously (not that they wouldn’t be intolerant if they could, they’re just not strong enough). Similarly, when I’ve read about LGBT books banned by schools in Republican states they often turn out to be quite explicit about sex acts, the sort of things that only a complete wrong’un would want children to see.

At the Free Press, James Fishback writes about the truth about banned books.

For example, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, which argues that the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” is stocked in 42 percent of the U.S. school districts I surveyed.

Meanwhile, only a single school district—Northside Independent School District (ISD) in San Antonio, Texas—offers students Woke Racism by John McWhorter, a book that challenges the borderline religious “anti-racist” ideas advanced by Kendi.

Felix Ever After, a book by Kacen Callender that claims that girls who hate “being forced into dresses and being given dolls” are transgender, is available in 77 percent of the districts I surveyed. But not a single school out of the nearly 5,000 I searched offers books critical of trans theory. Students won’t find books like Trans by Helen Joyce or Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier, both recent bestsellers that present skeptical takes on the rapid rise of transgender identification among adolescents.

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Henry Jeffreys on how Britain sobered up.

By 1751, at the height of the gin craze that William Hogarth immortalised in ‘Gin Lane’, the English were drinking on average the equivalent of 20 bottles of gin per person per year. But Britain is losing its taste for alcohol. Around a quarter of 16- to 24-year-olds don’t drink at all.

When surveyed, Gen Z said they associate alcohol with ‘vulnerability’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘loss of control’. That’s precisely why my generation used to get hammered, but who would want to do the same today, with the ever-present possibility of online disgrace? Alcohol is also seen as unhealthy, and Gen Z are obsessed with their health. Teenagers look different to when I was young; they’re better groomed, with better teeth and skin. They want to look good for social media. They seem obsessed with drinking huge quantities of water. The water bottle has now become a cult item.

The real losers in Britain have been pubs. Since 2000, Britain has lost more than 13,000 pubs – a quarter of its total – and the rate of closures is growing. It doesn’t help that we are all increasingly told to drink less: in 2016, recommendations for drinking levels were lowered to 14 units for men and women in Britain. The World Health Organisation even states that there is no safe level for alcohol consumption, despite numerous studies which show that in small quantities alcohol can be beneficial to our health. Not that you are likely to hear about the benefits of drinking from the alcohol industry. Instead, it is fighting a losing battle in enemy territory, up against public health officials and the NHS.

This is one of the biggest cultural changes in my lifetime. My journey to work used to take me down the length of the London Borough of Islington, and this involved passing at least six disused pubs. Some of this is demographic; one had become an Islamic centre, for example, and even continental European immigrants and their children don’t drink as much as the Brits. But a lot of it is just down to a culture of greater sobriety among the general population; when I was growing up everyone seemed to be drunk, or at the very least in the pub. Not any more.

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Christopher Caldwell on how a stabbing changed France.

French people understand quite well that dangerous migrant neighborhoods ring all of the country’s major cities. But there remains a hard-to-shake faith in la France éternelle, and a confidence that unrest will never spread too far from the slums. That assumption has been shaken from time to time. Individual Jews have been singled out for violence at the hands of ethnic gangs this century. The cellphone salesman Ilan Halimi was tortured to death over 24 days by an African-led band in 2009. In 2017, a Malian drug dealer broke into the fourth-floor apartment of the retired doctor Sarah Attal-Halimi, beat her senseless, and threw her out the window to her death. French people could tell themselves that these were special cases.

Maybe they had to do with the Middle East or something. There were rationalizations for terrorism, too. When terrorists linked to Islamic State killed 130 people in Paris in November 2015, including 90 by machine-gun fire during a rock concert at the Bataclan theater … well … well, big cities are dangerous. Crépol, by contrast, is the sort of rustic place where people played rugby, not soccer, where they went fishing instead of dancing. If you could stand the boredom in a place like that, you could live in the same France your grandparents did. Now it, too, had been invaded by a war party from this second France.

I’m hoping to spend some time in France ahead of the European elections, so get in touch if you’re a subscriber. My French is… improving.

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Finally, Ian Leslie’s Nine Rules for Life.

It’s better to do things than not do things. A razor should sound so simple that it verges on dumb. Indeed this one might be dumb, but I have often found it useful in situations where I know that not doing the thing will be fine (‘if I stay in tonight, I’ll be perfectly happy watching TV’) but doing the thing might have some payoff in terms of pleasure or learning or profit (‘maybe I will enjoy that party/concert’). The hardest decisions to make are ones where the stakes are quite low and you know you’ll probably be happy either way and that’s where this rule comes in particularly handy. It invites more variation, opportunity and serendipity into your life. One useful aspect of a regular newsletter it that it constantly forces you to ‘do the thing’ (write the idea, or half-idea). When you do more things, you raise the chances that some of the things will be great or will pay off in a big way. The greatest artists and innovators tend to be prolific. It’s good to have a bias towards doing the thing.

It took me a long time to appreciate this but this is a great rule; always go to events, always try new things, and take every opportunity to meet new people. The potential benefits vastly outweigh the downside risks. Thanks for subscribing, and have a good week!