Sunday West: February 19

Subversives in Tudor times and ours

Good morning. This week I wrote about the conservative exit from academia and the arts (FREE), a sort-of response to a piece by one of my favourite columnists; I also wrote about the last culture war in England, and how what was the mainstream faith for centuries was recast as subversive by the country’s new rulers.

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Elsewhere, Douglas Murray on what counts as subversive today.

Last weekend the press reported on an analysis done by Prevent’s ‘Research Information and Communications Unit’ (RICU) in 2019. This analysis looked into social media users described as ‘actively patriotic and proud’. Oh no – anything but actively patriotic and proud! Anyhow, according to RICU there were warning signs if people absorbed information or opinions from ‘pro-Brexit and centre-right commentators’. These included Jacob Rees-Mogg, Melanie Phillips, Rod Liddle and yours truly. So everybody reading this column is at as much risk of being ‘radicalised’ as some young Muslim settling down with a tape recording of Ayman al-Zawahiri or Osama bin Laden, and Rees-Mogg becomes the equivalent of a finger–waving imam sending the young off to become martyrs in the cause of Allah. Which is strange because he never came across that way to me when we crossed paths at Conservative Philosophy Group meetings.

Among the other warnings sign are an interest in Edmund Burke and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, my favourite documentary series of all time. Prevent was set up to track Islamic extremists but now seems to increasingly focus on ‘far-Right’ extremism, but then that makes sense when you appreciate that conservative ideas are now not just unpopular but subversive. The idea that Britain before the revolution was actually a merrier place is now quite dangerous.

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 Gurwinder writes about why smart people believe stupid things.

In AI research there’s a concept called the “orthogonality thesis.” This is the idea that an intelligent agent can’t just be intelligent; it must be intelligent at something, because intelligence is nothing more than the effectiveness with which an agent pursues a goal. Rationality is intelligence in pursuit of objective truth, but intelligence can be used to pursue any number of other goals. And since the means by which the goal is selected is distinct from the means by which the goal is pursued, the intelligence with which the agent pursues its goal is no guarantee that the goal itself is rational.

As a case in point, human intelligence evolved less as a tool for pursuing objective truth than as a tool for pursuing personal well-being, tribal belonging, social status, and sex, and this often required the adoption of what I call “Fashionably Irrational Beliefs” (FIBs), which the brain has come to excel at.

Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior “identity-protective cognition” (IPC).

By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

What this means is that, while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. They’re better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true. This is why intelligent people tend to have stronger ideological biases; being better at reasoning makes them better at rationalizing.

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In The New Statesman, Madoc Cairns on Britain after Christianity.

The Conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is Hindu. From Labour’s foundation in 1900 to its election defeat in 2010, almost every leader professed the Christian faith. Since then, not a single one has. Paisley and Callaghan’s theological debate seems to ­derive not from our immediate past but from the annals of a lost civilisation.

By the time Paisley and Callaghan debated the nature of grace, religious disaffiliation had begun in earnest. But belief and unbelief remained mutually comprehensible; sleeping in separate bedrooms, living in the same house. The divorce is now complete. “Nones”, those people with no doctrinal affiliation, don’t just disagree with the religious; they’re unlikely to even understand them. Substantial numbers of under-55s struggle to distinguish Bible stories from the plots of superhero films. And what they don’t understand, they don’t care for: 55 per cent of Britons think religion does more harm than good in the world. More Britons think aliens have visited Earth than have a positive attitude towards religion.

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At the Critic, Jake Scott on language, and why we need to recapture it.

The problem runs deeper. It is not simply that the mainstream discourse is dominated by the Left’s language; it is also that even the language the right uses to critique the Left is almost exclusively left wing. Browse through the right wing media, if you can find it, and you will see the same tired phrases appearing again, and again, and again. The left is “woke”; it engages in “cancel culture”; it is for “equality of outcome, not opportunity”. I have a particular aversion to the word “woke”. Not only is the use of the word lazy, inaccurate and unable to capture with any precision the actual ideological enemy we are dealing with, but the word itself is a left-wing term. Originally meaning being “awake to systemic racism” and morphing into a myriad of other causes, it soon became the 2020’s answer to the2010’s “social justice warrior” (SJW) name-turned-insult of the internet.  

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And Tom Jones on what’s happened to art galleries.

Next door, in the early 19th century gallery, a space I recalled once being occupied by “The Desert” by Edward Landseer, was now filled by an artwork called “Untitled” by Tentative Collective, which served, via the medium of two printed out visa rejections and some graph paper, to remind us that the UK’s borders arestill, occasionally, enforced. 

Between that and the Pre-Raphaelites was the “Climate Justice” gallery, which the gallery uses “to explore how art and collections can help people learn from history, shape the future, scrutinise decision-making and encourage caring, collective action”. Usually in my dreams this is where I try to run and can’t. Here you can play a thoroughly unenjoyable game of unremarkable metrolefty opinion buzzword bingo. A particular highlight was “The Empty Space”, a literal empty space reserved for the “Black Women’s Art Works” that MAG doesn’t own. 

Almost every gallery in Britain is like this now. This is what I mean when I say that you could have gone into a coma in 2010 and just woken up, having no idea who had been in power in the meantime.

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Just in case any of you were ever tempted to enter academia, here’s Vincent Lloyd in Compact:

This might be just another lament about “woke” campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. But the seminar topic was “Race and the Limits of Law in America.” Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.

Like others on the left, I had been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States. But now my thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion. How did this happen to a group of bright-eyed high school students?

My quite basic belief about ‘wokeness’ is that, while many people overthink it, a lot of is just straight-up racial narcissism. Most forms of racial narcissism are taboo, for very good reasons, but narcissism among sacred races is encouraged, approved and subsidised — with obviously disastrous consequences; and since the well of racial narcissism is essentially limitless, if people in authority approve it, they will get more of it. Many problems, especially in education and policing, will continue to get worse until people in public life have the courage to say basta! But that is currently some way off.

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In The Guardian, Martha Gill on the great vexation of modern life: people can’t have as many children as they’d like.

OK: so it’s about social structures, then? Lack of childcare, unequal parental leave and career penalties for mothers. Not so – or not primarily. In our fecund recent past, remember, career penalties for mothers were even higher. Mothers still suffer a career penalty almost everywhere, but attempting to remove it doesn’t seem to alter their decisions that much. Since 2008, amid unequalled progress in gender equality and some of the most generous parental support schemes on the planet, birthrates in Sweden, Norway and Iceland have fallen precipitously. Nordic countries are, comparatively, parental utopias, yet birthrates tick along slightly above the EU average and still well below the replacement rate.

I agree with her basic premise. Aside from Georgia, no country has successful brought fertility rates above replacement rates, whatever the childcare incentives, because sub-replacement fertility is probably an inevitable product of female emancipation. In particular the issue is that women don’t tend to marry men with lower education and income levels, so the modern system ensures that a large minority of men are simply unmarriagable.

I’m not convinced by Gill’s solution, since outcomes for the children of single parents are way worse on average, and even with huge state support it’s going to be incredibly hard to raise children alone. Even without grandparental support it’s hard with two parents. I also think this problem is inevitably helping the drive towards poly-acceptance. As Rob Henderson wrote earlier this month:

In a deregulated market, power laws dominate. This is true not only in the economic realm, but in the romantic realm as well. At no point in history have all men in a given society been equally desirable. Today, though, the disparity between men is particularly pronounced. And the gap shows no sign of slowing or closing. The polyamorous movement may be a reaction to shifts in sex ratios among attractive individuals. Many individuals who do not identify as poly are likely practicing some version of it, knowingly or otherwise, as the case of West Elm Caleb demonstrated. The majority desirable young males using dating apps almost certainly have at least three women in their rotation, if not more.

As with so many things, post-Christian society is reverting to pre-Christian norms, in this case the norm where a large proportion of men were thrown onto the romantic scrapheap.

Hope that’s cheered you up — have a great Sunday!