Sunday West: February 26

I have a cunning plan to make history more interesting

Good morning. This week I wrote on the rather depressing subject of fertility collapse, and the fact that modern society conspires to make parenting as difficult as possible; I also wrote about the interesting theory that the culture war is a battle of mating strategies; and on Saturday I wrote about why history should be a black comedy, not a morality tale (I realised after that I was showing my age by calling it RE, rather than RS, for religious studies).

I was also interviewed by William Clouston of the SDP, which can be found on YouTube. It was based on the piece I wrote back in November about what conservatives should believe.

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Elsewhere: Harry Lambert on Bari Weiss, one of the most influential and impressive media figures in the Substack age.

In trying to destroy Weiss, that media set made her. Since 2017, Weiss has gone from being an unknown books editor at the Wall Street Journal to the founder of one of the biggest political platforms on Substack, via the opinion pages of the New York Times. Her news and comment site, the Free Press, is estimated to be bringing in around $2.5m in reader revenue per year, and is growing quickly. The venture has also attracted outside funding from major investors in, friends of Weiss tell me, both the San Francisco tech class and an older generation of Jewish backers in New York who see Weiss as a voice of sanity in a journalistic generation they do not understand….

“I find the hatred baffling,” says Andrew Sullivan, who also gave up a prized column in New York media in 2020 to move to Substack. Asked to explain the feeling against Weiss, Sullivan suggests that she is “a young Jewish lesbian mother, and if you have those characteristics, you are supposed to be very left, and she isn’t. The other obvious factor is jealousy.”

The fury some feel is easily heard on local podcasts, such as Chapo Trap House, a show hosted out of Brooklyn by three once-young men. “I always hate talking about her,” one of the hosts says to the other two, on one of many episodes in which the trio painstakingly dissect an article or announcement by Weiss. “Because there’s just nothing there, just absolute zero.”

Weiss’s The Free Press now has 30,000 paying subscribers, which might explain *some* of the hatred. Every time another journalist succeeds, I die a little…

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Also at the New Statesman, Christopher Caldwell on Bernie Sanders.

Good old Marx-influenced leftism has the advantage of being more capacious than the contemporary culture-war kind: Sanders wastes little time on arguments about abortion, pronouns and critical race theory, believing those can be subsumed under his general message of fighting the powerful. He can be heretical. Representing a rural mountain state, he has been at best a fitful friend of gun control….

More than most senators, Sanders has a realistic idea of what today’s working class is and who is in it – not so much miners, smelters and lathe-turners as shirt-folders, aisle-swabbers and sheet-changing home health workers. His picture of American oligarchy is less vivid but reinforced with powerful statistics. Three of the richest Americans – Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates – own more wealth than half the US.

When Sanders was a boy, the average CEO earned 20 times what one of his workers made; today’s average CEO outearns his workers by 400-to-one. “Billionaires should not exist,” he repeatedly stated during his 2020 presidential campaign. You can see why younger voters like that. Older progressives have been waiting for the country to reject oligarchy and rediscover its true identity; for the kids, oligarchy is the country’s true identity. A Bernie Sanders rally has the atmosphere of a countercultural music festival.

Indeed, Sanders was in London this week, drawing big crowds by the looks of things.

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At The Atlantic, Jennifer Senior on why we feel younger than we actually are.

Yet we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time. A friend, nearing 60, recently told me that whenever he looks in the mirror, he’s not so much unhappy with his appearance as startled by it—“as if there’s been some sort of error” were his exact words. (High-school reunions can have this same confusing effect. You look around at your lined and thickened classmates, wondering how they could have so violently capitulated to age; then you see photographs of yourself from that same event and realize: Oh.) The gulf between how old we are and how old we believe ourselves to be can often be measured in light-years—or at least a goodly number of old-fashioned Earth ones.

I’ve found this, too; that if I ever think about how old I am, and it’s always about eight years younger than the reality, then reality comes crashing down and I remember I’m basically ready for a care home.

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Conor Fitzgerald on consensus collapse in Ireland.

This is something I feel I need to emphasise with non-Irish people, particularly from the US and UK, because I think they find it hard to recognise and understand, and they question it when they see Irish people aren’t protesting about a given topic. It’s important so I’m going to put in bold (sometimes I feel like tattooing it on my face). Because of Ireland’s size, it is much more socially costly for an Irish person to appear to go against a consensus than it is for other people in other countries.

This has a couple of interesting effects. One is that when people do publicly break away from the consensus it often marginal people who either don’t know or don’t care what reputational damage they are doing to themselves. The movements are often made up of people from poorer areas, again because they are shut out of bourgeois respectability, so there is less at risk. If you remember how mainstream people spoke about the Water Charges protestors I think this stacks up. 

Ireland also adopted Christianity very quickly, and with very little in the way of internal conflict. I may have shared this Angela Nagle article before, about why Ireland is also uniquely vulnerable to progressivism because of its economy and history.

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At Works in Progress, Guillaume Blanc on France’s babybust.

So, the demographic transition took place exceptionally early in France, but why? In my research, I argue that the diminished sway of the Catholic Church, nearly 30 years before the French Revolution, was the key driver of the fertility decline. Since at least Tocqueville, and more recently Emmanuel Todd, we know that a sustained loosening of traditional religious moral constraints took place in the mid-eighteenth century, at a scale and extent that no other country has achieved.

How can we measure secularization at the time? In a pathbreaking book, historian Michel Vovelle studied the language used in invocations in the opening statements of wills to document ‘dechristianization’ in Provence, in the south of France. Whether it was dechristianization, secularization, or simply a loss of influence of the clergy is hard to say, but the data shows that attitudes toward life and death changed radically in the course of the eighteenth century. 

At the end of the seventeenth century, most testators referred to God, Paradise, or various saints in their wills. On the eve of the French Revolution, they used more secular language and expressions, such as ‘indispensable tribute that we owe to Nature’, to discuss death. Other measures, such as requests for requiem masses (perpetual masses for the dead), bequests, offerings to the church, or even invocations of the Virgin Mary or average weight of funeral candles, all declined significantly.

He points out that ‘Had France’s population increased at the same rate as England’s since 1760, there would be more than 250 million French citizens alive today.’ Imagine that. This is a subject that fascinates me, because it seems that the cultural trends begun by France’s fashionable elite had huge consequences for European and world history.

There will be no Sunday newsletter next week but there will be posts coming as usual. Have a good week, and thanks for subscribing.