Sunday West: February 5

Why we're not taking back the institutions

Good morning ‘y’all’. As of this week, I now have more subscribers in the United States than Britain, so I suppose I better start writing color and defense, and talking about ‘soccer’.

A special hello to the subscribers in New Zealand, too; after Britain, the highest per capita readership total, and way more than any other Anglophone country. Also to the surprising number of Moroccan readers — about the same as the rest of the Arab-speaking countries combined. (I don’t know why that it is, I don’t think I’ve written about the country, and I’ve never been, but to all of you — As-salamu alaykum and azul)

Since my last newsletter a fortnight ago, I’ve written two pieces on empire, the first about the historical parallels between Russia and the United States, the second about how multiculturalism was pioneered by Russia’s successor state, the USSR.

This week I wrote about how monogamous marriage reduces testosterone in men, and the wider impact this has on society; finally, a piece about how the decline in American churchgoing has had a huge impact on the West.

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Elsewhere, Janan Ganesh on why conservatives don’t try to take back control of the institutions (it doesn’t pay enough).

Conservatism is to a large extent self-eroding. A philosophy that (rightly) salutes enterprise will not attract enough people who want to serve in the culture-shaping institutions. Sure enough, the culture becomes less and less conservative. This problem is all the more acute in the US, where conservatism so exalts the profit motive that it is itself an industry. Burning away in the Republican gut is a historic grievance. Even as the “movement” achieved electoral success over half a century, the texture of life in the country went the other way. The school curricula. The policing of language. The positive discrimination. Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes didn’t win for this…

Some conservatives have rationalised this discrepancy between electoral triumph and cultural retreat as a kind of leftwing swindle. Or, worse, as proof of democracy’s futility. Their own complicity is lost on them. There are Republicans who can’t believe how leftwing universities are and also can’t believe that anyone would ever choose the unlucrative life of an academic. At some point, you’d hope, the irony will dawn on them.

It’s true enough. I would only add that the process is helped by homophily; Left-wing people in organisations tend to hire other Left-wing people (political discrimination in employment is pretty well-established), and in some cases make institutions mildly hostile places to work, often with the help of the law. Conservatives don’t believe in equality or diversity, so having entire departments promoting it is going to make a job less attractive.

Housing costs also change it a bit. Academia in Britain had a Left:Right ratio of 3:1 in the 1960s, while today this must be well over 10:1, probably 20:1 among the under 50s. Partly it’s because housing costs in the most desirable cities have made it far harder to afford both a career and a family, something conservatives feel is especially important.

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I remember a few years back, on holiday in Wales, being surprised to see that phone boxes now had defibrillators installed. It was in one of those towns you now see across provincial Britain where the median age seems to be about 70, so I imagined that heart attacks must have been quite a frequent occurrence. I noticed it again while visiting coastal Northumberland, in another very greying part of the country, but if you lived in one of the country’s urban hubs you might not have noticed them.

Defibrillators have since become far more widespread, and with good reason — survival rates without them are quite poor. There is also more awareness following Christian Eriksen’s on-pitch cardiac arrest in 2021.

But this trend hasn’t escaped the notice of the eagle-eyed vaccine-sceptic community, who see the proliferation of these devices as evidence that something sinister is going on. Looking at the problems a conservative might see facing Britain, Charlie Peters laments in The Critic:

How are some of the Conservatives’ Right-leaning critics reacting to this grave, reversible failure? The most effective opposition to the Right should always come from the Right. Are they piling on the pressure to call for an urgent change to our outdated human rights laws that allow for bogus asylum claims to be stamped through? Are they crying out for emergency funding for prisons and frontline policing? Are they regularly reminding the Tories that they do not, in fact, need to sustain an entire universe of journalists, activists and lawyers who hate them and exist to terrorise their legislative plans?

No. Unfortunately, much of the lifeblood of the British Right is instead being channelled into the scandal of someone discovering a defibrillator in a phone box in rural England.

Sadly, the anti-vax movement has even reached as far as the parliamentary party. It feels like such a weird thing to focus on, when there are so many actually bad and real things being done by nefarious elites!

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You will probably want to read Gurwinder’s latest post if you have teenagers.

Other platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, use recommendation algorithms as features to enhance the core product. With TikTok, the recommendation algorithm isthe core product. You don’t need to form a social network or list your interests for the platform to begin tailoring content to your desires, you just start watching, skipping any videos that don’t immediately draw your interest. Tiktok uses a proprietary algorithm, known simply as the For You algorithm, that uses machine learning to build a personality profile of you by training itself on your watch habits (and possiblyyour facial expressions.) Since a TikTok video is generally much shorter than, say, a YouTube video, the algorithm acquires training data from you at a much faster rate, allowing it to quickly zero in on you.

The result is a system that’s unsurpassed at figuring you out. And once it’s figured you out, it can then show you what it needs to in order to addict you.

When it receives the signal that it’s got your attention, it doubles down on whatever it did to get it. This allows it to feed your obsessions, showing you hypnotic content again and again, reinforcing its imprint on your brain. This content can include promotion of self-harm and eating disorders, and uncritical encouragement of sex-reassignment surgery. There’s evidence that watching such content can cause mass psychogenic illness: researchers recently identified a new phenomenon where otherwise healthy young girls who watched clips of Tourette’s sufferers developed Tourette’s-like tics….

On top of this, there is the fact of who owns it.

The first indication that the Chinese Communist Party is aware of TikTok’s malign influence on kids is that it’s forbidden access of the app to Chinese kids. The American tech ethicist Tristan Harris pointed out that the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is a “spinach” version where kids don’t see twerkers and toilet-lickers but science experiments and educational videos. Furthermore, Douyin is only accessible to kids for 40 minutes per day, and it cannot be accessed between 10pm and 6am.

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All day breakfast in a tin. Spotted dick. Faggots. Truly Britain is blessed with the greatest cuisine in the world. Admittedly our food has got considerably better in the past 30 years, but it’s still a rich seam of humour (sorry, humor) so I’m going to keep on mining it. The British abandonment of decent food and its modern return is a fascinating area of social history, one Aris Roussinos writes about for UnHerd.

Is there some kind of political salvation to be found in the Lancashire hotpot or toad-in-the-hole? Probably not. Yet I have often thought that, should you wish to initiate from scratch a metapolitical British nationalist project, distinct from the globalised aspirations of the Westminster class, you could do worse than take Waitrose as a model. Nationalism was always, historically, a pursuit of the affluent bourgeoisie, and even if its political content (aside from a devotion to the royal family rare among major brands) remains largely sublimated, Waitrose’s cultural production — its lovingly produced weekly newspapers and monthly magazines showcasing small-scale food producers toiling away in a timeless British countryside, its strangely feudal relationship with the Duchy of Cornwall — already echoes, in sublimated form, much of the aesthetic content and instinctive cultural meaning of classical nationalism.

Thanks for subscribing, and have a nice day! (Unironically)