Sunday West: March 26

Spring is in the air

Good morning, and with Lady Day behind us, we are most definitely in spring. This week I wrote about how different the age of the War on Terror appears to us, and how comparisons between 1938 and today’s migrant crisis are tenuous.

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Elsewhere, this piece by Thomas Prosser on ‘low liberalism’ was very good.

Lineker's views and conduct highlight an important trend in liberalism. Historically, liberalism is an elite ideology, being associated with intellectual classes and most voters not thinking in ideological terms. But this has changed. Following the expansion of higher education and diffusion of postmaterial values, liberalism is increasingly popular among non-elites. Whilst such voters think ideologically, their conceptual understanding is limited and they embrace populist methods, failing to understand that, in a liberal democracy, politics should have limits. Borrowing Anglican terminology, let us call this low liberalism.

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It’s generally foolish for British or American political partisans to align too closely with political movements in countries with more troubled histories, because they inevitably turn out to be corrupt and/or brutal. It’s especially wise to avoid being too associated with anyone in Latin America, because the guy you thought just wanted to reduce inflation to double figures and instigate supply-side economics actually wants to throw people out of helicopters.

Having said that, El Salvador’s crime reduction is very impressive, and I tend to agree with Richard Hanania that the social costs of high crime are so debilitating that it’s worth it. No developing country can reach first world levels of living standards with murder rates El Salvador suffered, because crime destroys our sense of security, without which growth is impossible and ‘democracy’ is meaningless.

Hanania’s piece on East Asian success is also good.

Granted, stereotype threat as a way to understand the East Asian package has certain difficulties. It would need to explain how stereotypes operate globally, across cultural, linguistic, and political barriers. Somehow, a Korean in Los Angeles and a descendent of Japanese immigrants in Brazil must both know that Westerners expect them to have a certain collection of traits. This influence of stereotypes even penetrates foreign countries, including China, despite the best efforts of the government to keep its population culturally isolated from the outside world. Of course, Xi Jinping is no match for the power of global stereotype threat, given that it even made North Koreans good at math. Kendism may also need stereotypes to travel back in time to work since East Asians somehow were already wealthy in the US decades ago, despite China being associated with crushing poverty throughout most of American history. But these are small details for Kendism, an ideology so convincing and scientifically well-established that universities produce glossaries to teach its core tenets.

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In the Sunday Times Matthew Syed on how we export the problem of asylum, and have for years.

Is Alastair Campbell, who condemned government policy last week, aware that his mentor Tony Blair — with other EU leaders — lifted the arms embargo on the murderous despot Colonel Gaddafi in 2004 as a quid pro quo for the Libyan leader shutting his borders to the sub-Saharan exodus? That’s right: we gave guns to a psychopath engaged in extrajudicial assassinations in return for his stemming the flow of people. Indeed, the entire thrust of western foreign policy for quarter of a century has been to implement policies described as “partnership agreements” — which are mere cover stories, marketing doublethink, for erecting walls.

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On a similar subject, a few weeks back I wrote about how immigration was a big factor in London being unaffordable, even though struggling renters tend to be pro-free movement. Migration is also a factor behind the shortage in social housing places, and on his substack Patrick O’Flynn looks at the numbers. As it currently stands, the housing system can favour people from overseas over local people because they have more ‘need’, part of a system that was changed in the 1970s and which previously favoured people with local connections.

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Niall Gooch on Master and Commander.

One of the central concerns of the film is the relationship between Jack and Stephen. The screenplay does a pretty good job of filling out their respective characters, although the books - twenty of them, totalling by my rough estimate over a million and a half words - have the time and space to do so more richly and deeply. Their relationship is of a kind not commonly seen or celebrated in modern culture - a deep and intimate male friendship, founded in a mutual love of music and an appreciation for the virtues and strengths of the other. 

Jack, as noted above, is brave and big-hearted, a born sailor and a born leader. He is not an intellectual but nor is he a philistine: he and Stephen play music together - he the violin and Stephen the cello - to the comic disgust of Preserved Killick, the captain’s steward. “Here we go again. Scrape, scrape”. Stephen is quieter than his friend, restrained and academic in temperament and a liberal in politics. He too is courageous, however, conducting surgery on himself after being wounded in a shooting accident

He is also a political radical - his background is barely eludicated on screen, but the books explain that he is a veteran of the United Irishmen’s rebellion of 1798, who nevertheless works as a spy for London because he loathes the tyrant Napoleon even more than he loathes British rule in Ireland. That radicalism leads to his confronting Jack with an objection to the flogging of a seaman, Nagle, who failed to salute Hollom. His dismissive attitude towards naval tradition - something very close to Jack’s straightforward Tory heart - sets off a quarrel, focused on the relative importance of freedom and authority in human affairs.

It’s just such a shame this never became a franchise. A tragedy, you might say.

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Christopher Snowdon at the Spectator on his bet with Jonathan Portes. It’s good to see some ‘skin in the game’ in the fake ‘discipline’ of economics; this is how all writing on the subject should be done. If you’re unaware of the background, two economists, Jonathan Portes and Christopher Snowdon, broadly on the Left and Right respectively, made a £1,000 bet on whether child poverty would go up or down. Portes, like a gentleman, paid up.

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A few weeks ago I noticed the word ‘longhouse’ for the first thing, and now I see it all the time. Here’s a piece in First Things explaining what it means, by someone who appears to be called ‘L0m3z’ (which sounds like a rapper, but then I’m getting old).

The historical longhouse was a large communal hall, serving as the social focal point for many cultures and peoples throughout the world that were typically more sedentary and agrarian. In online discourse, this historical function gets generalized to contemporary patterns of social organization, in particular the exchange of privacy—and its attendant autonomy—for the modest comforts and security of collective living.

The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced ‘The End of Men.’ Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: “The future is female.” She was correct.

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I linked to it in one of my posts but Ben Sixsmith’s piece on Iraq is good. I was about 70/30 in favour of invasion, and I thank the Lord I didn’t write about politics at the time. While in New York in the summer of 2003 I went to watch Christopher Hitchens debating and joined the throng of young fans trying to get his autograph or attention or to argue with him afterwards, the trail of his smoke outside followed by a similar trail of youngsters. I was quite convinced by his argument for liberating Iraq, firing me with optimism and hope for the world, which could be rebuilt; sadly, as it turned out, his more pessimistic brother Peter was right. He generally is.

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