Sunday* West (on Monday) 49

Back in Blighty

Good morning, and firstly my apologies to anyone frustrated that they couldn’t comment on the last three posts. I always schedule pieces for when I’m away on family holidays but check the comments; this is to ensure that it hasn’t broken out into a fight or a libel has been posted, plus I want everyone around me to know that I’m so important that if I don’t put in a couple of hours the ‘office’ will collapse without me.

However, this time I turned them off because we were in south-east Asia, we’d be moving around a lot, and so I didn’t bring my laptop; and I didn’t want to be checking comments when I was literally in a jungle.

Vietnam is an extraordinary place; my dad spent much time covering the war and I can see why he loved it so much. I will post about it in the coming days. 

And comments are now back on.

Since my last newsletter, I’ve written about what I would do if I were mayor of London. 

About why ‘mental heath’ might be bad for our mental health. 

The case for reverse grammar schools. 

On the new progressive calendar of saints, and why everything is now an awareness day, week or month.

On why there isn’t a new revolt on the right (yet).

On the existential crisis of authority.

On why the current system of monarchy is too cruel.

On how Victorians (and Americans) got the Tube built.

On the great debate about whether the fall of Rome was a cataclysm or not.

And about the Sackler family and America’s drugs epidemic.

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The third Canon Club event takes place next month, with Professor Douglas Hedley speaking on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Buy your tickets here.

For those who might be interested, my Canon Club co-organiser is also putting on another series of talks, called Sacred Cows. The first event is on Wednesday, 1 May, and is titled ‘May Contain Lies: Do Diverse Companies Really Perform Better?’. Should be interesting.

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Elsewhere, there was an excellent piece by Louise Perry explaining why 'wokeness' is two things, and why gender wokeness is in decline while race wokeness will only get stronger

Also by Perry, on why reading The Children of Men in the Britain of 2024 is painful ‘because James’ characters, even in the face of disaster, do not share that drive to self-annihilation.’

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Conor Fitzgerald wrote another good piece on the recent Irish referendum.

The message of the referendum, and the last 18 months in general, is this: the party’s over. Politicians spent 20 years unconsciously in search of the limit of the Irish electorate’s tolerance for change. They’ve found it.'

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Fred Skulthorp on the myth of the conspiracy-believing public.

As the cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier has argued, most people still have a good intuition for the truth, and the digital age has not upended historical norms regarding the effects of propaganda and information intended to mislead.

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Neil O’Brien on the great immigration data disaster. I am extremely critical of the Conservative Party, and will take a certain face-spiteing pleasure in their coming destruction, but the Harborough MP has done a fantastic job in holding the government to account, and if he is standing for re-election I hope he can buck the trend.

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William Atkinson on why building more houses is not enough to attract young voters to the Tories.

Let me spell that out: even those under 40s for whom the facts of life areconservative are failing to vote Conservative. Their aversion to Toryism is not only based on material circumstances but what Burn-Murdoch calls a “growing misalignment on values”. Brexit crystallised a value seperation between young voters and their parents and grandparents.They might not smoke, drink, or bonk like previous generations. But don’t kid yourself that they are budding social conservatives. 

This was the premise of my last book, so obviously I agree.

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An interesting post on how England fell out of love with universities.

There’s a well known story about two hikers who meet a bear in the wilderness. As the first pulls on his shoes, the second turns to him and says, ‘What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear.’² “I don’t need to,” says the first. “I just have to outrun you.”

In an inverse of this situation, in the race for public funding, it’s not enough for people to like you - they have to like you more than they like every other call upon the public purse. The Conservative Party has made clear that it won’t be changing the funding situation for universities any time soon - and Labour’s speeches about universities have focused on easing the debt burden on graduates and (perhaps) bursaries for poorer students. In the wider education picture they’ve focused on childcare, early years and primary school maths, and skills and apprenticeships - not to mention the pressures either party will surely face, after the next election, on teacher pay and crumbling concrete in schools. Universities are going to be a long way down the list.

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Matthew Syed on the problem of cousin marriage. I wrote about this a while back, and it’s a subject that’s always interested me ever since reading Steve Sailer’s article about Iraq.

And on that subject, Ben Sixsmith wrote a very good review of Sailer’s book, Noticing. I’ve started reading it, and will also review, but am behind with everything right now. 

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I’ve been vaguely working on a piece on why RyanAir’s Michael O’Leary is actually a national hero, and if I was ever going to tweet out one of those cringe ‘fantasy cabinets’ he would be our prime minister. Watching the departure lounge at Stansted Airport, where people from all backgrounds are able to travel across Europe for a relative pittance, is one of those moments which makes me think modern capitalism is a miracle. Annoyingly, James Marriott has written the article, and done it better.

The deplorable aspects of mass tourism have been rehearsed many times elsewhere. I agree with all the obvious criticisms. But much fretting over the problem contains a measure of snobbery (are we going to restrict access to Venice to a handful of appropriately Byronic aristocrats?) as well as the English tourist’s traditional contempt for other English tourists — that unbanishable conviction that one’s own holidays are infinitely more authentic than those undertaken by the pink, waddling hordes on the other side of the piazza.

More rarely entertained is the thought that mass tourism is a symptom of a laudable popular enthusiasm for European culture. The stereotype of the British citizen flying to the Costa del Sol to eat fish and chips in a pub called the Red Lion is out of date. 

We are getting better at behaving ourselves abroad. Football hooliganism is long past its heyday. The lads’ holiday is in decline. The Times reports that “city breaks” have overtaken beach holidays in popularity. Favoured destinations include “Rome, Venice, Istanbul, Madrid … and Berlin”. That sounds like progress.

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I always admire Richard Hanania’s ability to tale a very trollish topic and take, and to make a serious point about it, and I knew that his post on Sydney Sweeney would break the internet (do people still say this?). But, as always, the underlying point is true and interesting.

Women’s bodies have always been political, and they must be, given how fundamental sexual selection and family formation are to human society. In the Muslim world, whether a family covers their daughters tells you a great deal about their views on geopolitics and whether they’re likely to drink alcohol. We’re not that different in this regard. As mentioned before, the backlash to sexualization in the US used to come from the right, while today the division is less about smut versus prudishness than heteronormativity versus feminism and LGBT.

The leftists who think the Constitution requires books on gay sex in elementary schools are those who are most uncomfortable with the male gaze, while pro-Trump types who believe foreigners pose a threat to our Christian civilization are making pinup calendars and nostalgic for the kinds of cultural products that a previous generation of conservatives wanted to ban. I would bet that there are few societies in the world where how a woman presents herself does not predict something about her values and political opinions, along with those of her family, local community, and subculture. The same is true about men, but to a much more limited extent. A guy with a thick beard could be a hipster or a religious father of four.

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Finally, Sean Thomas on why AI will soon make editors redundant.

In one of the responses to my post, someone suggested I should try Google’s latest AI, Gemini 1.5 Pro, because, she told me, ‘it might be even better’. Gemini 1.5 Pro is not publicly released yet (it will likely arrive in May), but with a smidgen of persistence you can access it. So I did. I opened up the Gemini Pro chatbox and I said ‘Hi I’m a writer, can you help me’ – in my experience, these AI chatbots respond better if you are polite, an uncanny fact which is worthy of scrutiny in itself. 

Gemini eagerly agreed, then Gemini instantly gulped down the whole draft of my new novel without a problem, like a dolphin swallowing a fish. Then Gemini ‘read’ the book in 20 seconds – yes, it did this in 20 seconds – and then it served up the critique you can see below. 

We are doomed.