Sunday West: September 18

The origins of the Great Awokening, Lord of the Rings spin-offs, and strong, silent types

Happy Sunday. This week was still dominated by the death of the Queen. Earlier I wrote about people who, like Elizabeth II, straddled different historical eras and connected people from both; thanks for all the suggestions, and I have a second part coming out soon. On Friday I wrote about why the evidence points to monarchies working better than republics.

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At The Critic, Capel Lofft wrote about the monarchy and the emotional divide in British life, epitomised by Queen Elizabeth and her daughter-in-law Diana.

I don’t wish to comment on the character of Diana — no doubt in many ways she was a kindly woman with good motivations. But a sort of caricature of the worst elements that could be extracted from her life, or perhaps more accurately her public image — making a spectacle of oneself, ostentatious virtue-signalling, a lack of emotional self-control — has become the model for our culture for 25 years now. One reason why the death of the Queen is so painful and seems to herald such uncertain and disquieting times is because, in our heart of hearts, we’ve all become sick of it. We saw in the Queen one last outpost of the old values that most of us endorse but struggle to emulate because they are counter-cultural and unpopular and difficult to stick to. We embraced a Diana culture whilst deep down we knew that the Elizabeth morality we were leaving behind was superior.

I’m obviously on the side of the emotionally repressed, the ‘strong, silent types’ in Tony Soprano’s words.

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I will be writing about this properly but here’s an interesting piece by Robert Steuteville on King Charles’s new town, Poundbury, sneered at by the architectural establishment but probably destined to last longer than any grand building commissioned by a democratic politician over the past 70 years.

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One of the most interesting things I’ve read for a while, by Suzy Weiss, on women suffering from invisible illnesses.

The blogger Christine Miserandino, who has lupus, coined the term spoonie in a 2003 post called “The Spoon Theory.” A spoon, Miserandino explained, equates to a certain amount of energy. The Healthy have unlimited spoons. The Sick—the spoonies—only have a few. They might use one spoon to shower, two to get groceries, and four to go to work. They have to be strategic about how they spend their spoons.

Since then, the theory has ballooned into an illness kingdom filled with micro-celebrities offering discounts on supplements and tinctures; podcasts on dating as a spoonie; spoonie clubs on college campuses; a weekly magazine; and online storeswith spoonie merch. In the past few years, spoonie-ism has dovetailed with the #MeToo movement and the ascendance of identity politics. The result is a worldview that is highly skeptical of so-called male-dominated power structures, and that insists on trusting the lived experience of individuals—especially those from groups that have historically been disbelieved. So what do spoonies need from you? “To believe; Be understanding; Be patient; To educate yourself; Show compassion; Don’t question.

And later…

In a TikTok video, a woman with over 30,000 followers offers advice on how to lie to your doctor. “If you have learned to eat salt and follow internet instructions and buy compression socks and squeeze your thighs before you stand up to not faint…and you would faint without those things, go into that appointment and tell them you faint.” Translation: You know your body best. And if twisting the facts (like saying you faint when you don’t) will get you what you want (a diagnosis, meds), then go for it. One commenter added, “I tell docs I'm adopted. They'll order every test under the sun”—because adoption means there may be no family history to help with diagnoses.

The internet really was a mistake.

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I’ve linked before to Ben Southwood’s Baldwin Substack because he’s a great source on crime and its wider, unexplored social impact. This week he has another piece on the subject, and its effect on perhaps the most important issue of all — housing.

A New York City with 2,200 murders in a year is one where you will be minded to block every bit of housing people want to build nearby. Residents of a 300-murder NYC will balance up the probabilities differently. This is true across all categories of crime – for example California has more than 3x fewer murders per capita today than in 1993, 2.5x fewer car thefts, 8x fewer burglaries, and 3x fewer robberies. But I tend to use murder as the best indicator, since it is measured most consistently and accurately. 

Sadly, these attempts to allow more development in suburban areas of cities will for the most part have trouble succeeding, in part due to worries about crime. Overall, the gigantic overwhelming majority of new housing in American cities is not being built in the places where housing is most expensive, near the best jobs in San Francisco and New York City, but instead forced to the places where it is easiest to sprawl, with all the concomitant costs.

Hsieh & Moretti look at 220 American metropolitan areas between 1964 and 2009. They find that these strict zoning laws that locals have imposed are keeping people from moving to superstar cities. They find that this lack of migration is driving the widening productivity gaps that opened up between cities during this period. And summed together they find that growth would have been 36% higher over the period, which implies that overall output would have been about 14% higher in 2009 with rules that allowed more upzoning.

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I include this piece by Janan Ganesh because it’s so beautifully written, even though I think I fundamentally disagree with it, and will write something in the week on why.

Last week, at a bar counter, I cycled through three small pours of white wine to find the right pairing for a mackerel and dill starter. I left in some pique at having failed to nail it. Don’t blame Occidentalists for questioning the mettle of a society of such risible comfort. We who live here don’t understand it either, which is why the decadence thesis haunts us with its intuitive plausibility. The culture that produced the Jazz Age shouldn’t have been able to take and hold Guadalcanal. Each month, I expect to see western exhaustion with Ukraine. Each month, the support persists. Seventy per cent of Germans tell pollsters that high gas prices won’t sap their will.

I don’t think the West really has been tested, and all the actual fighting has been done in the name of nationalism, not liberalism or western values. But, as always, his piece will leave you feeling a tiny bit cleverer just for reading.

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‘When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything’ is a well-cited Chesterton quote, even though there’s no conclusive evidence he actually said it. Scott Alexander looked at the data to see whether it was true or not.

We find a similar pattern. Agnostics and people with “no particular religion” are more likely than Protestants to believe in astrology, but outright atheists are much less likely.

Overall I think these results support the fake Chesterton/Lewis quote, but in a weird and unexpected way.

Strongly religious people and outright atheists were usually less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. The conspiracy believers were usually somewhere in the middle: either weakly religious people who never went to church, or vague agnostics.

That seems plausible to me; it’s the ‘spiritual but not religious’ types to tend to adopt wacky believes, while atheists tend to be resistant to everything.

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Academic David Rozado has done a lot of research into the Great Awokening and writes about his latest findings in UnHerd. The upshot: don’t blame journalists — it’s the academics.

More recently, I have investigated the prevalence of the same terms in the academic literature. What I found is that in contrast to news media content, where the number of references to different prejudice types has been fairly flat since the 1970s and then rises sharply post-2010, in academic literature the prominence of prejudice terms has been steadily rising for several decades.

The figure below shows how academic focus on ethnic prejudice has been growing for almost a century through four distinct waves. The first wave occurred right after World War II, the second one after 1968, the third during the so-called “politically correct” 1990s and the fourth wave takes place post-2010. Notice also how after each wave, the base level remains elevated, thus establishing a new normal.

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Luka Ivan Jukic writes about how the Soviets once re-wrote Lord of the Rings.

In the face of a looming climate catastrophe, the peaceful eastern realm of Mordor, under His Majesty Sauron VIII, harnesses modern technology to embark upon an industrial revolution, aided by its elite class of scientists, the Nazgûl. A universal literacy law is passed, and thanks to an experienced diplomatic corps and powerful intelligence apparatus, the standing army is drastically reduced.

In the late Nineties, years after the Soviet Union had collapsed, a Russian palaeontologist called Kirill Yeskov self-published a book that enshrines the Soviet interpretation of The Lord of the Rings. The Last Ringbearer assumes that Tolkien’s story is indeed a Cold War allegory, but tells it from the other side. “Lord of the Rings is the historiography of the victors,” Yeskov’s narrator reminds us towards the book’s end. He offers the Kremlin’s version of events.

Imagine that: progressive ideologues who stand for everything Tolkien hated twisting his work to push their own insane modernist agenda. Unthinkable these days.

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If you’re into superforecasting, there is a new Substack run by the Swift Centre, a panel of superforecasters with a proven track record of analysing the likelihood of a future event. This week they’re looking at whether Joe Biden will still be president in three years. Their verdict: unlikely, but it depends on Ron DeSantis.

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There were also a couple of interesting Twitter threads this week.

On the ancient origins of British traditions.

And the even more ancient geological origins of politics in France.

There won’t be a newsletter next Sunday, as I’m away, but — uniquely — there will be another post today, on THE QUEUE. (If you’re British, you’ll know.) Oh, and thanks to Ian Leslie for the name suggestion, although I may just change it to Wrong Side of History Newsletter. Any suggestions welcome.