The great 2024 vibe shift (and other stories)

Wrong Side of History Newsletter #58

Good morning, people. Firstly, episode 3 of the Canon Club is now up, on Anton Bruckner.

I wasn’t too aware of Bruckner’s work, nor of his life: he was a good case of someone who plugged away for years without huge success until his talent was recognised. He was also fascinatingly weird in some ways, and kept a photo of his mother’s corpse in his teaching room (but none of her when alive). The first two episodes, if you missed them, were on Caravaggio and Macbeth.

Since my last round-up I’ve been in Armenia, a beautiful but tragic country whose striking religious architecture and scenery I have badly captured in photographs below. I wrote a two-part piece about the small nation’s current troubles and troubled history: part one is here and part two here.

Britain is brutally self-interested when it wants to be but in other ways hopelessly naive and gullible, and earlier I wrote about the Government’s mad idea to hand over islands to Mauritius.

I also made the case that Tory members should choose Robert Jenrick (they didn’t).

On the limits of empathy, and why it’s not always a good thing.

On polarisation in the US and elsewhere (part one is here).

On Donald Trump the Anglophile, and why we should be sucking up to him more. Looks like he might be coming to Scotland next year - what an opportunity.

Finally, my thoughts on Trump’s victory, and on the increasing anti-countryside rhetoric of the BBC and other media.

Elsewhere

I’m on Bluesky at edjameswest, although still learning the ropes. My thread on why Rhodesia was Africa’s most successful country did not go down as well as I expected.

On the subject of social media, James Marriott wrote about why echo chambers might be good.

There is compelling research to show that the radicalising political effects of the internet derive less from our insulation from the views of others than over-exposure. Online rage results not from liberals and conservatives complacently agreeing with one another but from people seeing too much of their maddest political opponents. Echo chambers can be benign. For more than a century, The Guardian and the Telegraph have peaceably provided for audiences with opposed political tastes. Telegraph readers rarely had to find out what crazy views were being espoused in The Guardian’s oped pages and vice versa. On X, Guardian types are forced daily to reckon with the looniest right-wingers and Telegraph readers with the nuttiest lefties. Neither side has been made much calmer by the experience. Connection is not an unlimited good.

I do have some regrets about liberal flight, which I will expand on later. Meanwhile Twitter remains hugely useful for learning things, but it drives almost no traffic towards the substack because of the way it suppresses links.

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Louise Perry on why transgenderism is so over.

I’m not an innovator, but I do tend to be an early adopter. I’ll often decide – apparently spontaneously – that I like a particular piece of clothing, or a piece of decor, only to read a few months later that this is an up and coming trend. When I was younger, and had a lot more time on my hands, I used to spend hours and hours sewing my own clothes or trawling through charity shops in order to cheaply create a particular look that I’d decided was cool. Perhaps I’d seen a really hot woman wearing something similar in central London and subconsciously bookmarked this as a style to experiment with. I honestly don’t remember ever deliberately imitating the innovators, but I suppose I must have been influenced by them, because I’d then watch as “my” cool new thing moved from cool, to mainstream, to dated, and finally to uncool over the course of several years. Such is the way with memes. 

Political trends are exactly the same. Which is why the news that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has removed her pronouns from her Twitter bio is worth paying attention to.’

I saw the other day that a Major in the British Army had started stating his pronouns - apparently lots of them do. It will take the imperial periphery a while to catch up with the changing fashions in Rome.

Of course, some people will continue to believe…

Scott Alexander has written a great review of Rodney Stark’s 1997 The Rise of Christianity.

Mohammed’s first convert was his wife, followed by his cousin, servant, and friend. Joseph Smith’s first converts were his brothers, friends, and lodgers. Indeed, in spite of the Mormons’ celebrated door-knocking campaign, their internal data shows that only one in a thousand door-knocks results in a conversion, but “when missionaries make their first contact with a person in the home of a Mormon friend or relative of that person, this results in conversion 50% of the time”. 

Stark asks whether the first great intermingling of Jews and Gentiles had the same effect. While the Jews in Palestine stayed religious and laid the foundations for the Rabbinic Judaism of future centuries, the Jews in the Diaspora - did what? Presumably Hellenized into some sort of semi-assimilated proto-Reform movement. Although we have limited historical evidence about these Jews’ religious behavior, we know they spoke Greek and not Hebrew (otherwise why would they need the Septuagint?) and that many of them took Greek names.

Reform Judaism is unstable. The Law of Moses is central to the Jewish faith; relax it too much, and believers can justly wonder what’s left. In America, Reform Jews are over-represented not only among atheists and agnostics, but among every cult under the sun. 33% of American Buddhists come from a Jewish background, and even the Moonies were 30% Jewish at one point! (they’re now down to 6%)

As the Jews were assimilating into Greeks, some Greeks were assimilating into Judaism. They were impressed enough with monotheism and the Jews’ upright behavior to adopt some of the rituals, but they couldn’t take the final step and circumcise themselves. Instead, they hung around the fringes of Jewish society, admiring it from without. The Bible and the historical record call them “God-fearers”, but by analogy I can’t help but think of them as “weajoos”. These weajoos would have been easy prey for the first semi-Jewish sect to shed the circumcision requirement and explicitly pivot away from being an ethnic religion.

The Apostles and other early Christians, leaving Palestine to minister to the wider world, would have made use of existing Jewish networks and connections. They would have found themselves in the middle of the spiritually-disaffected, half-assimilated pseudo-Reform Jewish communities of the Roman world, plus their half-assimilated-the-other direction Greek hangers-on. They would have preached that Judaism was basically true, but that you can drop the restrictive Law of Moses and avoid getting circumcised. They would have sliced through the cultural angst of these in-between communities, saying that Jews could join together with Gentiles in a big friendly tent under the leadership of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

I love Alexander’s dry sense of humour. On the effects of the plague on Christianity’s rise, he writes:

The survivors must have been shell-shocked and looking for some sort of meaning behind it all. Paganism had nothing for them - “sorry, we don’t do that kind of thing, would you like to hear another story about Zeus raping a woman and turning her into an animal?”

He goes through all the possible explanations, including female dominance of the new religion, higher survival rates in plague, the example of martyrdom and the moral superiority of the Christian religion - as well as the most relevant to our age, the collapsing fertility of upper-class pagan Romans.

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On that subject, the Boom substack writes about Scotland’s fertility rates. Some of it is due to Scottish women wanting fewer children, and some of it due to immigration – migrants in Scotland have even fewer children – but much of it is just unexplained.

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Lots of stuff relating to the American election. Peter Thiel’s interview with Bari Weiss is very interesting and worth a listen. He talks about the stresses which immigration puts on housing costs (the same problem in London), makes a good case for why pro-free trade ideologues should not be doing trade deals, and whether we are more in danger of repeating 1914 or 1938 (he leans towards 1914, as do I). Thiel was also a big early backer of vice-president-to-be JD Vance, who he describes meeting for the first time at Yale in 2011.

It was interesting to see how the ‘JD Vance is weird’ theme seemed to completely fail, and he actually came across as a very impressive figure. One of my subscribers, who hails from the same part of that country and a similar background, tells me he will save the Republic.

On the other hand Trump’s new health secretary, Robert Kennedy JR, seems like a total nutter. According to the Washington Post, he even helped cause a measles outbreak in Samoa, and apparently Kennedy also promoted Aids conspiracists. (It’s largely forgotten but there was once an entire Aids denialist movement, with their own magazine, Continuum, which folded after its editor and editor-in-chief both died – of Aids.)

The appointment of Kennedy all seems perverse, since Operation Warp Speed was an undoubted triumph of the first Trump presidency.

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Elsewhere, John Burn-Murdoch on how ‘Democrats have shifted sharply left on cultural issues in recent years, leaving the median voter behind’.

In April 2022, Elon Musk tweeted a cartoon made by US evolutionary biologist Colin Wright. The image shows a stick figure representing Wright, a self-described “centre-left liberal”, becoming politically stranded as the American left shifts ever further leftward during the 2010s, leaving him closer to the right despite his ideology not changing. The graphic was mocked at the time. But recent events suggest it may have a grain of truth to it.’

I came to find that cartoon quite irritating, mainly because it became such a theme of Elon-era X slop merchants, but it’s also true: the last few years have been characterised by increasingly extreme political positions by the western ruling class.

Also on the election, this Shinzo-Trump video is funny

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David Brooks on good form.

When universities like Harvard shifted their definition of ability, large segments of society adjusted to meet that definition. The effect was transformative, as though someone had turned on a powerful magnet and filaments across wide swaths of the culture suddenly snapped to attention in the same direction.  Status markers changed. In 1967, the sociologist Daniel Bell noted that the leadership in the emerging social order was coming from “the intellectual institutions.” “Social prestige and social status,” he foresaw, “will be rooted in the intellectual and scientific communities.”

Family life changed as parents tried to produce the sort of children who could get into selective colleges. Over time, America developed two entirely different approaches to parenting. Working-class parents still practice what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods, called “natural growth” parenting. They let kids be kids, allowing them to wander and explore. College-educated parents, in contrast, practice “concerted cultivation,” ferrying their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another. It turns out that if you put parents in a highly competitive status race, they will go completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success.

Alexandra Wilson on making high culture popular again.

Channel-surfing idly a few nights ago, I stumbled across a TV show from 1975 that the BBC had dug out of the archives. It was a programme so outlandish that it was hard to believe such a thing had ever existed, so deeply shocking that it could not possibly be made nowadays. Its name was Face the Music.

For the benefit of younger readers, Face the Music was a panel game show entirely devoted to classical music. Celebrities who were well-known at the time, including Joyce Grenfell, a young David Attenborough, and an extraordinarily knowledgeable broadcaster and actor called Robin Ray, were set a series of challenges, all of which revolved around identifying musical extracts. 

Under the ‘West terror’, the BBC would be funded directly by taxes, would also be smaller and jettison low culture and moronic yoof ‘journalism’ altogether. You don’t need to be a fuddy-duddy to find this stuff hugely embarrassing to the corporation’s name. The aim of the BBC should be to promote the love of high culture and the formation of an informed citizenry.

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Chris Bayliss on Ukraine. I thought this was interesting and sums up my feeling a bit. I want Putin to lose, and worry about the implications of allowing territory to be taken; but I also feel that Russia can’t be beaten, and that it’s wrong to encourage Ukrainians to die in a war we’re not sacrificing our own young men in.

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A concerning thread about a new report on migration centres in Britain. It is an unsustainable system which is eroding trust in the state and politics by the day. On that subject, Sam Ashworth-Hayes wrote about why ‘smashing the gangs’ won’t work.

Scenes in New Zealand’s Parliament. I suppose this is a basic test of our emotional-political feelings, and this kind of thing horrifies me. Civilisation depends on our discontent.

Nice thread on new infrastructure projects.

Is it time to disestablish the Church of England? By 50% to 21%, Britons yes. I’ve written before that Britain is the only Left-wing theocracy.

A thread of notable Catholic University architecture in the United States.

Britain’s ‘best new building of 1996’ is to be demolished. The list of Stirling Prize winners really is a midwit’s parade, and I wonder how many will survive the 21^st century.

Meanwhile, here are some British railway stations built in the last 10 years. Create Streets’s proposal for a new Cambridge station would be beloved of the entire nation.

A man who cycled around the world had it stolen when he arrived in England. This has happened three times now, that I know of.

The authorities promised to give £10 for every ‘zombie knife’ handed in, knives which cost about £7 to buy – you’ll never guess what happened. If only they’d Googled ‘perverse incentives’.

Forty-two percent of private school pupils in England get extra time in exams because of ADHD, dyslexia, or other diagnoses, far higher than state schools. This makes no sense considering that pretty much every social malaise, with the exception of anorexia, is much more common among the poor.

A nice story about Napoleon.

A blind person’s account of using a self driving car for the first time. Lovely!

On a similar note, young religious people in the US are most optimistic about AI.

Once again, thanks for subscribing and for sharing with friends! Have a great weekend.