West's weekly round-up: August 8-14

France, glorious France; and why Catholicism is cool again

Good morning. The substack is having a two-week break after this, as I’m off to Spain. Although I’m very much looking forward to it, my heart will always be in France, the subject of my first post this week (free); I love our neighbours, despite everything, and one day I hope to write a book about the country and its history and culture, and with all the royalties go and live in a castle in Gascony and produce increasingly unhinged screeds about the decline of Western civilisation. Anyway, we all need our dreams. On Friday, I wrote about the theory of vibes, and how most politics is just about this and nothing deeper.

****

Elsewhere, in the New York Times, Julia Yost writes about Catholicism as social rebellion.

The confluence of New York’s young, right-leaning intellectuals and thinkers like Ms. Nekrasova, who was once better known for her irreverent socialist critiques, might suggest that the rising interest in Catholicism in certain social circles is just another way of being ironic or chasing a trend. Nekrasova calls herself“Catholic, like Andy Warhol.” In a scene indebted to Warhol, the self-proclaimed “deeply superficial” Pop artist, is Catholicism just another provocation?

Faith, to these trendsetting Catholics, may be partly a pose — a “LARP,” in internet slang. But as Ms. Levy explained on a recent episode of “Wet Brain,” “You just do the rituals, and then it becomes real, even if you don’t [initially] believe in it.” She added, “That’s what religion is.” Ms. Levy’s co-host, the casting director Walter Pearce, agreed: “There’s not a problem in the world that three Hail Marys can’t fix.”

****

On that subject, convert Niall Gooch observes in UnHerd that:

You need not be a believing Christian to understand the reasons why people might become alienated from a society which manages to be at once both insistently libertine, and cruelly unforgiving in the application of an ever-shifting and vague moral code. We have blended the worst characteristics of Cavaliers & Roundheads, without their compensating virtues; we have indulgence without joie de vivre and tolerance, and grim censoriousness without moral seriousness.

****

Why do men duel? Anthropologist William Buckner writes about this fascinating subject at Works in Progress.

Even Napoleon Chagnon – known for his work among the Yąnomamö showing that men who killed had greater reproductive success than men who did not—emphasised it wasn’t necessarily the most violent men who were most reproductively successful. Instead, he noted that the most frequent killer he was aware of had actually left no children, and that, ‘Being excessively prone to lethal violence may not be an effective route to high reproductive success, but, statistically, men who engage in it with some moderation seem to do better reproductively than men who do not engage in it at all’.

Of course, duelling isn’t just found in hunter-gatherer or ‘traditional’ societies. In 1804, the sitting vice president of the United States, Aaron Burr, famously shot and killedformer secretary of the treasury Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Future United States president Andrew Jackson was shot in a duel in 1806. He killed his opponent, Charles Dickinson, in that same duel. After his opponent fired and struck true, with the bullet lodged into his body only an inch or so from his heart, Jackson’s first pull of the trigger came with the hammer half-cocked, and failed to fire. He fully cocked the hammer, aimed again, and fired, killing his opponent. This seems to have hurt Jackson’s reputation at the time, as his accusers argued his second pull of the trigger was unethical.

Incidentally, the decline of duelling in Europe is an interesting subject in itself — in the English-speaking world it was essentially laughed out of existence, became low-status and ridiculous, ‘cringe’ as the kids say.

****

Like (almost) everyone, I was horrified by the attack on Salman Rushdie, and wish him a full recovery, although the latest news is pretty grim. The poor man has endured the hell of anticipation for over three decades and now the horror has finally come true. As Konstantin Kisin says, though, there is no real willingness to deal with the underlying bullying that drives this; the Satanic Verses would obviously not be published today, nor even written, and it’s partly the case that these sort of censorship clashes have ended because we’ve accepted a veto.

****

At the Spectator, Mary Wakefield writes about the kindness industry.

Did you think that to be kind meant to go out of your way to help someone? I’m afraid, in workshop world, that’s a very passé definition. The golden rule of the new corporate kindness is always to be kind to yourself first. Any impulse towards self-sacrifice is a grave error of moral judgment. Tim Keogh agrees. ‘Be kind to yourself, that’s the first step,’ he tells clients, and I see this makes sense from a business point of view. Rebranding kindness as wellbeing is an easy sell, and customer feedback means repeat business.

****

On a similar subject, Kit Wilson in the Critic on the weird emotional language that has become all-pervasive.

Welcome to the new, strange, mealy-mouthed vocabulary of true emotivism. All of the above, you’ll notice, deliberately avoid communicating any kind of moral content whatsoever — they could, indeed, be talking about anything. It’s “not okay” to jaywalk in certain American cities. I can “normalise” a snazzy new hairstyle. You can “do better” at throwing socks into your clothes basket blindfolded. (Reflect, while we’re at it, on the huge gulf in meaning between “do better”, which is in common use, and “be better”, which isn’t). 

*****

There have been a number of pieces about how Britain is completely doomed, many relating to our inept and listless ruling party:

John Oxley at the Spectator suggests that the problem with the modern Conservative Party is that they are completely unideological.

At the Telegraph Steven Edginton recently wrote: ‘One thing Conservative politicians have been very effective at is delivering rhetoric against wokeism in the civil service and public bodies. They are far less competent at actually delivering. For example, in 2020 the government declared a Whitehall-wide “ban” on the pseudo-science of unconscious bias training, yet two years later the training is still mandatory for all civil servants.’

Tim Stanley, meanwhile, makes the case for old-fashioned Tory socialism.

Katherine Bayford at the Critic writes that British politicians seem so boring and uninspiring compared to predecessors.

And at the Economist, which still has unbylined columns like it’s 1876 or something, a piece on why nothing in Britain seems to work.

****

On Substack, Stuart Ritchie (subscribe here) on how some academics will defend literally anything if a Tory MP is criticising it.

Publishing this paper was an unbelievable, gross mistake - mostly on the part of the author, but to varying degrees on the part of everyone listed above. It illustrates that something has gone terribly wrong in the world of qualitative research, and especially at the journal Qualitative Research. What’s the point of having an academic community, with all its supposed checks and balances, if they merrily speed a paper like this on its way to publication - and then let it sit there for months until there’s a fuss online? Can anything get under the radar of this academic community if it’s dressed up in the language of “autoethnography” and “experimental methods”?

****

Thanks so much for subscribing — the Substack now has almost 7,000 — and for all the support and comments. It’s very much appreciated. Enjoy the rest of the summer!