West’s weekly round-up: July 18-24
Greetings from the auld country
Greetings from Ireland, where I’m taking the children on a trip to see the ancestral home. There may be a slightly slower output in the coming week as a result.
On Monday I wrote about the growing importance of India and Pakistan to British politics. On Tuesday — unbelievably, hellishly hot Tuesday — I wrote about the medieval warm period and the devastating impact climate change had. On Friday I looked at what is really the most important division in politics – the battle between the average and atypical.
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This week I took the train from Euston, a quite fantastically ugly railway station that connects London and the north-west of England. What is actually mind-boggling is that they knocked down this to build it, a demolition that caused dismay at the time and roused opponents of architectural nihilism enough that when they came for St Pancras, it was spared.
Euston was destroyed under a Tory government, who initiated most of the worst architectural destruction, either out of financial greed or a deluded belief in the car. Yet today we have a perverse situation where beautiful architecture has come to be considered a Right-wing thing: Aaron Bastani doesn’t think it should, and this week makes the socialist case for Trad Architecture. Welcome to the resistance, Aaron.
Euston 2 is horrendous and, typically, is going to make way for Euston 3, which is similarly uninspiring — the sort of thing that can be seen in any global city. If I were mayor of London the first thing I’d do is shelve the plan, and order the reconstruction of old Euston station, complete with arch.
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I enjoyed Joel Kotkin’s book on how we were all becoming medieval and I just love the man’s perky optimism:
Political alienation is at a high. As headlines proclaim disaster after disaster, from the pandemic to recession to the climate “apocalypse”, people are losing their faith in the future. In the US, public trust in government is lower today than it was after Watergate, and Americans are disengaging massively from politics on social media and cable news. In the world’s democracies, voter turnout has dropped from an average 80% in the Eighties to closer to 60% today. More than half of that decline reflects generational change. In the US, for instance, citizens between the ages of 18 and 29 typically turn out at a rate more than 10 points lower than those over the age of 30.
Thanks, Joel! And now, as he writes, loads of people are dropping out of the rat race too.
It would be one thing if people were merely tuning out of politics, but they are increasingly dropping out of the economy as well. In Japan, the historical heartland of workaholics, observers in the Eighties began to note the rise of the “shinjinrui”, or the “new race”. These were young people who rejected work for a life as “freetors”, often living with their parents and spending their time traveling, playing video games, and pursuing hobbies. Lately, a similar phenomenon has spread elsewhere in Asia, including China, where millennials have abandoned striving in favour of “lying flat.”
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At the City Journal, Tanner Greer takes on the idea that social media plays a big part in America’s fragmentation. Via Post-liberal Pete. No, there are deeper problems.
Credentialed experts, smart centrists, and small-l liberals of all stripes held the reins of power right up to 2016. They presided over a catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, two decades of defeat in Afghanistan, a hollowed industrial base, an earth-spanning recession, a secret surveillance regime, an opioid epidemic, and stagnating livelihoods in both the black communities of America’s inner-cities and the white communities of America’s rural hinterlands. With events like these, retweets are hardly needed to explain faltering faith in the American creed.
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Today, too many baby boomer observers chalk radicalization up to the procedural machinery of twenty-first-century politics instead of their generation’s own leadership failures. The answers to hard questions such as, “How much immigration can America accept before it undermines our political order?” or “What must we sacrifice to bring black America the prosperity and security most Americans take for granted?” cannot be to stall, equivocate, or start talking about the retweet button.
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Wikipedia is a great resource which makes it all the more concerning when I read about who is editing it. For example, I only recently learned that biographies of trans people on Wiki routinely do not mention their birth names. An obituary will always list an individual’s birth name, but the editors make sure this is removed. Isn’t that a bit weird? Anyhow, as Shuichi Tezuka writes in this disturbing piece for Quillette, the entire Wikipedia section on intelligence research has been twisted by campaigners.
A central plank of modern progressivism is belied in the blank slate, the idea that human variation is shaped almost entirely by environment, society, prejudice, the system, man. This quite obviously isn’t true, and yet almost no mainstream discussion of any social problem will ever really consider it. When, a few years ago, Dominic Cummings suggested that middle-class children do better at school in part because they have a genetic advantage, some people responded as if he’d blurted out the most outrageous crackpot theory in the world rather than something which is almost blandly obvious.
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Ibram X Kendi is a great advocate for this comforting idea, and for that reason he is wildly popular, showered with grants, awards and speaking gigs. And as Tomiwa Owolade writes, his thinking is pretty simple and Manichean.
Throughout these books, his conclusion is the same: there is no such thing as a non-racist. You are either a racist or an antiracist. A racist, as he writes in How to Be an Antiracist, is someone “who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea”. An antiracist, meanwhile, is anyone “who is supporting an anti-racist policy through their actions or expressing an anti-racist idea”.
Racist ideas assert that differences between racial groups exist because some groups are better than others; antiracist ideas emphasise that differences between groups exist because of racist policies, and not because one racial group is superior to another. For instance, white Americans are ten times as wealthy as black Americans not because they are more naturally gifted, but because of racist policies that discriminate against black Americans.
He affirms that every racial disparity in the US can be explained fundamentally by racism. This is reductive. Nigerian-Americans and Indian-Americans, for example, both have higher median household incomes than white Americans. But a fact like this, according to Kendi’s thinking, is not because of class, education or cultural and economic differences between various ethnic groups. He views every inequality or social disparity in the US through the lens of race.
I guess when you have a hammer, and people pay you vast amounts of money to use that hammer, and appoint you Chief Hammerer, and the Hammer Board is subsidised by the government to spread the importance of using hammers to fight every single problem, then, yes, everything will look like a nail.
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Jane Austen ‘is the most historically distant writer truly loved by the public’, James Marriot writes in the Times, hitting the sweet spot of being distant enough to be interesting, while still being relatable.
Well, obviously Austen was a complete genius. But importantly it’s in her novels that true modern personality first appears — with its complexity, its flux, its self-awareness, its complicated sociability. Jane Austen could not have been Jane Austen had she been born even 50 years earlier. The intuition that haunts us surveying the weird, alien art our ancestors left in cathedrals and churches, or traipsing around their ruined castles and villas is correct: the people in the past were not like us.
They had, as the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm put it, “a type of personality which was very different . . . The individual did not exist”. Men and women were identical with and bound by their social roles. There was little concept of personal freedom or personal identity as we understand those concepts today. The obsessive modern habits of introspection and self-reflection hardly existed. Friendship was different. So was love.
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At some point in the mid-2030s, Poland is set to overtake Britain in terms of per capita GDP, a result of a system that actively discourages growth, as Sam Ashworth-Hayes writes.
We’re doomed
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I’m planning to use the Sunday newsletter to post some reader’s reactions, and criticisms, but since I’m going to be away for quite a bit of the school holidays, and will be overloaded in those weeks I’m not, I’ll probably wait until September.
I enjoy Austen. I do. Pride and Prejudice is her most readable book, which makes it the most popular. There are fan clubs, fan chat rooms, fan reddits even.
I read Austen because I specifically try to understand how people genuinely thought and behaved and understood things in the past. We may share a common humanity, but otherwise we are very different people from our ancestors. That also explains my love for history.
But what I find intriguing in the ongoing modern obsession with Austen is how it contradicts all the correct woke values of our times. Austen is decidedly elitist. Her characters are gentry, the top 1% of British society. To be "impoverished" in her book still means a pleasant house and several servants, you just can't afford a carriage, oh my! There is no judgment against the class divides of her time, the vast majority of British people, the working classes and the servants, barely exist on her pages. What Austen does judge in her books are people who abuse the privileges of rank without living up to its idealized (heavily Christianized) expectations (Lady Catherine). Or who also abuse the privileges of family and friendship without thought (Lydia Bennet). But it is still a world where even heroines like Lizzie Bennet take fully granted their superior status and deference to them. Austen clearly believes in a very strong, even demanding, set of rules and behaviors and attitudes, aka standards. But it is not a society based on equality or equal respect.
Of a similar generation to Austen was Frances Trollope, mother of Anthony Trollope, who wrote a very popular bestseller on her travels in America for several years in the early 1820s. Among her observations of the nascent American democracy were slavery and equality. She abhorred slavery. And she also abhorred equality, the sentiment that all people were equal, and found American serving people insufficiently deferential. She ultimately concluded that of the two forces, belief in equality was the worse!
The real question is why hasn't Austen been canceled for "oppressive white privilege." After all, some of her books even include families with Caribbean plantations!
But it's occurred to me what Bridgerton reflects in modern society is that the angry anti-racist forces don't mind class or privilege, they just want to make class and privilege racially correct. Interesting. But not surprising when one considers most of DEI is a form of wealth redistribution to the black professional classes (seeking more black professors, more black leaders) rather than meaningful improvement of the larger racial group's economic standing.
"For example, I only recently learned that biographies of trans people on Wiki routinely do not mention their birth names. An obituary will always list an individual’s birth name, but the editors make sure this is removed."
Actually, this isn't always the case. Compare the Wikipedia entry for Jan Morris with her BBC obituary. It was the latter that refused to "deadname" her, to use modern parlance - despite the fact that one might stumble across a book by "James Morris" in any second-hand bookshop. The Wikipedia entry does state that she was "born James Humphrey Morris" and that she worked, wrote and published under that name until the 1970s.