West’s weekly round-up: July 4-10

Big Dog has gone but the new litter doesn't inspire huge confidence

Good morning. This week was dominated by the shocking murder of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, the longest serving in the country’s history. May he rest in peace.

Until then — in Britain at least — it was all about the peaceful but farcical downfall of Boris Johnson. My conclusion is that Boris would have made a brilliant sultan, benevolent, tolerant and fond of life’s pleasures, but a terrible prime minister, a job that requires the modern qualities of hard work and republican virtue. And after 12 years of Tory PMs in Downing St, they’ve really got little to show for it.

On Monday, I wrote about the influence of Magna Carta on the United States. On Friday, I wrote a cheery and optimistic piece about how immigration, fertility and house prices all interact, and why it’s so hard to break the NIMBY lock. Which is easier to learn, do people think, Hungarian or Polish? Ah, never mind.

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Big Dog has gone

It’s over for Boris, and at the Dish, Andrew Sullivan points out that Johnson wasn’t the coming Right-wing reaction, as commentators suggested, he prevented the coming Right-wing reaction.

For the core legitimacy of the British state, this role was invaluable. Imagine if the elites had thwarted Brexit. Imagine the populist backlash, democratic crisis and surge of rightwing extremism if the referendum result had simply been vetoed by the elite. This is what too many miss: Boris did not represent a far-right, racist takeover. He actually prevented one. 

He was rewarded with the biggest parliamentary majority in decades, and, with some real courage and bullshit, took Britain out of the EU. In the process, he and his top adviser, Dominic Cummings, transformed British conservatism into a more populist, patriotic, working-class party, claiming old Labour strongholds in the north while keeping the Tory shires in the south. They also kept the radical left Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, from Downing Street, helping to usher in the more electable opposition we have today.

I’m absolutely terrible at predictions, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something else comes to fill the space once inhabited by Ukip, especially now that immigration is running at record levels. Every country in western Europe with a significant non-western population has a populist movement above 10% in the polls, so it would be strange if Britain avoids it. A lot depends on whether our electoral system changes, but even without such reform I can imagine it happening.

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Can’t Dig the Tug

One reason for a future breach may be the Tory Party’s difficult position on progressive overreach. MPs rail against ‘wokeness’, without explaining what that means, but most of them also display a desperate urge to be liked by the culturally dominant Left, which is why most of the Tory candidates fill me with slight dread. And as Ben Sixsmith writes in the Critic, none are so keen to be seen ‘as one of the good Tories’ as Tom Tugendhat.

His lowest moment in this quiet campaign of social distancing came when Roger Scruton was dishonestly smeared by the New Statesman as a bigot. Tugendhat rushed to demand his firing as an unpaid adviser to the Housing Ministry, saying, “Antisemitism sits alongside racism, anti-Islam, homophobia, and sexism as a cretinous and divisive belief that has no place in our public life and particularly not in government.” Tugendhat soon apologised, which was welcome, but let down his own apology by saying, “We can only act on the basis of information given.” 

Throwing Scruton to the wolves was a particular low point for the parliamentary party. I want Conservative politicians to present the most rational and logical arguments for their beliefs, and to give their opponents’ arguments consideration. But Tory MPs should not want to be liked by progressives, especially not commentariat-Twitter-journalism progressives. They may be a witty, gregarious and fun bunch, but it doesn’t mean you should seek their approval.

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This book, sir, contains every word in our beloved language

In the New Statesman, Pippa Bailey writes about the workings of the Oxford English Dictionary.

In 1857 a group of gentleman scholars from the Philological Society – Herbert Coleridge, grandson of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frederick Furnivall (immortalised by his friend Kenneth Grahame as Ratty in The Wind in the Willows), and Richard Chenevix Trench – established the Unregistered Words Committee, with the aim of capturing those parts of the English language that had not yet been recorded. Previous attempts at a dictionary had been made, but none was comprehensive. Robert Cawdrey’s 1604 Table Alphabeticall was the first monolingual English dictionary, but was more of a synonymicon; Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, drew only on sources published after 1586, omitting the lexicon of great works from Chaucer to Bede. “Every word,” wrote Coleridge at the time, “should be made to tell its own story – the story of its birth and life, and in many cases of its death, and even occasionally of its resuscitation.”

I suspect that dictionary-compiling is more political than it has ever been, and it becomes increasingly hard to resist the urge to make everything political, and politically orthodox. Many have already fallen.

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The return of sacrifice

Also in the New Statesman, Helen Thompson writes on the return of sacrifice with the Ukraine war.

This politics of sacrifice appeared exhausted in the 1970s. With conscription during the Vietnam War having proved so divisive, Richard Nixon turned the US towards an all-volunteer military. The culture of patriotic savings after 1945 was ended by the return of international capital markets in which governments could borrow much greater sums of money. When Jimmy Carter asked Americans to reduce their energy consumption during the oil shocks, imploring them to view their efforts as the moral equivalent of the American Revolution, he destroyed his chances of re-election.

Now, once again, we’re being asked to do our bit. If you ride alone, you ride with Putin. I worry that, after years and years of exhausting Third Reich analogies, now that we’re faced with a genuinely menacing and aggressive nationalist regime in Europe, people may not be willing to believe it.

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Nation-building in Ukraine

On a similar subject, Luka Ivan Jukic writes about the strange Ukrainian programme of nation-building.

Not only is this a plan for Ukraine’s physical reconstruction, but also included in this proposal is a detailed plan to forge a stronger unified Ukrainian national identity. Like if a McKinsey audit was written with the goals of 19th century Romantic nationalists in mind.

For example, one plan from the “Youth and Sports” working group sets out in three stages a path to solving the problem of “insufficiently formed Ukrainian national and civic identity.”

Stage 1 — to be completed this year — sees a unified narrative on the formation of Ukrainian identity being created. Stage 2 — from January 2023 to December 2025 — sees the level of Ukrainian identity in the country reaching 85%. And, finally, stage 3 envisions “the field of national and patriotic education” aligned with EU standards by 2032.

The “Culture and Information” working group, for its part, proposed a far more comprehensive agenda. It calls for a sharp acceleration of the process of Ukrainian nation-building that began in 2014, taking the Maidan Revolution of that year and the Russo-Ukrainian war as the new foundational myths of the modern Ukrainian nation-state.

It’s strange, coming from a country where, until about 60 years ago at least, national identity was incredibly strong, unusually so. For decades, the received opinion has been that nationalism is low-status, nations are fake, and the only acceptable national identity is to be so inclusive as to be meaningless. Now it turns out that weak national identity leads to chaos, corruption and nothing working, while having a strong national identity allows you to fight off one of the scariest militaries on earth. Who knew?

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When assortative mating stopped

Prince Albert’s premature death had a huge social, economic and genetic impact on the British elite, writes Felix Salmon.

When the Queen went into mourning, the Season was effectively canceled for three successive years (1861–1863). As a result, posh rich daughters failed to meet posh rich men, and married commoners instead. 

Peer–commoner intermarriage rose by 40%; titled women married husbands 44 percentile ranks poorer in terms of family landholdings.

Such marriages caused real harm to the daughter's brothers and even fathers. Her brothers were 50% less likely to enter parliament; her family's prestige fell; and she was much less likely to become the kind of terrifying matriarch so familiar to readers of PG Wodehouse.

Constituencies that were no longer represented in parliament by the local peer were much less likely to oppose the introduction of state education — which eventually became law in the 1870s. 

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The reinvention of St Paul

I’ve previously linked to a review of Jerry Muller’s biography of Jacob Taubes, The Professor of Apocalypse, but Blake Smith always bring a fresh and fascinating view to everything. Aside from Taubes being the classic example of the intellectual-as-terrible-human-being, this passage about his writing on St Paul is very interesting.

I knew Paul from my Southern Baptist childhood as a sublime prophet of love (only just last week, I wept at a wedding while his famous passage “Love is patient, love is kind …” was read) and freedom from the law—and as the condemner of homosexuality (my own form of love) the opponent of women speaking in church, the self-promoting hustler who transformed a nebulous spiritual movement still not clearly distinct from Judaism into a new religion with universal ambitions and a historic hostility to the Jewish people. Lover of love and liberty, hater of gays, women, and Jews, Paul is hard for anyone but earnestly—or unthinkingly—pious Christians to like. I never managed to be one of them. But Taubes, my friend insisted, gives us Paul afresh….’

The modern reinterpretation of Paul is an important part of the reinterpretation of Christianity itself, not as the historic enemy of enlightenment, liberalism and even sexual liberation, but as its birth mother.

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Forwarded Many Times

Christopher Snowdon has joined Substack and writes about one of his pet hates, WhatsApp.

Thirdly, they say that WhatsApp is encrypted at both ends and therefore protects you from all those Chinese hackers who want to know what time you’re meeting the lads on Sunday. Politicians like it for that reason. It is supposed to be secure and confidential. But whenever the newspapers get hold of incriminating messages from disloyal MPs or racist policemen, what platform are they harvested from? It is invariably WhatsApp.

And also, I’m late to this, but Snowdon recently wrote an interesting piece on McCartney after the Beatles. Is McCartney the most beloved man in Britain, or even on earth? I do believe that, when the histories are written of Britain during the second Elizabethan era, the Beatles are probably going to be pretty much all anyone cares about. But I love making these bold claims about what people in the 23rd century will believe because I won’t be around to be proved wrong.

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Reading ourselves to death

Between 1900 and 1990, the amount of time the average American spent reading and writing remained broadly consistent: somewhere between one and two hours a day. According to a 2012 McKinsey report, the addition of text messaging and the Internet raised that amount to something closer to four or five hours a day. Most people were illiterate four hundred years ago; today Americans spend up to a third of their waking hours encoding and decoding text.

Every minute, humans send 220 million emails, 70 million WhatsApp and Facebook messages, 16 million texts, 530,000 tweets, and make 6 million Google searches. The journalist Nick Bilton has estimated that each day the average Internet user now sees as many as 490,000 words — more than War and Peace. If an alien landed on Earth today, it might assume that reading and writing are our species’ main function, second only to sleeping and well ahead of eating and reproducing.

That’s Kit Wilson on how reading may have changed our way of thinking.

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