Wrong Side of History newsletter #54

Britain's summer of discontent

Good morning. The British edition of my book about 1066 is published next month, and is available on Amazon. The French cultural domination of England is something that fascinates me, and I have a few posts on the subject coming up as I share my thoughts and shamelessly try to flog the book. If you’ve already bought the US edition, which came out in 2017, it’s about 95% the same, but the name has slightly changed - so don’t buy it again and give me a one-star review on Amazon in a rage.

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Since the last of my sporadic newsletters, the news has been a bit depressing here in Britain. Before that I wrote about the French Olympic opening ceremony and blasphemy.

Since then, much of the discourse has been about tragic events in Southport and the aftermath.

I wrote about popular distrust about reporting, about how things in Britain seemed to be getting worse.

On the criminal element driving the riots, and on Elon Musk’s battle with the government.

On whether we have a two-tier society, how Twitter was becoming more conservative, and on the excessive punishment for rioters

I also wrote about how Dominic Cummings would fix Britain, and why I love Ryanair.

I also appeared on the Spectator’s Americano podcast discussing Elon Musk with Freddy Gray and Richard Hanania.

I’ve also started using Grok, which I’m addicted to in a very childish way. Here’s a nice suggestion for a square, perhaps a new town if we put the King in charge.

Elsewhere, N.S. Lyons, one of the best substackers out there, wrote about foxes, lions and wolves.

A distant student of Machiavelli, fellow Italian political theorist Vilfredo Pareto, would later expand the metaphor further. Observing history, he noted that the rise and fall of states and civilizations could be matched to a cyclical pattern in the collective personality of their ruling classes.

Nations are founded by lions, who are a society’s natural warrior class – its jocks, so to speak. They establish and expand a kingdom’s borders at the point of a sword, pacifying external enemies. Like Sparta’s Lycurgus or Rome’s Augustus, their firm hand often also puts an end to internal strife and establishes (or re-establishes) the rule of law. Their authority can be dictatorial, but it is relatively honest and straightforward in nature. They value directness and the clarity of combat. They are comfortable with the use of raw force, and open about their willingness to use it, whether against criminals or their own enemies. They have a firm sense of the distinction between enemies and friends in general – of who is part of the family and who is a prowling wolf to be guarded against. The security and stability they establish is what allows the nation to grow into prosperity.

Samuel Rubinstein on academics arguing over the British Empire.

Like the original Historikerstreit, which occupied West German letters in the 1980s about how to incorporate the Nazi period into German historiography, this one turns on the question of how a country should relate to its past. Like the original Historikerstreit, it has much more to do with present politics than serious historical inquiry. Perhaps personality-politics also enters the field of view: there is certainly no love lost between the two sides. Lester and Biggar had a head-to-head last year in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. Some of Biggar’s comments about Lester are scathing: ‘it may be that Professor Lester is unfamiliar with epistemic moral failure – and unforgiving of it – because he has never recognised it in himself’. The feelings are mutual: Lester, apparently, was among the first to rate Colonialism on Amazon, giving it a cold one out of five stars. Lester evidently thinks that Biggar, an ethicist and theologian by training, is a force for ill in the world of colonial historiography ­– which is why he has marshalled a legion of his fellow-historians to drive him out of it.

The Empire has become more relevant to British life than it was 50 years ago in part because so many British citizens are now descendants of its subjects; as a result, politics is mired in what Francis Fukuyama correctly foresaw as an ‘excess of isothymia’ and megalothymia - the struggle to raise group prestige. London’s mayor, while notionally preaching an inclusive creed, is the master of this.

On a lighter note, there is almost nothing funnier than academics feuding with each other.

Above is how I imagine the River Fleet would look reborn, as I suggested a while back.

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Another great column from Janan Ganesh on how having kids keeps you cool.

One thing no one warns you about forgoing kids: it can induce a sort of premature old-fashionedness. Childless men are expected to be cool (About a Boy has a lot to answer for) but it is through children that people keep up with cultural change. I had never heard of Charli XCX until the recent meme that Kamala Harris decided to run with. Having investigated, I still don’t understand what is going on. What form a Snapchat message takes, or what the logo looks like, I can’t picture, and that app launched in 2011. TikTok? A closed book. Shein? Hadn’t heard of the brand until June.

There are parents in their fifties who are much closer to the zeitgeist. This isn’t, or isn’t just, one man’s backwardness. Forced to think of a trait that unites all the bachelors I consort with, I’d suggest rampant ignorance of modern mass culture. Ours is a world of old books, old films and old music. Old manners, even. The scatological chaos of child-rearing loosens people up a bit. My crew, meanwhile, are fastidious and almost quaint: handshake greetings, as though we’d just met; an analytic detachment in even the most personal conversation. The Men Behaving Badly trope — beer stains, rough talk — gets it exactly wrong.

This is true - I am more up to date on musical trends than I was 10 or 15 years ago. Without my daughters I wouldn’t have heard of The Last Dinner Party or Chappell Roan [check spelling], both of which ‘have a good beat’, as Hugh Dennis’s middle-aged teacher in the Mary Whitehouse Experience used to say.

London’s new China Town East in Limehouse

David Brooks had another great piece.

‘Unfortunately, Hunter notes, this fruitful cultural tension died with King. Starting in the 1960s, America grew less religious. Those who remained religious were told to keep their faith to the private sphere. American public life became largely secular, especially among the highly educated classes, producing what the First Things editor Richard John Neuhaus called “the naked public square.” By 2020, 60 percent of Americans said they would vote for an atheist for president.

‘In other words, Americans lost faith in both sides of the great historical tension and, with it, the culture that had long held a diverse nation together. By the 21st century, it became clear that Americans were no longer just disagreeing with one another; they didn’t even perceive the same reality. You began to hear commencement speakers declare that each person has to live according to his or her own truth. Critics talked about living in a post-truth society. Hunter talks about cultural exhaustion, a loss of faith, a rising nihilism — the belief in nothing. As he puts it, “If there is little or no common political ground today, it is because there are few if any common assumptions about the nature of a good society that underwrite a shared political life.

Liberalism is a product of Christianity, and the decline of one is leading to the decline of the other.

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Ben Southwood on making streets safer.

Based on a question London Green leader Jenny Jones putto the Mayor in 2008, something like 1 percent of London cars are illegally driving without tax. The Motor Insurers Bureau found that about 1 percent of UK cars are (illegally) uninsured as well – probably the same ones.

About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are

My extremely depressing Twitter crime thread is full of people who serious injure or kill pedestrians or cyclists through incredibly reckless driving, and they often receive a driving ban of six years or so.

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Alice Evans on Indonesia’s great project of social engineering to create ‘Unity in Diversity’.

The Transmigration program, while primarily aimed at population redistribution and development, was also seen as a tool for nation-building. By mixing people from different ethnic backgrounds in new settlements, policy-makers hoped to strengthen Indonesian identity.

From 1979 to 1988, the Government relocated two million ethnically diverse migrants from the Inner Islands of Java and Bali to hundreds of newly created agricultural villages in the Outer Islands. This was one of the biggest resettlement programmes in human history. It was of course hugely controversial, often usurping indigenous communities.

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Ian Leslie on friendships:

Weak ties are friends you don’t see very often or don’t know very well; friends in the outer circles of our network. The term was coined in a classic sociology study which suggested that we get more insight and information from weak ties than from strong ties. Our close friends tend to know the same stuff as us and have similar thoughts. Weak ties bring something different to the party. There’s evidence that weak ties make us happy too. That makes sense to me. I really love my weak ties. The worst thing about the pandemic was not seeing the people I used to see infrequently.

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Phoebe Arslanagić-Little on how one company in Taiwan seems to show the way forward in reversing the baby bust. She writes of the extraordinary fertility  of the employees of ‘Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the world’s leading manufacturer of semiconductors and producer of nearly 90% of the most advanced chips. Though TSMC employees make up 0.3% of Taiwan’s population, they are responsible for 1.8% of all babies born in Taiwan. In every fifty Taiwanese babies born, one is a TSMC baby.’ 

I’ve written a fair bit about the fertility collapse, and at some point I will write something about measures which I think governments will start taking in future; I think there will be a lot more nudge-ish sort of policies as people grow alarmed about the future, although the British, famous for their plucky independence from the state (ho ho), will probably be last.

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There’s a certain kind of person who likes to talk about Chesterton’s Fence, and who will tell you that you should obey tradition because, being the distillation of centuries of human experience, it encodes tacit knowledge and gives you truths you couldn’t possibly reach on your own. This person, whom we may call the utilitrad, is rarely from a society that burns its widows.

Ouch - that’s me! I enjoyed Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of our Success, about how traditions often carry wisdom we don’t understand, but this is a good post on sick societies, and how traditions are often dysfunctional.

Even when people are trying to take care of each other, they don’t necessarily do a good job. The Bena Bena of the New Guinea highlands are careful to keep their children away from neighboring villages they believe are inhabited by evil sorcerers, but they also leave those same children to sleep unattended beside the fire. (Unsurprisingly, many Bena Bena children lose fingers or toes to burns and some are seriously crippled.) And in east African pastoral societies like the Maasai, whose lives are centered around their cattle, children are discouraged from brushing away the flies that cluster around their eyes. Flies mean dung, and dung means wealth — but flies also carry trachoma, which if untreated leads to blindness. “The benefit to society of blind children,” Edgerton remarks drily, “is not self-evident.”

A while back I started writing about the ‘Karen’ insult and how this was an example of a dysfunctional cultural norm in a modern setting, one that stigmatised women from both enforcing good behaviour and trusting their suspicions about men who trigger alarm bells. Lots of societies develop such dysfunctions, largely because people in power encourage them, because they rest on superstitions, or people misunderstand causality (stereotype threat, for example). But then the Karen meme died out - so maybe modern society is better at correcting sick norms.

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Neil O’Brien on the economics of Britain’s immigration policy.

If we look at the earnings of people of the same age the effect is even more striking: in fact, we see a cash decline in the median earnings of Indian and Nigerian nationals aged 22 to 40 - meaning a larger decline in real terms. 

A less selective approach has massively dragged down the average, from young working age people from India and Nigeria earning 15 and 10% more than UK nationals of the same age before the pandemic, to earning less now.

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Megan Gafford on hillbilly feuding

Tony and Maria from West Side Story may be the most famous American retelling of Romeo and Juliet, but there is also the real life story of Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy. These star-crossed lovers managed to consummate their affair, but even after Roseanna became pregnant, their feuding fathers forbade a shotgun wedding. When Johnse found out Roseanna carried his child, he snuck around to see her, which was reason enough for Roseanna's brothers to hunt him down. To save him, Roseanna fashioned a makeshift bridle from a strip of her petticoat, then galloped across a mountain to alert his father (who was also the leader of the Hatfield clan) to his son's peril. She arrived in time for “Devil" Anse Hatfield to rescue Johnse, for which her own father, the McCoy patriarch, disowned her.

Thus Roseanna became estranged from the McCoys, yet even after saving Johnse’s life, Devil Anse would not accept her as his daughter-in-law. When she gave birth to Little Sally, the baby girl never got to know her father before a measles epidemic took her at just three months of life. Legend has it that Roseanna died soon after from a broken heart.

Elsewhere

When Richard Nixon introduced price controls, ‘Among the few dissenters at the time were economist Milton Friedman in his column in Newsweek, plus National Review, which in response announced small pay increases for the entire staff. Since pay hikes were illegal that fall, all NR employees received promotions to more pompous-sounding positions make their raises legally valid. William F. Buckley elevated himself in the masthead from Editor-in-Chief to (IIRC) Supreme Editor on High and the staff Librarian became The Keeper of the Tablets.’

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I’ve already linked to Aris Roussinos’s piece on ethnic conflict but here it is again.

I didn’t know this, about how the BBC sources its gender stories.

The spread of literacy in Ancient Greece, 700–500 BC.

Automation is associated with higher wages and unchanged or higher employment. Bring on the robots!

In just seven years, the percentage of young men who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party has shrunk from 51% to 39%.

More ‘disimprovement’, as my mother says, from the Liverpool Then and Now account. A significant proportion of the city’s economy comes from Beatles tourism - I’ve seen 9 per cent been quoted - and I wonder how much that would raise if the government rebuilt some of the majestic structures that would have been around when the Fab Four were growing up.

An interesting-sounding idea to expand Heathrow westwards over the M25, which allows for four runways yet reduced noise.

‘Based on more than 300.000 experimental profiles of politicians assessed by respondents in more than 40 studies, mostly fielded in the US… women and Asians have a significant advantage compared to male and white candidates.’

The British Museum once glued a snail to an index card and then realised four years later that it had been alive the whole time

The decline in nuclear power plants caused by Chernobyl ‘led to the loss of approximately 141 million expected life years in the U.S., 33 in the U.K. and 318 million globally’. Nice one, commies!

More analysis on Wikipedia bias.

In Dungeons and Dragons, ‘dwarves are no longer tougher but slower than elves, orcs and dark elves aren't evil, because that would imply "biological essentialism" and thus white supremacy.’ You can’t do anything now, because of WOKE.

Thanks for subscribing. I’m taking a break next week and have scheduled a couple of pieces, but I might not respond to that many comments, so wake me up when September begins. Enjoy what’s left of the summer, and thanks for subscribing.