Wrong Side of History Newsletter #57

'Can liberals save liberalism?' and other questions

Good morning. Tomorrow is the feast day of St Edward the Confessor, one of the ‘might have been’ patron saints of England, while Monday is the anniversary of the most famous battle in English history, and there has been something of a 1066 theme this past couple of weeks - let no one say I don’t have my thumb on the important issues facing the country.

Since the last newsletter, I’ve posted two pieces on how our language changed as a result of French domination, creating this beautiful mixed Latin-Germanic tongue - here and here. (If you are interested in the subject, my short book on 1066 is now available in the UK in paperback and kindle.)

I also wrote about the question of how many people live in Britain and whether the supermarket population truthers were onto something. The ONS got in contact to point out that they no longer rely on surveys, and while the international passenger survey ‘is stretched beyond its original purpose…. We now use admin data methods – Visa data, higher education data etc.’ There is a blog which explains their move to admin data.

I also wrote about English towns and their funny pronunciations.

As a couple of readers, Tom B and William Amos, pointed out, it might be Gren-itch to the rest of us but locals know it as Grin-itch.

Esme Fae writes

Here in Massachusetts, we have carried on the English tradition of pronunciations that have little to do with spelling, much to the rest of the country's befuddlement. Gloucester (Glostah), Reading (Redding), Salisbury (Salzbury), Worcester (Woostah), Leominster (Lemminstah), Haverhill (Hayvril), Peabody (PEAbidee), Norwich (Norridge), Swampscott (Swamskit), Wellesley (Welzlee)...the list goes on and on. Interestingly, many of these place names turn up in other parts of the country - even in other parts of New England - but are spelled much more phonetically.

An anon reader in the Peak District also wrote to point out: ‘You missed Tintwistle in Derbyshire (historically Cheshire), wonderfully pronounced Tinsel. I tried to work out the origin and stumbled across a very old map where the village was recorded as Eynsel, which might be a clue. The same map uncovered the mystery of the hamlet called Taxal. On the site of modern day Taxal was a single building, marked The Tax Hall.

‘Finally, there is the highly contested name of another nearby village: Buxworth. Originally called Bugsworth or even Buggersworth on some maps. A local Methodist vicar detested the name and changed it to the grander Buxworth (being near Buxton) in the 19th century. But older locals still insist on the older spelling and pronunciation, which still persists in local signs. A few years ago, the parish council held a referendum on changing it back.’ Buxworth narrowly won.

Elsewhere

Janan Ganesh on why liberals can’t be trusted to save liberalism.

I wish those of us in the liberal centre could take a bow. But who led the resistance when it was hardest? Single-issue feminists. Rightwing free speech zealots. Political casuals with a radar for humbug. Not all liberals deserted. Malcolm Gladwell and others signed a Harper’s Magazine letter about creative freedom when that took some fibre. But don’t let’s pretend this was typical of the wider caste. Newspaper websites have search engines. Our successors will be able to look up what passed for the bien pensant “position” circa 2020. Which was? Woke is exaggerated by conservatives (which doesn’t say where one stands on the issue), a distraction from economic injustice (which doesn’t say where one stands on the issue) or the wrong way of winning people over (a piece of tactical counsel from Barack Obama that didn’t, quite, say where he stood on the issue). 

This almost physical horror of confrontation is captured in that weasel phrase, “read the room”. Rooms can be wrong. The eternal mistake is to conflate liberalism, a set of specific beliefs, involving trade-offs and hard choices, with what we might call liberality: an openness of spirit, a generalised niceness. You can only build a society on the first of these things. Recommended Joshua Chaffin Was this the year of peak woke? I write all this as someone who wants milquetoast liberals in charge almost all the time. But in a crunch moment? When core freedoms are on the line? We’re too flaky. You need cranks and single-issue fanatics. You need people who take abstract ideas to their conclusion. In order to recognise and fight extremism, it helps, I think, to possess at least a trace element of it. (Dawkins would be awesome in a crisis.)

Quite. I’m a child of liberalism, and I’d like to preserve it, but it requires eternal vigilance against extreme ideas. Here’s to the political casuals.

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I don’t agree that woke has peaked, however, for reasons Helen Andrews spells out in a piece on Ta-Nehisi Coates, Israel and Palestine.

For a while, it looked as though a similar divorce might happen again in our day. Many liberals were genuinely shocked by the support for Palestine on college campuses in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack. It caused many to rethink their support for “wokeness” and its crude division of the world into oppressors and oppressed, evil whites and blameless people of color. Wealthy liberals like Bill Ackman defected. Suspicions of anti-Semitism among Black Lives Matter activists, which The New York Times had covered as far back as 2018, gained new credence as campus protesters chanted “From the River to the Sea” and some embraced paraglider iconography. The tensions threatened to bring about a split in the left as far-reaching as that of the 1970s.

Wokeness isn’t over, because it’s actually not what people think it is. Coates strikes me as a not very thoughtful writer and I find his worldview quite chilling, and yet he has attracted some of the most comically sycophantic reviews – ‘essential, like water or air.’ Just this week, a CBS journalist was told off for asking him hard questions. God forbid.

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Two of the best people on substack, NS Lyons and Freya India, in conversation.

Freya says of therapy culture at one point:

In terms of what it’s doing to us, I think, ironically, it’s making us mentally ill. People say therapy culture is stereotypically feminine and it harms men by expecting them to behave more like women, which I agree with—but I actually think it’s worse for women. Girls ruminate more than boys. Women are more anxious, on average. We tend to be more neurotic. And so it gets to me when I see girls being told to focus on their feelings, to take their thoughts so seriously, to search their lives for symptoms. That’s the worst advice we could give. It’s heartbreaking to see how many young women are so miserably stuck in their own heads now, and encouraged to go further and further inwards to find relief. Do the work! Go to therapy! Unpack your trauma! Reflect, analyse, ruminate! Their heads are spinning. Maybe I’m anxious all the time because I have ADHD? Maybe my ADHD is a trauma response? Wait—is it PTSD or a personality disorder?

It was Mental Health Day this week, and what’s notable is that all the things which activists encourage to deal with mental health are associated with worse mental health.

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At Boom, Phoebe Arslanagic-Little on France’s family policies (which seem to work, as much as any fertility policy does). And the same author on people who voluntarily catch the plague for science. I mean, I wouldn’t do it personally, but I’m happy that someone is.

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Scott Alexander issues a report card on Javier Melei. It will be interesting to see how Argentina pans out – a fascinating country which has taken one or two wrong turns.

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At Aporia, on America as the laboratory of democracy

Here are some longer-term numbers. Between 2010 and 2023, states that Trump won in both 2020 and 2016 gained 5.65 million people through internal migration (39 people per 1000 population in 2023). States that Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020 gained 410,000 people through domestic migration (8.6/1000 population in 2023). States that Trump lost in both 2016 and 2020 lost 6.06 million people (42.5/1000 population) to red and swing states.

And this isn’t just low-earners forced out of blue states by high housing prices. The difference in incomes between internal migrants to and from a state generally tracks overall population flows—more desirable states attract more productive people.

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This week marked the anniversary of the October 7 massacre, one of the most disturbing events in my lifetime – only the Bataclan and Beslan compare, and at least these tragedies were mostly greeted with sympathy. What made last year’s horror all the worse was the response of so many people who took such glee in people getting butchered, something I find really hard to comprehend. I can’t remember anyone saying the same about Russians in 2004, even after their military had flattened Grozny.

Aris Roussinos wrote about Palestine and British politics.

There is a dark historical irony, then, in Conservative critics of mass immigration simultaneously presenting themselves as Israel’s strongest supporters. The process by which most of Mandate Palestine became the State of Israel was after all the direct consequence of immigration policies enabled by Westminster officials, who set in train, as the Israeli historian Benny Morris observes, “a demographic-geographic contest the Arabs were destined to lose”. From a tenth of Palestine’s population when Britain assumed the Mandate in 1918, Jews made up a fifth by 1931 due to immigration from Europe. By the time of the 1948 war, and the forced expulsion of the Palestinians, Jews comprised a third of Palestine’s population, and owned 5% of the country’s land. “Palestinians now saw themselves inexorably turning into strangers in their own land”, the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi records, but were given no democratic recourse to opposing this vast and irreversible upheaval, carried out over just 30 years: “This was still the high age of colonialism, when such things being done to native societies by Westerners were normalized and described as ‘progress.’”

I think that so long as Zionism is seen as a colonial project, its support will continue to ebb in the west; I just think that, if you look at the history, and indeed if you look at the average Israeli, that’s not true - it was just one of many population transfers that took place during the dying days of empire. Tragic for the people who had to move, but no more so than the million Greeks who were also displaced. But it’s certainly ironic, as Aris points out, that support for the two sides in Europe now somewhat aligns along pro and anti-immigration lines.

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A lovely story about online friendship.

Then something rouses them. It is an email from a stranger, expressing their sorrow at Mats’ death. It is quickly followed by another email from another stranger, eulogising their son. The messages continue, a trickle becoming a flood as people convey their condolences and write paragraph after paragraph about Mats. He had a warm heart, people write. He was funny and imaginative, a good listener and generous. You should be proud of him, everyone stresses. A primary school teacher from Denmark writes that after hearing of Mats’ death, she broke down in class and had to return home. A 65-year-old psychologist from England says something similar. “Mats was a real friend to me,” writes another stranger. “He was an incurable romantic and had considerable success with women.” Someone else writes to them describing Mats’ empathy. “I don’t think,” they say, “he was aware of how big an impact he had on a lot of people.”

Gaming and social media receive almost entirely negative coverage in the media and, while I appreciate there are downsides, both provide a huge amount of joy, comfort and friendship to a lot of people.

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Cremieux on how the Ottoman threat helped play a part in the Reformation, Europe’s descent into religious bloodbath, but ultimately the religious peace that followed.

The pace and power of the Ottoman advance contributed to an urgent need for the Pope, Charles V, and Ferdinand I to align with the Protestants to repulse further advances. Many of the Holy Roman Empire’s princes had already converted to Protestantism by this point, and so the forces under Protestant command were doubtless invaluable. Their importance to the Pope-Charles-Ferdinand axis was so great and obvious that Luther and his converts saw war with the Ottomans as a means of gaining acceptance for his movement.

Fischer-Galati’s work contains a detailed telling of the negotiation process between the Protestant German Diets and the Catholic Church and Habsburg family. Ferdinand, in his quest to save Hungary from Ottoman conquest, repeatedly sought out German help because there was no other way to reinforce his realm and repulse the invaders. But contra the axis, the Germans initially didn’t care much about the Ottoman issue and preferred to sit about, discussing the religious issue.

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A fascinating essay by Luka Ivan Jukić on the history of nationalism in eastern and western Europe.

While the distinction between these two kinds of nationhood was known to 19th-century thinkers, the notion that ethnic and civic aspects of nationhood were necessarily in conflict, or that one or the other was purely characteristic of a certain part of Europe, was not. Western ‘civic’ nation-states have always been built on the dominance of certain ethnic groups with their own language, traditions and myths of origin and distinctiveness. Indeed, the assimilation of minorities into the dominant ethnicity in Western nation-states was celebrated as progress.

Central and eastern European nationalists did not ‘reject’ the civic values of their Western counterparts but tried to follow them closely. They acknowledged civic rights for all that lived in a given nation-state but sought – like their Western counterparts – to eventually see all ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities assimilated into the general civic nation that was ultimately shaped by the dominant ‘state-forming’ ethnic group.

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Sparta is surprisingly popular among the American public, when asked about ancient states and empires. I can’t imagine anywhere I’d want to live less.

Inspired by the Rest is History series on Boudicca, I polled the public on which side they supported. It’s an interesting question, because the Romans brought great material and civilisational benefits, but the Britons were our ancestors – and yet, the English have historically identified more with the Anglo-Saxons who came after. Personally, I think I would have been a collaborator/traitor. Sorry, but I like underfloor heating.

Forty-four economists were polled on what would make Britain richer, and number one and two were planning and nuclear power. These were the key points in the Foundations paper. And on that subject – the road has been delayed again!

I didn't know that the whole toxoplasma thing about people who own cats is based on very thin studies and may well be completely fake. Obviously another lie put out there by the dog lobby. I wonder if there is a bit of women-hating involved in the meme, since cats are intrinsically linked with single, liberal females. Also on the podcast - most ‘blue zones’ full of very old people are explained less by their Mediterranean diet and more by fraud.

Yet another ‘Native American’ academic has been found out. This was the subject of one of my first substack posts, and I think the total is now about 25.

In 2002 a Dutch architect came up with a new flag for the European Union to symbolise its ‘diversity and unity’. It could probably do with some work.

People in Birmingham on June 6, 1969 asked where they were 25 years earlier.

A Twitter account posts pictures of Johannesburg in 2010 and 2024 to show how much it’s fallen apart.

I’ve started listening to a on the history of Taiwan on Russell Hogg’s podcast, which is hugely interesting. 

Thread on China’s Greater Bay Area, which is home to more than 88 million people and has a bigger economy than South Korea or Silicon Valley

A man in Iraq keeps trying to organise Astral Codex Ten meet-ups despite the challenges of finding like-minded people.

A majority of Americans think the Constitution of the United States contains laws against hate speech. Perhaps the only example of ‘Britain Brain’ out there.

Leipzig's cross-city rail tunnel, completed in 2013 - and what Manchester could have had with its aborted Picc-Vic project from the 1970s. What a shame - I know there are financial considerations about viability etc etc, but I just want more tunnels and exciting infrastructure projects built.

French military liaison officers are caught photographing a Soviet column in East Germany when they are found out.

The most peaceful period in human existence was the presidency of George Dubya Bush; I would suggest this is despite, not because of, but interesting.

The Netherlands has digitally mapped every single street sign in the country.

Russia jails a 72-year-old American for fighting for Ukraine. Is he the oldest volunteer in history?

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