Wrong Side of History newsletter #55

Murder, beauty and Britpop

Good morning, and I hope you enjoyed your summer holidays. I spent a week living in a converted train carriage in Spain and visited Madrid’s Almudena Cathedral (pictured). Incredible to think that, back when this was being built, people were listening to Ace of Base and 2 Unlimited.

Last week, I wrote about the lingering Norman influence on England.

But there is an argument to the class theory. In The Son Also Rises, Gregory Clark observed that, even in 1800, people with Norman surnames were eight times as likely as the general population to be Members of Parliament, although that has narrowed since. Research published in 2011 found that people with Norman surnames are still richer than the population as a whole, by some 10 per cent on average. Of course the effect shouldn’t be exaggerated - the Grosvenor family have been especially astute at managing property and making well-chosen dynastic matches down the years, and the late duke was simply employing the self-effacing humour typical of the English aristocracy.

Among Clark’s findings was that Englishmen with Norman surnames were especially prominent in the military even four centuries after the Conquest, playing a prominent role in the later stages of the Hundred Years’ War, and they certainly remained so afterwards.

The British edition of 1066 is coming out this month – please buy!

Since the last newsletter, I also wrote no fewer than three pieces on Dominic Sandbrook’s excellent Seasons in the Sun and the Rest is History series on 1974, the worst year in modern British politics… so far.

Part one and two deal with the year itself, and part three looks at whether we are at a similar point where the consensus is going to break. I tend to agree with Steve Davies that we’ve reached a point.

I also wrote another post on great historical crossovers, having written two before. Suggestions for further crossovers welcome.

Elsewhere…

A must-read post on using murder as a measuring stick for general crime.

But these two wealthy, aged (median ages of 43 and 49, respectively) East Asian societies are not the only ultra-low crime societies to exist. Mid-century England had about four times the homicide rate of modern Japan, which, given advances in medical care, implies it had similar levels of crime and disorder. This with an average age of 34, 15 years younger than the median Japanese person today!

Postwar Western European countries were among the safest on Earth, comparable to much older, much wealthier, and much more forensically sophisticated modern Japan. There’s no technical reason why Western European societies today shouldn’t be this safe, and reap the benefits, beyond a lack of will. 

The black pill conclusion: actually things are quite bad.

****

Christopher Caldwell on Germany’s political firewall.

Germany continues to operate under the Basic Law prepared during Western occupation after World War II. By (American) design, Germany is not a free-speech country. For much of the Cold War, you could not buy a copy of Mein Kampf. You could not join a communist party. Foundations lavishly funded by the government seeded society with approved opinions. And a Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) spied on parties and eventually individuals suspected of extremism. During the Cold War, this meant mostly communists. Today, it means mostly conservatives. The author Ronen Steinke has recently published a history of the Verfassungsschutz in which he details its metastasis over the decades. 

As sociologist Wolfgang Streeck laid out recently in the London Review of Books, the Verfassungsschutz “has long held that the belief that Germany should be ethnically homogeneous (rather than bunt, meaning ‘colorful’) is anti-constitutional.” Yes—in Germany, you can be placed under state surveillance for opposing diversity. This decade, there have been battles at the highest levels of the bureaucracy over whether expressing support for regulating immigration or skepticism about Islam’s role in Germany is sufficient for investigating a citizen as a potential public enemy. According to Streeck, the Verfassungsschutz became more zealous as “right-wing ‘populist’ political parties came to be seen as electoral competition by Germany’s center right and center left.” In July, the interior minister, Nancy Faeser, attempted to ban a magazine deemed to take an unduly indulgent attitude towards the AfD, though her ban was blocked in the courts. (The magazine, which is called Compact, has no connection to the Compact you are reading.)

Under these circumstances, the multiparty firewall against the AfD doesn’t look terribly secure, or even particularly admirable. Firewalls often work this way. At the start, the bourgeois parties swagger around, confident that they are “protecting democracy” from a bunch of losers who can get only 4 percent or 5 percent of the vote. But things look different when the excluded party starts taking a third of the vote. Then the bourgeois parties are no longer protecting democracy from extremists—they’re protecting themselves from democracy.

As in France and elsewhere, we’ve reached a point where the populist Right is too large to keep inside a cordon sanitaire, leading to a stalemate.

****

Post-Liberal Pete on Britpop

The musical trajectory of Oasis and of Britpop reflects the trajectory of rock music in general from the 1990’s onwards. Rock was a musical form which emerged in an explosion of creativity in the 1950’s and 1960’s but had finally exhausted itself by the 1990’s and ended up on the fast-track to a museum piece channelling the ghosts of yesteryear. Britpop itself wasn't so much a revivalist movement as a revival of a revivalist movement, like a photocopy of a photocopy in which the ink has faded over time. Oasis didn’t sound like The Beatles so much as The La’s sounding like The Beatles and they didn't look so much like 1960’s-era Lou Reed as Ian McCullough trying to look like 1960’s-era Lou Reed. 

If Britpop wasn't so much retro-rock as meta-retro-rock then their recently announced upcoming reunion represents meta-retro-rock squared. It says something about the extent of our cultural stagnation that in the 2020’s the reunion of a band from the 1990’s, who were themselves products of cultural nostalgia about the 1960’s, has managed to generate as much excitement and anticipation as it has (to the extent that it has been discussed in Parliament.) It would be as if George Formby returned to the stage in the 1960’s to reproduce his popular act from the 1930’s, itself with roots in the Edwardian music-hall tradition of his father, and generating more interest than The Beatles or The Rolling Stones in their 1960’s heyday. 

As was discussed on a Rest is History episode from a while back, the Blur-Oasis rivalry was the last time the charts felt relevant because it was the last time there was a vaguely unified pop culture. I can see why people my age and a bit older are nostalgic, although the whole scene had a sense of arrogance that was a bit off-putting - I’m reminded of James Blunt’s recollections of Albarn and Gallagher, compared to the kindly Keith Flint from the Prodigy.

Ross Douthat on why we don’t build beautifully

We had been home from Italy only a little while, though, when I read an essay that made me feel ashamed of my attempted evenhandedness. Titled “The Beauty of Concrete” and penned by Samuel Hughes for the online magazine Works in Progress, it starts out by limning a version of my own “on the one hand, ideas, on the other hand, economics” explanation for why, sometime after the Art Deco era, so many Western buildings became either hyperutilitarian or gobsmackingly ugly. (Those are my own aesthetic judgments; his essay is more circumspect.)

Hughes calls the first explanation the “naïve” one — the idea that there was a change in ideology and worldview, starting with the modernist era in the early 20th century, that altered what elites wanted to commission and what architects wanted to design. The second explanation he calls the “sophisticated” one — the idea that “ornament declined because of the rising cost of labor,” that old-fashioned architecture is made up of “small, fiddly things that require far more bespoke attention than other architectural elements do” and modern economies don’t generate the right incentives to create a large caste of bespoke fiddlers.

Sometimes the more obvious answers are the correct ones, and it’s not ‘nuanced’ or ‘complex’. It’s just that people in positions of power have terrible tastes and ideas.

Justin Germain on how we may be close to discovering scrolls that will change our view of antiquity.

Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a ‘river of gold’. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. There are literally lost texts that, if we had them, would in all likelihood have made it into the biblical canon.

…

However, many of the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri remain not only unread, but also unopened. This is because the eruption of Vesuvius left the scrolls carbonized, making it nearly impossible to open them. Despite this obstacle, Dr. Brent Seales pioneered a new technology in 2015 that allowed him and his team to read a scroll without opening it. The technique, using X-ray tomography and computer vision, is known as virtual unwrapping, and it was first used on one of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, specifically the En-Gedi scroll, the earliest known copy of the Book of Leviticus (likely 210–390 CE). The X-rays allow scholars to create a virtual copy of the text that can then be read like any other ancient document by those with the proper language and paleography skills. Using Dr. Seales’s technique, scholars have been able to upload many of the texts online. A group of donors led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross have offered cash prizes to teams of classicists who can decipher the writings. The race to read the virtually unwrapped scrolls is known as the Vesuvius Challenge.

By democratizing the translation of these texts, virtual unwrapping has created a type of Wild West for scholars, allowing them to pursue lasting glory in the field and no small amount of money as they compete to translate the scrolls. The first prize money was claimed last year, and there are many more scrolls to be translated and prizes to be claimed.

It’s exciting to think that many of our ideas about ancient history might be blown away in the coming years.

Elsewhere elsewhere

More Anglo-Saxon erasure, this time at Nottingham University, which is imitating the more status Cambridge University, which is imitating even more high-status academics in the US.

I’ve written about this subject before, and I suppose the subject brings up a deep atavistic feeling of sadness and anger in me because, well, these are my ancestors. It’s bad enough being conquered by the Normans but they were, at least, ruthlessly effective horsemen and archers. Being conquered by North American academics is less forgivable.

****

The Netherlands tried rent controls, and you’ll never guess how it worked out

In July, the Dutch government expanded nationwide rent controls—which had already covered about 80 percent of rental units—to almost all remaining rental properties. Fully 96 percent of Dutch rental housing is now subject to rent caps.

A report from Bloomberg published last week details the results: Owners of rental properties are selling their buildings and getting out of the rental housing market.

The tenants of those units are being forced to try and find one of the few remaining market-rate units or purchase a home in the Netherlands' hot housing market. In either case, home hunters face spiking prices and limited availability.

Rent controls are hugely popular with the public, at least in the States - sometimes the eggheads are right.

****

‘States that legalized pot for recreational use saw double-digit increases in addiction, chronic homelessness and arrests, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.’

Feels like prohibition may soon be back on the menu, although American public opinion continues to trend towards being pro-legalisation. I’d be interested to see some country try out a compromise where citizens are able to purchase drugs, and use them within private homes or clubs, on condition of having some sort of permit, but I can’t imagine anyone ever will. Otherwise the social costs of drug proliferation are disastrous.

****

And elsewhere on Twitter

Thread on sprezzatura, one of my favourite Italian words.

‘Activism is frequently praised and elevated… viewed as selfless and egalitarian, but is associated with the dark triad of personality traits: Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism.’ Not the first time I’ve seen this.

Lab grown meat comes closer. I can’t wait, personally

‘Glasgow had one of the world’s best tram networks. When it was scrapped in 1962, the doomed trams rolled to their depot in a long ritual procession. 250,000 people came out to watch. “Grown men wept and held their children up to touch them as they passed.”’ You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

Inauguration of a metro line in Madrid - similar to the images of priests blessing early Aer Lingus planes.

Heavy cars are far more likely to kill you (as one would expect).

The David Reich interview on the Dwarkesh podcast is fascinating. Turns out that west Asians and Europeans may be far more Neanderthal than we imagined. Only 20 years ago I was reading books which held the then-mainstream belief than Neanderthals were too distantly related to have interbred, and that our ancestors wiped them out.

Air conditioning has a huge effect on exam results. Over 13 years in New York City, ‘upwards of 510,000 exams that otherwise would have passed likely received failing grades due to hot exam conditions,’ and these failures delayed or stopped 90,000 graduations. The great Lee Kuan Yew saw air con as the secret to Singapore’s success.

Italian Serie D club Boreale Calcio have a new kit themed on the Roman Empire and Constantine the Great. Their home kit is a 16th century painting of the Battle of Milvian Bridge, which is close to their stadium. Maybe York City should do the same.

A new tunnel between Denmark and Germany will cut the train journey time between Copenhagen and Hamburg by two hours. There is no excuse to put off building a St Patrick’s Tunnel between Britain and Ireland, therefore allowing me to take a train direct from St Pancras to Dublin (aside from the exorbitant cost).

More amazing medical breakthroughs: ‘there are now three large cluster randomised trials across five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa showing that giving every kid antibiotics reduces child mortality by around 14%.’ Fantastic stuff.

A new app allows you to wander around cities while listening to historians talking about what happened on the very spot. I’ve long wanted this, and glad someone is doing it - and visiting Vienna a couple of years back really made me wish something like this existed.

A new poem in New York Review of Books is composed of lines taken from the last words of executed murderers - and here is a thread of what these men actually did. Why do some many artists sympathise with violent criminals? It goes back at least to the 19th century in Paris.

Wealth by ethnicity in England, in the late 19^th and late 20^th centuries. West Indians and Pakistanis were wealthier than the average in Victorian England, presumably because they were so small in number and mostly comprised merchants and aristocrats. Germans were notably rich, being especially prominent in the then wealthy Bradford. The Irish were poor and got even poorer, but today the profile of the Irish in England is very different indeed.

Thanks for subscribing!