July Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. This month, I wrote at THE ZONE about oikophobia, vaping, right-wing humour, the beauty of Britain, the amoral right, the mafia and conservatism and Hulk Hogan and cancel culture.

I wrote for The Critic about the Afghan resettlement scheme, positive role models, New Labour and elite condescension, failing on podcasts, Hulk Hogan, Angela Davis and Labour and criticism.

Late Soviet Britain redux. I wrote about how much there is to love in Britain at THE ZONE this week, but there is also a lot to hate about how it is being treated. Chris Bayliss is one of my favourite Critic authors and this month he wrote about its dire economic contradictions:

The risk is that somebody actually looks at the implications of the logic which the British system is now running under; it is not feckless politicians overspending to win electoral advantage — markets are familiar with what happens then. What we have instead is a legal settlement that obliges certain needs to be met, under the terms enshrined in rights that are considered sacrosanct, rather than under the normal tax vs spend trade-off of political economy. Sometimes these needs are to be met by the central government, sometimes by sub-sovereign entities with ambiguous terms of insolvency, and often by other members of the public who it is just assumed will go on being productive. The question will be; what happens when we run out of those people?

The need for elite honesty. On a similar theme, Ed West writes about how the establishment has to be more honest with itself and more honest with the public:

One suspects that the state is behaving surreptitiously over the Afghan programme because the public would be enraged by many of these facts. Politicians continue to delude themselves about the relevance of this data, brushing aside patterns and insisting that you can’t make judgements about whole groups of people. But you can, and you should – it’s the state’s job to assess and minimise risks, not to reduce public awareness.

The public tend to be ignorant of absolute numbers but accurate about patterns, and opposition to different nationalities correlates with that nationality’s crime rate; the public are agitated by the arrival of Afghans because they are aware of the number of crimes being committed by this group, and they are going to become more so as the numbers grow.

The Ulsterisation of Britain. Aris Roussinos considers how the dynamics of Northern Ireland are spreading to Great Britain:

Is it going too far to declare a creeping Ulsterisation of English politics? In a response to their demographic decline, currently mostly focusing on the British state’s loss of control of the nation’s borders, one would have expected the English to adopt a similar siege mentality to that of Ulster’s Protestants, whose “conditional loyalty” to the British state has always been dependent on the sense that it was safeguarding their ethnic interests. It now appears that they have.

Belief and belief. Becca Rothfeld reviews Believe by Ross Douthat:

The real problem with “Believe” is not its argumentation, most of which provokes and entertains even when it does not persuade. The real problem is Douthat’s presumption that religion is the sort of thing one can be rationally compelled to accept. Plenty of theological giants over the centuries have begged to differ. Augustine of Hippo famously told his followers, “Crede ut intellegas,” or “Believe that you may understand.” If faith is a prerequisite for intellectual enlightenment, he suggested, then we cannot grasp an argument in favor of belief unless we believe already. And as the great medieval Islamic philosopher and mystic Al-Ghazali pointed out in his 12th-century treatise “Deliverance From Error,” “If your faith were based on a carefully ordered argument,” it could be “broken by an equally well-ordered argument.”

Let me declare an interest: I have a long-delayed project on a similar theme to Douthat’s. (I haven’t read his book so as to keep distance between our arguments.) Rothfeld’s point is a compelling and powerful one. To offer some tentative responses, though: (1) the truth is the truth, however broadly and deeply it convinces people, (2) other theological giants — like Aquinas — have emphasised the importance of making arguments for the reality of God, (3) arguments based on fact claims, unlike the arguments from experience that Rothfeld prefers, have at least the inherent potential to direct us towards external reality and not just internal narratives. (Which is not to deny the importance of the latter.)

Freethinking and fakethinking. The always interesting Bentham’s Bulldog discusses the tyranny of the contrarian:

Step 1: Some non-mainstream view will be labeled a dangerous conspiracy theory and suppressed.

Step 2: Those who think of themselves as heterodox defend the theory to the death.

Step 3: Popular support builds for that view, until it’s the majority view. Even after most people believe it, the view is still considered edgy, heterodox, and non-mainstream. The view shambles along, zombie-like, no matter how weak the case for it is.

One of BB’s big examples is the lab leak theory. I struggle with this one. It seems extremely suspicious that COVID-19 emerged from a city that contained a lab which studies coronaviruses. On the other hand, it seems extremely suspicious that a virus which might have emerged as a result of zoonosis appeared in a country with appalling sanitation standards when it comes to animals. There’s no great arguments, in other words, from a hunch. We have to do the hard work of specific investigation.

Writing and civilisation. Nadya Williams brings lessons from Christopher Lasch and George Orwell to a consideration of AI and writing:

Even if AI were perfectly accurate, it wouldn’t solve the deeper problem. Writing is formational. A recent MIT study using EEG scans across 32 brain regions found that ChatGPT users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Over time, users became lazier, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the study’s end. In other words, even when AI produces clean prose, it atrophies the mind.

Lost vitality. Colin Gorrie reflects on Old English poetry:

Although Beowulf is great heroic poetry, the Old English poetic corpus has a lot more to offer than just heroic poetry! It also contains elegiac poetry, which are meditations on the fleeting nature of life. It contains riddles as well, some of which are quite salacious. There are also wisdom poems, which provide the kind of timeless, well, wisdom that you also see in the Biblical books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes or the Old Norse Hávamál. Finally, there are religious poems, which transpose Christian themes into the Germanic worldview.

In each of these genres, there are works that rise to the level of great art that has stood the test of time. They’re just sadly not so well-known today.

Have a lovely month!

Ben