June Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. I wrote at THE ZONE about William F. Duckley, Jr., corrupt evangelicals, modern publishing, leaving my office, mental illness and political violence, Tony Blair and grooming gangs, place and war and intelligence.

I wrote for The Critic about the “quiet revival”, violence and the law, Musk and Trump, Amerithrax, miserable Greens, Reform, grooming gangs and the Tories, Harry Dunn, a freelancing mystery and Andrew Cuomo.

The British question. Four excellent piece on Great British politics and culture begin this month’s diary. Fred Sculthorp visits Birmingham and considers the future of Britain:

“We’re constantly being asked to integrate, but no one can actually tell us apart from British values which we all respect. I ask you, what is this country we are supposed to be integrating into?”

We look back down into the sprawl of suburban Birmingham, and, for a moment, there is a long silence as one of us is expected to come up with an answer. Then we are interrupted by a car tooting its horn, a giant Palestine flag billowing gently against the early evening Birmingham sun.

Mutations of modernity. Ed West reflects on Britain and the instability of demographic taboos:

I don’t claim to know what Real People think, but I do read a lot of history books, and one of the most common causes of political turbulence is demographic instability. This was the trigger for violence in Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Fiji and Bosnia, where one group feared that their numbers were falling. This is why Singapore, the one state to treat multiculturalism in a hard-headed way, meticulously regulates the arrival of Chinese, Malay and Indian migrants, appreciating how vital stable demography is.

Modern Britain is, by historical and global standards, demographically very unstable.

As Ed writes, two visions of Britain — as a distinct place with a distinct history, and as a young culture born out of demographic change — cannot be aligned.

Late Soviet Britain. On a similar theme, Chris Bayliss addresses the absurd national narratives of the British state:

I cannot help but return to Dalrymple’s explanation of the propaganda of the Eastern Bloc. Britain’s current regime cannot yet quite force us to mouth their absurdities as in Havel’s time, but they can have us sit and watch as the institutions that once made us a free country do so.

The problem with post-liberalism. Sam Rubinstein considers the failings of Blue Labour:

Do the British people yearn for more social obligations? After the lockdown they might have had their fill. Do they want higher taxes, as the ideal Blue Labour programme would likely entail? It’s unlikely; the tax burden is already the highest it’s been since the Second World War. Do they want more power in the hands of “local communities”? Perhaps — though they are hardly impressed by devolution in its current form, and might prefer a centralised state which can actually do things.

I have made these points — somewhat in opposition to my own earlier writing — before. As Sam adds, though — and as he has also written before — Britain has an unusually rich tradition of individualism. For it to become more like itself, then, the individual and the collective must be emphasised.

The idiot box. Alex Webster writes on TV:

It is a surprisingly conservative industry — not politically obviously, but in its general aversion to risk-taking and novelty. New formats are seldom adopted if they haven’t been shown to work elsewhere, and when finally something new does break into the mainstream, it is imitated relentlessly. When Serial broke new boundaries of boredom and tedium in its attempt to prove that podcast producers are better at solving crimes than the police, TV commissioners were falling over themselves to uncover similar cold cases, with similarly boring and tedious results.

As Alex writes, modern technology does at least allow artists to step over traditional platforms.

Making common sense rigorous. Bethel McGrew reviews Rod Dreher:

When Dreher himself or interview subjects like Shaw keep repeating that we’re not going to “argue our way out” of the dark modernist wood, that “apologetics” doesn’t work, that we must all escape the trap of “left-brained” thinking, I tend to think they’re operating with a rather low-resolution view of what the business of apologetics is really about.

Whatever else it is, it’s certainly not about waving away epiphanies of beauty as “not an argument” or “too right-brained” and therefore irrelevant to the case for Christianity. On the contrary, it’s about homing in on such epiphanies, encouraging the strong commonsense reaction that they must mean something, and making that common sense rigorous.

Meaning and modernity. Zach Winters writes on Islamic futurism:

Islam may well be a source of wisdom for those who are confronting, for example, atomisation and the accompanying loss of meaning, but does drawing from these sources on a personal level confront the prime cause — the very prioritisation of technicalism as the prime goal of human functioning? Or does this ethical-moralistic approach only provide palliative relief to the individual in the face of a technicalistic ideology which, by definition, cannot but continue to innovate, dislocate, and disrupt?

Ideology and loserdom. Sam Kriss writes on Adam Curtis, culture and politicisation:

In an interview back in 2021, Adam Curtis explained that most political journalists couldn’t understand his films because they aren’t interested in music. Having known a fair few political journalists, I can say with some certainty that he was right. Most politically motivated types are – not to be unkind, but it’s true – total losers. This cuts across left and right, all ideologies and tendencies, from Toryism to anarchism to Islamism and back: whatever you believe, if you believe it too strongly you were probably a weirdo at school.

Have a lovely month!