March Diary
Hello,
Obligatory shilling. This month at THE ZONE I wrote about Red Dwarf, Gad Saad, war hawks, gentrification and multiculturalism, androcratic idiocies, Ian Miles Cheong, Poland and migration, the war and conservatism, hoarding and slopaganda.
I wrote for The Critic about Trump at war, the BAFTAs and Tourette’s, ritual slaughter and factory farming, Reform and war, Will Self, the right and conspiracy theory, Matt Goodwin, reparations and Tony Blair.
I wrote for the American Conservative about war propaganda.
I wrote for the Telegraph about Dubai.
Finally, for the Washington Examiner, I reviewed a fine new biography of the antimafia author Leonardo Sciascia.
Happy birthday to THE ZONE. This newsletter turns 6 in a week. It is not the most significant or successful of Substacks — which, given its inconsistent output, it has never deserved to be — but I have loved, and continue to love, writing and being read here. Thank you so much.
On reading about myself. It’s a curious feature of having even marginal notability online that one develops all kinds of esoteric lore. Three completely bogus claims about me circulate as facts whenever a piece of mine goes semi-viral, so at the risk of being self-indulgent I’d like to take a moment to debunk them. One is that I’m a Catholic, when is understandable when I have written for The Catholic Herald, but you don’t have to be French to write for The Paris Review. (I’m agnostic.) The second is that I went to Poland for political reasons, which is just flatly untrue. (I was offered a job there quite randomly.) The third, and the funniest, is that I must be related to the diplomat and author Martin Sixsmith. Nepotism is rife in the media, so I see why people assume this, but my dad is actually a mathematician. This doesn’t open many doors in journalism — or many doors anywhere unless I wanted to get into Complex Dynamics though I wonder if I have had commissions accepted because people think I must be related to Martin. I’m not at all — and I suspect the rumour is more damaging to him than it is to me — though he did give our family a laugh when he was involved in a diplomatic scandal and my dad turned on his car radio to hear the words, “The government blames Mr Sixsmith …”
Home front. I had a lot of fun this weekend, going to see Maniac Zone Wrestling in Wrocław. The quality of the wrestling, and the booking, and the production was far higher than I would have expected for a tiny outfit that must struggle every year to stay afloat.
Don’t get me wrong, I know professional wrestling is absurd. But in a little venue in Lower Silesia, in front of no more than a couple of hundred fans, the villainous heel faction claiming the MZW championship still felt, just briefly, like the most important thing in the world.
When the Music Fades. My sister Lucy’s book — on evangelicalism, abuse, power and dignity — is released next month! You can pre-order it here. She talked about it on the Nomad podcast.
They never learn. It’s rare that I disagree with the great and powerful Philippe Lemoine, and the war in Iran is no exception:
The truth is that it’s a stupid war that obviously wasn’t the result of careful deliberation. Trump painted himself in a corner in January by threatening to intervene militarily if the regime killed protesters, he was under pressure from Israel and probably let himself be convinced that he could get another easy win by pulling the same stunt as in Venezuela. But Iran isn’t Venezuela, so instead he just got himself into a mess and now he has no idea how to get out of it.
The revival that wasn’t. The Bible Society has pulled its “Quiet Revival” report after YouGov admitted that some of its polling had been bogus. I take no pleasure in saying that I was always sceptical of the narrative. I think the kernel of truth was that a lot of people have been saying, “There must be something more!” But it didn’t follow that their next sentence would necessarily be, “And it’s Jesus!”
Bennett’s Britain. The great and powerful Fred Sculthorp writes on Alan Bennett and British culture:
Enough Said is about Britain’s last literary national treasure getting old, and with it a sense of Englishness marching to its doom. This is a country floating off into the antithesis of Bennettland, where no one knows the local vicar and his famous monologues of quiet desperation have unfurled themselves into full blown howls.
I went to see Bennett speak in Bath, almost twenty years ago, and it was like Beatlemania for grandmothers.
The limits of therapy speak. Sarah Fletcher writes on Louis Theroux and the charmless opportunists of the “manosphere” (itself a marketing term of its critics):
The left are used to being called crazy, but it is none the better for them to call the right crazy, even when encoded in the polite and cosy gauze of therapy speak. Pathologising political anger means any movements outside the acceptable liberal conversation become signs of illness. I find the views, in so much as they are even cohesive views, shown in the documentary to be incorrect. But not diseased.
The limits of liberal moralism. James Martin Charlton also addresses Theroux:
Theroux begins to resemble a kind of cultural parasite, feeding on the moral and psychological disarray he documents while offering no alternative vision of the good. The snarky, ostentatiously tolerant liberal humanism he represents, far from occupying a stable moral high ground from which figures like HSTikkyTokky can be judged, looks exactly like the stance that made them possible.
The price is wrong. Chris Bayliss considers the British state and markets:
All of this is a result of a stubborn — or perhaps pig ignorant — refusal to consider second or third-order effects of policy. We currently have a government dominated by people who are actively hostile to the idea that human beings respond to incentives (though this type of policy was also the hallmark of previous Conservative governments, especially that of Theresa May). We now see intervention upon intervention, with policy-makers desperately trying to address the consequences of their previous blow of the cudgel.
Fake news and lame news. Ed West reflects on a neglected problem in journalism:
This is lame news, in other words, something Sailer characterised as reporting deliberately designed to obscure the ‘who what where how why’. It’s different from fake news in that it doesn’t actually fabricate facts - it just frames a story in a misleading way and leaves out relevant information, the sort of details that are the basics of reporting. Lame news is not as popular a concept as ‘fake news’, but it has a corrosive effect on public trust in the media.
Not even an ethos. Becca Rothfeld considers therapeutic managerialism:
Chapters are subdivided into digestible sections (“Get Bored the Right Way,” “Give More to Transcend Yourself”) and often end with homework, set aside in a little box, as in elementary-school textbooks. When Brooks is not offering “Questions for Reflection and Self-Assessment,” he is laying out “Three Big Things to Remember,” as if he were providing a study guide for the exam of a meaningful life.
The Critic is now on Substack! Subscribe here.
Have a lovely month!
Ben
The essays about the manosphere documentary helped me put together something that's been knocking about in my head for a bit: I think the reason Andrew Tate doesn't get talked about much in this documentary or in a lot of discussion of the current crop of manosphere guys is that he's too obviously threatening, and that ruins this odd line of attack that's developed that's focused on discrediting them on their own terms by trying to make them look like silly children.
The focus on whether they have unresolved childhood trauma, and the constant need to involve their mums as much as possible, strikes me as an attempt to almost accept their framing for what a high status man should be then judge them harshly against it. No mainstream commentator would ever say it in these words, but the impression I get is a sort of "haha look at this beta cuck, he thinks he's a threatening alpha wolf but actually he's a traumatised little boy who is still close with his mum, awww lil' boy did daddy not really like you?"
You can't make that work with Andrew Tate, because he's just so obviously an actual threat, so it would come off as really insensitive. Thing is, I rather suspect plenty of these guys have done plenty of really bad Tate-like stuff. I'm not levelling specific accusations, but they lionise him as a figure worth emulating so it wouldn't shock me if they had, well, emulated him in practice as well as theory in at least some cases.
Even if they are the way they are because of childhood trauma (which might be at least be part of the story, though I doubt it’s as totalising as this narrative likes to make out) that hardly suggests they aren’t doing or couldn’t do real harm. So you get this bizarre disconnect where people who do actually seem to me to be quite threatening get treated as sort of objects of comedic pity. It’s as if their detractors can’t bring themselves to admit they might actually be dangerous, because that would be giving them too much credit!
I think it stems from the growing mainstream reliance on a “legitimacy / credibility / seriousness” quality as the prime morally relevant axis. Remember “adults in the room”? I get the sense that a lot of these people see “you are trivial / childish / unserious” as about the most devastating burn they can muster. In these situations, I think it actually leads to their accepting, unstated, a lot of the macho-poser might-makes-right morality of the very people they criticise, and that’s why it ties them in such crazy knots.
This is perhaps a reach, but I suspect the same problem is a good part of why the mainstream narrative is struggling to make any serious engagement with AI risk: They feel uncomfortable admitting that anything made by tech bros could be important enough to do major harm. That’s why you see people coming up with crazy inside-out takes like that people raising the alarm about catastrophic risks from AI are actually paid agents of the AI companies themselves, hyping their products.
You know, like how tobacco companies paid people to say smoking causes cancer, and oil companies paid people to say burning fossil fuels causes climate change :p The possibility of doing real harm becomes a mantle they couldn’t possibly grant to their enemies, because that would be tantamount to admitting they matter in some way, and that would cut against their casting of irrelevance and triviality as the ultimate failing.