Hello,
Obligatory shilling. I wrote on Substack about counter-cultural artists, right-wing scolds, vegetarianism and bad arguments for good opinions, Libya and Western intervention, the bright side of polarisation, the secrets of famous men, the nasty noughties and the human body.
I wrote for The Critic about pseudo-pragmatism, the sad side of the war on cigarettes, racial politics in Peckham, the presumption of innocence, GB News, multiculturalism and GB News again.
I also wrote for The Spectator about the tenth anniversary of my moving to Tarnowskie Góry, Poland.
Home front. Ten years in Poland! I’m so grateful that I’ve had the chance to live here. It doesn’t feel like a long time ago that I was standing in Bristol Airport, wondering if I was making the worst decision of my life. It turned out to be one of the best.
I showed these pictures to my friend and said, smugly, that I didn’t think I’d aged much in the last ten years. “I think you’ll age more over the next ten years,” he said. The Polish sense of humour.
Home front II. I had two very fun visits this month — first to England to see my family and then to Warsaw with the great English opinion columnist Ed West. You can read Ed’s fine piece on the reconstruction of Warsaw here.
Arabofuturism. Guy Dampier discusses the impressive if disturbing economic development in the Middle East:
Whilst HS2 lumbers on, its further branches ruthlessly pruned away, much of it buried in tunnels to avoid the wrath of rural NIMBYs, all promise dissipated, the Saudis have proposed and are now building an entirely new state-of-the-art city for nine million people. NEOM sounds like something from an architectural student’s fantastical end of year project, but it’s real…That Arab ambition has already been made visible in Dubai. Whilst Britain floods reclaimed land to protect birds, Dubai conjured the Palm Islands out of the sea, building an instantly recognisable palm tree shape into the waves and filling it with luxury hotels.
Nothing to be sniffed at. Still, I don’t think it’s just handwringing Western cope to ask what the Saudis and Emiratis really want to do with civilisational progress. Where is the Saudi and Emirati art going to come from, for example?
Then again, our art is hardly thriving. And we barely build anything.
Culture wars contra culture. I’m recommending another article from The Critic here, but what can I say? I wouldn’t choose to publish pieces if I didn’t like at least something about them. Pierre d’Alancaisez is one of our most interesting writers, and I thought this piece on how the culture wars have swallowed culture was very compelling:
The final step for the critic is to performatively turn away from the art in disgust. Progressives defiantly drape everything in rainbow pride flags, even though such sensory overload must give them migraines. Conservatives spontaneously recite passages from Keats which they swore they hated at school. It’s a culture-jamming kicker that drowns out everything other than itself.
Terminal mental illness? Victoria Smith writes about the treatment of anorexia (unfortunately, the headline does not reflect the author’s ambivalence):
When L was dying, we treated her badly. To us, she was all illness, no person. I wish we had been better, but acceptance of the dying person should not come with acceptance of anorexia as a terminal disorder. It isn’t — or, if it is, it is only because we have made it so.
Soul searching. I grew up in an evangelical Christian family. One of the highlights of the evangelical calendar was the religious/music festival Soul Survival, which was led by the charismatic pastor Mike Pilavachi. Sadly, Mr Pilavachi’s legacy has been tarnished by revelations that he engaged in massages and weird wrestling matches with young male interns. My sister Lucy has written about it with her typical style:
…the thing about Soul Survivor is that, even though I am now older and irritable and lazy, when I went to Soul Survivor I was fourteen or sixteen and full of whole-hearted adolescent enthusiasm. Consequently it feels like I could cheerfully murder anyone who hurts anyone who even so much as reminds me of the boys and girls with whom I huddled round in the dark under gazebos, playing ‘cheat’, drinking horrible cheap fizzy pop and saying that things were safe as, meaning cool.
RIP Michael Gambon. The Singing Detective is one of the great artistic achievements of television as a medium, with Gambon’s performance at its heart. You must watch it. (I’m not saying “must” carelessly here. I’m on my way to force you to watch it — Clockwork Orange style — right now.) Here’s a taster.
Bans can work. Ellen Pasternack critiques the myth of authoritarian ineffectiveness:
It’s true that totally eradicating a certain behaviour may well be impossible. This doesn’t mean that prohibiting it is ineffective. Granted, if someone really wants to do something, they will probably find a way — but most people aren’t hell-bent on doing things. If you make something more difficult, more risky and more socially censured, fewer people will do it.
The world of things. I really enjoyed Wessie du Toit’s discussion of Arendt, things and place:
A good way to understand this point is to consider how a novelist or filmmaker typically creates a setting. They focus on characteristic details – the clothes people wear, the style of their buildings and streets, their implements for work and everyday accessories – which communicate the richness of a particular “world” those people inhabit together. In the same way, Arendt thinks the artefacts that surround us serve the purpose of “stabilising human life,” because people are always different, and so can only “retrieve their sameness… their identity” through a shared world of things.
An age of obligations. Here’s a sharp dissection of the post-liberal critique of individualism — which, full disclosure, I’ve made before — from the esoteric anonymous gadfly J Sorel:
In the Britain of 2023, the language of obligation is everywhere. The British people are not permitted to vocally disagree with the egalitarian ideas expressed in the Human Rights Act (1998) and, still more, the Equality Act (2010) – doing so will bar you from all public sector employment and may land you in prison. It will increasingly preclude you from private sector employment, and even banking services – something that not even the highest of high Tories would have ever dreamt of inflicting on the Protestant Dissenters. The spirit of the age isn’t transgression but orthodoxy, rigorously enforced…To meet all these obligations the British will soon pay the highest tax burden seen since the Second World War.
I think Mr Sorel’s absolute dismissal of the concept of “liquid modernity” is premature, though. After all, one can be drowned inside a cage.
Sublime terror. The excellent Armin Rosen writes for First Things about Andrei Tarkovsky:
This greatest of all Soviet movies is a paean not to dialectical materialism nor to the Soviet system, but to God and artistic expression, the things that system was most eager to suppress or co-opt.
Have a lovely month,
Ben