Why do we use spices in our foods? In thinking about this question keep in mind that (1) other animals don’t spice their foods, (2) most spices contribute little or no nutrition to our diets, and (3) the active ingredients in many spices are actually aversive chemicals, which evolved to keep insects, fungi, bacteria, mammals and other unwanted critters away from the plants that produce them.
Several lines of evidence indicate that spicing may represent a class of cultural adaptations to the problem of food-borne pathogens. Many spices are antimicrobials that can kill pathogens in foods. Globally, common spices are onions, pepper, garlic, cilantro, chili peppers (capsicum) and bay leaves. Here’s the idea: the use of many spices represents a cultural adaptation to the problem of pathogens in food, especially in meat. This challenge would have been most important before refrigerators came on the scene. To examine this, two biologists, Jennifer Billing and Paul Sherman, collected 4578 recipes from traditional cookbooks from populations around the world. They found three distinct patterns.
1. Spices are, in fact, antimicrobial. The most common spices in the world are also the most effective against bacteria. Some spices are also fungicides. Combinations of spices have synergistic effects, which may explain why ingredients like “chili power” (a mix of red pepper, onion, paprika, garlic, cumin and oregano) are so important. And, ingredients like lemon and lime, which are not on their own potent anti-microbials, appear to catalyze the bacteria killing effects of other spices.
2. People in hotter climates use more spices, and more of the most effective bacteria killers. In India and Indonesia, for example, most recipes used many anti-microbial spices, including onions, garlic, capsicum and coriander. Meanwhile, in Norway, recipes use some black pepper and occasionally a bit of parsley or lemon, but that’s about it.
3. Recipes appear to use spices in ways that increase their effectiveness. Some spices, like onions and garlic, whose killing power is resistant to heating, are deployed in the cooking process. Other spices like cilantro, whose antimicrobial properties might be damaged by heating, are added fresh in recipes.
Thus, many recipes and preferences appear to be cultural adaptations adapted to local environments that operate in subtle and nuanced ways not understood by those of us who love spicy foods. Billing and Sherman speculate that these evolved culturally, as healthier, more fertile and more successful families were preferentially imitated by less successful ones. This is quite plausible given what we know about our species’ evolved psychology for cultural learning, including specifically cultural learning about foods and plants.
Among spices, chili peppers are an ideal case. Chili peppers were the primary spice of New World cuisines, prior to the arrival of Europeans, and are now routinely consumed by about a quarter of all adults, globally. Chili peppers have evolved chemical defenses, based on capsaicin, that make them aversive to mammals and rodents but desirable to birds. In mammals, capsicum directly activates a pain channel (TrpV1), which creates a burning sensation in response to various specific stimuli, including acid, high temperatures and allyl isothiocyanate (which is found in mustard or wasabi). These chemical weapons aid chili pepper plants in their survival and reproduction, as birds provide a better dispersal system for the plants’ seeds than other options (like mammals). Consequently, chilies are innately aversive to non-human primates, babies and many human adults. Capsaicin is so innately aversive that nursing mothers are advised to avoid chili peppers, lest their infants reject their breast (milk), and some societies even put capsicum on mom’s breasts to initiate weaning. Yet, adults who live in hot climates regularly incorporate chilies into their recipes. And, those who grow up among people who enjoy eating chili peppers not only eat chilies but love eating them. How do we come to like the experience of burning and sweating — the activation of pain channel TrpV1?
Research by psychologist Paul Rozin shows that people come to enjoy the experience of eating chili peppers mostly by re-interpreting the pain signals caused by capsicum as pleasure or excitement. Based on work in the highlands of Mexico, children acquire this gradually without being pressured or compelled. They want to learn to like chili peppers, to be like those they admire. This fits with what we’ve already seen: children readily acquire food preferences from older peers. In Chapter 14, we further examine how cultural learning can alter our bodies’ physiological response to pain, and specifically to electric shocks. The bottom line is that culture can overpower our innate mammalian aversions, when necessary and without us knowing it.
Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, 2015.
July 20, 2019
QotD: Spices
July 18, 2019
QotD: “They might speak English, but they don’t speak Western”
But something happened to me last night, I had a kind of realization. It suddenly hit me WHY that is.
It’s because Harry Potter is literally all they collectively know.
Schools don’t teach history anymore.
They no longer teach the canon of Western literature.
They certainly don’t teach the Bible.So Millennials literally have no points of common reference. It’s not that they all just want to look like complete morons by infantilizing their political metaphor to the level of a children’s book, it’s that they have no other choice.
They’re literally bereft of the allegorical language of the West. I’m sure there’s some Harry Potter monster analogy I could use to explain it to them, how it’s like monsters have come along and literally stolen their ability to speak, their common language, and their birthright.
They can no longer express or understand the set of references we have from our past, our most prized stories, and our culture’s religious quotations. They can’t do Shakespeare, Milton, or even Mark Twain because they’ve never learned any of these while they were being taught Indonesian multicultural dancing and given participation awards. They don’t know what happened at Hastings in 1066, at Runnymede in 1215, or even at Sarajevo in 28th June 1914, because they were being given feminist diversity training instead of learning the history of their civilization. They certainly don’t know what “the least of these” refers to or where it comes from, as a recent event with a White House staffer proved.
They’ve lost the entire allegorical language of the West. They might speak English, but they don’t speak Western. To them, it’s like a foreign, dead, alien language. A set of stories they do not know.
RPGPundit, “Harry Potter and the way Millennial Leftists Don’t Even Speak Western Anymore”, The RPGPundit, 2017-02-02.
July 14, 2019
QotD: The legacy of the original hippies
Not now I’m older and wiser, I don’t. Beneath the kaftan of every other hippie beats the heart of a fascist — the intolerance, the zeal, the control-freakery — and it all stems from that moment, pinpointed in the documentary, when a left-wing activist and Berkeley drop-out named Jerry Rubin had a sudden insight: that there were more hippies than there were radicals.
The unfortunate result of this was that Rubin and his ilk realised that they could prey like vampires on these fluffy-headed flower children and turn their innocent yearning for peace, love and drug-addled sex into something much more dangerous, whose effects we are ruing to this day.
All that long hair, those beads, the patchouli, the starry eyes, the psychedelic sounds of the Grateful Dead; they were really just a kandy-kolored, tangerine-flake Trojan Horse for the values — or rather the anti-values — that have gone on to make our culture so weak, decadent and vulnerable to destruction by more iron-willed invaders.
This was, of course, exactly what influential campus thinkers of the time such as German-born cultural Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse wanted. For them, free love, female emancipation, black empowerment, the groovy rejection of authority and pursuit of the self — all sugar-coated with a great soundtrack and lashings of lovely psychotropics — were really just a means to an end: the death of the family, the dismantling of the system, and, ultimately the destruction of western civilisation.
James Delingpole, “Hippies gave us wonderful things, but they left an evil legacy too”, The Spectator, 2017-06-10.
July 5, 2019
QotD: The paradox of tolerance
This is now referred to as “the paradox of tolerance.”
Popper argues that unlimited tolerance is self-defeating. If a tolerant society is tolerant of the intolerant, the intolerant will defeat the tolerant. Therefore, tolerance is all well and good, but to defend itself, it must maintain a certain degree of intolerance towards the intolerant.
It it this defense of intolerance that radicals use to justify violence against their political opponents.
If one dares to question the legitimacy of “direct action” from communist groups against their political opponents, these groups will quickly cite this paradox of tolerance. When fascists are shooting up mosques and synagogues, it’s difficult to defend them against mere milkshakes.
Which is why the paradox of tolerance is constantly brought up to defend violence: It’s hard to argue against. Only the most strict pacifist will argue against violence in (the name of) self-defense. Karl Popper was right to point out that a tolerant society that is tolerant toward its enemies will be destroyed.
Nathan Kreider, “Misconceptions of the Paradox of Tolerance”, Being Libertarian, 2019-05-31.
July 3, 2019
Canada’s “elite”
Jay Currie responded to a CBC article on a recent poll that found “nearly 80 per cent of Canadians either strongly or somewhat agree with the statement: ‘My country is divided between ordinary people and elites’.”
The CBC interviewee, Tony Laino, at Fordfest, said describing elites, “Those that think they’re better than me,” he said. “Because I don’t espouse their beliefs.”
Which misses the point. Elites really don’t think of guys like Tony Laino at all. Largely because, as Charles Murray points out in Coming Apart, the new upper class rarely, if ever, meets the Tony Lainos of the world. Murray was writing about white people in America but much the same social bi-furcation is taking place in Canada. Murray looks at education, wealth, marriage, access and what he refers to as the rise of the super-zips, areas where highly educated, well connected, well off people live with others of their class and kind. It is an accelerating phenomenon in the US and it is plainly visible in Canada. Murray quotes Robert Reich as calling this, “the segregation of the successful”.
Inside elite communities “the issues” look very different than they do in the more pedestrian parts of the country. A few pennies extra for gas or heating oil or natural gas to fight the universally acknowledged menace of “climate change” makes perfect sense if your income is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. It is downright terrifying if you are making $50K. Only bigots and racists could be anti-imigration when you, yourself, live in virtually all white, old stock, Canadian enclaves and welcome refugees and migrants who you will never see.
The populist moment has not yet come to Canada and, if Andrew Scheer’s brand of Liberal lite wins in October, there will probably be another decade of elite consolidation before a proper populist movement gets off the ground. Whether it will be right populism a la Trump and Farange, or left populism with a firebrand NDP leader, is hard to say. However, as the Canadian elite grows more insular and disconnected from the ordinary life of Canada and Canadians, that populist moment draws closer.
June 29, 2019
Ancient Rome in 20 minutes
Arzamas
Published on 30 May 2017Caesar, The Colosseum, Republic, Nero, geese, plebeians, legions – everything that you once knew, but forgot, in a crash course video by Arzamas.
Narrated by Brian Cox.
“Ancient Rome in 20 minutes” is a Russian version of a Russian video by Arzamas.
June 25, 2019
QotD: Perpetual adolescence
SENATOR BEN SASSE: Yes, so this book is 100 percent not about politics, and it’s 99 percent not about policy. It’s about this new category of perpetual adolescence. And, first, let’s just say that, over the last two millennia or so, the emergence of a category called adolescence is a pretty special gift. We believe that, when our kids become biological adults, when they hit puberty, they don’t have to be fully formed, morally, emotionally, economically, educationally, in terms of household structure. They don’t have to go out and be fully adult immediately. They don’t have to go off to war, and they don’t have to become economically self-sufficient. That’s glorious, to have that protected space between childhood and adulthood. But it’s only glorious if you understand that it’s a transitional state, it’s a means to an end. Peter Pan’s Neverland is a hell. It’s a dystopia. And we don’t want to be — have our kids caught at a place where they’re not learning how to be adults. And, right now, we’re not tending to the habit formation aspects of a republic.
“Face the Nation transcript, May 14, 2017: Schiff, Sasse, Gates”, CBS News, 2017-05-14.
June 22, 2019
QotD: Militant Islam and the arts
Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.
June 14, 2019
QotD: Kink-shaming
And now sexual perverts (among whom, on occasion, I happily count myself) are the latest group to demand “inclusion”. Please! When I was young, we thought nothing more desirable than being An Outsider – why are the young of today so obsessed with getting a tick on the register, rather than playing hooky? There is a happy place between believing that no one should be excluded on the basis of race, sex or social class, and believing that official validation of every life choice any person freely makes are the same. Someone who likes dressing up in a gimp mask is not Rosa Parks, and I find the increasing lack of ability to differentiate between the two in some quarters highly risible at best and downright insulting at worst.
The latest snowflake flutter is “Don’t kink-shame me!”. At a Vancouver university last year, a man insisting he was an “adult baby” pestered a university nurse to change his dirty nappy and perved over his repulsed female classmates. A whistle-blowing workplace-safety director was sacked for standing up for the women. In Wolverhampton a few months back, a tattooist calling himself “Dr Evil” was charged with grievous bodily harm after slicing ears and nipples from paying customers. He was reported as having support from “the body-modification community” who set up a petition in his favour.
Perhaps the most gobsmacking illustration of how mainstream perversion has become is a photograph of a Pride march showing a gaggle of kiddies (whose parents obviously got the memo that Pride is family-friendly) staring in what looks like confused repulsion at a man in front of them who leads a group of men, crawling on all fours and dressed as dogs, on leashes. Personally, I don’t think Pride needs to be family-friendly – it’s about the very adult desire to connect your genitalia to the genitalia of the same sex, which is pretty specific. But neither is it about kinks. Considering its origins, lesbians have far more right to be there than men who pretend to be dogs at weekends. Lesbians are now routinely removed from Pride marches by police due to their insistence that lesbians don’t have penises and the hurty feelz this causes in people who believe they can and do.
I’m a broad-minded broad, so I’m not offended by these people – but I do despise them for being so wimpy that they need their kink validated by straight society. When did perverts start being ashamed to be perverts and need to be a community? “Community” used to be such a jolly word, redolent of cheery singing or a nice place to land on the Monopoly board. Now it just means a bunch of whiners whining about stuff.
Julie Burchill, “The pervert community? Oh please”, Spiked!, 2019-05-08
June 13, 2019
American anarchism
Not all anarchists are bomb-throwers, as Christopher Schwarz explains:
The idea of pairing anarchism and design work seems – on its face – to be a ridiculous marriage. After all, design is about creating things from scratch, and anarchism is about burning everything down, right?
Well, no. Anarchism – particularly the American flavor of it – is woefully simplified and misunderstood by people on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. The truth is that most of the furniture designers and graphic designers I’ve worked with in my career possess strong anarchistic tendencies. They just don’t know what to call their urges and beliefs.
I’ve been an aesthetic anarchist for more than 25 years, after first encountering the concept in graduate school (thanks Noam Chomsky), then observing one of my cousins, Jessamyn West, an anarchist librarian. There’s a chance you might be one, too. And while I’m certain that you probably should be working on something far more pressing and billable for work at McCorp, reading this short article isn’t going to hurt anything….
The face of American anarchism. Josiah Warren is considered the father of American anarchism. Among his many accomplishments was the founding of the Cincinnati Time Store, where you traded your labor for goods. No money.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.The Briefest Description Ever of American Anarchism
America’s individualist anarchism is not about the violent overthrow of the government and its institutions. Period. Full stop. Instead, it is a tendency to eschew the enormous organizations – churches, states and corporations – that we have created during the last 250 years.
Why do this? While working with others is generally a good thing, there is some threshold upon which an organization becomes so large that it is capable of inhumane behavior – war, slavery, environmental destruction, mass extinctions or even just failing to treat its employees and contractors fairly. These are things that individuals are (mostly) incapable of accomplishing.
Anarchists like myself avoid working with these massive and dehumanizing institutions. I don’t want to burn them down, but I also don’t want to prop them up by shopping in their stores, praying in their cathedrals or voting in their elections.
That doesn’t mean I’m opposed to making money, that I’m an atheist or that I’m uninvolved in my community. I just decline to work, pray and serve others via these institutions. Working with them gives them power, while working with the family architectural firm a few blocks away helps your neighbors in every way imaginable.
Americans “don’t really believe in foreigners”
A few days back, Sarah Hoyt wrote a long post about the actual differences between American culture and the many different cultures that most Americans have difficulty understanding:
I don’t think anyone who hasn’t actually acculturated between two countries understands how different cultures can be, deep down, at the bone level and the most basic reactions level, let alone what causes the difference, from inherited influences to just deep built in assumptions about climate/physical plant/fauna.
And some of the people who have acculturated, at that, might not be self-aware enough to see the difference, and just replace one set of assumptions with another and roll with it. (Or get caught somewhere between. Well, to some extent we all get caught somewhere between. The question is, what percentage is in the new country. I’d say for me, after being in Portugal recently, probably 95% American. There are things trained in before the age of 3 which I’ll never let go of, though some got truly weird with the acculturation, like how I react to “shame.”)
That experience this weekend was the “clicking in” of something that’s been bothering me for a long time. In our writers’ group I used to run across people who projected modern AMERICAN female back into the time of pharaohs. One of my best friends refused to believe me when I told her there was zero chance of an alien race having the same university system as the US since even Portugal (avowedly human) doesn’t. There were other things. You guys have heard me rant about several “historical” books that make the past exactly like the future only with different tech. The fact that they don’t understand that tech affects not just how people live but how they think, feel and react is another of those things I don’t get, as I think even within living memory we should be able to see how different things have gotten. See for instance not wearing of aprons, because the clothes are cheap enough and abundant enough that ruining a shirt is not a big deal, unless it’s a very good shirt.
Technological shifts in living memory have made ordinary life from before the new technology (like cheap, dependable cell phones) almost unimaginable. How many movies and TV shows from before the mobile phone became widely available depended as a plot point on the characters being unable to communicate with one another at key moments? Many mystery novels of the pre-mobile-phone era probably make no sense at all to modern readers because instant communication has become “baked in” to our world.
The clothing aspect has been less obviously important, yet only a couple of generations back, most people owned perhaps three changes of clothing, including one “good” suit/dress for church-going or special occasions. We’ve become so wealthy as a culture that almost everyone has more than enough clothes for any imagined need … although church-going has become almost exotic to urban and even suburban folks, and formal attire is becoming more and more rare. (But everyone has more T-shirts and shorts than they know what to do with.)
But until this weekend I didn’t realize how prevalent and universal it is, since the clash took place between two people from native anglophone cultures, both of which are denizens of the net and contact people of other countries, regularly. Okay, one of them didn’t know she was dealing with a foreigner […] This weekend I realized people don’t really believe in foreign countries either. They’re willing to accept that some things (and those usually conform to their mental picture of the generic “culture” or “region”) are different, but that the fundamentals and the cherished unexamined assumptions might be different is unthinkable — literally. And if we can think of them, we still assume the other country is somehow “wrong” or worse “pretending” to be different to be contrary.
This means, ultimately, that even an era of instant all over the world communication, human tribalism still wins. And with it, I suppose, nationalism.
The wave of populism in the west that has taken the establishment and the mainstream media by surprise is a predictable response to the globalist attitudes of the elites. If you work hard enough at it, you can provoke unpleasant responses from those who don’t agree with your worldview, and the transnational elites have been working very hard indeed.
There are other implications: since it’s virtually impossible to avoid faster communication and more widespread travel in the future, this is going to make the next couple/three centuries a series of epic clashes, until either some sort of understanding emerges or polarized cultures can immigrate to the stars and far far away from each other.
Mass immigration is a REALLY bad idea (‘mkay) not that this is a surprise to any of you. People inhabiting enclaves of “their kind” are slow to acculturate (three generations, if it happens at all.) And the number of people coming over the Southern border is like nothing we’ve ever experienced before. And trust me, in terms of functionality, you do NOT want to import any culture descended from 17th century Spain. There is a reason that the American countries South of us are in crisis on a more or less permanent basis, and that Brazil, screwed up though it is, is more functional than the others. No, just no.
I’m certainly not against immigration, but I strongly believe it is possible to have too much immigration, as Europe and the United States are being forced to confront. When people leave their native land to go somewhere else, be it for economic or political reasons, there’s a natural expectation that they will at least attempt to acculturate to their new country. To western elites, this is wrong (or at least, misguided) and “we” should encourage new immigrants to avoid acculturation and to embrace and celebrate the culture they came from. Because reasons. And a lot of immigrants are happy to avoid the hard work of learning how to fit in to the foreign culture they find themselves in — and it is hard work — leading to second or third generations who still can’t or won’t fit in and adapt to the culture.
Let me just say that is one more proof of “people don’t really believe in foreigners.”
Sure, a lot of American culture is triumphant and imitated. Only it’s more “spoofed” because what they imitate is what they see in movies, and proving that humans prefer narrative to lack there of, even when it makes no sense, the bad parts are often picked up first. And they’re often bad parts only seen in movies, btw. Like certain underclass behaviors being seen as glamorous.
But it’s an overlay. At a deep down level, these people dressing in jeans and t-shirts are still foreign and — THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT — don’t believe Americans software-in-the-head is different, which leads to cargo-cultish attempts to import American successes without getting what brings them about, from innovation, to social mobility to freedom of speech. Not really, not at a deep level.
[…]
This means the left’s project of “fighting nationalism” is not just doomed, but it’s stupid as eating rocks, and will cause only unending misery suffering and war. (So, SOP for Marxists. In fact, chalk this whole internationalism bullshit as something else Marx was wrong about. Workers of the world unite, my little sore feet.)
May 31, 2019
Basil Fawlty’s “John Cleese” moment
Renowned English comedian Basil Fawlty had a thinko the other day when he (accidentally?) tweeted in the character of noted racist, sexist, white supremacist, homophobe, transphobe, neo-Nazi, etc., etc., “John Cleese”:
Some years ago I opined that London was not really an English city any more
Since then, virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation
So there must be some truth in it…
I note also that London was the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU
— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 29, 2019
Arthur Chrenkoff somehow mistakes the actor for his character (because no real life person like “John Cleese” could possibly exist in post-Cool Brittania, could they?).
As you can imagine, this sentiment didn’t go down very well. The mayor of London, Saddiq Khan, tweeted back “These comments make John Cleese sound like he’s in character as Basil Fawlty. Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength. We are proudly the English capital, a European city and a global hub.” Don’t mention the culture war, I guess. Needless to say, various other worthies have joined in to chide Cleese, including questioning what is Englishness anyway?
That’s a good question. Cleese no doubt had in mind the ethnic English, or people who come from the Anglo-Saxon or at least the Anglo-Celtic stock and heritage, who for the great majority of the past millennium and more have constituted the great, if not the overwhelming, majority of the inhabitants of England, and who, again over the course of centuries, have created what we know and understand as the English culture, tradition and institutions. Yes, there have always been migrants arriving and contributing to the mix – Normans, French Huguenots, Jews – but they have been relatively small in number and by and large ethnically and culturally similar. But Cleese’s definition is increasingly at odds with the post-nation state view of belonging. As TV presenter Anila Chowdhry replied to the Monty Python alumnus, “John Cleese, your comment is not only ironic as you live in the Caribbean, but it fails to recognise the benefits of multiculturalism AND that people of different colour in London may actually be English too! I was born & bred in England. I’m brown, English & proud. #ThisIsMyHome”, which of course can be true too, if anything as a legal and cultural matter. This is also coincidentally while it is easier to “become” an American or an Australian or another -an of one of the historically migrant countries where the “-anness” is built on shared civic ideas rather than ethnicity.
(For the record, over 40 per cent of London residents have been born overseas, which is one of the highest proportions in the world, and if you consider major cities, over one million in population, only Toronto, Sydney and Melbourne have more first-generation migrants. Whatever you think, and whatever you think of it, the London of today is certainly not the London of Cleese’s childhood or even his middle age.)
May 30, 2019
QotD: Wahhabism and the West
“You’re right,” he says, “it shouldn’t be different for Islam, but we make it different. Muslims fought for king and empire in both world wars. Muslims were the backbone of the Indian army. Ataturk’s Turkey was an example of Muslims functioning perfectly well in a modern democratic society — but Ataturk’s Turkey is going away. We don’t have that trust any more. It was a Wahhabi who assassinated the chief justice in British India, and that is more or less the only brand of Islam exported today — extremist Saudi-style Wahhabism. All these giant mosques you see going up in cities all over the world are not paid for locally, they’re paid for by Saudi Arabia. They’re trying to make it one-size-fits-all Islam, and a type of Islam that regards the West as its enemy, instead of the mom-and-pop Islam of the past.”
So you’re saying the problem is not Islam, the problem is Wahhabism?
“No! Wahhabism is the symptom. The problem is us. We don’t defend ourselves. If you are a woman living alone in a Muslim community in Europe, you do not venture out after 6 p.m. If there are sexual assaults by Muslims, and the allegations are made public by the victims, the accuser is inevitably accused of racism. Nobody disputes that it happened, but they’re held to a different standard because the victims are Swedes or Danes and the accused is from a Muslim country. It’s believed that it’s unreasonable to expect decent behaviour from an Afghan or an Iraqi — which is racist. You’re denying the humanity of these people. And so you surrender incrementally. You live in a citadel. You make ridiculous changes to your own culture. In Britain the banks don’t give piggy banks to children any more, because the “piggy” might be offensive. There’s a fetishisation of the burka, which should be regarded as what it is — a prison for women. Why should we abandon our own heritage to barbarism? I’m a nineteenth-century imperialist a hundred years past my sell-by date.”
Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.
May 24, 2019
QotD: Politics and culture
… sometimes Mark Steyn seems like the only conservative you can discuss these issues with, because most Republicans think popular culture is beside the point, if not downright dangerous. Steyn, on the other hand, has performed “Kung Fu Fighting” before thousands of people in civic auditoria more accustomed to Mary Kay Cosmetics conventions, so he gets it.
“Social conservatives are always editing pop culture,” says Steyn, “and it’s completely pathetic. Conservatives play to the caricature. Mention a French movie and the crowd turns on you. It’s a reductive view of the world. There are ideological enforcers casting aside works of art because they contain bad words or uncomfortable associations. It’s one of the biggest abdications of the American right. Who gives a crap about who gets elected to the Congressional district in Ohio? — that’s not going to change the culture. It’s movies that move the culture. And if you abdicate that space, you lose. Jeb Bush spent a billion dollars to get 2.8 per cent of the vote in Iowa. Mitt Romney and people like him who have a billion dollars — don’t spend it on politics, buy a TV network! Theatre, movies, music, that’s where the battles are fought. They’ve abdicated that space in the schools. As a result, my kid had to sit through Al Gore’s lousy movie three times. All effective storytelling is inherently conservative — because your choices have consequences. For the Left, nothing has consequences. But the trends are all in the Left’s direction, because the Right got out of the game — they chose to make themselves culturally irrelevant. If you’re not in the same room, having the conversation, there’s not gonna be a solution.”
Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.
May 23, 2019
Those “theories of history”
At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian starts off talking great-man versus vast-impersonal-forces-of-history then segues into passivity (not Severian’s, but the widespread use of the passive voice):
Lionel Royer (1852-1926). Vercingetorix jette ses armes aux pieds de Jules César (Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar)
The painting depicts the surrender of the Gallic chieftain after the Battle of Alesia (52 BC). The depiction of Gauls with long hair and mustaches is also called into question today. The horse is a Percheron, although at this time this breed was not in Gaul. The rectangular shield also does not accord with the time when they were mostly oval.
Musée CROZATIER du Puy-en-Velay. — http://www.mairie-le-puy-en-velay.fr/ via Wikimedia Commons.
Academics, of course, are all in on “social” explanations of historical phenomena. Being weak, ineffective people themselves, with no experience of life, the very idea of a Caesar frightens and repels them… so they construct theories of History in which it is impossible for a Caesar to exist. On this view, “social forces” (what they used to call “the relations of the means of production”) tore the Roman Republic apart; the Empire was its inevitable next stage. Assign whatever name you like to the Imperator — whether Caesar, Marius, Sulla, or Miles Gloriosus, he’s just the temporary face of the vast, impersonal social forces that control our fate. None of this “History is just the biographies of great men” for them!
The eggheads have a point, though, albeit not the one they think they’re making. The Roman elite’s social system was designed to produce a certain type of man. Whether Gaius Julius Caesar was personally the embodiment of that system, or a perversion of it, is irrelevant — the system was designed to produce men like Caesar, fellows with a very particular set of skills. Eggheads have never seen one, but anyone who has kicked around the world outside the ivory tower for a bit has met that type of guy. The skills themselves are fairly common, at least in embryo. Whether a potential Caesar becomes actual might well be merely a question of opportunity and scale.
A terrifying notion, that, when you look around the modern West. The one characteristic all effective elites have in common is the self-knowledge that they are the elite. The British, for instance, thought nothing of sending some 19 year old kid, whose slim formal education was mostly Latin and Greek, off to govern the Punjab. It worked, largely because that kid, whatever his defects of intellect and ability, had character, of the kind you just don’t get without a pedigree stretching back to Hastings.
Again, if you’ve ever met one of the horsey set you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, the most accessible American equivalents are the sons and grandsons of career army officers. Think of Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, as played by Gary Sinise in the movie. That kind of guy always completes the mission, or dies trying, because it’s simply unthinkable that he won’t. After five generations, West Point is in his DNA…
