The Monthly Salon: May

Come and start a conversation

Hello everyone. Welcome to the monthly salon, where readers start the conversation. As ever, the floor is yours. Bring to it anything you want to talk about.

While I’m here, I’ll highlight a few things that have interested me, and might interest you:

• I recently appeared on Rhyd Wildermuth’s podcast The Re/A/Lign. Rhyd is a pagan and I am a Christian, but despite that - or, in fact, probably because of it - we had a very interesting conversation, about nature, politics, faith and the insanity of modernity. Oh, and smoking.

• Ed West writes on his Substack about the politically-driven erasure of the Anglo-Saxons from English history, and how this represents not ‘decolonisation’ but colonisation. I wrote about this wider phenomenon last year here.

• Louise Perry predicts the eventual end of gender wokeness (curiously enough, people promoting radical queerness and gender fluidity tend not to have big families which will sustain their culture) but also predicts the continuing rise of racial wokeness - potentially a much more dangerous phenomenon.

• Meanwhile, in a piece that chimes well with my recent essay on asceticism in the age of the Machine, Mary Harrington writes at Unherd about the West as a society in constant rebellion, and how this applies to the invention of the ‘teenager.’ I’m not convinced by her conclusion, but as ever the substance is solid.

• The Book of Ptah is a new Substack I have just discovered, and it’s a lovely breaking of the mould. Not just another Western semi-intellectual type talking about big concepts (I plead guilty), its author, Ashutosh Joshi, is a young Indian man who writes movingly about life in a very traditional Indian village, and how it is changing as the world does. See this post, for example, about how the villagers deal with modern technology and wild buffalo all in one day.

That’s enough for now. Enjoy the spring, and talk away.