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.
We are battered to have the right opinion on things we have no real understanding of...ancient conflicts, covid vaccines, the constant nudging to be on the correct side of history and do it fast!. And then we discover that what we felt so self righteously convicted about turns out to the opposite. Having a slow, quiet, private life (the way most of us lived for millenia seems to be an indulgence.
By now many of you have seen or at least heard of the disastrous (and since pulled) iPad commercial "Crush," in which a roomful of instruments, paints, a bust and other artifacts of creation are destroyed under a mechanical press, a process which ends with the eyes popping out of a three-dimensional emoji figure. The press then lifts to reveal the new product. (How it can sculpt a bust is beyond me.) As some of the younger people put it, Apple was saying the quiet part out loud, and they were called on it. Big Machine energy there.