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UnHerd picks: July’s best Substacks

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July 31, 2021 - 7:15am

July was a month that saw an enormous row about race and social media as England lost the final of Euro 2020, the return of mask mandates in the United States, and the “pingdemic.” These have been the headline making events that British newspapers have dutifully recorded.

But elsewhere — especially in the expanding digital ecosystem of Substack — writers and journalists less tethered to the news cycle have been following their own interests, and producing superb work. Over the course of the month, UnHerd staff collected some of the best new writing.

Essayist Wesley Yang began his deep-dive into what lazier writers call wokeness, and what he calls the successor ideology:

This Substack will describe the ideological fever that overtook the governing and chattering classes in America during the Trump years. Its subject is the bourgeois moral revolution, many decades in the making, that flowered at the midpoint of the decade, composed in equal measure of new political propositions, new moral premises, and new psychological underpinnings, in pursuit of what it declares to be “social justice”. It will excavate the historical lineage of the diffuse and decentralised movement behind this ideology, chronicle its unfolding, and reflect on the consequences likely to flow from it.
- Wesley Yang, Substack

What happened to culture? The critic Angela Nagle wondered whether the impermanence of globalisation has removed the preconditions that allowed great works of art to flourish. She writes:

The afterglow of what ever it was that made us create culture seems to have been finally extinguished. The financial models of the institutions that used to create popular culture still exist and so movies, books, clothes are still being made but they’re artistically dead and there is no organic audience or excitement about them. The standards have plummeted. I imagine one of the reasons nobody seems to be admitting this is that the people who are in the business of producing culture or writing about it or facilitating it in some way would be putting themselves out of work in the industries that remain.
- Angela Nagle, Substack

N.S. Lyons considered the rise of China as the foremost ‘megatrend’ of our time. What does China really want? Lyons knows it’s a silly question — but recognises that China’s leaders have been answering it for years. They call it the ‘China Dream’:

Xi’s was lauding himself for progress made toward his signature personal political slogan: the “China Dream” of achieving “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” He had revealed the slogan in 2012 during a visit to a “Century of Humiliation” exhibit at the National Museum of China, but he was hardly the first to come up with the idea. Indeed, in doing so, Xi encapsulated a far-reaching answer to the question of “what China wants” that transcends his personal ambitions, or even those of the ruling CCP regime.
- N.S. Lyons, Substack

Elsewhere, Freddie de Boer wrote about the new Gawker — a gossip blog with nothing to gossip about. Henry Oliver examined the career a forgotten Prime Minister — Andrew Bonar Law — a complicated, effective politician, who brought Britain to the edge of civil unrest with his remarks in support of Ulster Unionism. And the philosopher Justin E.H. Smith critiqued liberal ideas about speech and violence under digital conditions:

Older liberals are mistaken to carry their inherited ideas about free speech vs. real-world harm, about words vs. sticks-and-stones, over to this revolutionary new engine. Social-media discourse is no more an ordinary exercise in free speech than modern industrial slaughter of cattle is a sacrifice in some ancient temple. The industrialization of discourse —for that is what social media have brought about— will inevitably, like earlier instances of industrialization, generate new waste products that will be difficult to contain and that will bring about real-world harms.
- Justin E.H. Smith, Substack

Abigail Shrier celebrated the British feminists — from Maya Forstater to J.K. Rowling — who have struggled for open debate and a calmer examination of the facts around  sex and gender issues. Simon Sarris wrote a defence of religion in a world dominated by rationalism, particularly in art and architecture. And the novelist Walter Kirn delivered a searing critique of the mainstream media:

Every morning, there it is, waiting for me on my phone. The bullshit. It resembles, in its use of phrases such as “knowledgeable sources” and “experts differ,” what I used to think of as the news, but it isn’t the news and it hasn’t been for ages. It consists of its decomposed remains in a news-shaped coffin. It does impart information, strictly speaking, but not always information about our world. Or not good information, because it’s so often wrong, particularly on matters of great import and invariably to the advantage of the same interests, which suggests it should be presumed wrong as a rule. The information it imparts, if one bothers to sift through it, is information about itself; about the purposes, beliefs, and loyalties of those who produce it: the informing class. They’re not the ruling class — not quite — but often they’re married to it or share therapists or drink with it at Yale Bowl football games. They’re cozy, these tribal cousins. They cavort. They always have. What has changed is that the press used to maintain certain boundaries in the relationship, observing the incest taboo. It kept its pants zipped, at least in public. It didn’t hire ex-CIA directors, top FBI men, NSA brass, or other past and future sources to sit beside its anchors at spot-lit news-desks that blocked our view of their lower extremities. But it gave in.
- Walter Kirn, Substack

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Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago

This is the cream of the crop? I guess I am glad I never heard of substack, seems like a real wan* fest of dancing around ideas and concepts they cannot quite figure out well enough to express.

“The afterglow of what ever it was that made us create culture seems to have been finally extinguished. The financial models of the institutions that used to create popular culture still exist and so movies, books, clothes are still being made but they’re artistically dead”

This is so obviously because morality has been replaced by correctness. Morality gave truth, it was Right / Wrong, morality gave solid ground to work from, a foundation to build on. The flexible codes of honour, situational ethics, and moral relativity mean art is dead, it has no ability to find truth. “”Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”” Picasso said, Lies, like truth, have been killed by Liberalism, all is merely grey, all is merely more correct or less correct. With no ultimate standards there is no meaning.

Really the same can be said of the Yeats thing on art “‘”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Beauty is now so degraded and cheapened it no longer gives the basis to build art. Sordid, faked, photo-shopped, CGI, squalid, depravity, degenerate….

Art is dead, beauty and truth dead, killed by Liberalism. Culture is what art mirrors; modern culture is like Dracula looking into a mirror, and seeing nothing there.

chris sullivan
chris sullivan
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

The Dracula analogy is brilliant – and should perhaps replace the emporer’s new clothes !!

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

To My Down Vote person (first vote) sorry, but Liberal ‘High Style writing (and who can forget Waugh’s ‘Scoop’ example so long ago…”“Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.””) leaves me a bit blank, this one exceedingly so:
““Social-media discourse is no more an ordinary exercise in free speech than modern industrial slaughter of cattle is a sacrifice in some ancient temple.
I mean, come on….like what we are doing here – is our slaughter of speech here in a temple or in a abattoir?
“governing and chattering classes in America during the Trump years. Its subject is the bourgeois moral revolution, many decades in the making, that flowered at the midpoint of the decade, composed in equal measure of new political propositions, new moral premises, and new psychological underpinnings , in pursuit of what it declares to be “social justice”.”

This one I stumbled on ‘bourgeois’. I am assuming he is referring to the White Lefty/Liberals, mostly in Academia, Education, Arts, Human Resources, MSM, Entertainment, and Lefty Politics, as well as the student/ post student layabouts who tend to march and be anti West. Well I think those guys are not really bourgeois, as, at least in Marx based Liberalism – bourgeois is the business folk, the Capitalists as it were, tho ones who own the means of production the Proletariat must toil under, sort of like Trump voters. I do not what ‘Collective noun’ would best describe the Liberalgencia, but do not think it is bourgeois.

“It consists of its decomposed remains in a news-shaped coffin.”
I apologize for by first post, I must learn to not take Liberal Essays as more than verbal fun and mood, to not think of them as reporting or arguing on issues, but as literary things.

Hardee Hodges
Hardee Hodges
3 years ago

Substack and Medium have become places for essays often overly long, but often refreshing. The Kim piece was good enough for me to follow him. I do follow several Substacks but not much of the more ideological Medium. Sadly, I don’t seem to find many guides to topics on either platform. I truly do value Alex Berenson on Substack, even more now that Twitter has decided his writings are bad for we plebes.

Su Mac
Su Mac
3 years ago

Read the last quoted Walter Kirn rant in full – absolute gem…