Society

A couple of years ago, in high summer, my wife and I attended Mass in St Patrick’s Cathedral, as we do every time we visit New York. It is, in general, a bracing experience for Catholics who have been paddling in the tepid pools of Irish Catholicism. The celebrant, a middle-aged man with the physique and personality of a matinee idol, gave a startling sermon about the gospel of the day, Matthew 10:34, in which Jesus declares, ‘I have come to bring not peace but a sword.’ In his homily, the priest tore into sentimental notions of Christianity and the corruptions of concepts such as compassion and mercy.

Reading Andrew Sullivan reminds me of a Latin tag the novelist Iris Murdoch favored: corruptio optimi pessima: the corruption of the best is the worst. Sullivan is an intelligent and well educated man. He is capable of writing quite movingly about religion, especially about the challenges our media-saturated age — we really are, as T. S. Eliot put it, ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’ — pose to that reservoir of quiet thoughtfulness that any spiritual life worth the name requires. Back in 2012, Sullivan wrote a little paean to St Francis, a well-to-do young man, who sold everything he had and devoted himself to a life of poverty and renunciation, practices that Sullivan described as the ‘core’ of Jesus’s message.

If the Weekly Standard closes down by year’s end, as is widely expected and as Spectator USA first reported, the country will have lost one of its few remaining writer’s magazines. But for most people, the caliber of writing from Andrew Ferguson or Christopher Caldwell or Matt Labash is not what stands out about the Weekly Standard. Its reputation is tied to the Iraq War and to its founding editor’s reinvention of himself as the most acerbic NeverTrumper on Twitter. The latter has led the New York Times and other outlets to blame the closed-mindedness of conservatives toward criticism of Trump for the magazine’s demise.

It is very easy to hate Lena Dunham. Very easy. Trivially easy. There are men and women people find it easier to hate but most of them are lawyers, real estate agents and autocrats. Right-wingers hate her shrill commitment to ‘social justice’, her obsessive fangirling on behalf of Hillary Clinton, her incessant crassness, her habitual nudism and her smearing of an innocent man as a rapist. Left-wingers hate her apparent white privilege, her un-PC comments, her astonishing wealth and her defense of a friend who was accused of rape. The left and the right can bond over their mutual hatred of her ubiquity. ‘In an era of hyperpartisanship,’ said the left-wing writer Sean McElwee, ‘Lena Dunham’s ability to...

‘Your parents would be embarrassed by you,’ a masked woman said as she blocked me from walking into a downtown Portland Plaza. An antifa counter-protest was taking place. Joined by others, a group of black-clad masked individuals surrounded me. ‘You’re an Asian giving into white supremacy, motherfucker,’ one shouted. Why did I, a Vietnamese-American gay journalist, receive this reaction from a self-described anti-racist social justice movement? Because I tried to report honestly on antifa – the far-left movement of communists, socialists, and anarchists who agitate for revolution. Their M.O. is direct confrontation against their opponents by any means necessary, including violence.

The decision by the popular liberal podcast Pod Save America to break ties publicly with Tim Miller – a Republican adviser and Trump skeptic – might not make ripples beyond the beltway. It’s an interesting story nonetheless. In a strangely sanctimonious statement posted on Twitter, Pod’s co-hosts – three ex-Obama staffers – announced they would be dropping Miller, a regular guest, because of his links with the lobbying firm Definers Public Affairs. They 'ultimately found it impossible to square that work with the values of our company’. Definers – for those who missed it – is currently caught up in a media storm regarding some advisory work it had been doing for Facebook.

By now, it’s clear to most American Catholics that our Holy Father just doesn’t like us. While most laypeople assumed his ‘rigidity’ slur was aimed at the legions of young people who are returning to the Latin Mass. Nope: most bishops know he’s talking about the Yanks. He calls the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’s conservative majority, like the saintly and learned Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, right-wing ideologues. His senior advisers accuse Catholic conservatives of engaging in an ‘ecumenism of hate’ with Evangelical Protestants. Sure: Pope Francis cottoned to a few bishops.

So, here’s a proposition — an idea, a notion that might be worth exploring: the computer revolution has saved the small city. Four decades into the digitizing of our lives, some of the unintended and unexpected consequences of computerization are coming clear. And one of those consequences may be the possibilities for success found by some small Midwestern cities. The truly great cities of the nation — New York, Los Angeles — are among the most powerful economic engines ever created. The computer revolution proved to be jet fuel for the economics that brought them out of the doldrums of the 1970s. The large Rust Belt cities — Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit — have either succeeded or failed to find a way out of the collapse of American manufacturing.

Regional inequality is perhaps one of the hardest social issues America faces – the sense that a select few prosperous metropolitan areas increasingly dominate the rest of the country economically, culturally, and politically. Every election, the consequences of this inequality become more evident; it was crucial in electing Donald Trump president in 2016. When Amazon announced last year that it would embark on a mission to find its next headquarters, the (naive) hope was that by spreading around its largesse, some of this inequality could be stemmed. From Birmingham, Alabama to Pittsburgh, cities were teased with the prospect of a once-in-a-lifetime influx of economic stimulus.

Today the Catholic bishops of the United States are in Baltimore to begin their three-day annual general assembly. Security is tight, and protesters are expected outside the conference hotel. Inside, few are making any attempt to pretend that it is business as usual for the Church. Months of scandals have reignited a sexual abuse crisis that many of the bishops hoped they had laid to rest a decade and a half ago. This time, it is the bishops themselves, rather than the rank and file priests, who are in the firing line.

The tech sector, we are forever being told, has a gender problem. Recently, for example, Women in Technology International reported that only a quarter of US information technology workers are women – something which it was quick to claim was a result of ‘unconscious bias’. How else, it invited us to ask ourselves, can the proportion of women in technology be so low when women receive 57 percent of college degrees and nearly half of professional degrees in law, medicine, and the physical sciences? Worse, we are led to think, the bias is inbred in the machines themselves.

The British edition of GQ is 30 years old and, to celebrate its birthday, it is conducting a ‘dissection of masculinity’. I can’t help feeling that’s a bit of a shame – if a men’s magazine won’t celebrate masculinity, who will?  – but fear not. The male gender still has one unapologetic champion – step forward Canadian psychology professor Dr Jordan Peterson – and, as part of this promotional push, GQ sent Helen Lewis to interview him. Those hoping for a re-run of Peterson’s famous encounter with Cathy Newman, the Channel 4 News presenter, will be disappointed. Peterson comes out on top, of course, but Lewis, the deputy editor of the New Statesman, is better prepared than Newman.

As a child, I was fond of a catchy little ditty called ‘I’m An Indian Too’ (‘A Sioux!’) Though she’s 10 years older than me, I wonder whether this ear-worm also stuck in the consciousness of the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, whose claim of Native American descent has recently been rubbished by both a DNA test which revealed her to be around 1/1024th of this persuasion (most of us are more unicorn than this, surely?) and the Cherokee Nation Secretary of State, Chuck Hoskin Jr, who accused Warren of ‘undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.

Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most fascinating is ‘who created woke capitalism?’ For those living in splendid isolation from the mass media: woke capitalism is a description of the ever growing number of corporations that take risky, high-profile stances on social issues. Woke capitalism is Nike’s Kaepernick  campaign. Woke capitalism is Diageo creating limited edition bottles of ‘Jane Walker’ for International Women’s Day. Woke capitalism is a Conde Nast publication coming out with approving features about Karl Marx. Woke Capitalism is a trend rather than a movement. It has heralds rather than theorists. It is akin to a fog, a gas or an atmosphere.

Cockburn still takes the Sunday edition of the New York Times. He has two cats, and all those extra sections make excellent liners for the litter tray. Perhaps this is what people mean when they say that you have to hold your nose when you read the Times. The Times may have closed the curtains on the question of Nikki Haley’s window dressings, but its writers still cannot be trusted. Is it from malice or ignorance? Or a cocktail of the two, in which the presumption of virtue overrides the responsibility to check the facts?

Modern tyrants have always looked to antiquity for models of how to exercise and display their power. For Joseph Stalin self-improvement did not mean listening to more audiobooks or enrolling in bi-weekly meditation classes. A lifelong bookworm who kept improbably long office hours, Stalin enjoyed reading about Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible. Yet the most heavily annotated work in his 20,000 volume library was an account of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire by his favourite historian, Robert Vipper. The terrible, godlike power of the Caesars was something he could relate to. Adolf Hitler, taking a more dilettantish route, looked to classical aesthetics in painting, sculpture and architecture to infuse German culture with his ideas about race.

The South African apartheid state runs down its final morbid years. Enter a young Elon Musk. Like Mozart, Musk was a child prodigy. Unlike Mozart — who was awarded the Order of the Golden Spur by Pope Clement XIV when he was a teenager — Musk had to go to school. Young Elon was not a social success. His mother Maye described him as the ‘youngest and smallest guy in his school’. He was an autodidact who enjoyed reading science-fiction 10 hours a day; a kid who it was almost too obvious to bully. The most traumatic moment came in his early teens. Musk, by this point a skilled enough programmer to make (and sell) video games, was hurled down the stairs by a group of bullies and beaten into unconsciousness.

The Catholic Church is confronting a series of interconnected scandals so shameful that its very survival is threatened. Pope Francis himself is accused of covering up the activities of one of the nastiest sexual predators ever to wear a cardinal’s hat: his close ally Theodore McCarrick, the retired Archbishop of Washington, DC. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI are also implicated; they did nothing, or almost nothing, while McCarrick was seducing every seminarian he could get his hands on. (‘Hide the pretty ones!’ they used to say when he visited seminaries.) Yet powerful cardinals kept quiet and are now suspected of lying their heads off after McCarrick’s crimes were recently made public. McCarrick is the world’s only ex-cardinal.