Monday 5 August, 2024
Director’s cut
I don’t suffer from house envy, but if I did — and had won the lottery — this is the kind of house I’d go for. It’s Cory Lodge, which used to be the residence of the Director of Cambridge University’s Botanic garden (maybe it still is, but given the utilitarianism of university administrations, it could well have been turned into offices). It’s a perfect example of a certain kind of Victorian villa.
In the late 1980s, when I desperately needed a place of my own, I rented a wing of a house of this type and vintage for a year and a half, and it was a lovely, restorative experience. There’s something about this kind of architecture that’s good for the soul.
From 1951 to 1973 John Gilmour was the Director of the Garden and his three daughters gave a nice interview looking back on what it was like growing up in such a lovely home.
Quote of the Day
”The cognitive dissonance the Olympics produces for me: You’re watching these amazing athletes push their bodies to the limits of their abilities, you tear up at the drama and the joy and the excitement and the pain and disappointment of it all, you’re maybe even thinking about what it means to be human and how much intelligence is the result of being an embodied creature… and then every tech company ad wants you to buy into artificial intelligence.”
Austin Kleon
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Vance VP – a parodic adaptation of ABBA’s Dancing Queen about Trump’s running mate .
Some very sharp lyrics reminding listeners that if Trump were to win in November, this Hillbilly elegist will be just “One Big Mac away” from the nuclear button.
Thanks to Timothy Garton Ash, who spotted it first.
Long Read of the Day
The Friedrich Hayek I knew, and what he got right – and wrong
There’s an interesting essay in the New Statesman by John Gray about one of the most enigmatic thinkers of the 20th century. What I hadn’t realised was that Gray actually knew Hayek. The essay is interesting throughout, but particularly good on the relationship between Hayek and Keynes.
The two men had quite different kinds of minds – Keynes’s swift and mobile, with an almost clairvoyant power of entering into the thinking of others; Hayek’s slowly probing, inwardly turned and self-enclosed. They were nonetheless on cordial terms.
Keynes found Hayek rooms in King’s College when the London School of Economics (where Hayek became a professor of economics in 1931) moved to Cambridge for the duration of the Second World War, and for a time the pair shared fire-watching duties on the roof of the college when it was feared that Cambridge might be bombed…
Like many of these Long Reads, it made me want to read something else related to its topic.
(Memo to self: check out Nicholas Wapshott’s book Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics in the University Library this morning.)
Back to the 1930s: Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters
Yesterday’s Observer column:
In How Democracy Ends, his elegant book published after Trump’s election in 2016, David Runciman made a startling point. It was that while the liberal democracy that we take for granted won’t last for ever, it will not fail in ways familiar from the past: no revolutions, no military coups, no breakdowns of social order. It will fail forwards in an unexpected manner. The implication was that people making comparisons to what happened in 1930s Germany were misguided.
But then something changed. Significant sectors of Silicon Valley – which for decades had been a Democrat stronghold – started coming out for Trump. In 2016, Peter Thiel, the contrarian billionaire and co-founder of PayPal, had been the only prominent Valley figure to support Trump, which merely confirmed the fact that he was the region’s statutory maverick. But in the past few weeks, quite a few of the Valley’s big hitters (Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, to name just three) have revealed themselves to be supporters of – and donors to – Trump. Musk has set up and donated to a Republican-aligned political action committee (or Super Pac). On 6 June, the venture capitalist Sacks hosted a $300,000-a-plate fundraising dinner for Trump at his San Francisco mansion. And so on.
Why all this sudden interest in politics?
Books, etc.
John Simpson, the BBC’s veteran Foreign Editor, reviews of Anne Applebaum’s new book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.
Until around 2015, I tended to be moderately positive about the world. There were far more democracies than when I started at the BBC in 1966, I would tell myself, and markedly fewer dictatorships. Africa and Latin America, once host to so many military dictatorships, were now mostly run by elected leaders. The terrible threat of nuclear war had receded. A billion people were being lifted out of poverty. Yes, what Vladimir Putin had done in Crimea in 2014 was worrying, and Xi Jinping was starting to make disturbing speeches about Muslims and Uyghurs; but given that I’d seen Soviet communism melt away across eastern Europe and in Russia itself, I still felt there was reason for optimism.
That pretty much ended in 2016. Brexit damaged the European project, and Donald Trump shook the columns of American leadership. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, based on the completely false assumption that most Ukrainians would welcome the return of Russian domination, and China’s ruthless suppression of political freedom in Hong Kong have darkened the 2020s much as German, Italian and Japanese intervention darkened the 1930s. And the tide of democracy has turned. Elections have so often become shams. Corruption in government has turned into a major global industry. Well-intentioned but indigent governments welcome Chinese cash because no one else will supply it, and pretend not to notice the strings attached – or even welcome them. Populist movements well up in countries that have traditionally been moderate and calm.
And so the kind of neo-Whig version of history, which taught that trade would bring us all closer together and economics would make war impossible, has collapsed…
Good piece. So much for that Neo-Whig interpretation of post-war history.
My commonplace booklet
What’s going on…
”The far right here and in other countries trawl violent and sexual crimes in the hope that they have been committed by migrants or non-whites. Instances are posted on social media and widely shared, often with a sneering reference to the “joys of multiculturalism”. I hardly need to add that when these crimes are the work of white people, the perpetrator’s origins or ethnicity won’t rate a mention. The absolute jackpot crime would be a child sex murder committed by a Muslim asylum seeker who arrived on a boat. This wouldn’t just rate a mention by your unfriendly local social media nazi and a bevy of YouTube influencers but by half a dozen Telegraph columnists and a score of GBNEWS and Talk TV hosts and their guests.
Within hours of the murders for which Axel Rudakabana has been charged – and in the absence of his identification, far right social media decided that they had completed its blame-bingo card. (Note, however, that despite a judge taking the unusual step of having an under-18 suspect named, it has made no difference whatsoever to those rioting in several towns in England.)…
From David Aaronovitch’s Substack.