RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/16/houellebecqs-annihilation-an-unlikely-antidote-to-nihilism/

French master Michel Houellebecq has said that his latest novel, Annihilation, will be his last. If that does prove to be true, his departure will deprive us of a rare literary voice.

There is simply no one quite like Houellebecq. Through his novels he is able to explore the mood of the times, our spiritual malaise, in a way few other writers can. Take his last great succès de scandale – his 2015 novel, Submission. It dramatised the self-induced decline of the West and the rise of Islamism. And it did so by convincingly presenting the seemingly impossible – an Islamist political party assuming governmental power in France – as something entirely predictable and chillingly banal. He painted a picture of a political and cultural elite all too eager to collaborate with and ultimately submit to an Islamist regime.

Submission quickly acquired a tragic poignancy. On 7 January 2015, the exact day the novel was due to be published in France, two French-born Islamist gunmen massacred the staff of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on the grounds it had insulted Islam. Houellebecq suspended all promotional activities and left Paris to lie low.

At the same time, in an echo of the themes of Submission, too few among the French political class were willing to stand up for free speech, a fundamental principle of Western liberal democracies. Instead, they criticised Charlie Hebdo for its mockery of Islam. French prime minister Manuel Valls denounced ‘hatred’ and ‘intolerance’ towards Islam and Muslims. Tellingly, he insisted that ‘France is not Michel Houellebecq’.

We’re now a decade on from the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Houellebecq’s Anéantir, originally published in January 2022, was finally translated into English and published as Annihilation in late 2024.

This delay in publishing the translation is striking. Houellebecq’s previous novel, Serotonin, was published in France in January 2019 and the English translation appeared just months later. Contractual difficulties reportedly played a role in the delay of Annihilation. But it’s hard not to suspect that the increasing provincialisation of the Anglosphere played a role, too. In the 1950s and 1960s, the films of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, or the novels of Françoise Sagan and Marguerite Duras, were part of the culture here as well as in France. Today, the latest French novels or films barely register in the English-speaking world.

As the West struggles against attempts to destroy it from within and without, key lessons in resilience from its Jewish parent can enable both Christianity and civilization to survive.

Western civilization is facing a critical moment. Foreign enemies sensing its weakness are circling. Internally, the West is being consumed by division, decadence, and demoralization. The October 7 attack on Israel presented it with a choice between civilization and barbarism—a challenge the West has failed. But this damaged society is far from lost if it takes advice from an unexpected source. Western culture is based upon Christianity, whose own foundations in turn lie in Judaism. The unique survival of the Jewish people offers both the West and its struggling Christian church, as well as secular people who shun religion, priceless lessons in resilience that they must learn if their culture is to survive.

https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1982181281?

The #1 New York Times and global bestseller from Walter Isaacson—the acclaimed author of Steve Jobs, Einstein: His Life and World, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci—is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating, controversial innovator of modern times. For two years, Isaacson shadowed Elon Musk as he executed his vision for electric vehicles at Tesla, space exploration with SpaceX, the AI revolution, and the takeover of Twitter and its conversion to X. The result is the definitive portrait of the mercurial pioneer that offers clues to his political instincts, future ambitions, and overall worldview.

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.

At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” he said.

It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.

For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?

https://www.afterbabel.com/ac

There were a few prophets warning us that we should be cautious about moving so much of our social and intellectual lives onto computers and later phones. Among the greatest of them was Nicholas Carr, who wrote an article in The Atlantic in 2008 titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”– Jon Haidt

“Society is formed and sustained through acts of communication — through people talking with each other — and that simple fact has led us to see communication as a powerful moral force in human affairs. Self-expression is good, we tell ourselves, and it’s good to hear what others have to say. The more we’re able to converse, to share our thoughts, opinions, and experiences, the better we’ll understand one another and the more harmonious society will become. If communication is good, more communication must be better.

But what if that’s wrong? What if communication, when its speed and volume are amped up too far, turns into a destructive force rather than a constructive one? What if too much communication breeds misunderstanding rather than understanding, mistrust rather than trust, strife rather than harmony?

Those uncomfortable questions lie at the heart of my new book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. Drawing evidence from history, psychology, and sociology, I argue that our rush to use ever more powerful online media technologies to ratchet up the efficiency of communication has been reckless. Even as the unremitting flow of words and images seizes our attention, it overwhelms the sense-making and emotion-regulating capacities of the human nervous system.

The ill effects ripple through the lives of everyone today, adults as well as kids, and they’re warping relationships at both the personal and the societal level. With social media, we have constructed a hyperkinetic machine for communication that is more likely to bring out the worst in us than the best.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/27/holocaust-envy/

To mark Holocaust Memorial Day, we are publishing this chapter from Brendan O’Neill’s book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation.

One of the most striking things in the aftermath of 7 October was the silence of the fascism-spotters. You know these people. They’re the centrists and liberals who see fascism everywhere. Who think everything is ‘like the 1930s’. The vote for Brexit, Donald Trump, the rise of populist parties in Europe – all of it reminds them of the Nazi years. And yet when the Islamofascists of Hamas stormed the Jewish State and butchered a thousand Jews, suddenly they went quiet. No more Nazi talk. No more trembling warnings of a return to ‘the dark days of the 1930s’. No more handwringing over ‘new Hitlers’. It seems that to a certain kind of liberal, everything is fascism except fascism.

These are the people who lapped up Guardian articles with headlines like ‘The reich stuff’, exploring the supposed ‘comparisons between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler’. They’re the people who will have nodded in vigorous agreement when a spokesperson for Joe Biden slammed Trump for parroting ‘the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler’. They’re the folk who no doubt permitted themselves a chuckle when it was revealed that Biden staffers refer to Trump as ‘Hitler pig’ behind closed doors. They’re the self-styled ‘vigilant’ members of respectable society who will have cheered when Biden described Trumpism as a ‘semi-fascism’ that threatens the ‘soul’ of the free world.

They’re the pro-EU middle classes who fretted over the vote for Brexit, viewing it as a ‘return to the 1930s’. They’re the broadsheet readers who will have murmured in agreement with headlines saying there are ‘terrifying parallels between Brexit and the appeasement of Hitler’. They’re the royalty-sceptics who will have found themselves in agreement with princes for once when Charles, then Prince of Wales, said populism has ‘deeply disturbing echoes of the dark days of the 1930s’. They’re the weekend marchers who will have attended anti-Trump demos at which people waved placards showing Trump with a Hitler tache, and anti-Brexit protests at which speakers issued dire warnings about our descent into Hitlerite mania.

There was a time when you couldn’t open a newspaper or peruse social media without seeing some pained liberal hold forth on how populism will drag us back to the death camps. Fascism panic was the fashion of the day. And then it stopped. In the wake of the 7 October pogrom – the worst act of slaughter against the Jews since that period of the mid-20th century these people love talking about – their fascism chatter evaporated. In fact, they started warning people not to use Nazi analogies. Not to compare 7 October to the 1930s. Not to engage in the very fascism fretting that had been the bread and butter of their own political commentary for years.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/destroying-legal-education/

As Donald Trump begins his second term as president with a mandate to undo the damage done to the country by leftist ideology, incompetence, and corruption, one of the many stables that most need cleaning up is academia – which is, of course, the source of virtually all of the most misbegotten ideas that have sent America astray.

To be sure, some parts of academia are more desperately in need of reform than others. As a rule, the elite universities, especially those in the Ivy League, are more poisoned by the new progressivism than most state schools, especially those in the heartland. Humanities and social science departments are worse off than STEM departments. And as Ilya Shapiro points out in his important new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elite, the introduction of woke thinking into law schools is singularly damaging.

Yes, writes Shapiro, it’s unfortunate enough if, say, a sociology faculty is selling ideology rather than fact, for it represents “a loss to the richness of life and the accumulation of human knowledge.” But for a law school to head down the same road is far more perilous. For these schools turn out the lawyers, politicians, and judges who will serve as “the gatekeepers of our institutions and of the rules of the game on which American prosperity, liberty, and equality sit.”

And the sad fact, alas, is that in too many American law schools today, a preponderance of students are the products of classrooms in which, as Shapiro puts it, “the classical pedagogical model of legal education” has been abandoned in favor of “the postmodern activist one” – a process that has been underway for decades but that was greatly accelerated during the Covid pandemic and in the wake of the irrational nationwide hysteria over the killing of George Floyd. Hence those students swallow such dangerous notions as critical race theory and its corollary, critical legal theory, and therefore believe that colorblind justice, due process, and freedom of speech aren’t desiderata but tools of  white supremacy.

Lawless has its roots in Shapiro’s own hellish encounter with this ideological leviathan. It happened like this: on January 26, 2022, the day that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, Shapiro tweeted that the “best pick” for a replacement was Sri Srinivasan, who, if appointed by President Biden, would be the “first Asian (Indian) American” on the Court. Yet because Biden had promised to name a black woman, lamented Shapiro, “we’ll get [a] lesser black woman.” After sending off the tweet, Shapiro went to bed – and awoke in the morning to discover that his comment had caused pandemonium in the legal community, where he was being viciously attacked as a racist and a sexist. Shapiro immediately deleted the tweet and issued an apology for expressing his opinion in such an “inartful” manner.

As the West struggles against attempts to destroy it from within and without, key lessons in resilience from its Jewish parent can enable both Christianity and civilization to survive.

Western civilization is facing a critical moment. Foreign enemies sensing its weakness are circling. Internally, the West is being consumed by division, decadence, and demoralization. The October 7 attack on Israel presented it with a choice between civilization and barbarism—a challenge the West has failed. But this damaged society is far from lost if it takes advice from an unexpected source. Western culture is based upon Christianity, whose own foundations in turn lie in Judaism. The unique survival of the Jewish people offers both the West and its struggling Christian church, as well as secular people who shun religion, priceless lessons in resilience that they must learn if their culture is to survive.