French collapse + Jordan Peterson harpy terror

plus Project 25, "white man has no friends"...all connected, all to be stood back from

You might have caught my news: I wrested back the rights to my book This One Wild and Precious Life and have republished it in Australia and New Zealand as a revised (and orange!) paperback edition. All of you AU and NZ kids can get 20% off on preorders now (price updated at checkout; mailed out May 24).

Also, are any of you be up for letting your local indie bookshop know they can order the book again? 🙏 And that if they share images on their socials, I’ll reshare, and around it can all go in some lovely mutual support. This would help me out a stack and I’m guessing indie bookstores might like helping out a now-indie author.

All the information they need is here:

A new life for This One Wild and Precious Life in Australian and NZ

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I have observations about all kinds of things at the moment. I’m trying to see truth and beauty in as much of it as I can. And where there’s ugliness and fear, I try to access awe. You see, according to Professor Dasher Keltner - regarded as the world’s leading voice on awe - this increasingly important emotion is mostly aroused by witnessing either vastness or human kindnesses. However, his research also shows a quarter of awe experiences are “flavored with feeling threatened”. They can be accessed by looking at a lion in a zoo or gruesome videos of genocide (Keltner’s examples, not mine). There we go.

Here in Paris I’m noticing that men really do just pull out their doodles on a boulevard and piss up a wall (the city has a rank stink of “the urine of a man who doesn’t get his eight glasses”). I quite loved seeing burly trade unionists last week in their “gilets jaunes" handing out little posies of Lily of the Valley on Labour Day on their way to protests. It’s a tradition. And I learned at my French class¹ that the French for “that gives me the shits” is “ça me fait chier”. Which I’ve already used twice in conversation.

Further afield, I noticed the following moments in post-industrial complex living…let’s discuss their implications in the comments.

Jordan Peterson finds some harpies

There are many things to say about JP’s helpful reflections on the Colombia campus protests, per his reply tweet below:

1. He picks up on the fact most of the protesters are women. He’s right! They are. 👏🏼 And ever has it been so. Women do the tireless lion’s share of work bringing about the progressive social change he now gets to enjoy as a comfortable man living in a democracy.

2. Is it possible that the women are childless because, um, they’re teenaged students? Just asking questions, Jordan!

3. Screaming “childless” at women has become the insulte du jour of scared men facing the decline of the status quo. It’s funny because being childless often leaves women less resentful and really rather comfortable in their skin around sad dominated v repressed diatribe.

   

4. PS. A harpy is a woman-clawed-bird-monster-thing from Greek mythology (aren’t they always?) that snatches at objects; it has become a popular slur among scared men in the alt-right community.

5. PPS. Richard Hanania is a right-wing commentator and founder of the think tank Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. He wrote the book The Origins of Woke. I scan his substack from time to time; headlines include, “Women's Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas” and “It Doesn't Matter if Abortion is Killing a Person”. He and JP make for an insprired chorus.

Should muslims and progressives vote for Biden in November?

A big question.

Mehdi Hasan

covers this over at

Zeteo

(have you checked out this new news site?) And have you heard Macklemore’s free Palestine song, which landed yesterday and is about the college protests (Ben moves fast)?

The clip made me cry. But he flags not voting for Biden. Is it my age? Have I always been a pragmatist? Have I always accepted politics is not a forum to which one should peg their idealism? I’m not sure, but for the sake of global stability I beg US citizens here to vote for Biden. Sure, it’s a lesser of two evils situation. But here we are.

Cocooning ourselves to artless death

A US artist and teacher wrote how art is not meant to be comfortable in the New York Times this week. It feeds into free speech/cancel culture/our collective inability to live with complexity stuff, I think. She writes:

“When I work with younger writers, I am frequently amazed by how quickly peer feedback sessions turn into a process of identifying which characters did or said insensitive things. Sometimes the writers rush to defend the character, but often they apologize shamefacedly for their own blind spot, and the discussion swerves into how to fix the morals of the piece. The suggestion that the values of a character can be neither the values of the writer nor the entire point of the piece seems more and more surprising — and apt to trigger discomfort.

“While I typically share the progressive political views of my students, I’m troubled by their concern for righteousness over complexity. They do not want to be seen representing any values they do not personally hold. The result is that, in a moment in which our world has never felt so fast-changing and bewildering, our stories are getting simpler, less nuanced and less able to engage with the realities through which we’re living.”

I feel the above also speaks to the way the world is handling the US campus protests (ie: terribly). All sides are caught up in righteousness over complexity. I mean, there are a few realities that seem super obvious and that, yes, seemingly contradict, but can very much exist at the same time. Some examples: Young people mouth off about morals and don’t always get the pitch right (it’s just young people do while they find their adult footing); wanting to stop the occupation and genocidal slaughtering of Palestinian civilians is not unreasonable; neoliberal interests are dictating college responses; threatening American Jewish students is counterproductively dumb and dangerous; it would indeed be great if the students found a smarter, more efficient, conditions-sensitive way to make their point that doesn’t drag the spotlight from Gaza (but refer to first point re what young people do and my “but here we are” pragmatism above); and pundits should not descend into moral panic around any of this.

Relatedly, I have

Greg Lukianoff

joining me on Wild in a few weeks. He wrote Coddling of the American Mind with

Jonathan Haidt

and has just published a book on all this - Cancelling of the American Mind. Feel free to post questions for him below (he also wrote a critique of Haidt’s latest and mega-bestselling book The Anxious Generation).

Cocooning ourselves (dumber and) short…

A few stats that I took from this article that you might find interesting:

• Last year, the OECD reported a massive ten-year decline in reading, math, and science performance among fifteen-year-olds globally.

• There’s been a tripling of A.D.H.D. diagnoses between 2010 and 2022, with the steepest uptick among elementary-school-age children.

• College students increasingly struggle to get through books, according to their teachers, many of whom confess to feeling the same way.

• Film pacing has accelerated, with the average length of a shot decreasing. (I read the same about kids’ cartoon frames recently.)

• In music, the average length of top-performing pop songs declined by more than a minute between 1990 and 2020. (I wrote a few weeks ago about song lyrics have become progressively more simple, aggressive and repetitive in the past five decades.)

• A study conducted in 2004 by the psychologist Gloria Mark found that participants kept their attention on a single screen for an average of 2.5 minutes before turning it elsewhere. Today it’s 45 seconds.

• The SAT (the US Scholastic Aptitude Test) was redesigned this spring to be 45 minutes shorter, with many reading-comprehension passages trimmed to two or three sentences.

• Ivy League professors report being told to switch up what they’re doing every ten minutes or so to avoid falling behind their students’ churn.

The radical antidote must surely be to extend and progress our human experience by sitting with things longer, rather than shortening everything to meet our declining standards?

Which is a good juncture to bring up the “Free Sundays”we’re doing here

Free Sundays: Who wants to do a tech detox with me?

The paid membership crew and I are going to do a tech detox together, holding each other to account and inspiring one another to take back control of our attention and sanity. I’m putting together a “program” of sorts and will post about it on Friday. Click on the post link above to become a member.

The French talk collapse

I’ve been asked a few times about how French people respond to what I write about. In short, they are all over it. “Collapsologie” is a Discussed Thing here. Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens are young, good looking commentators here who wrote a bestseller - How Everything Can Collapse - that everyone I’ve met has read. They actually talk the topic on morning telly!

Raphaël Stevens and Pablo Servigne

The energy engineer Jean Marc Jancovici wrote a comic about collapse - Le Monde Sans Fin - that became the number one bestseller in the country and that, as someone I went on a date with recently told me, “everyone was reading on the beach last Summer”. The French also first coined the term polycrisis, as an FYI. Anyway…

This week France’s President Emmanuel Macron (who’s read Jancovici’s book) did an interview with the Economist:

“A civilisation can die,” Mr Macron warns, and the end can be “brutal”. “Things can happen much more quickly than we think.”

This was after giving a speech at the Sorbonne in which he announced that “our Europe can die”.

Which is not to say the French have a solution or are changing policies in radical ways. But you’re certainly not treated as bonkers for discussing the idea at your local boulangerie.

Project 25…heard about it?

Reader

Siobhán Costigan

alerted me to this phenomenon of an authoritarian manifesto called Project 25:

“In April 2022, conservative American think tank the Heritage Foundation, working with a broad coalition of 50 conservative organisations, launched Project 2025: a plan for the next conservative president of the United States…”

which sets out plans for:

“Climate and the global environment, defence and security, the global economic system and the institutions of American democracy more broadly (that) aim for nothing less than the total dismantling and restructure of both American life and the world as we know it.”

Not much short of horrifying and Orwellian.

The White Man has no friends

Aporia

just ran a piece referring to a book about “the situation of ‘Whites’ in France”. In the book, an African discusses the individualism of White people, a slant that I found super interesting to sit with:

Impatience, love of money, individualism, all of these traits define Westerners for Africans: “The Whites don’t stop running, they want to stay ahead of us. We take our time … One day, surely, they will stop. After all, one cannot run endlessly for centuries. They will understand that two or three weeks of vacation are not enough for the kind of life they lead.”

… African solidarity is under threat of giving way to the European’s every-man-for-himself. In African novels, this counter-discourse is seen in remarks like “the White man has no friends” or “we aren’t Whites who couldn’t care less about the misfortunes of others.” 

Image: Aporia

A somewhat doomy newsletter this week. But, honestly, take a look at what I had to work with (sweep of hand out to the week’s world news). Feel free to share uplifting stuff in the comments, of course. In the meantime, I share with you another French phrase I learned this week:

C’est cool mes poules (It’s cool my chickens!).

Sarah xx

1. I do 2 x 2 hours of intermediate classes a week, ambitiously building on the six months of compulsory French I did in Year 7 at Lyneham High. I flounder.