The Catholic Herald, May 31, 2019

spiked, November 30, 2018

The rise of Generation Needy
The desperation of today’s young people to be ‘liked’ is deeply unhealthy.

The Catholic Herald, April 29, 2016

The atheists who take heaven for granted

According to recent research by the University of San Diego, the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as atheists doubled to 22 per cent between 1984 and 2014, while the proportion of the populace who believe in or regularly pray to God has reached an all-time low. No surprise there, you might say. It’s a while now since atheism in the United States was considered “un-American” or tainted by association with godless communism.

Yet the research also shows that this decrease in the belief in God has been accompanied by a rise in the belief in heaven or some kind of afterlife. This figure has risen from 73 to 80 per cent since 1972. “It was interesting that fewer people participated in religion or prayed, but more believed in an afterlife,” remarked the University of San Diego psychology professor, Jean Twenge. “It might be part of a growing entitlement mentality – thinking you can get something for nothing.”

I suspect that Twenge, author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – And More Miserable Than Ever Before (2006), is on to something. People’s day-to-day religious outlook is inevitably shaped by social, technological and cultural forces. Just as the first information technology revolution, the printing press, occurred in tandem with the emergence of Protestantism – both of which challenged authority from below – so the second big information technology is likewise fostering a society in which greater importance is placed on the 
individual. 

For instance, some sociologists noted in the last decade the resurgence of a belief in guardian angels. This was deemed a logical outcome in a society that both adheres less to organised religion and has become more atomised, consumerist and focused on the self.

This shrinking inwards towards the self has been accelerated by the age of Instagram selfies and Twitter. A generation that grew up with the internet has come to expect most commodities – from online news to television to movies – to be free and instantly available. A “paywall” is spoken of as a monstrous effrontery. 

For those today who know only instantaneous gratification – who wouldn’t understand the concept of waiting for holiday photos to be developed, or for one’s favourite television programme to be repeated – even reading a book seems daunting. Accomplishment is measured instead by more superficial methods, such as how many “likes” or “retweets” you get on social media.

“Self-esteem” and “self-belief” is what matters now. This is why, when they go to university, Generation Me become so easily upset and offended, demanding “safe spaces” and censorship. The new generation, as Professor Twenge outlines in her book, are taught “to be whatever you want to be, as long as you ‘believe in yourself’.” This is why the language of gender-fluidity appeals to them (and baffles their elders): one can “be” a man or a woman as long as one simply “identifies” oneself as such.

Yet some things don’t change in human nature: a hardwired fear and incomprehension of death. Appropriately, this can be witnessed most obviously on the internet when a much-loved celebrity dies before their time: Victoria Wood and Prince being the most recent examples. They are “out there somewhere” or “looking down on us now” or “resting in peace”. This language transcends ages and cultures. 

For centuries, belief in heaven in Christian cultures was accompanied by the notion that for some reason, usually by good behaviour and avoidance of sin, your soul warranted a place there. Thanks to my generation having cosseted them and filled their heads with all this babyish talk of “self-esteem”, Generation Me don’t believe in making an effort to get your rewards. I mean, why do good or try to change the world when a quick sympathetic hashtag will do? Let’s hope the Pearly Gates don’t have a “paywall”.



One of the most pleasing aspects about the 1998 film Shakespeare 
in Love was that it portrayed the Bard not so much as a poet or grand man of letters, but more akin to a hack. He’s always searching for new ideas, looking for sponsors to pay him money to write, scribbling into the small hours to meet urgent deadlines.

I like to think of his Spanish contemporary Miguel de Cervantes, the 400th anniversary of whose death we also commemorated recently, as likewise an inspiration for creative types. Here was a man who endured injury, kidnap, imprisonment, bankruptcy, an unhappy marriage and ill-health, and who in his prime saw his 20 to 30 plays sink into obscurity.

Only in 1605, in his 59th year, did he publish Don Quixote, which became an instant bestseller, and which today is regarded as a masterpiece of European literature. There is a lesson here for all writers and artists who toil alone.

Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked

in Spiked, October 1, 2015

Generation Z has arrived
The day of whinging millennials has come and gone.

in Spiked, April 22, 2015

Stop taking Twitter death threats seriously

Self-styled victims of Twitter trolling like Jack Monroe need to get out more.

in Spiked, March 29, 2015

Too young to resist ISIS, but old enough to vote?

Politicians’ view of 16-year-olds is schizophrenic.

in spiked, February 19, 2014

 

It's mental to give 16‑year‑olds the vote

Neuroscience shows us why teenagers are too young to vote.

in The Catholic Herald, February 7, 2014

The Victorians era had its share of Russell Brands

The Victorian age was stuffed with eccentrics touting counter-cultural creeds, says Patrick West
 
Victoria's Madmen
by Clive Bloom
Palgrave MacMillan, £20


The Victorians were prudish in their morals, solemn in their temper and adherents to order, progress, Church and Empire. Or so the caricature goes – the one created in the 1920s that persists to this day. Popular wisdom still has it that they were a stuffy lot and the word “Victorian” continues to be pejorative shorthand for dusty and sclerotic.

The 19th century was, however, also an era of great turmoil. Most of us know about the rise of the conventional popular ideologies of democracy, nationalism, imperialism and socialism, but this was also a time for more fevered counter-cultural creeds. Communism, anarchism, feminism, the occult, environmentalism, exoticism and mysticism: all jockeyed to capture the imagination of those who sought not to improve the world but to re-imagine it. 

Structured in a series of mini-biographies, Victoria’s Madmen seeks to illustrate “the imagination of a generation bored with inertia and complacency”. It features familiar figures as Oscar Wilde, Karl Marx and Arthur Conan Doyle, alongside lesser-known characters such as the painter-madman Richard Dadd, the occultist Aleister Crowley, aspiring messiah James Jezreeel, the worshippers of Pan and the Latvian anarchists of London’s East End. The book is a cross between a Daily Telegraph book of obituaries and the Fortean Times.

What’s so striking here is how Victorian society, particularly at its dawn and tail end, resembles our own. We live in a time of deep introspection, one consumed with identity politics, “personal goals“, “self-esteem”, the number of “likes” and “retweets” on social media and the Selfie. We are reminded that the early-19th century was also a period for self-reflection, if not sheer self-obsession. The Enlightenment had promoted the autonomy of the individual through reason. But after Napoleon, this begat the narcissism of the Romantic era, the “disease of self-expression, individualism” so exalted by the poets. This spirit led Coleridge to oblivion. “I was heart-sick and almost stomach-sick of speaking, writing, and thinking about myself.” he lamented in 1804, describing his descent into opium addiction. The Marquis de Sade was another consequence of the “Byronic personality which … had unwittingly discovered the path to hell alongside the path to heaven.” 

While we associate the mid-Victorian period with scientific and industrial progress – Darwin and Brunel – “the last two decades of the 19th century was both a period of intense complacency and intense doubt.” There was a feeling that the price of industrialisation had been man’s soul. The “back to the land” movement of the 1880s was one consequence. In his book Merrie England (1893), Robert Blatchford imagined a return to primitive socialist values. He wanted to “restrict our mines, furnaces and chemical works … stop the smoke nuisance … Then I would set men to work to grow wheat and fruit and to rear cattle and poultry for our own use”. He was kind of Victorian George Monbiot.

The late 19th-century and Edwardian era of nostalgia and escapism gave life to the folk music movement (with its Morris Dancers), the cult of Pan, paganism, nudism, occultism, Futurism and Imagism. 

It was the paradoxical time of Jekyll and Hyde, when even Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, that arch-sceptic and rationalist, could be an ardent Spiritualist. It was a time of country house decadence, champagne and drug addiction. Rather than being an age of calm and progress, the late Victorian era was one deeply uneasy with itself. Society, wrote G K Chesterton, was “plunging deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide”. People were turning inwards, regressing. “Pan represented to many late Victorians and Edwardians a dream of social escape and personal release, expressed sometimes as a return to magical thinking and sometimes as a rush towards sexual excess and free love,” writes Bloom. Like Russell Brand, Victoria’s madmen believed society needed a spiritual revolution and, more portentously, that it was decadent and in need of cleansing.

With its centenary approaching, much has been written recently about the First World War, whether it was just and who was to blame for it. Revisionists are keen to question the consensus established in the 1960s that it was a futile war of lions led by donkeys. Historians such as Max Hastings maintain that imperial Germany was itching for a fight. The truth, as Victoria’s Madmen reminds us, is that by 1914, there was a widespread belief in Europe that “the old world must be blown up to be born anew”. Everyone in 1914 was eager for conflict. “We wish to glorify War,” the first Futurist manifesto proclaimed, “the only health-giver of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that kill”. The Irish poet revolutionary Patrick Pearse believed “bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing”, while according to Bloom, Gerard Manley Hopkins believed that “to die young and beautiful was better than to die old and decayed”.

 

Bloom concludes: “By 1913, the idea of violent insurrection and war would be the rhetorical position of almost all advanced thinkers, their imaginative metaphors filled with crusades, apocalyptic violence and images of heroic death.” Only after the trenches, after the gas attacks and the Somme would heroic death lose its mindless, romantic allure.

 

Victoria’s Madmen is a fine achievement, if somewhat cramped. I would have preferred a deeper focus on fewer characters. Nonetheless, it is a engaging read and a cautionary tale for our times. It’s a reminder that the most dangerous revolutionaries are those with full bellies and empty heads.

in Spiked, November 14, 2013

Horoscopes: smarter than you might think

The often practical wisdom of horoscopes is preferable to woe-is-me narcissism.

 

 

in The Catholic Herald, September 13, 2012

Cheap Thrills
Despite some great set-pieces this novel of the 16th century has no heart, says Patrick West

Altai
BY WUN MING
VERSO, £16.99

Wu Ming is not a real person, and the title of this historical novel is irrelevant (“altai” is a type of falcon, but like Trainspotting or Reservoir Dogs, it tells you nothing of the plot). With this in mind, the reader might expect a self-consciously postmodern book, it being the creation of a four-man collective of Italian anarchists. As it happens, Altai turns out to be a rollicking, swashbuckling adventure story set in the late 16th century, the backdrop being a war between the Ottoman Empire and forces loyal to the papacy.

When a fire breaks out in the Arsenal of Venice in 1569, everyone blames the arch-enemy of the Republic, the dastardly Giuseppe Nasi (“The Sultan’s favourite Jew” – a kind of Bin Laden bogeyman). But it is the city’s chief spymaster and torturer, Emmanuele De Zante, who is framed for the blaze, and accused of being a spy himself.

Having escaped jail, De Zante flees to the Balkans, rediscovers his own Jewish roots, heads on through Salonika to Constantinople, and ends up working with Nasi himself. With the patronage of Selim II, Nasi seeks ultimately to build a new Zion in Cyprus. A great religious war ensues when the Turks invade the island, reaching its terrible conclusion at the Battle of Lepanto.

Altai is the follow-up to the collective’s novel Q. Like its predecessor, it’s been a best-seller in Italy. It’s not hard to see why: Altai is gory, epic and sensual, constant with themes of love and betrayal. It’s written in the first person, present tense, in a staccato style that gives it irresistible momentum. At times it has the feel of a detective novel, with each terse chapter ending with a cliff-hanger worthy of Philip Marlowe or a 1970s cop show. (For example: “She left without a sound, leaving me prey to my obsessions, my eyes lost in the night.”)

Wu Ming’s underlying motive, of course, is political: to channel and echo the sentiments of Europe’s disillusioned youth, to the discontents and malcontents who feel betrayed by their elders and rulers. 

Corruption and deception are pervasive in Altai. Venice is a sordid state riddled with anti-semitism. The papacy is rapacious and cynical. The Ottoman Empire, while superficially tolerant and multicultural, is as scheming as its main foe: the Sultan fabricates a pretext for invading Cyprus – a nod, again, to real-life geopolitics.

Like a Sergio Leone film, there are no good guys or bad guys, and no redemption – only the inevitability and thrill of violence: “We fought for ages, acrid smoke and the smell of death filling our lungs … The clash dragged on in a hideous balance of death, attacking, retreating, gaining a few feet of ground, with shouts, curses prayers, insults, music, hissing arrows, roaring arquebuses, the smell of combusted bodies, of burnt wood”.
Throughout, De Zante agonises over his maternal religion, embracing then rejecting his Judaism in turn, seemingly condemned to be the wandering and wondering Jew. He is a man utterly self-absorbed with his identity, a veritable embodiment of Generation Me.

The success of this novel is a depressing sign of the times. Altai, in a perverse way, is a marvellous work, with its stirring pace, attention to historical detail and linguistic wordplay. (If you speak a Romance language you will understand the lingua franca spoken by its seamen: “Kon una barba blanka ke lo faze pareser un profeta.”) But it’s cheap thrills all the same. This book has neither heart nor feeling. It solicits no sympathy. In the end, I didn’t care what happened to the protagonists. There was no one I wanted to live and no one I wanted to die. How strange that such an immense piece of work can feel so hollow.