Duas coisas são infinitas: o universo e a estupidez humana. Mas, em relação ao universo, ainda não tenho a certeza absoluta.
(Einstein)
But the tune ends too soon for us all (Ian Anderson)
After the Olympics, France has to face its grim reality
[Getty Images]
The French television personality Laurent Baffie, interviewed by Le Figaro, came up with a nice phrase for the success beyond most expectations of the Paris Olympics: it had been ‘une parenthèse enchantée’, he said, but parentheses always have to close and ‘la merde va revenir’. I’m guessing he meant France’s brief political truce will end and attention will refocus on economic woes, even after a slight fall in unemployment – to 7.3 per cent, compared with the UK rate of 4.4 per cent – that was announced as another ‘bonne surprise’.
Writing from the Dordogne, where lunch is long and markets that matter are not global and financial but local and focused on tomatoes and melons, I hope you’ll forgive me if I take Baffie’s cue and offer a sunny interlude. La merde will hit the fan for sure in the autumn:in riot-scarred Britain, Trump-torn America and all across Europe as far as the Ukrainian front. But just for this week, I’m inclining to the brighter side.
Microcredit hero
One cause for optimism is the emergence of Muhammad Yunus as interim leader of Bangladesh after the ousting of the autocratic Sheikh Hasina. Yunus is a rare phenomenon: a Nobel laureate economist whose practical ideas have helped lift many thousands of people out of poverty. Another, though more controversial, is Hernando de Soto (once a presidential candidate in his own home country, Peru) who advocates awarding to squatters and street traders property rights that can be used to secure loans. Both men realised that access to credit – nowadays often seen as dangerous in the developed world – is essential for the most basic level of subsistence business-building.
Yunus’s epiphany was an encounter in 1976 with village women who were making bamboo furniture but had to borrow at exorbitant rates to buy raw materials. He lent them small sums of his own money on terms that allowed them to make a profit. They repaid him and he went on to institutionalise this system of ‘microcredit’ through the much-imitated Grameen Bank, which has since lent $38 billion to otherwise marginalised Bangladeshi borrowers, currently reaching 10.6 million of them. Hasina’s regime tried but failed to blacken Yunus’s reputation and now – at 84, three years older than Joe Biden – he’s been asked to grasp the reins of his turbulent nation. Let’s hope dark forces don’t rise against him.
Too cosy?
Here’s another good-news item – at least that’s how it was reported – emanating from the subcontinent: the arrival of the Indian telecoms titan Sunil Mittal as BT’s biggest shareholder, having bought the 24.5 per cent stake previously held by the French-Israeli dealmaker Patrick Drahi, who has problems elsewhere. An Anglophile with an honorary knighthood who also owns the Gleneagles hotel in Perthshire, Mittal has ruled out a takeover of BT and praised the chief executive Allison Kirkby for a ‘wonderful job’ rolling out full-fibre broadband to reach 25 million premises by 2026. All very cosy – but thousands of BT users waiting for stronger internet connections might dis-agree; and let’s not forget BT’s second biggest shareholder, Deutsche Telekom, whose boss said plainly last year ‘I want my money back’ after almost a decade of weakness in BT’s share price. A more threatening major shareholder might fire up BT’s performance on all fronts.
Summer ripple
But what about the pound? The financial market I can’t ignore, especially as a holidaymaker abroad, is the one in which sterling has posted its ‘longest run of losses in almost a year’ (Guardian) in reaction to street violence that made the UK a no-go destination for foreign tourists, the end of the short Starmer honeymoon and the first of what’s expected to be a series of interest-rate cuts. Is the thin hope of economic revival the Tories left behind about to be knocked out by a flight of foreign investors?
Nah, says my man on the foreign ex-change desk, who in quiet August trading has his feet up watching YouTube replays of the women’s beach volleyball final. In fact the pound has stayed in a range of $1.26-28 and €1.16-17, where it still is, for most of the year, with one brief April surge and dip fuelled by mismatched US and UK rate-cut signals. A fall of a little over 2 per cent from the high of the past month, also driven as much by US news as by events at home, is neither here nor there in terms of historic sterling volatility.
Remember when the pound in your pocket plunged close to dollar parity immediately after Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget in September 2022? That’s what a proper sterling crisis looks like. This, like the recent stock-market correction, is a summer ripple.
Sex, drugs and ripe tomatoes
Speaking of foreign exchange desks, something to look forward to in the autumn BBC schedules – or watch tonight if you have a teenager who can hack into the US HBO network, where it has just launched – is a third series of Industry, the drama that follows the dealings of young thrusters on and off the London trading floor of the fictional US investment bank Pierpoint & Co. Written by Mickey Down (ex-Rothschilds) and Konrad Kay (ex-Morgan Stanley), the show achieves a heightened authenticity worthy of Dickens in its financial detail, plus lashings of sex and drugs.
If your recently graduated offspring are contemplating careers in the money world, they may be fascinated or repelled by Industry, but they should certainly study past episodes to prepare for the job interview. Meanwhile, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to reveal that a suitably dramatised cover of The Spectator has a walk-on part in the new series.
And finally, back to the market that never disappoints – at Cazals in the Lot – to buy multicoloured ripe tomatoes for a delicious gazpacho. Another long lunch beckons.
The French sociologist Olivier Roy believes that “deculturation” is sweeping the world, with troubling consequences.
My mother, who is Chinese, grew up in Malaysia and came to America for college, in the nineteen-seventies. She and my American dad divorced when I was small, and this allowed her to make her suburban household as Malaysian as possible. She and my grandmother, who often visited, spoke a dialect of Hokkien, their regional language, that was used by no one else we knew. On weekends, we went to Asian grocery stores in search of niche ingredients for Malaysian food, which we spent whole days preparing. My grandma practiced Tai Chi in the mornings and, for my birthday, gave me a set of Baoding balls—small metal spheres with dragons on them—so that I could learn to swirl them around in my palm, exercising the muscles in my hands. She stuffed sticky rice into triangular packets made from lotus leaves, and hung them in our kitchen until they were ready to cook.
During my early childhood, it never occurred to me that any of this could mean anything to anyone. It was just the way we lived. My non-Asian friends were interested in non-Asian things—playing guitar, professional wrestling, R.V. trips—that meant nothing to me; the mutual opacity of our cultures seemed normal. It was only as I got older that I began to see how cultural facts could have communicative significance. In middle school, my friends started viewing my Asianness through the lenses of “The Karate Kid” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”; in high school, they discerned looming associations with math and computers. The meaning of being American also dawned on me: somehow, at the nexus of TGI Fridays, Bruce Springsteen, and my weekend soccer games, there was an aura of wholesome, heroic normalcy—an ordinariness meant to be admired.
Oddly, the culture around me seemed to get more communicative as I aged. One day in 2019, I walked into a trendy Malaysian restaurant—Kopitiam, in lower Manhattan—and found the food of my childhood presented as cool, even chic. Enjoying it apparently meant something beyond enjoyment; beautifully photographed on Instagram, it signalled both the rising fortunes of Southeast Asia and the possibilities of one’s own personality. (“Once upon a time, food was about where you came from,” the novelist John Lanchester wrote, in a 2014 essay. “Now, for many of us, it is about where we want to go—about who we want to be, how we choose to live.”) Americanness was shifting in its significance, too: for some people, in some places, flying a flag or eating a corn dog could be a form of resistance. Increasingly, everything was Googleable and shareable, and social media was reducing cultural difference to a matter of style; as the novelist William Gibson observed, the virtual world was colonizing the real one. Every cultural act seemed to be becoming a message to be read, a statement to be placed in quotes.
We all get a little cranky in middle age; maybe growing disillusioned with culture is just a natural part of being a “mid guy,” as my six-year-old puts it. But in “The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms,” Olivier Roy, a French political scientist, argues that culture, in general, really is getting worse; in fact, the whole world is undergoing a process of “deculturation.” Roy believes that a range of abstract and apparently unstoppable forces—globalization, neoliberalism, postmodernism, individualism, secularism, the Internet, and so on—are undermining culture by rendering it “transparent,” turning our cultural practices into “a collection of tokens” to be traded and displayed. Culture used to be something we did for its own sake; now we do it to position ourselves vis-à-vis other people. For Roy, this means that it’s dying.
It’s common nowadays to talk about the “culture wars.” The notion is that we’re profoundly divided about the kinds of people we want to be, and that we express these divisions in everyday, sometimes petty ways. But, in Roy’s view, this framing is wrong. It would be more accurate to say that there’s a war on culture; what we call the culture wars are just skirmishes among the ruins. Hold this idea in mind, and you may find yourself seeing the ruins everywhere. Many houses in my neighborhood, for instance, fly variations of the American flag—rainbow flags, Blue Lives Matter flags, Thin Red Line flags, and so on. The flags are part of the culture wars. But, going by Roy’s account, they also reflect how much the “sociological grounding” of common culture has eroded. Less and less in our culture is self-evident—the phrase “our culture” might even seem suspect—and so the American flag, which should have some intrinsic, unchanging, obvious meaning (isn’t that the point of a flag?), has become a more fungible outward-facing sign, perhaps not too different from the campaign placards that we put in our yards. Flags are just vocabulary. Why not let them multiply?
It’s hard to imagine what it might take to prove a thesis like this; “The Crisis of Culture” doesn’t really try. It’s a short book that could be charitably described as wide-ranging, or more skeptically characterized as being full of unsupported generalizations. Roy, a celebrated intellectual in France who’s most famous for his work on Islam, radicalization, and the West, writes with sweeping assurance about everything from Al Qaeda and #MeToo to Roland Barthes’s “Empire of Signs.” There’s something to disagree with on every page. But this makes the book more enjoyable and interesting, not less; it offers valuable provocation.
Roy finds deculturation everywhere: in viral controversies over whether emotional-support animals belong on airplanes; in the recent, charged debate over whether Israeli or Lebanese people invented hummus; in Disney’s “remixing” of traditional fairy tales into profitable mega-franchises; in the struggles of universities to attract humanities majors. What unifies these phenomena, he thinks, is that they unfold in a cultural vacuum. In the past, a society could rely on “a shared system of language, signs, symbols, representations of the world, body language, behavioural codes, and so on” to govern all sorts of situations. Today, in the absence of that shared background, we must constantly renegotiate what’s normal, acceptable, and part of “us.” Two things are true simultaneously: we can’t agree on those things, yet we need rules of the road. The result, Roy writes, is that we’re “caught in expanding systems of explicit normativity.” There are lots of rules, many of them conflict, and you break them at your peril.
Deculturation is what happens when Culture, which is bigger than you, is replaced with a system of revisable cultural codes. Roy writes that it’s the product of “desocialisation, individualisation, and deterritorialisation.” On a practical level, he means that more of us are bowling alone and working from home, perhaps for vast multinational corporations that exist in no particular place. Yet Roy also sees more abstract changes in our “imaginaries.” In the past, he argues, people found meaning in “grand ideologies”—Christianity, Marxism, the American way—or based their existences on the unquestioned habits of a traditional society. But “neither high culture nor anthropological culture provide the stuff of dreams today,” he writes. “ ‘Ways of believing’ now come within the realm of subcultures; they are associated with sects, fandoms, conspiracy theories and the like.” We still have a society, of course, but we understand it as a project aimed at maximizing our liberty and happiness. Roy identifies this view as “neoliberal,” because it is fundamentally individualistic, and suggests that it is actually paradoxical, since we can’t agree on what counts as liberty and happiness. (Do we want to be free to say anything, or free from hate speech?) “Here we are on a terrain in which culture has no positive aspect, since the old culture has been delegitimized and the new one does not meet the necessary condition of any culture, which is the presence of implicit, shared understandings,” he argues. What’s left is power: whoever happens to be in charge at any given time seeks to impose their norms on everyone else.
In a review of “The Crisis of Culture” published in the magazine Philosophy Now, Théo Blanc asks, “Hasn’t culture always been in crisis?” Blanc notes that Roy “presupposes a ‘state of culture’ (echoing the classical ‘state of nature’) where everyone shares the same implicit code of conduct, identities are clear to everyone, and there are no significant cultural differences or conflicts. But was that ever really the case?” Roy himself acknowledges that, in many ways, deculturation is nothing new: cultures change—for reasons of immigration, colonization, war, and technological transformation—and people change with them, getting “acculturated” to new traditions. But Roy believes that the situation today is different, because there is nothing for us to get acculturated to. Around the world, cultures aren’t being replaced by other cultures; the idea of “Westernization” is a red herring, he suggests, because, despite the worldwide popularity of pizza and “Succession,” what’s actually ascendant are “weak identities” constructed through that “collection of tokens.” It’s a bit like moving from a place where your family has lived for generations to a faceless suburb. You could adopt your neighbors’ traditions, if they have any, but they don’t—they’re just a random collection of people who happen to live near one another. “You do you,” they say. That’s not the same as doing everything together.
Is Roy right? Who knows. Some people will feel that he’s simply out of touch—that “culture,” in the broadest sense, is still thriving, and that he just doesn’t see it. He could be nostalgic, or reactionary, or romantic. Maybe he’s both right and wrong: arguably, Culture is dying, and yet a society that hosts a range of cultures, rather than a single Culture, is actually more humane, inspiring, and interesting.
When I test Roy’s ideas against my own life, I find that they fit somewhat well. My family story involves deculturation: my mom, after moving to America from Malaysia, never really found a version of the rich, all-encompassing culture she left behind (or, perhaps, fled). I was born in the United States, but I’m not sure that I’ve found anything equivalent, either. My cultural life is satisfying but idiosyncratic; like many people, I find enjoyment in “rabbit holes.” The cultural touchstones that seem to unite Americans—football? Taylor Swift?—don’t actually add much meaning to my life; I’m one of those people who is “spiritual, but not religious,” and so religious holidays, like Christmas, often feel more hollow than they should. When it comes to Roy’s “shared system of language, signs, symbols, representations of the world, body language, behavioural codes, and so on,” I have a lot in common with the people around me. But Americans increasingly live in bubbles, and I imagine that I’m no different.
Because Roy sees no way to create “real” culture ever again, “The Crisis of Culture” is tragic in tone. I don’t find tragic certainty to be a plausible attitude for subjects of this nature and scale. Still, his book has caused me to look more carefully at how I live, searching for the kind of culture that he says is dying. I find that I can, in fact, point to islands of widely shared value. On my father’s side, I come from a family of doctors and scientists, and I experience a durable connection to the culture of science—a belief in it as a large-scale enterprise that constructs value and meaning. I also studied literature in college and graduate school, and look to the arts as a kind of church.
On a more local level, I live in a small town where many families, including my wife’s, have resided for generations. Culturally, my town is probably less coherent than it was in the past. There are more kinds of people living here than there used to be. But should that be a cause for despair? We live, for better and worse, in a global era, in which planet-wide problems affect us all. Suppose your neighborhood is, in fact, just a collection of people who live in the same place. Possibly, that’s good. Maybe they’ll find a way to care less about where they came from, and more about where they live. If culture is becoming less powerful, that’s a loss—but there are other ways of experiencing commonality which, while not equivalent to culture, may have their own advantages. Mourning the loss of what’s gone is healthy, as long as you embrace the possibilities in what remains. ♦
Society might not like to talk of dying, but we are confronted by it almost every day
‘Portrait of the Artist's Mother’ by James McNeill Whistler (1871)
I used to think a lot about Switzerland and how to accrue enough morphine to top myself when the time comes. But yay, at last, an assisted dying law seems likely and I can stop plotting.
No one talks about death. But oldies think about it all the time, not deliberately – it just inserts itself into everything. I’d like to write another trilogy, but will I finish it? Doubt if I’ll last through novel 1, never mind 2 and 3. When the garden centre chap tells me to buy tiny saplings and avoid 15-foot trees which will likely die, I know I’ll be dead before the three-footers look anything like a copse. But he quotes the ancient Greek proverb, ‘Society thrives where wise men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit’. So, now we now have a young orchard, a mini-copse and lots of trees mostly hidden by their tree-guards.
Every day, confronting my wall of necklaces and earrings, I think I should be getting rid of some of them, not adding to them. (But ‘not needing’ is not the same as ‘not wanting’ is it?) Every time I slap a hormone patch on my bum, I think of my doc telling me (not because she believes it, but she needs to cover her back) that continuing with HRT in my eighties could be the death of me. I’ve been on it since my forties and thank it for my energy and generally upbeat attitude. If I die, I die, but it’s been a good life.
Other frequent thoughts are: how many more summers have I got? Can I risk signing another TV contract? How will I bear it if John goes before me? How long will I be able to climb these stairs? Am I leaving my affairs in reasonable order?
The last is the only serious one really. You do need to leave life with crystal clear instructions, with everyone knowing what’s in your will. You don’t want to cause nasty surprises or family fall-outs. I wrote a will 12 years ago and a file for my offspring, about finances, leases, mortgage, passwords, etc. But in 12 years, things have changed a lot: siblings have died, we moved house, I re-married, sold my house, grandchildren were born… So the lesson is, yes, write a will, but review it every five years.
My children will get what’s left of my lolly which won’t be much after what I hope will continue to be a spendthrift, merry old age. But I also plan to leave a bit to six charities that I have cared about for years. Deciding who gets what and how much took a bit of serious thought, and selfishly, I decided to restrict myself to the organisations which have given me the most satisfaction working with them. One is the Royal Society of Arts, which I once chaired and which has been plugging the holes in society since 1754. Then there is the Soil Association, which runs Food For Life, teaching children to love healthy food, and schools and other organisations to serve good food. They also help farms to go organic, caterers to serve sustainable food, and badger governments to back nature-friendly food and farming. Charities don’t pay inheritance tax. And you can feel your halo glowing warmly.
I’ve also been sorting out all those things I really don’t want to think about, like organising an LPA (Lasting power of Attorney) so my children can manage my affairs when I’m incapable of doing it myself, and writing a ‘Living Will’ or ‘Advance Instruction’ about how to treat me, or more important, not treat me, when I’m gaga or speechless or dying.
But where to put this? Your lawyer, doctor and children should have copies I guess, but frankly they are unlikely to be there at the critical moment. My 97-year-old mum, Peggy, was quietly dying with Alison, her carer (who knew her wishes) holding her hand as she lay peacefully in bed. At that moment the nursing assistant assigned to help put her to bed at 6 p.m. arrived, realised at once from Mum’s laboured breathing that she was dying, and promptly ran for the phone to call 999. Mum’s carer called to stop her, trying to tell her Peggy didn’t want to be kept alive, but the poor woman, trained to save life, was determined, and Alison didn’t want to leave Peggy to wrest the phone from her hand. So the ambulance was called. But my mama, an actress who knew her exits and her entrances, died minutes before the paramedics arrived.
Whew. Too many old people are kept alive by a system designed to save life at all costs, even if it means repeated dashes to hospital, often violent resuscitations, more stays in hospital when they just want to be at home.One answer to this might be to have Do Not Resuscitate tattooed on your back and chest, but that seems a bit extreme. Better might be, I think and hope, to belong to the Lions Club, a charity with a simple solution: they provide a little bottle you keep in your fridge with your medical details, and instructions to resuscitate or not, inside. Paramedics are trained to look for the Lions Club Logo on a sticker by your front door, and know to look in your fridge. Of course, all this sorting and planning doesn’t make the grim bits of old age go away, but it helps on the peace of mind front. I recommend it.
We have entered a new dark age. I’m not just referring to the situation in Britain since last week. Though if I were, that too would seem irrefutable. I mean in a far broader sense – that the world has entered a new dark age.
The first dark age was characterised by a lack of information. For centuries almost nobody – even the most privileged people of the day – had access to any knowledge. The second dark age, by contrast, is characterised by a surfeit of information. Indeed there is so much information around us that nobody has a chance of absorbing even a calculable portion of it.
Never mind the millions of books published each year, or the billions of podcasts. Consider the trillions of opinions thrown out every day. The noise created by the half a billion people who use Twitter tends to dominate. But what about the almost three billion people (nearly half the planet) pinging messages to each other on WhatsApp? Today people have information coming at them all the time from every direction, and almost no ability to sift it.
Let me give one example that came my way this week. I hadn’t heard much of theLancetsince the Iraq war. That was when a magazine previously known only among those interested in peer-reviewed medical journals made huge headlines. For no clear reason, the journal decided to publish an article far away from its area of competency. The piece attempted to put a number on civilian deaths in Iraq. Its methodology was shown to be badly flawed, but the figure it came up with got thrown around anyway.
Personally, I chalked it up as one of those occasions when a publication completely delegitimises itself. If I can’t trust a specialist journal on something I know about, then how could I trust it on things I don’t know about?I can’t, and so I never had cause to trust the publication again.
Of course there is a danger in that, because if previously trustworthy journals delegitimise themselves, then there is one less reliable source. And if that happens many times – say, over the course of two decades – you are soon in a place where almost nothing can be believed, all the while being bombarded with information from such sources.
Anyway, theLancetcropped up again this week. Once again it seems to have decided to get into the area of working out how many deaths have occurred in a war – this time, how many will be attributable to the conflict in Gaza over the past eight months. The outlandish yet weirdly precise figure of 186,000 deaths was put forward, which is far outside any previous estimates from any source in the region. What’s more, the figure was proposed at one and the same time as ‘not implausible’ and ‘conservative’ as an estimate.
The deranged mobs on social media caught wind of the story from an allegedly unimpeachable source and promptly ran with it. One thing they failed to note was that the article was not an article. It was a contribution to the ‘correspondence’ section, or letters page of theLancet.
Ordinarily this would be counted as bad form. We have some splendid letter-writers inThe Spectator, and the occasional oddball as well. But if somebody wrote a letter to this magazine and made some outlandish claim in it, it still would not be quite right to pass around the internet the idea that this was something which we had endorsed. It would just be one person’s opinion.
But in the new dark age that sort of detail gets lost. Earlier this week, as the Labour government got under way, a number of our wonderfully informed MPs joined the throngs of people passing theLancet’s figure around social media. Perhaps they were appalled at the possibility that the figure was true. Or perhaps they wanted to whip up their base of activists online and try to get ahead of the outrage by leading it. Or perhaps they are just ignorant as swans.
On social media the Labour MP Zarah Sultana proclaimed: ‘TheLancet– the most prestigious medical journal in the world [as though Ms Sultana had surveyed all the relevant journals and soberly landed on this assessment] – conservatively estimates that the death toll in Gaza could be 186,000 or more.’ She went on to conclude that the UK should end any arms sales to Israel. In short order this message was read more than a million times.
TheIrish Timesjoined in the fun. What was once Ireland’s leading broadsheet repeated the claim as a headline article, with the number attributed to a ‘British medical journal’. The UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese – a political, partisan hack if ever there was one – also helped spread the error across the world. On the BBC’sNewsnight, an ‘author and climate activist’ called Mikaela Loach repeated the claim, noting that Joe Biden is often called ‘Genocide Joe’ because he had ‘aided and abetted’ the killing of… and here the number was trotted out again, without any challenge from the BBC presenters.
What all these people were apparently doing – knowingly or otherwise – was picking up an unsubstantiated claim, misrepresenting the source, presenting it as something it wasn’t while the cover of a once–recognised specialist publication gave a veneer of truth to the claim.
Of course, many of the people who did this are just the sort of people who would rail against talk of ‘fake news’. But we are so far beyond that. As I say, it’s a new dark age, characterised not by monkish silence, but by uninformed howling.
Why are Chinese students giving up on architecture?
I recently convened an urban studies summer school in a top university in Shanghai and asked the assembled class of architectural master’s students: ‘Who wants to be an architect?’ Not one hand was raised.
This was not the typical reticence of Chinese youngsters; this was a class of architectural students who have given up on architecture. They are all hoping to escape architectural education, so that they might progress to classes in AI, digital transformation or some other hi-tech sector where they believe jobs exist. For them, architecture is a dead end.
As my Chinese students are discovering, there are too few jobs in the sector, the pay is low and the work is unappealing. Notwithstanding the Norman Fosters and Zaha Hadids of this world, the same is largely true in the West, where the average salary for a five-year qualified architect in London is £45,000. But architecture retains its appeal in the West, in part because it is seen as a high-status profession, not a job.
Architecture only emerged in China as a viable independent profession 25 years ago. As the country modernised, students had more freedom to choose creative degrees. Architecture was seen to be an easy-going, inspiring career. It was also an escape route from rote learning and the promise of a laborious desk job.
But now, in China’s tightening jobs market, thousands of arts graduates are competing for each role. Internships are often unpaid, while junior architects earn as little as £400 per month. The nine-nine-six working week of old (working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) is back. Chinese architecture students seem desperate to avoid it.
Many still hope to reach a well-paid job, of course, consistent with their status and years of studying. But the reality they face is very different. Studying architecture is increasingly considered to be a sign of decadence or gullibility. What sort of fool studies architecture in the hope of a more comfortable life? This attitude is a symptom of a bigger problem. In recent decades, the Chinese understood that they could represent their aspirational goals through their buildings. ‘Better City, Better Life’ was the slogan of the 2010 Shanghai Expo, which was intended to showcase China’s urbanity and civilised development to the rest of the world. Of late, that belief in building ‘the future’ (or as it’s sometimes referred to, ‘China’s century’) has been replaced with a sense of cynicism.
China has fallen out of love with architecture. China’s pragmatic former leader Deng Xiaoping once said that it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice. The same mantra increasingly seems to apply to China’s attitude to construction. It doesn’t matter who designs and constructs a building so long as it works.
Which explains why university architecture courses are disappearing. The numbers of students enrolling in the subject has slumped to unsustainably low levels in many leading universities. Even engineering – for decades the top subject chosen by parents for their children – is in decline, largely due to the parlous state of the construction sector and the economy more broadly.
It would be a step too far to say that China’s architectural renaissance is over, but its real estate sector has been in the doldrums since the country’s draconian Covid lockdowns. When China Evergrande Group, one of the country’s largest development companies, was liquidated in January with £240 billion of total liabilities (the world’s most indebted developer), the mainstream construction sector and its secondary businesses struggled to survive. The Chinese Communist party intervened to minimise the impact on the rest of the economy, but it was impossible to contain the fallout. China had constructed more than 745 million square metres of surplus commercial housing. The construction industry has now stagnated, falling by 4 per cent year-on-year.
An outsider might not notice this slump, in large part because there is still plenty of building going on across China. Unfortunately, many of these are projects that left the architect’s drawing board years ago. There is little new work coming in to fill the order books. People are getting nervous.
I have also noticed among Chinese architecture students a growing acceptance of the western belief that there are ‘limits to growth’. They no longer believe in the project of building the future. Could it be that the turn away from architecture – which has happened so swiftly and casually – reflects a pessimistic shift in how young Chinese people see their role in society? Or are they merely responding to the economic fluctuations taking place? It’s not entirely clear.
To stabilise things somewhat, the CCP has said that it wants to oversee the ‘construction of a digital China’. Design students have responded by giving up on building the physical world, in the hope that they might earn more constructing the virtual one.
France descends into chaos hours before the Olympics starts
Thousands of passengers have been left stranded after a sabotage attack on France's railways (Getty)
France’s Olympics could not have got off to a worse start. Hundreds of thousands of train passengers have been left stranded after the country’s high-speed rail lines were targeted by a series of suspicious fires. Rail company SNCF says it’s a ‘massive attack aimed at paralysing the network’, with security services suggesting this morning that the far left may have been behind the attack. Whoever is to blame, one thing is clear: France’s president Emmanuel Macron will be furious. The world’s eyes are on Paris tonight as the opening ceremony gets underway. Macron wanted them to see France at its best; instead, they will see a country in chaos.
The man behind tonight’s opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics is Thomas Jolly. True to his surname, the theatre director promises a stunning show that will surprise and thrill. Above all, the ceremony will be a ‘celebration of cultural, linguistic, religious and sexual diversity in France’.
No one can argue that France is diverse, but is there much to celebrate? There once was.
French president Emmanuel Macron surveys Paris ahead of the Olympics (Getty)
The last great global event France hosted was the football World Cup in 1998 and, for the first time in their history, the French won the tournament. It was a gloriously diverse team. They were dubbed ‘black-blanc-beur’ (beur is a colloquial word denoting someone born in France of North African heritage, such as Zinedine Zidane, the star of the 1998 triumph). More than one million French partied in the Champs-Elysées after the 3-0 thrashing of Brazil in the final.
It was the high point of what the French call vivre-ensemble, or ‘live together’; a favourite phrase of politicians at the time, today it is rarely heard.
‘Live together’ began to die out a decade ago. In June 2016, France hosted the European football championships and to coincide with the event the sports sociologist William Gasparini reflected on that 1998 victory. In his view, it was a time when the West brimmed with confidence, the ‘end of history’, as we were told. ‘Unemployment was falling, the economy was performing well and France was winning,’ explained Gasparini. The euphoria evaporated in the new millennium.
Gasparini cited the 9/11 attack in 2001 as a significant factor in the deterioration of vivre-ensemble because some French began to regard their Muslim fellow citizens with suspicion.
In his 2004 book,The War for Muslim Minds, France’s leading expert on Islamism, Gilles Kepel, contrasted the hospitality of Britain in granting asylum to figures from the Islamic world to the intransigence of France. ‘What French officials fear is that the social malaise felt by Muslims in the suburbs of major cities…will be expressed as religious extremism, leading eventually to violence and terrorism,’ wrote Kepel.
This fear has been realised, not because France began granting asylum to radicals but because of the emergence of the internet. Kepel pinpoints the launch of YouTube in 2005 as a seminal moment in the re-Islamification of some young European Muslims. Extremists used the site to proselytise and propagandise, and the results have been dramatic.
A major survey in 2020 reported that three quarters of French Muslims under 25 placed Islamic law over Republican law; among the over 35s, this figure fell to a quarter.
Asked in 2016 if France could ever return to the vivre-ensemble of 1998, Gasparini replied: ‘I don’t think we can go back on this enchanted interlude…we are now in a France that is in doubt’.
The following month, in Nice, an Islamist in a 19-ton truck murdered 86 people who were celebrating Bastille Day. That was the last of the large-scale massacres in France, but since then there have been many more Islamist attacks, including the murder of two school teachers.
Far from being a country of vivre-ensemble, France has become a nation where its citizens live ‘face to face’. Those are the words of the former minister of foreign affairs, Gérard Collomb, uttered when he resigned his post in 2018.
It was meant as a warning to French president Emmanuel Macron, but Collomb’s cri du cœur went unheeded. Worse, through his indifference and incompetence, the president has stirred anger among another demographic afflicted by a similar ‘social malaise’ to that experienced by many French Muslims in the inner cities. These are the ‘proles’ in the provinces, the yellow vests who demonstrated their discontent on the street in 2018 and then at the ballot box last month.
In the Europeans elections this summer, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally triumphed in 93 per cent of the country’s municipalities and in 96 out of 101 departements. Only the cities offered any resistance; here the radical left La France Insoumise (LFI) did well, campaigning on little else than the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. This appealed to Progressives and also Muslims, 62 per cent of whom voted for LFI in the European elections.
The National Rally also dominated the first round of voting in the parliamentary elections and would have won a majority of seats in the second round but for a hastily concocted ‘cordon sanitaire’ by Macron’s centrists and the bourgeoise left.
According to the historian of French Institutions, Philippe Fabry, the cordon sanitaire is ‘no longer ideological, it is sociological’, a revival of the class contempt that characterised the last years of Louis XVI’s reign: ‘The nobility of the Republic is refusing to allow the people to intrude into their place of life and power,’ was how he described Macron’s strategy toLe Figarothis week.
Perhaps nothing demonstrates the collapse of France’s multicultural myth more than two op-eds published during the recent parliamentary elections: one was signed by 80 prominent Muslims and it urged people not to vote for the National Rally because of their ‘racism’. The other was backed by 100 notables, many from France’s Jewish community, and urged people not to vote for the left-wing New Popular Front because, they said, it was a ‘threat’ to Jews.
This is the bitter reality of France today; a country with deep and dangerous fractures. This won’t, of course, be on display this evening. We’ll be treated to Macron’s version of France, a Progressive Utopia. If pipe dreaming was an Olympic event, Macron would win gold.
J.D. Vance was a weird teenager. So were most of us
The real weirdos are now in control
(Getty)
Two photos from the youth of Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance have recently surfaced and are filling his opponents with glee. In one of them, he’s dressed as a woman, with shoulder-length golden hair, a look of yet-to-be-plucked wistfulness, and three days of teenage stubble. The other shows him loitering in a men’s bathroom, a faint aura of The Munsters about him, as three smiling young women (fellow members of his Ohio school’s student government) pretend to relieve themselves standing up into a row of urinals. Along with his views on abortion (at the battier end, admittedly, of the pro-life movement) and his strong take on women’s role within the family – ‘If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had’ – they have given fuel to the Democrat idea that, like Trump, Vance is ‘weird’ and has a problem with the opposite sex.
Whether this will hit home with voters is another question. Democrats will have their work cut out for them arguing that the first photo is proof of anything unsavoury – since when did they disapprove of men in women’s clothing? Equally, how can a party associated with unisex public bathrooms cavil at the second (couldn’t Vance put the photo forward himself as evidence of early, swinging open-mindedness about gender)? There may be an oddity about both snapshots, but the fact is they’re hardly unique. For most teenage boys – those who don’t necessarily shimmy through high school years as an Alpha-hit with their female colleagues – adolescence is a profoundly unsettling time, one of sweaty awkwardness, existential doubt, and bottles of Biactol drained as quickly as a wino downs a litre of hooch. Vance’s photos do nothing but paint him as a fairly normal teenager. To see true adult weirdness, one need only watch clips of Kamala Harris’s unprompted maniacal laughter or the way running mate Tim Walz’s mouth hangs goofily open at times, like Fozzie Bear expressing wonder on the Muppet Show.
Besides, what if Vance was a ‘weird’ teenage boy? Most of us, men and women, still shudder with horror at our teenage selves and will sympathise. The writer Dennis Potter once said we should look back on our youth with a kind of ‘tender contempt, and we’ll probably find the second part of that emotion much easier to access. It’s not that we were wicked, more we had a tendency to be fatally unguarded, manically egocentric, and clueless about what would work for us and what wouldn’t. We trusted too much, our weaknesses were freely on display, and we’d mistaken the imminent, lasting afflictions of our lives (oh, how they fly in like planes once adolescence kicks in) for temporary conditions that could be solved by a new haircut or a change of clothes. It’s in your teenage years you fall most recklessly in love, not only with potential romantic partners but with your friends as well, sure you’ll be sitting round the same (or better) tables with these people for the rest of your life’. In such a state of naive trustfulness, Vance and those like him can surely be allowed a few klutzy indiscretions. One Nikki May, treasurer of the same student council which supplied that female trio of urinal-botherers, had this to say about the young Vance: ‘He was a great student and guy. I am very proud to say I went to high school with J.D. and very impressed of the man he has become.’
Could that be said of all of us? Like many, I look back on my own teenage years and can only sympathise with Vance. There is a photo of me aged about 15, fresh-faced and perky looking, the wall of my room at school covered with pictures of the Kray Twins (don’t ask me why this gruesome pair appealed to me – I supposed it was to do with masculinity, danger, and good tailoring). I even wrote a play about them, performed as part of a school drama festival, with squeaky-voiced public schoolboys snarling at each other in cockney-rhyming slang or lines I’d lifted verbatim from the Long Good Friday (you have actually to hear the line ‘I’ll have his carcass dripping blood by midnight’ delivered in a Rees-Mogg accent to realise these things don’t always translate). But then, Ronnie and Reggie were only part of the weirdness. There were the series of true crime books about people like Dennis Nilssen or Myra Hindley. Or the lip gloss and eyeliner I wore, David Sylvian style, in the early 1980s, or the antique cigarette holder I (tragically) waved about for a season, or the way I’d dab on fake stubble with my sister’s mascara to try to gain underage entry to Chelsea nightclubs. Would any of this help a political career?
Well, perhaps it might. Weirdness has quite a good track record when it comes to success. Morrissey hung out in graveyards. The young Margot Robbie had clear-lensed spectacles made up, just so she could look like Harry Potter. Steve Jobs never washed and had heinous BO. And though none of them were in politics, you could argue that those who have known true weirdness in their youths, blundering through the awful phantasmagoria of adolescence, learn at an early age about real injustice: that teenage charisma is bestowed by the gods far more randomly than wealth.
Besides, who’ll disagree completely with Vance’s 2021 statement that the US (and by extension, Great Britain) is ‘effectively run by a bunch of childless cat ladies’ who are ‘miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too’?
Cats aside (I have two myself), it would take a somnambulist or a Starmer supporter not to notice that in the last woeful decade, western culture seems to have been taken over wholesale by the most unpopular kid in the class: the one who mistrusted fun because they never had any, was out to sabotage everyone’s love life as they didn’t have one of their own, and was the mortal enemy of laughter, having provoked it themselves only unintentionally. The kid who invariably sneaked gleefully on their classmates and got a pat on the head from teacher for so doing. For over a decade or so we’ve exalted these people, told ourselves they’re on the side of the angels, thanked them as they squatted over us and – in boardrooms, editorials, on quangos and, recently, in landslide governments – handed them power. J.D. Vance can sleep easy, I’d guess, because what could be weirder than that?
