"Entertainment and the arts are undergoing what might be termed a Great Simplification."

"Take the Netflix film 'Irish Wish,' which ranked No. 1 on the streaming platform following its release in 2024. The film stars Lindsay Lohan as an American book editor named Maddie, who travels to Ireland dreaming of marriage to a hunky best-selling author (a genre of person more common in films than in life). As writer Will Tavlin observed, as you watch, you may notice that the characters are explaining what is going on, as if you are too slow to understand. In one scene, Maddie says to her lover, 'We spent a day together. I admit it was a beautiful day, filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.' He replies, 'Fine. That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over, I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.'"

Writes James Marriot, in "Is society growing stupider? The clues are simple and repeated. Shorter sentences and monotonous lyrics form a sign of something bigger" (WaPo)(gift link).

Speaking of shorter sentences, yesterday, I happened to run across this long sentence:

"I say fling but he only worked like a dog in parkinglots, the most fantastic parkinglot attendant in the world, he can back a car forty miles an hour into a tight squeeze and stop on a dime at the brickwall, and jump out, snake his way out of close fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty miles an hour in a narrow space, shift, and back again into a tight spot with a few inches each side and come to a bouncing stop the same moment he’s jamming in the emergency brake; then run clear to the ticket shack like a track star, hand a ticket, leap into a newly arrived car before the owner is hardly out, leap literally under him as he steps out, start the car with the door flapping and roar off to the next available parking spot: working like that without pause eight hours a night, evening rush hours and after theater rush hours, in greasy wino pants with a frayed furlined jacket and beat shoes that flap."

Wrote Jack Kerouac, typing "On the Road: The Original Scroll." I'm fascinated by the readability of very long sentences, but that one struck me (at 40 mph) because I have a long-running debate with Meade about whether good drivers back into parking spaces. 

"Looking back, I grew up in the last great age of childhood reading. Juvenile bookworms..."

"... were still a regular sight in the early Noughties. You could glimpse our kind on trains and in cafés: wan, bespectacled and dreamy, trailing after our parents, clutching our grubby, sticky copies of The Chronicles of Narnia or Northern Lights. It was the era of Philip Pullman, of Horrible Histories, of Artemis Fowl. Above all, it was the age of Harry Potter, with its feverish midnight queues of miniature witches and wizards up past their bedtime to get their hands on the latest instalment (my sister and I went to the cavernous, warehouse-sized Borders bookshop at Silverlink Retail Park wearing bin bags for Hogwarts capes).... [A]s the age of print fades away and the angry, distractible age of the smartphone dawns, I think we find ourselves facing a post-literate world that will resemble the pre-literate world: less democratic, less rational and less enlightened...."

Writes James Marriott in "The 36 books that changed my life/An obsession with words got the Times columnist through his eccentric childhood and his parents’ divorce. Now 33, he has written a book — in praise of reading, of course" (London Times).

I don't know if that link will work for you to see the list, but it's an excellent list. I've read many of the books, and I was motivated to buy one of them on the spot — "The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous." Another — "In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England." — I would have bought if there had been an audiobook. 

Marriott's new book is "The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society," and I will buy that too when it comes out in October, assuming there's an audiobook. There are some things I know I need to walk to read. 

If you use any of those links to buy a book, I receive a commission, and I'm telling you that because I believe that transparency is required, but in fact, I only link to books that I wanted to mention anyway.

"I ask Pinker whether we are witnessing an anti-rationality backlash. He suggests..."

"... what we’re seeing is 'greater inequality in irrationality.' Sport has never been more rational: nowadays in America every team has a statistician. Also, 'there’s more evidence-based medicine' than before. But 'at the same time as that, irrationality has gotten absolutely entrenched at the highest levels of power in the United States.' He thinks the roots of the problem may be partly traced to 'the politicisation of science.' During Covid there were 'hundreds of public health experts saying that it’s OK to go out in Black Lives Matter protests' because 'the benefits of social justice outweigh the costs of spreading Covid.' They would not have said the same had it been 'say, a Maga rally.' He cites a number of similar examples, including an academic journal that promised to 'consult members of indigenous minority groups before deciding whether to accept scientific papers' and a science magazine that endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. Such things 'erode the credibility of science.' He says: 'If science as an institution brands itself as on the political left, it should be prepared to alienate and maybe kiss off the American right.'"

From "Steven Pinker: I’m pinned between cancel culture and Trump/The Harvard psychologist talks to James Marriott about the campus ‘woke’ left and the Republican campaign to defund universities" (London Times).

"It is unclear whether he believes in God. He certainly does not believe in rational argument."

"[Jordan] Peterson’s thesis... is that... 'archetypes' recur throughout the most influential stories in Western culture. For instance, the archetype of the intellectually arrogant adversary represented by the biblical Cain is manifested in the figures of Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Faust, as well as, less exaltedly, 'Felonious Gru, of Despicable Me fame,' Jafar from the Disney film Aladdin and 'Syndrome in The Incredibles.' The obvious problem is that if you convince yourself that every animated children’s film is rich with ancient allegorical meanings, it induces a kind of symbological paranoia. Potential allegories lurk behind every tree and lamppost, waiting to be interpreted. Like the madman who glimpses messages from the CIA in the clouds, Peterson sees revelations about 'the intrinsic nature of being' in the most banal and improbable places.... And because he employs no interpretative system other than his whim the reader is soon overtaken with apathy. Your job is not to be persuaded or argued with, but just to sit still and be instructed in the specious art of Petersonian symbology: 'Shoes signify class, occupation, purpose, role and destiny,' 'smoke is essence, gist or spirit,' the rainbow 'represents the ideally subdued community, which is the integration of the diversity of those who compose it.'..."

Writes James Marriott, in "We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan Peterson review — rambling, hectoring and mad/The conservative polemicist’s new book is a bizarre study of the Bible featuring Jiminy Cricket, Harry Potter and Tinkerbell the porn fairy" (London Times).

Tell me about an "interpretative system" that is better than Jordan Peterson's "whim." He's one man, interpreting things. If my "job" is to "sit still" and take in his ideas, how is that different from reading any book? The author isn't here with me, the reader, to be "argued with." But I buy the Kindle version and excerpt any passage I want to pick apart, and I do my own writing here on this blog, which you are sitting still and reading. If you are "overtaken with apathy," you stop reading. If you want to argue, you go into the comments section. If it's just too much interpretation, coming at you endlessly, take a break. Nobody said you had to read this all at once. I heard that Elon Musk read the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica when he was 9 years old. That's unusual, and it's not what the encyclopedia writers had in mind.

Anyway, here, buy the book and send an Amazon commission my way: "We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine."

ADDED: The book review says that Peterson asserts that "the archetype of the intellectually arrogant adversary represented by the biblical Cain is manifested in the figures of Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Faust, as well as, less exaltedly, 'Felonious Gru, of Despicable Me fame,' Jafar from the Disney film Aladdin and 'Syndrome in The Incredibles.'" So — without mentioning Peterson or Cain — I asked Grok what those characters have in common. Answer:

"The dreariest aspects of the 'woke' movement are partisanship, outrage, victimhood and an obsessively political view of the world."

"But just as politically correct comedians trade on stories of their own oppression, anti-woke comedians now delight in referencing their own cancellations — Gervais and Chappelle’s shows are full of tales about people who have attacked them on the internet and in real life.... The outrage of woke comedians at the immorality of their enemies is echoed by the ceaseless outrage of anti-woke comedians at the absurdity and stupidity of their enemies. Comedy should offend. Comedians should speak freely.... But offensiveness is not synonymous with wit. And the best comedy is anarchic, not partisan. Surprising, not predictable. The antidote to an age of political polarisation and outrage is not more of the same. That men as talented as Chappelle and Gervais have succumbed to the temptation is a testament to just how powerful those forces are."

Writes James Marriott, in "Sorry, anti-woke comedians, the joke is on you/The problem with Ricky Gervais is not that he’s outrageous, it’s that he’s not outrageous enough" (London Times).

Yes, having watched the new Netflix shows from Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle, I think this criticism is apt.

"A new series of adverts on the London Underground instructs men to say 'maaate' to friends making inappropriate remarks about women."

"Proust was gay and one of the incidentally entertaining things about In Search of Lost Time is its unconvincing portrait of heterosexual lust. Albertine’s cheeks 'glowed with a uniform pink, violet tinted, creamy, like certain roses . . . I felt a passionate longing for them as one feels sometimes for a particular flower . . . what might be the perfume, the taste of them?' Is this toxic masculinity? In the present climate you never know. Whenever Proust starts going on like this I mutter 'Maaate' under my breath, just in case."

James Marriott, in his London Times column, has various things to say about his summer reading. Interesting to see the London approach to the toxic masculinity problem.

"Our exaggerated reverence for the creative impulse derives from the romantics of the early 19th century... and filtered through from intellectual bohemia..."

"... to the upper middle classes.... Now, quite banal instances of human creativity are preposterously overvalued. Witness the often conceited superiority of those in only tangentially creative professions. Why should a newspaper columnist or an advertising copywriter feel himself to be more interesting than a banker or a cleaner? I have lawyer friends who complain of the rictus countenances and slipping eye-contact they get from artistic types at parties. But I know those parties. And I know my lawyers are the most interesting people in the room. ... [Some] argue that AI cannot be creative because it lacks internal understanding, is merely a 'king of pastiche'.... But this is close to what those original artists were doing too — the artist’s great struggle, the critic Harold Bloom argues, is confronting and overcoming the influence of predecessors. And does it even matter what’s going on internally now that human audiences fail to distinguish between a composition by a robot and one by Bach...?...  AI should disillusion us of the spurious glamour of creativity. It will be good for those who have suffered the social condescension of 'creatives.'"

Writes James Marriott in "AI spells trouble for creatives — about time too/Machines that can write and paint are a welcome rebuff to the prestige enjoyed by artistic types" (London Times).

"The art critic John Berger once remarked that 'the state of being envied is what constitutes glamour' — and glamour, Berger thought..."

"... was what our culture (especially advertising) pushed us to aspire to. The cocktails, cars and expensive clothes that prove our superiority. Berger would have been horrified to discover how envy has triumphed, and become, perhaps, the predominant modern social emotion. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook earn our engagement (our clicks and eyeballs) by feeding our envious, self-wounding appetite for others’ achievements.... Nietzsche writes with acute psychological perception about the way the vain, self-promoting man wants 'to give joy to himself at the expense of his fellow men' by aiming at a reputation so high 'that it would have to cause them all pain by arousing their envy.'... Half the moral fury on social media is envy in disguise, something that should give pause to those who desperately seek to be envied. Inspiring envy in others is a potentially self-destructive hobby...."

From "Online moral fury is often just envy in disguise/Inspiring jealousy is considered a great achievement but it also drives others to want to tear us down" by James Marriott (London Times).

Writing this post, I discovered I had a tag called "envy shortcircuiting," but I'd only used it the time I created it, and I'd meant for it to be something I was going to keep track of. In that post, the subject was "poverty appropriation," where people who have a choice chose something associated with poor people. I wrote:

"Nobody familiar with office life will have managed to avoid the absurd pantomime of excitement which now attends almost all corporate activities..."

"... from the greying and weary middle managers who must pretend to be thrilled about PowerPoint presentations to the prospective interns who have to write begging letters proclaiming themselves to be 'passionate' about the prospect of making those same greying and weary middle managers coffee for a couple of weeks...  And as work (thanks to longer hours and ubiquitous email) encroaches on our time and becomes more defining of who we are, the boosterish values of the workplace have become more prominent in society generally. Employees find themselves colluding in this. For, if work is the defining activity of your life, how depressing not to be passionate about it. In a meritocracy passion is also a sign of worth. The top jobs — at least in theory — go to the eagerest beavers and are no longer insouciantly inherited by the upper classes. If you were insouciantly to inherit a job, a public display of enthusiasm might help convince sceptical colleagues you were there on merit.... We must not be afraid of indifference, which nowadays looks positively like a virtue."

Writes James Marriott in "The cult of enthusiasm leaves me indifferent All this talk of passion and excitement is crowding out the virtues of boredom and apathy" (London Times).

ADDED: It's important to keep in touch with your natural aversion to fakery, but what if your livelihood depends on existing with it all around you and generating plenty of it yourself? Ah, it's not the hardest job in the world, but it's horrible.

"The specifically English hatred of patriotism has long been kept alive by its intellectual classes, the people who, as George Orwell wrote, 'would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than of stealing from a poor box.'"

"Because England was not the creation of intellectuals, patriotism has never been an intellectual pastime. The ecstasies of 19th-century Romantic nationalism which gave birth to Germany and Italy were forged by poets, musicians and the re-assemblers of lost national epics and folk traditions. By this time England had been muddling along for a millennium. Unlike nations ushered into being by Enlightenment intellectuals which enshrined philosophical abstractions as national principles ('liberty, equality and fraternity' for Republican France, 'freedom' for the United States), British patriotism comes from below. Accordingly it is usually defined in hilariously prosaic terms: queueing, warm beer, roast beef, rain. These are all things disliked by intellectuals.... Our long tradition of national self-hatred has in some ways stress-tested the national consciousness. Self-hatred doesn’t portend a 'chasm.' It is something we are long-sufferingly accustomed to. Things are more dangerous in brittler, prouder America." 

From "It’s deeply British to question our patriotism/A tradition of tolerating dissent is a sign of national strength rather than something to fret over" by James Marriott (London Times).

We're brittler than Brits, he says. And prouder. He sounds proud, you might say, but not proud of his country, and that's his point about pride.

I do think our intellectuals look down on patriotism too, though less amusingly. There's a lot of expression of patriotism in America because most of us don't take our cues from intellectuals. I'm sure at least half of my readers are, right now, rankling at my acceptance of Marriott's word "intellectuals" to refer to America's present-day elite.

The top-rated comment at the London Times quotes James Boswell’s "Life of Johnson" (entry dated April 7, 1775):

Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone, an apothegm, at which many will start: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest.

"Several studies suggest education is detrimental to critical thinking. As students progress through their degrees, they get better at supporting their own arguments..."

"... but don’t improve at looking for evidence that might undermine their opinions and help them come to a more balanced point of view. I did my undergraduate degree at Oxford, an institution which obsesses this country’s elite. While the university undoubtedly rewarded many highly intelligent students, I also came to believe the other principal factor for getting ahead was a bland adherence to the academic value system of hard work and a consuming preoccupation with grades.... For some reason, I spent most of a term studying 17th-century sermons. That is a wonderfully eccentric use of a 19-year-old’s time and one of the reasons I hope English degrees flourish for ever but I hesitate to assert that it buys me the right to feelings of moral or intellectual superiority."

From "Academic intelligence is absurdly overvalued While previous societies admired courage or manual dexterity, we judge only on exam results" by James Marriott (London Times).

If you, like me, wondered what's in 17th-century sermons, here's a big page of links to English sermons from the 17th century. Lots of John Donne sermons here. Sample:

If I were but mere dust and ashes I might speak unto the Lord, for the Lord's hand made me of this dust, and the Lord's hand shall re-collect these ashes; the Lord's hand was the wheel upon which this vessel of clay was framed, and the Lord's hand is the urn in which these ashes shall be preserved. I am the dust and the ashes of the temple of the Holy Ghost, and what marble is so precious? But I am more than dust and ashes: I am my best part, I am my soul. And being so, the breath of God, I may breathe back these pious expostulations to my God: My God, my God, why is not my soul as sensible as my body?