Pineapple Slices 7: Chopper Harris
Centrist dads, managers, popes, kings, Shane Meadows, RH Tawney etc
Dear Reader,
Delay too long – and this instalment is dedicated to Ron “Chopper” Harris, the take-no-prisoners Chelsea defender who once excused a bruising late tackle with the words “I got there as soon as I could, ref” – and your most white-hot takes will settle to room temperature. I had been thinking of writing something about the strange ebbing of political radicalism; of how the left, as Aaron Bastani remarks, is afflicted by “a sense that making even basic changes to the status quo is impossible”, while on the right, as Sohrab Ahmari laments, youthful political energy is being domesticated into “lifestyle rightism” – crypto schemes, Andrew-Tate style masculinity fantasies, dreams of founding a close-knit community somewhere far away and letting the world go to hell in a handcart; of how even the Great Awokening seems to be fading into “ambient wokeness”, an intersectional hum rather than a revolution.
But I never got round to it, and the diminuendo of radical politics is now widely counted as a fait accompli. John Gray observes that “The technocrats now believe they’ve got a second chance and they’re back in the seats of power”, while Janan Ganesh exults over the “revenge of the centrist dad”. Unlike Ganesh, I find this a gloomy development; and I don’t share his enthusiasm for Sir Keir Starmer, currently reshaping the Labour Party as a Blairite tribute act and burbling about a “partnership with business” – fine in principle, but in truth likely to mean the disappearance of any economic alternative to the current set-up, as I argued at UnHerd. (I’d have sounded even more jaded if I’d known about this development.) The populist radicals, of both left and right, had a point. Wealth and economic power really is flowing upwards with an irresistible anti-gravity. Social elites really are imposing surreal and incoherent doctrines on the rest of us. (I wrote at length for Compact on how that happens at the level of institutions like trade unions, the NHS and the police.)
All is not lost. Those still in search of an intelligent populism that doesn’t implode on contact with reality will be encouraged by the work of the New Social Covenant Unit, and by Michael Lind’s provocative manifesto on behalf of “democratic pluralism,” a dull name for an interesting idea:
For pluralists, the ideal society is a community of communities, in which the central government has direct and unmediated authority only in a few spheres like defense and law enforcement and public markets. Outside of the civic realm, the territorial government reigns, but does not rule, over largely self-governing communities of various kinds: familial, religious, ethnic, occupational, and industrial.
One of Lind’s most striking contentions, in an essay full of them, is that even as a self-professed “heathen”, he believes it is essential to defend organised religion:
given the disintegration of organized political parties in America and the near-extinction of organized labor in the private economy, organized religion may be the last mass-membership institution in the United States that can put up barricades to the complete consolidation of authority in the economy, government, and culture by the arrogant technocrats of our managerial overclass.
Lind doesn’t take the argument this far, but his remark seems to me another reason why – apart from more weighty reasons – resisting liberal Christianity is an excellent use of one’s time. Listen to the people who want to rewrite ancient doctrines, and they always want to replace them in the name of some buzzword picked up from Lind’s “managerial overclass”, like inclusivity or empathy. Those of us who don’t buy it can comfort ourselves that we are opposing the absorption of the churches into the grey machine that runs everything else.
On that point, I wrote here about the first ten years of Pope Francis’s pontificate, and here about the divisions within the churches symptomatic of the third great crisis in Christian history. And I investigated the killing-off of a Catholic college at Oxford, which perhaps has something to do with that crisis too.
Bishops and theologians struggle to make their beliefs intelligible, let alone appealing, to twentieth-century ears. Yet the task is not impossible. In the Critic I paid tribute to Shane Meadows, a genius of Christian art:
This may seem an unlikely title to bestow on a middle-aged bloke from Staffordshire with no known religious convictions unless you count his passionate love of Notts County FC, whose films include scenes so graphic as to make any conscientious Christian grateful for the skip button. But they also contain exceptionally vivid depictions of conversion and redemption, of sainthood, and of the undeserved forgiveness which stands at the centre of the Christian story.
Over Christmas, struck down with flu, I lay in bed emitting self-pitying groans and pathetically waving away offers of tea and soup. I couldn’t focus on anything—until, that is, I stumbled on George Monbiot’s two appearances on The Adventure Podcast. A practised and witty storyteller, Monbiot evokes a recent but now mostly vanished era of daredevil foreign reporting. Highly recommended.
In First Things, I invited readers to join the cult of RH Tawney:
Where other writers saw their ideals blown to bits in the trenches, Tawney’s were only confirmed. Life was communion with one’s fellow man, whom one encountered as a creature of God. As death wrapped itself around him, what he felt above all was loneliness, and when the doctor arrived with bandages, morphine, and a few gentle words, Tawney sensed a touch of divine compassion. From now on human fellowship would be his theme. As he had written in a pre-war notebook: “Every human being is of infinite importance and therefore . . . no consideration of expediency can justify the oppression of one by another. But to believe this it is necessary to believe in God.” Capitalism was before anything else a spiritual disaster, which “stunts personality and corrupts human relations by permitting the use of man by man as an instrument of pecuniary gain.”
The Pineapple will of course be swearing allegiance to King Charles III this Saturday. In an age of dissolving institutions, the monarchy is one worth upholding. More on that theme in this eulogy for Elizabeth II and a review of the TV coverage. Here is an essay on coronation art from the eleventh century to the twentieth, and what it reveals about the meaning of tomorrow’s ceremony.
Elsewhere: I wrote about living on a narrowboat. The internet is over; how, nevertheless, to succeed at internet writing. (The Pineapple will not be pursuing this strategy, but…but it could.) Chris Arnade is walking the world. I reviewed a visually beautiful but preposterous Danish film. The brilliant Mary Harrington has a book out, as does the brilliant Nikhil Krishnan. The don’t-have-kids-save-the-planet thing appears to be based on a statistical error. I had a go at the Tories’ childcare policy. The brilliant Laura Freeman has a book out this month. A personal history of pubs. Capitalism is transmogrifying. According to string theory, the “music of the spheres” stuff was right all along. What happened to the Catholic University. Barnes and Noble is enjoying some instructive success. The brilliant and aforementioned Sohrab Ahmari has a book out in August. Candace Vogler’s shattering spiritual memoir.
Pineapple-related quote of the month
My friend Fr Michael Ward, a groundbreaking CS Lewis scholar, draws my attention to this passage in CSL’s review of Charles Williams’ Taliessin Through Logres, in the March 1946 edition of The Oxford Magazine:
“If this poem is good at all it is entirely irreplaceable in the sense that no other book whatever comes anywhere near reminding you of it or being even a momentary substitute for it. If you can’t get an orange, then a lemon or a grapefruit will give you a taste that has something in common with it. But if you can’t get a pineapple, then nothing else will even faintly put you in mind of it. Taliessin is like the pineapple. You may like or dislike that taste; but once you have tasted it, you know you can get it from no other book in the whole world. It is as unique as Tristram Shandy or the Pervigilium Veneris.”
Image: James Basire, The Procession of King Edward VI from the Tower (Wikimedia Commons)