Notes from Last Week 20
The value of the past; and what the decline of libraries tells us about the decline of Western civilisation
07/07/2025
Archaeology
Stuff I saw on the way to the bank on Baker Street today: a building daubed in red paint, with “Viva Pal[estine] Action” scrawled alongside (referring to the antisemitic terrorist group recently banned in the UK for being a terrorist group, to cries of “Free speech!” from people who have spent the last fifteen years or more stopping Zionists, gender-realist feminists and conservatives generally from speaking anywhere, ever). I’m not sure what the building was; there was no obvious sign, except for one warning of major renovation work which I don’t think had anything to do with the paint. Possibly the idiots had got the wrong building.
Also: a lot of hammer and sickle stickers with Russian writing on them.
Pret a Manger still had up the June “proudly mutilate your children” augmented rainbow sign.
They are still advertising Scientology on the Tube.
London feels like a a cross between occupied territory and a decaying Soviet city.
***
When I was an undergraduate studying history, I got very into questions of historiography. This refers to the study of the study of history i.e. it asks questions of how and why we study history, such as, “Can we find historical laws?” “Can historians escape bias?” and “What is a historical fact? And how do you move from historical facts to historical narratives?” These questions interest me less now, but I was very into them back then.
Many of the books I read on historiography would start by making a distinction between the study of history and “mere antiquarianism.” Antiquarianism always got that snide little adjective.
I don’t know what’s wrong with antiquarianism. I love the past. I love old things. I love things that connect me to the past. I love second-hand books, particularly old ones. I love facts about the past, particularly trivial ones that wouldn’t get in to “serious” history books (admittedly this is probably context-dependent). I love reading old books or watching old TV and coming across political or cultural references, social conventions or pieces of technology that don’t exist any more or even that are impossible to understand without annotation (I particularly enjoy when I know about them without reading the notes).
I believe conservatism, organised religion and culture begin, or at any rate can begin, with love of the past, investment in it and the desire to preserve it. Roger Scruton talks about this in How to be a Conservative, talking about how his left-wing father inadvertently made him (Scruton Junior) a conservative by instilling in him a love of traditional British architecture and the British countryside.
The past is there, right with us all the time, but we ignore it. We’ve moved past modernism and its focus on the future to a postmodern present which has deconstructed the past in order to feel superior to it, something it would not, under any circumstances, do to a contemporary culture.
Old things connect me to the past, like the coral paperweight in Nineteen Eighty-Four that has somehow survived the Party’s erasure of history. I’m rooted in them, whether it’s trivial things like watching TV science fiction from the 1950s, 60s and 70s or more substantial things like reading classic literature and investing myself in a three-thousand plus year old religious tradition. It broadens my perspective and allows me to converse with those long-dead. It is time-travel.
09/07/2025
Comment on this post from The Free Press, about libraries collapsing as they become refuges for junkies and homeless people.
I used to be a librarian. Homeless people in the library isn't so much problem in the UK, where I live, but the invasion of wokeness is.
I've not been a member of CILIP (The Chartered Institute of Librarians and Information Professionals) for a couple of years, but they still send me their magazine for some reason. Every month, I flick through it in a state of anxiety about what I might find this time.
Recently, they had an interview with some high up person in CILIP about "diversity" in the library. She said something along the lines of, "We legally have to stock books by gender-critical writers, but we don't have to promote them." Her advice was to bury them at the back and promote the books that encourage teenagers to mutilate and sterilise themselves, I mean that encourage "gender diversity." Because that's what "public service" means in 2025.
This is really the important quote from the article "They’ve taken all the things they’re good at and lost them in the pursuit of something they’ll never be good at.” This is wokeness in a nutshell. Western societies are abandoning things we used to do quite well in the pursuit of things that are impossible to achieve, like equality of outcome and societies that are highly culturally diverse, but somehow still have high social capital. To this end, we have destroyed our high-trust societies, crippled and defunded our police forces, politicised our judiciaries, turned our schools and universities into far-left indoctrination centres and, now, turned our libraries into homeless shelters.
As for the idea that librarians are "saving democracy" from Donald Trump -- give me strength. This is just virtue signalling and the common contemporary egocentric liberal fantasy that one is on the front line of a cosmic battle between good and evil.
I used to struggle with telling teenagers that they couldn't talk loudly or eat crisps in the library. All I can say after reading this is, thank Heavens I didn't have to get a homeless junkie off his high or clean up after someone went to the toilet in the sociology section.
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