Obliquely Weekly #1
Recently read things that left a mark and might for you too
It feels like a good time to start sharing some stuff I didn’t write but wish I had.
The title is Obliquely Weekly because I like the sound of it and it’s also probably true, because the feature might very well appear more or less than weekly.
OW1 - Jack Leahy on distraction [
]Why I love it: Joining the Substack community has energised what I might poncily term my intellectual life. Part of what’s happened is that I’m reading people I’d never otherwise have bothered with.
Jack is a good example. He comes from a Christian perspective and he’s currently living in an actual monastery. I was once sure that I’m an atheist and now the whole idea of being for or against a thing like the God of scripture seems to miss more points than it answers. Anyway, thanks to Substack, I’m reading things from perspectives I’d formerly have avoided, without feeling jerked around by it.
Anyway, he’s written this piece that made me pull up short because it describes some aspects of my own life that baffle me.
To illustrate; I tend to organise my days in order to avoid being present with myself alone for very long. I’ll start the day writing, then fill it up with things I enjoy, such as walking or working in nature. Then I’ll ritualistically open a beer, cook something good, listen to a podcast, eat, chill a bit and finish up making amateurish music.
I’m careful never to finish a walk or working in the garden, with 2 hours left to fill before that ritual beer. Weirdly, I’m afraid to do that. Sometimes I’ll tell myself it’s because I used to be incredibly idle and no longer wish to waste time doing nothing. But that’s just a story I tell myself.
Jack seems to experience a similar dynamic and the honesty of his writing - and the insight he brings - makes this one of the most impactful things I’ve read lately.
OW2 - Ed West on migration [
]Why I love it: If you’re British and at all politically engaged you’ll almost certainly have an essentialised view of the huge numbers of people crossing the Channel to gain entry to the country. You’re either for them or against them.
I keep wondering what hope there is for the countries these people are escaping. If all those highly motivated people have the admirable wherewithal and determination to reach Britain I wonder what their countries of origin are losing with each departure.
If you think the answer is that ‘no one is illegal’ or ‘something something human rights’ you probably aren’t wondering that. But I am. And Ed’s piece on the sheer numbers involved makes me wonder what a truly social justice oriented approach to solving this might look like.
It might begin with the honesty to accept that the current situation probably isn’t sustainable. And it will almost certainly include pointing out how fucking stupid the Conservative policy of cutting foreign aid is.
Here’s how he explains the situation.
OW3 - Philippe Lemoine on Putin, NATO expansionism and Ukraine [
]Why I love it: If you read legacy media and standard punditry you’ll be aware of the flattening of this war into good versus evil and nothing else. You’ll know that criticising the approaches of the West to Russia’s perceptions of its security will have you branded as an apologist for Putin. Or, if you think Putin is massively out of order in invading Ukraine (as I do) you’re likely to swallow the whole ‘Putin as madman’ story.
Lemoine steps back and looks more dispassionately at the conditions that seemed to suck Putin into the vile impasse that we now see. And the dishonesty in most ‘analysis’ of the situation. Given that our opinions (as citizens of countries that will probably have a hand in organising an eventual peace, thereby exerting our pressure on governments) matter, it seems important to me that they are founded more intelligently than they mostly seem to be.
That’s it for Obliquely Weekly #1
My father is old enough to remember WW2, and when he was younger and his memory was a little better, he told me a lot about the ideological climate he was in as a very young boy. I also heard a bit from my uncle, his older brother, who was already elderly by the time I was born and had been old enough to actually fight in it.
When I lived in Japan, I spent most of my time in rural areas pretty far removed culturally from the kind of urban environments people tend to associate with Japan; Japanese pastoralism is quite different from the Western version; in many cases it feels very much like living literally in the past- some of the villages I've stayed in look almost completely unchanged from their Showa or even Taisho-era photos except maybe with a little more electrification.
Doing traditional martial arts in Japan also means you tend to run into a lot of old people. As a very polite gaijin who respects her elders, I listened patiently to some absolutely insane, outrageous statements from various ojii-samas about how WW2 actually happened (did you know that Pearl Harbor didn't happen, and that the UNITED STATES actually started the war by launching such an attack on the Japanese coast?)- very occasionally, a younger Japanese person would be on hand to privately apologize and tell me that "this was what the government told everyone in schools in those days."
Some time after this I educated myself about the Russo-Japanese war and various other precursor events- there are a lot of them- including American policies of Japanese containment in the years leading up to WW2.
It is not Putin's job to serve the interests of the US, or NATO, any more than it was Hirohito's. Likewise, it isn't any nation's job to allow other nations to get over on them or to amass an advantageous position for an inevitable future conquest. Wars very rarely arise because of a clear unipolar right or wrong; they arise over irreconcilable goals.
Putin had the "moral" right to not want to be contained, and have his governance dictated to him by NATO countries. Ukraine and its NATO friends have the moral "right" to not want Putin to go around doing a reconquista of strategic former Soviet territories.
Likewise, while war is good at killing people, lots of other international policy that isn't war kills people too, also often in large numbers, usually by economically crushing them (or, you know, giving several billion of them toxic injections). It's interesting to me that war is always given the worst name simply because its killing is overt and explicit; what if a short war with (say) Iran would have killed fewer people than starvation or disease from sanctions?
Our hypocrises are endlessly fascinating to me, and I routinely make the mistake of imagining intelligent leaders to at least be aware of them.