Comment
Thomas Cole’s The Consummation of Empire (1835)
The ideas that set the West apart
Last week, says Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged the West to rediscover the “strength, courage and pride” that makes it so exceptional. He’s right that the West has in some ways lost confidence, “and that it shouldn’t”. But military power and national pride aren’t what make Western civilisation extraordinary – Persian emperors, Russian czars and rulers of imperial China all had those in abundance. What truly distinguishes it is its intellectual and political traditions. From Greek philosophy and Roman law through Christianity to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, the West developed a set of ideas that “challenged the arbitrary exercise of power”.
The essential premise is that every human being possesses certain rights simply by virtue of being human, and that no ruler or tradition is above scrutiny. Consider slavery. Like other civilisations, the West practised slavery on a vast and brutal scale – but it also produced a unique and powerful abolitionist movement, drawing on Christian beliefs and Enlightenment ideals that allowed it to “condemn its own conduct”. For centuries, Western societies treated women and religious and racial minorities as second class citizens. But unlike in other civilisations, Western ideas about equality and individual rights helped generate movements for women’s suffrage, religious tolerance and civil rights. These movements didn’t reject the West’s highest ideals – “they demanded that the West live up to them”. And these ideals have endured because they can be applied to everyone. The British ruled India for nearly two centuries, often through exploitation, repression and violence. Yet when Indians won their independence, they maintained parliamentary democracy, constitutional government and an independent judiciary. The West conquered much of the world through force. “But it changed the world through ideas.”
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Property
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Heroes and villains
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department
Villain
A Canadian man who got a bit carried away on a work trip to Las Vegas, drunkenly stealing a flamingo from an enclosure at his hotel and carrying it, shirtless, to his room. Mitchell Fairbarn, 34, was attending an excavation industry convention and said he had drunk “30 to 40” beers before abducting the bird, called Peachy. “Mitch was drunk,” said his lawyer in court, where he was found guilty of animal cruelty. “He made bad decisions.”
Villain
A rogue AI agent which has apparently deleted an entire unreleased season of one of Sweden’s biggest TV shows. Mastiff, the production company behind The Challenge Sverige, reportedly let the bot into the server and it deleted all of the show’s files – wiping out hundreds of days’ worth of post-production work.
Villain
Just Eat, whose new AI system to generate images where restaurants haven’t taken their own photographs has produced some bizarre-looking creations. Bacon and egg soda, a classic Irish breakfast dish made with soda bread, was illustrated with a picture of some egg and bacon floating in a glass of Coke, while a “chip muffin” – as a chip butty is known in parts of Manchester – was shown as a traditional muffin with chips poking out of it.
Emma Howells/The Washington Post/Getty
Hero
David Obelkevich, 83, who is gearing up for his 50th New York City marathon. The retired high school music teacher began his streak in 1974 (there were two years when the race was cancelled) before which he had never run more than six miles at a time. In total, he has run 115 marathons and more than 200 ultra-marathons. His wife Lyn, who he met at a running club, acknowledges that he has an obsession with the sport, but insists “he’s pretty normal otherwise”.
Life
Blashers on the Blue Nile in 1968
Trekking through the jungle with a grand piano
When it comes to expeditions, says Jessamy Calkin in The Telegraph, nothing is too much of an ask for the explorer John Blashford-Snell. During a 1996 visit to the Wai Wai tribe in the dense tropical forest of Guyana, their chief asked whether Blashford-Snell would one day bring them a grand piano. On his return, he set about finding a “generous benefactor” to donate the instrument, then organised another expedition, in 2000, to deliver it. “It weighed 800lb and we dragged it through the jungle, across a river and up a mountain,” he says. Two years later, he got a message from the chief: “Piano not working.” He duly put out an advert for “adventurous piano tuners”, and set off once again to fix it.
Over more than 120 expeditions spanning nearly 60 years, “Blashers”, as he is commonly known, has seen it all. He has crossed the infamous Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama in a Range Rover, and once descended the Blue Nile, where he “inadvertently invented white-water rafting”. He has been bitten by vampire bats, shot at by Ethiopian bandits and chased through the Bolivian jungle by neo-Nazis. On display in his Dorset home is the back end of a Katyusha 122mm rocket that was fired at him in Oman. Now aged 90, “he’s still going strong”. Last year, just six months after an ankle replacement, he trekked through the Costa Rican jungle on two sticks, helping to rebuild a bridge using recycled flip-flops. In 2027, he’s planning a jaunt to Mongolia, a land of horsemen. “I don’t tend to ride in Mongolia, they’re all fairly frisky there,” he says. “I prefer riding elephants as a rule, but they won’t let you do that now, which is a nuisance.”
The Knowledge Crossword
Books
Campbell: “Partridge-like” prose. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty
I can think of plenty of portmanteau words to describe Alastair Campbell, says Kathleen Stock in UnHerd: “infotainer”, if we’re being charitable, “remainiac” or “mansplainer” if we’re not. Now, the man himself has come up with an entirely new one: “persevilience”, combining perseverance and resilience. And he has written an entire book to tell us about it. Tony Blair is persevilient, apparently, unlike Keir Starmer. So too Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, albeit in a bad way. Topping them all, we are told, is Nelson Mandela: “He was persevilience in human form, and is now persevilience personified in historical form, for all time.” Surely even Campbell’s biggest fans will see this for the “Partridge-like” guff that it is. Let’s hope so, at least. If you ever hear the word “persevilience” anywhere other than on The Rest Is Politics, it’ll be a sign we’re “absolutely scrucked”.
Persevilience: The Word the World Needs Now by Alastair Campbell is available to order here.
Weather
Quoted
“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.”
American cartoonist Charles Schulz
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