Convenience Big Store: What will the Taliban do now?

20 August, 2021

Hello,

A few years ago Melvyn Bragg wrote about leaving the Church when at he was a student – experiencing "the common delusion that only reason mattered" – only to return, later, to valuing Christianity again, as he had in his childhood. I know exactly what he means; like Bragg, I think it's a mistake to believe "atheistic reason" marks the apotheosis of human intelligence.

In UnHerd this week, Paul Kingsnorth makes the simple and powerful claim that the West was, quite simply, Christendom. It's a compelling argument: the idea that the values of Christianity were what held the West together and that now they've faded we're not, as the rationalists contend, better off, but worse off, and living in a kind of moral vacuum. See below.

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All good wishes,

Jon Connell

Editor-in-chief

Afghanistan

What will the Taliban do now?

Kabul is "reminiscent of a doomsday scene", says Maryam Nabavi in the FT. Barbed wire blocks roads. Women's shoes, abandoned by their fleeing owners, litter the streets. Thousands of Afghans flooded the tarmac at Kabul airport, desperately clawing at retreating C-17 cargo planes as 20 years of US operations ended in chaos. Desperate refugees fell to their deaths from the departing aircraft. I haven't left home in 60 hours. A door-to-door Taliban search is rooting out Nato and former government employees. Even if they do not kill women like me who have worked and raised their voices, under the Taliban's hardline Sharia law, "we are dead anyway".

"I have the feeling that Joe Biden will have to wait for a while before he receives his Nobel peace prize," says Rod Liddle in The Spectator. God help Afghanistan, and in particular the women. But it's stupid to argue that we've let anyone down when we shouldn't have been there at all. The pullout of US troops was "atrociously" handled by a doddering halfwit. But you can't cajole a country, "at the point of a gun", into becoming a liberal democracy.

"Do you take us all for fools?" asks Ayaan Hirsi Ali in UnHerd. When Biden insisted human rights were still at the heart of US foreign policy, "I wanted to shout at the TV". What about the 19 million women sentenced by American foreign policy to a life of darkness under the Taliban? "Surely they deserve human rights, too?" In Kandahar they have been told not to return to their jobs, and Afghanistan's LGBT population has been abandoned. Biden must also own the way China, Iran and other current adversaries will use the "Afghan fiasco to their advantage".

Blame Biden all you like, says Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. But America has what it wanted. About 70% of the public supports a pullout. "Afghanistan is your fault."

I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan during the Taliban's five-year period of power from 1996, and found it "deeply scary", says the BBC's John Simpson. Public executions, stonings and whippings were commonplace. Women only ventured out with written permission from men. Gangs of vigilantes attacked men who showed their ankles or wore any western clothing. The Taliban minister of health complained to me that the International Red Cross refused his request to provide surgeons to cut off the hands and feet of convicted thieves, so he had to do the job personally. "He seemed to quite enjoy it." How will history remember the Taliban's return?

Perhaps as "the pivot point when the American empire lost its lustre", says Pakistan's Daily Times. After "dumping" trillions of dollars into fighting the war, erecting the Afghan government, training and arming the Afghan army, bribing ministers and buying militias, the US "still had to cut and run in the most humiliating way imaginable". And after the military phase, the real chaos begins. The former head of Afghanistan's central bank told the FT the country is broke. That will only fuel a migrant crisis. "Now the whole world will have to look on with bated breath as the Taliban decides how to run the country."

Britain's worst day since Suez

News that Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab was spotted lounging on a beach in Crete on the day Kabul fell "certainly sends a message", says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. Labour has called for his resignation after it emerged that he delegated a crucial call over evacuations to a junior while on holiday. This is "the biggest policy disaster since Suez", says Tom Tugendhat in The Times. MPs on all sides accused Boris Johnson of failure at a hastily recalled parliament. The US has once again shown it does what it wants, when it wants, with no input from us. How foolish we look. The urgent priority must be evacuating Britons and Afghans to whom we owe refuge. Britain has agreed to take 20,000 refugees. The longer-term question is: "What next?"

Long read shortened

The West is lost without Christianity

A century ago Oswald Spengler predicted the West's undoing in The Decline of the West, says novelist and environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth in UnHerd. It's hard to argue with that prognosis "as nations angrily fragment, the Gulf Stream stutters, the supply chains choke up". But what even is the West? It's older than liberalism, leftism, conservatism or empire. For centuries, from our taxes to our moral duties, it was, in short, Christendom. "But Christendom died" – killed off not by an external enemy, but from within.

When a culture is stripped of its heart, the shape of everything changes: family, work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals. Everything is "up for grabs". And so, welcome to 2021. We are living amid Christendom's beautiful ruins – cathedrals and Bach concertos, ghosts of the old sacred order. We should expect lasting upheaval at every level of society, "from the level of politics to the level of the soul".

Our empty throne has been filled, after a bloody detour via Hitler and Stalin, by money, which has "splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards". The post-Christian West isn't short on "world-saving" ideas, arguments and stratagems. But it is short on saints; and how we need their love, wisdom, discipline and stillness in these chaotic times. "Maybe we had better start looking at how to embody a little of these qualities ourselves."

🏝 🍆 🍽 💔 Philosopher Alasdair Macintyre saw the "partial, empty and over-rational humanism" of the Enlightenment as a poor replacement for the "mythic vision of medieval Christendom", says Kingsnorth. Perhaps civilisation needs values that aren't entirely rational to bind it together. When Captain Cook's men arrived on the shores of Polynesia, Macintyre observed, they were astonished by the contrast between the "lax sexual habits" of the Polynesians and their strict prohibition of men and women eating together. The incongruity seemed baffling, and slowly, one by one, the old taboos and rituals were abandoned, the beliefs behind them long forgotten. But instead of bringing some abstract "freedom", their loss created a "moral vacuum" and stripped the culture of its heart.

Read the full article here.

Property

THE COUNTRY HOUSE Dating from 1500, this timber-framed farmhouse in the Hertfordshire hamlet of Cromer has medieval wall paintings and a fireplace with witches' marks (to protect the inhabitants from evil spirits). Set in six acres, with outbuildings and a riding area, the Grade II*-listed property has five bedrooms, bifold doors in the modern kitchen and smart tiled and parquet floors. It's a 15-minute drive to Stevenage, for fast trains to London. £2.35m.

On the money

👨💻 🦄 A country of high taxes, free childcare and strong social protection? Or a happy haven for modern tech entrepreneurs? You can't usually have both, but, according to Reuters, Sweden's famed welfare system not only co-exists with red-toothed digital-era capitalism, it spawned it.

The key was to put a computer in every home, a government policy in the late 1990s. Coupled with investment in internet connectivity, it explains why Stockholm has become "such rich soil for start-ups, birthing and incubating the likes of Spotify, Skype and Klarna, even though it has some of the highest tax rates in the world".

In 2005, when the "shop now, pay later" fintech firm Klarna was founded, World Bank data shows there were 28 broadband subscriptions per 100 people in Sweden, compared with 17 in the US and a global average of 3.7.

Reuters interviewed leading Swedish VCs and entrepreneurs who credited the country's income insurance scheme. This guarantees up to 80% of an individual's previous salary for the first 300 days of unemployment, if their business fails or they lose their job.

As a result – or partly, at least – Sweden has the third highest start-up rate in the world, behind Turkey and Spain, and the highest three-year survival rate for start-ups anywhere. After Silicon Valley, Stockholm has the highest number of unicorns (start-ups valued at $1bn or more) per capita.

Noted

Don McLean, the writer of American Pie, now has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The lyrics of the 75-year-old's hit song are famously impenetrable. When asked what they mean, McLean usually replies: "It means I never have to work again."