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The Pope has an antidote to ‘brain rot’

The Oxford English Dictionary has selected “brain rot” as its word of the year. As the Christmas holidays approach, other dictionaries and publications have nominated their own neologisms. The Collins English Dictionary chose “brat”, which Kamala Harris was apparently. I still don’t know what it means. The Macquarie Dictionary, the leading Australian dictionary, chose “enshittification”, which confirms British stereotypes about Aussie yobbos. The Economist chose “kakistocracy’, the rule of the worst, which, it says, fits President Trump’s cabinet nominees. The others will fade, but brain rot is here to stay. It refers to the intellectual decay caused by overuse of social media, video gaming, doom-scrolling, zombie-scrolling, and so on. If you want to research the area further, check out the fabulously popular Skibidi Toilet videos, about animated toilets with talking heads trying to take over the world. Or maybe you shouldn’t – vulgar, brainless, meaningless, monotonous idiocy has an addictive fascination. They have been viewed 18 billion (yes, billion) times. Well, 18 billion and 7 – it's hard to stop, believe you me. “‘Brain rot’ speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time. It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology,” Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages, told the media. What is it? A mental health website defines brain rot as “a condition of mental fogginess, lethargy, reduced attention span, and cognitive decline that results from an overabundance of screen time.” And it has real consequences: “difficulty organizing information, solving problems, making decisions, and recalling information.” Anyone hooked on Skibidi Toilet videos will be familiar with these symptoms. The first recorded use of the term “brain rot” was in 1854, in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden. “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” he wrote. Thoreau's complaint suggests that people have been stuffing their craniums with junk food for a long time. But smartphones have supercharged it. Just look around on any subway car; they’re all glued to their screens – and they’re not reading Shakespeare. The term brain rot increased in usage frequency by 230 percent between 2023 and 2024, which reflects both increased incidence of the disease and heightened anxiety about how to cope with it.

Michael Cook

December 06, 2024

Notre Dame reopens tomorrow, 5 years after the devastating fire

Parisians navigating the narrow streets of the 4th arrondissement in recent days may have heard a familiar, yet nearly forgotten, sound. The bells of Notre Dame Cathedral have been ringing again after nearly five years, in preparation for the famed building’s long-awaited reopening. Notre Dame officially reopens on December 7, with a liturgical ceremony. The following day, the cathedral will host a public Mass, and its bells will again begin marking the hours of daily life in the French capital. On April 15, 2019, at about 6:50 pm, Frédéric Lenica, the chief of staff to Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, was among the first to telephone the fire department. Smoke was rising from the roof of the 850-year-old cathedral, and Lenica could see it from Hidalgo’s office. Parisians watched from rooftops as the beloved building burned, and they gasped when the cathedral’s spire crashed through the roof in a torrent of flames at 7:30 p.m. Those flames were not yet extinguished when French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to rebuild the cathedral, “bigger and more beautiful,” calling it “part of France’s destiny.” Finally, that process is complete. The embodiment of history itself I am a humanities professor focused on the cultures of medieval France. After the fire, I began teaching a class called Memory and Monument, which was inspired by the rebuilding of Notre Dame. Notre Dame is older than France itself. Construction on the medieval cathedral began in 1163, under the direction of the Roman Catholic Bishop Maurice de Sully. The first wave of construction lasted nearly 100 years. Throughout that time, the cathedral served as a laboratory for the innovations of Gothic architecture. It was given giant rose windows – circular, stained-glass windows that resemble flower petals – and 28 flying buttress supports of unprecedented scale to sustain its towering height. The tension between preserving the past and building the future has defined the cathedral since long before the April 2019 fire. During the French Revolution, in the late 18th century, revolutionary mobs toppled the stone sculptures in the facade’s gallery of kings and renamed this religious cathedral the “Temple of Reason.” That name did not stick for long. As the de facto victor of the French Revolution, Napoleon chose Paris’ Notre Dame as the place to crown himself emperor in 1804. Ever since the coronation of Louis the Pious in 816 C.E., French kings had traditionally been coronated at Reims Cathedral in the Champagne region. Napoleon reversed course, despite the cathedral’s vandalized and dilapidated condition, which he hid behind elaborately draped banners. Napoleon invited Pope Pius VII to attend the ceremony and then grabbed the crown out of his hands and crowned himself, a shocking break with past norms. France was once proud to call itself the church’s “eldest daughter,” but under the terms of Napoleon’s Concordat of 1801, Catholicism became just one of several recognized forms of Christianity. Jacques-Louis David’s depiction of Joséphine kneeling before Napoléon during his coronation, as Pope Pius VII sits behind him, is one of the largest paintings in the Louvre museum in Paris. Jacques Louis David’s painting depicts Joséphine kneeling before Napoléon during his coronation at Notre Dame. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel “Notre-Dame de Paris” mobilized public sentiment and helped to save the battered cathedral from destruction. The novel portrays Notre Dame as the embodiment of history itself. Its living soul is a character both noble and monstrous, the hunchbacked Quasimodo, who has been deafened by the bells that also serve as his – and the cathedral’s – voice. Hugo’s novel helped spur the 1837 founding of France’s Commission on Historical Monuments, which identified and funded the preservation of historical sites. The prolific and essentially self-taught architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc led the restoration of Notre Dame for more than two decades, beginning in 1844. Viollet-le-Duc is largely responsible for the modern ethic of restoration as returning a historic building to its original state, but he often produced “originals” that had never actually existed. The Notre Dame spire that burned in 2019, for example, was Viollet-le-Duc’s invention. In his time, it was mocked as a sign of megalomaniacal overreach. Now considered emblematic of the medieval cathedral, it was one of Viollet-le-Duc’s embellishments. In other words, what people may consider authentic and timeless can be a product of another era’s nostalgia or imagination.

Irit Kleiman

December 06, 2024

Why the UK’s assisted dying bill won’t work

Last week the UK’s House of Commons voted to pass, by a majority of 55, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP who put forward the Private Members Bill, promised it would have the “best safeguards in the world” and told those who spoke in terms of introducing a “state-sanctioned suicide service” to “mind their language”. I am doing so, for that is exactly what it will introduce into the NHS and sadly a minority of healthcare staff including both hospital doctors and GPs, will be willing to dispense death as a legal option, if the Bill does become law in England and Wales. (Interestingly, a majority of Scottish MPs voted against the Bill.) The claim was repeatedly made by those promoting the Bill that palliative care would not be affected – but the vast majority of palliative physicians were opposed the Bill. Only a few days after the vote, it was announced that 300 beds in the UK hospice network are closed through lack of funding. Once assisted suicide (to distinguish it from the assistance in dying provided to patients for decades by hospices) is legal, there will be pressure for all hospices to offer it, as has happened in other jurisdictions. Palliative care is expensive and however much money is set aside for the suicide service, it will be far less than the provision of palliative care in final months or years of life – a prognosis of six months to live is notoriously inaccurate, as I know well from 30 years’ experience as an NHS doctor. Extension of those qualifying The Bill has many ambiguities. I shall mention just three of them here to illustrate that its figleaf “safeguards” are totally inadequate. Part of the Bill’s definition of “terminal illness” (section 2 (1a)) is one of an “inevitably progressive illness, disease or medical condition which cannot be reversed by treatment”. Will potentially curative treatment be offered to the same extent as at present if the patient could opt for assisted suicide? Disability and psychiatric illness are both currently excluded (section 2 (3)) as sole reasons for eligibility for assisted suicide but these restrictions are untenable long-term in the light of the emerging concept of “terminal psychiatric illness” and the fact that many young patients with anorexia nervosa have already had their lives ended by assisted suicide in countries where the practice is legal. Should the UK Bill become enacted, there will be legal challenges to the “discrimination” of restricting access to the “terminally ill” under any definition. The suffering of those with painful chronic but not life-threatening illnesses will successfully be claimed in the courts for their right also to state assistance to end their lives. Once the principle of individual autonomy taking precedence over the protection of the vulnerable has been conceded, as it has by this recent vote, its extension to other groups is inevitable.

Trevor Stammers

December 05, 2024

Can a refrigerant be 'natural'?

The other evening my wife and I went to a new ice-cream shop in town, and while I was having my usual cup of vanilla, I happened to glance at a refrigerated glass-front cabinet where the employees kept decorated cakes for sale. Way down on the lower left corner of the front was a green label that read "NATURAL [followed by a leaf symbol] Refrigerant." That got me curious. I knew the "natural" label has great consumer appeal these days when applied to food and maybe clothing, but refrigerants? So I did some digging and discovered that there is quite a history behind the various refrigerants that have been used since mechanical refrigeration was developed in the nineteenth century. For readers who need a review of how mechanical refrigeration works, here's the brief version. When you compress a gas, it gets hotter, and that heat comes from the work you expend in compressing it. If you then remove the heat somehow (that's what the condenser unit does outside every air-conditioned building), and the gas is suitable for use as a refrigerant in the system designed for it, it will turn into a liquid when it's cooled down enough. If you then send the liquid through a small opening into a place where the pressure is lower, it will evaporate back into a gas, and get a lot cooler than it was before. That's what happens in the evaporator inside an air-conditioned building. It's the same basic principle that makes you feel cooler when you're sweating on a hot day, and a breeze comes up: water evaporates from your skin and takes some heat with it. Run this process around and around again with the same substance, and you have a mechanical refrigerator. Innovation When large-scale mechanical refrigeration systems operated by steam power became available in first Europe and then the United States in the 1880s, they used ammonia gas. The bottled liquid we call ammonia is just a solution of pure ammonia gas (NH3) in water. The gas itself condenses to a liquid at atmospheric pressure at a temperature of -28 F (-33 C), but under moderate pressure, it can be persuaded to condense at or above room temperature, and it carries a good amount of heat away when it re-evaporates at lower pressure. Nineteenth-century ammonia was about as natural and organic as you could get. It was obtained mainly from the waste urine from packing houses, by distillation, and it was therefore fairly expensive. It got a lot cheaper when the Haber-Bosch process for making it from hydrogen (obtained from natural gas) and nitrogen (obtained from air) was perfected in the early 20th century. But leaks in refrigeration machinery were common, and ammonia gas is nothing you want to get loose around customers. So the industry sought a non-toxic, non-corrosive substitute, and along came a General Motors chemist named Thomas Midgely Jr. Midgely was largely responsible for the development of leaded gasoline, which in the 1920s was viewed as vital to the efficient operation of gasoline-powered vehicles. Fresh from this first long-term environmental disaster, Midgely devised a new chemical that used carbon, hydrogen, and fluorine to make what at the time appeared to be the ideal refrigerant, which was trade-named "Freon". It became wildly popular, but in the 1970s, just when we were phasing out Midgely's first brainchild, leaded gas, it was discovered that the original type of Freon destroyed ozone in the atmosphere, at a rate that promised to leave us unshielded from the harmful ultraviolet rays that are normally absorbed by the naturally-occurring ozone layer.

Karl D. Stephan

December 05, 2024

Glimpses of eternity: Roger Scruton's philosophy

Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach: An Intellectual Biographyby Mark Dooley | Bloomsbury Continuum, 2024 | 191 pages Mark Dooley, the Irish philosopher and writer, has published a second edition of his 2009 work on Roger Scruton, four years after Scruton's untimely death. He points to the tributes received on that occasion and since, suggesting that his assessment of Scruton is shared by many. Roger Scruton (1944-2020) was a British philosopher who spent much of his productive time outside of academia: in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, giving hope to many dissidents, for which he was later decorated by President Vaclaw Havel (he was also knighted in 2016); producing more than sixty books; working on the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission, editing the Salisbury Review, enthusing about human love, religion, wine, hunting, Wagner and traditional (as opposed to Thatcherite) conservatism. Mark Dooley’s intellectual biography offers an overview of all of these themes. I recall an address by Scruton to a student society in University College Dublin (UCD) in the nineties, and while he was not cancelled, it was clear that his “gentle conservatism” didn’t go down too well with some overheated nationalists, but perhaps it was his Britishness which prevented them accessing the more profound and potentially friendly aspects of his thought. They might have gained by consulting Mark Dooley’s volume which offers a serene overview of key themes in Scruton’s thinking, such as the value of the everyday and the threat posed to it by scientism, the sacredness of the person, highlighted by the role of eros in enriching our experience of the sacred, how to experience the aesthetic gaze, value the nation and engage in true conservation. Scruton witnessed the Paris riots of May 1968, and asked himself (and the rioters) what on earth they planned to put in place of the values they were destroying. He found himself unmasking the destructive hatred at the heart of the “revolutionary sentiment”. This was the beginning of his lifelong work of valuing and preserving the achievements of the human spirit against the intellectual or physical destruction that threatened them. Philosophy: how to live on the surface Mark Dooley shows that for Scruton, philosophy is not just an academic pursuit. It is the “seamstress of the Lebenswelt”, the shared “lived world” we inhabit and love. Science tries to classify, analyse and explain things (or explain them away). Scruton asks us, rather, to live in the lived world, on the surface (“in things that matter it is only a superficial person who does not judge by appearances”). On this “surface”, free subjects dwell. We cannot allow scientism to reduce the world to a pre-human materialist wasteland. Sex is a feature which is specially prone to scientific disenchantment, focusing on the biology while omitting the human face, voiding desire of its intentionality. Object and subject; body and soul, irreducibly united, this is the reality which Scruton is defending or, better, celebrating: first person and third person, subject and social, which comes to the fore in many ways, but is incarnated in the marriage ceremony, a public utterance of meaning. Gazing aesthetically Scruton wanted everyone, not just elites, to experience the world in its sacredness. Religion and art, the holy and the beautiful, both show that while the human subject is situated in this world, it is not totally of this world. Our common culture is a lived experience which embraces the timeless and the temporal. But with the religious source of the common culture drying up in our time, Scruton suggests there is a secular route to the sacred in high culture which teaches us to live “as if our lives mattered eternally” (Pope Benedict’s gracious invitation to the doubting, to live “as if” God existed, welcomed by Douglas Murray, offers a similar path). As Dooley points out, Scruton challenges us to face up to “humane education” which studies the surface of the world, full of humanity’s cultural interaction with its surroundings. It doesn’t seek to plumb the depths of some sub-atomic “really real” as natural science will, but allows us to experience the world of appearances, intention and meaning, to live “on the surface”. Scruton’s Cambridge tutor, Laurence Picken, once remarked that knowledge is not there to help the student, but rather the student was there to help knowledge. The humanities have an objectivity, “the sum of those preferences which would emerge in a well-ordered soul”; whether in literature, clothes, even table settings or gardens, or villages like Poundbury, which show that building beautiful can mean building better. As Heraclitus said when his friends surprised him, the great philosopher, warming himself in the kitchen, “there are gods even here”. Music, another of Scruton’s passions, is only a visitor to our time: from the ideal time of music, it is, so to speak, a small step to eternity. The experiences of melody, harmony and rhythm open a door to the listener. Hearing a gavotte from the late Renaissance, one senses the mores of those who danced to it. In comparison, pop music presents youth as the goal and fulfilment of human life. Scruton is optimistic here, believing that the revival of melody and counterpoint is already well underway, announcing the imminent demise of the bleak noise-factories of the post-modern orchestra. The meaning of conservatism The true task of philosophy, for Scruton, is to provide for the “spiritually homeless, a promise of their proper home”. We build the self by engaging with the raw materials of reality and coming up with a world in which we are reflected. The natural order is thus re-enchanted, with ordinary things and customs acquiring a “quasi-divine and in any case mysterious givenness”. When we share such a dwelling place (Scruton evokes the English experience, with its buildings, institutions, symbols and monarchy) we see our existence as a source of value, against the backdrop of a culture and tradition that makes sense in itself and makes sense of us. We spontaneously wish to belong to such a tradition, and politics is rooted in this soil, not in an academically minted international set of ideas, whether liberal or socialist. Dooley illustrates how, in this vision of things, individual freedom is not immediately given, but emerges, rather, from the womb of civilised Sittlichkeit and the social order.

Fr Patrick Gorevan

December 05, 2024

Is life in today’s West really just like living in Nazi Germany? No, it’s just like living in Germany …

“It’s just like living in Nazi Germany!” – or so many excitable commentators like myself are often wont to say about life in the contemporary West whenever we see the latest egregious assault on free speech or outrageous overblown “hate crime” incident. Except, of course, it isn’t quite like Nazi Germany at all, is it? Such statements, at least on my own behalf, are often meant more as comic or critical journalistic hyperbole and bombast, not literal statements of verbatim fact. There are no death-camps in Europe, Australasia or America today, are there? And, say what you like about Brownshirt Biden, at least it ultimately proved possible for opponents to vote him out of office, unlike with Herr Hitler in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Instead, a better comparison to make might be not to say, “It’s just like living in Nazi Germany!”, but “It’s just like living in Germany!” instead, actual Nazis no longer in any way being necessary, just ordinary “democratic” politicians. Heel, Hitler! Back in the day, the Nazis themselves didn’t particularly like being insulted, to say the least. My favourite personal example came in 1941 when Nazi diplomats made persistent legal attempts to “cancel” a Finnish gentleman named Tor Borg who had amusingly trained his pet dog to raise its paw in classic “Heil Hitler!” style whenever he said Adolf’s name. Top Nazis suspected this was meant as an insult, leading to attempts at legal prosecution. When this failed, the Nazis tried to ruin Borg’s pharmaceutical business instead. As journalist Klaus Hillenbrand put it once news of the bizarre escapade finally emerged in 2011: “The dog affair tells us the Nazis were not only criminals and mass murderers, they were silly as hell. There are very few things you can laugh about [from the Third Reich] because what they did was so monstrous. But there were two or three dozen people discussing the affair of the dog rather than preparing for the invasion of the Soviet Union. They were crazy.” They sure were! No politicians in the modern-day West would ever bother wasting their time with anything as trivial as that these days, would they? Except that, in 2018, a Scottish comedian, Mark Meechan (aka Count Dankula) was successfully prosecuted in a court of British law after training his girlfriend’s pet dog to do a similar “Heil Hitler!” salute in response to his cues of “Sieg Heil!” and “Do you wanna gas the Jews?” before posting the resulting footage online to annoy his partner. Although Meechan was not actually an anti-Semite, just a prankster, he was convicted of hate speech and fined £800 nonetheless. Accordingly, here’s a new version of Klaus Hillenbrand’s 2011 assessment of the Tor Borg affair, updated anew for the age of Count Dankula: "The dog affair tells us the self-professed anti-Nazis of today’s liberal West were not actually outright criminal mass murderers, like the real Nazis once were, but it does show they were silly as hell. You can certainly laugh about it all, but really their persecution of innocent jokers and critics is at least a little bit monstrous. At a time when Vladimir Putin had already annexed Crimea, there were two or three dozen people in the United Kingdom discussing the affair of a Sieg Heiling dog rather than preparing for the potential looming invasion of Ukraine. They were crazy." Indeed so – and nowhere more so than in today’s oh-so-liberal anti-Nazi Germany.

Steven Tucker

December 04, 2024

It’s still possible to stop the UK’s assisted dying law

On November 29 a majority of MPs in the British Parliament voted in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill at its Second Reading. The current law, the Suicide Act 1961, makes it a crime for anyone to “encourage or assist” another person to take their own life. It protects everyone equally from being encouraged or assisted to attempt suicide, irrespective of the health of the person being encouraged or assisted. Guidance on the use of prosecutorial discretion focuses on the reluctance of the person assisting, the nature of the assistance and whether the person encouraging or assisting is the victim’s doctor. It makes no mention of the health of the victim. Notwithstanding cases of heavy-handed police investigation in cases where prosecution was not in the public interest, the law itself is an important protection, which also admits for merciful discretion. “A hard law, with a kind face”. In stark contrast, this Bill permits a doctor to give a lethal substance to “bring about death” to a patient who wished to “end their own life” and allows a doctor to encourage or counsel such a course of action. It legalises physician-assisted suicide. It removes certain people from the current protection of the law. Evidence from overseas jurisdictions shows that those included in such a law will widen over time, and that it will be used for people who, with adequate medical treatment and care, could have lived many years (as is the case in Oregon). Even were it possible to limit the application to a small group of people, it would deprive some people of suicide prevention on the basis of their health status. This is why the Bill is flawed not only in its details but in principle. In other jurisdictions increasing numbers of people commit assisted suicide because they feel that they are a burden to others, as the law changes – corrupts – medical and general culture, including the value people give to their own lives. In addition to this core issue, the evidence from other countries is that the “safeguards” in the Bill, such as the requirement for two doctors to sign off on the provision of lethal drugs, will not stop coercion. There is nothing in the Bill, for example, to prevent the social coercion that is due to the lack of adequate health or social care or to cuts in the benefit system, a form of coercion highlighted by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.