26. I dream of Julia
Plus the strange death of Skepticism
I’ve been thinking a lot about the brief triumph, and ignominious demise, of New Atheism/Skepticism this week. (The two things were not quite identical, but they were close enough that little seems to be lost by treating them here as one thing.) The inciting incident for this was the cancellation of an in-conversation between Helen Lewis and Hannah Barnes that was due to be hosted by Brighton Skeptics in the Pub. Hannah is the author of the brilliant book Time to Think, which built on her reporting for Newsnight about the failures of the NHS gender identity service in its treatment of children.
You can probably guess where this is going, but let’s pretend all you know about the Skeptic movement is its professed beliefs: a commitment to scientific evidence and a suspicion of faith-based systems. To such a mindset, Hannah’s book would be not just interesting but essential: GIDS was influenced by a quasi-religious ideology about gender identity which became the justification for treatments which are at best (per the Bell case) experimental, and at worst inflict lifelong medical harm on young people without doing anything to alleviate the underlying issues presenting as gender distress, but in either case were not being conducted in a such a way that practitioners could ever learn anything about their efficacy.
But for many people the Skeptic/New Atheist identity was never only, or even mostly, about those professed beliefs. It was about taste: believing in deities was a mark of the uncultured, and loudly asserting one’s rationality was — for some — a way of loudly asserting their distinction of class and education. A fierce attachment to the theory of gender identity performs the same social function, and a significant number of the loudest voices from the Skeptic/New Atheist scene evolved effortlessly into social justice activists. Which is why, in 2023, a society of alleged rationalists was pressured to cancel a sellout talk by two people who are genuinely and properly sceptical.
Skip to the links if you’re hungry for more of this stuff, or read on for this week’s cultural consumption.
Listened
Father John Misty, “Real Love Baby”
Last week I was hanging out with a friend who also does interviews, having something in between a conversation and a power struggle over who got to ask the questions — which turned into a conversation about the ethics of interviewing, which turned into me slightly drunk at Paddington remembering the Father John Misty lyric about the longing to “see and be seen” and listening to that song, which turned into Spotify rolling onto this song, which I’ve had on repeat ever since.
You could easily mistake this for vintage 1970s folk-rock, and the cover art practically begs you to make that mistake. It’s one of those songs where the hunger of the title (“I want real love baby,” sings Father John Misty, either ironically or meta-ironically depending on where you think he’s operating at this particular juncture, but I usually plump for meta-ironically, i.e. the song’s narrator is a real romantic concealing himself as a faux-romantic) is echoed by the heady irresolution of the music: the wanting is deliriously infinite, as the best wanting always should be.
(I’m a dummy about musicology so I have no way of vouching for the information I’m about to offer, but whenever I meet a song that has this particular feeling of delicate suspense, I remember this post by Owen Pallett about how Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” achieves the same effect. It’s a great idea for a series and I wish he’d kept it going.)
Watched
Dream Scenario (in theatres)
I learned while listening to an episode of The Business that Nicholas Cage was not the first choice of lead here — Adam Sandler was. But even having heard the words from director Kristoffer Borgli’s own mouth, I struggle to believe it, because Cage is so perfect here in the role of everyman schmuck Paul Matthews, a biology lecturer with a perfectly nice life but an abiding, poisonous belief that he’s been deprived of his true station. And then people start dreaming about him.
The dream sequences are all brilliantly constructed micro-features in their own right, ranging from the odd to the nightmarish to the perverse (and letting Cage go wild as he plays whatever the dreamers want Paul to be, from seducer to murderer to “weird man just watching”). The film is cannily evenhanded about whether this is a paranormal event or a case of social contagion (or even, maybe, the sole and only time the “it was all a dream” payoff might be truly justified in fiction). What matters isn’t the literal truth of the dream scenario, but what it does to Paul: fame turns his spot of commonness into a full-blown character failing.
The genius of Cage’s performance is that you feel sorry for him as it happens. You also laugh a lot, sometimes quite painfully. The film’s portrayal of social media success, the influencer business and the terrible slog of selling yourself as a commodity until there’s nothing left is so astute it was almost unbearable sometimes. (Borgli’s previous movie, which I haven’t watched, is called Sick of Myself and sounds like it similarly digs into the soul-sapping nature of the attention economy, via Munchausen’s.) Cringe bonus: a sex scene of such poignant humiliation I’m not sure it will ever be matched.
Read
Sandra Newman, Julia (Granta)
Two weeks ago I was bitching about how Wifedom by Anna Funder should have been a novel. In fact, it doesn’t need to be because this novel exists. I was a bit wary of the concept — a retelling of 1984 from Julia’s point of view — even though I’m a fan of Newman’s. I adored The Heavens, and interviewed Newman for a magazine regular I did at the time; I reviewed The Men for the Spectator and called it “a gripping, haunting novel that miraculously swerves both cheap misandry and the lazy pieties of contemporary rectitude”.
The Men was condemned for transphobia because Newman’s scenario treats transwomen as male, a charge Newman defended herself again by saying she was nonbinary, with the starry-eyed naivety of someone who actually — and haplessly — thought gender identity politics was a genuine thought system and not a mechanism for battering middle-aged women.
Or perhaps she’s savvier than that made her seem: Julia is richly intelligent about the power of coercive ideologies and the unavoidable truths of the female body. And because Orwell really could not write women worth a damn (see this essay I wrote a couple of years ago), Newman has plenty of space to let her imagination range out and allow Julia to become a full character in a tense, nightmarish story that surprises even though you know the contours.
Gimme gimme more…
“Dawkins insists that ‘the atheistic worldview has an unsung virtue of intellectual courage’, which might indeed be unsung had not its adherents themselves been singing it for so long.” Lols. Stephen Poole from 2019.
The classic account of New Atheism’s collapse: Scott Alexander on the godlessness that failed, also 2019.
Nicely done podcast from the Christian apologetics perspective covering New Atheism’s mayfly history, although I was slightly distracted through the first episode by the way interviewees kept saying: “Of course, New Atheism never answered the real arguments for belief in God.” And then… didn’t say what the arguments were.
Helen Lewis on Taylor, Travis and why squirle matters #crazy.