Moving House Amidst the Collapse

And thoughts on my new location

Yes, it’s time for one of my “apologies for the slowdown, normal service will be resumed shortly” posts. This time around, my excuse is that I’ve moved house. While I have to admit that the cursed veil of foreboding that hangs over blighted Blighty has led me to contemplate expatriating myself to foreign shores, for now I remain within the walls of Merlin’s Enclosure.

My new home is the city of Bristol, a medium-sized city in the south-west of England. A major port-town during the peak of the British Empire, Bristol’s history is indelibly linked with the Atlantic slave-trade. Today, Bristol is a hip university town, home to numerous refugee Londoners drawn by its reputation as a cultural hub that was cemented in the 1990s with trip-hop artists like Portishead, Massive Attack, and Tricky all hailing from the area. As such, the Bristolian egregore is, ahem, a tad conflicted regarding its own past.

This tension made international headlines when a statue of Edward Colston, a 17th century slave-trader and philanthropist, was pulled down during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. At the time, it had a very ‘year zero’ feeling, reminiscent of Saddam’s statue being toppled in 2003. Covid-hysteria, climate-hysteria, and race-hysteria converged in a three-pronged attack on everything that preceded Clown World, and the last embers of the 20th century finally died. We weren’t going back to normal, after all.

Bristol’s difficulty in reconciling with its past is a microcosmic reflection of a process afflicting Western civilization as a whole, which appears to have developed a guilty conscience about imperialism and slavery. Fair enough - I can’t exactly say I’m strongly in favour of that sort of thing myself. I know dissident-bros are supposed to be all into the Roman Empire these days, and I can see the appeal, but personally I’ve always been on the side of the moustached Gauls drinking strength-potions and uppercutting legionaries.

The problem for those who would seek to reform Western civilization one statue at a time is that imperialism and slavery are pretty much baked into the whole civilizational project at this point. Maybe there were exceptions. If so, please enlighten me, because from where I’m standing I can’t see much of evidence of that.

You see, much of the grand architecture of Bristol that makes the city so appealing today was built using money made from buying people in one continent and shipping them to another continent, as well as money made from making said people grow cash-crops like sugar cane and tobacco. That’s really just a slightly more indirect variation on the way that most impressive structures are built: with actual slaves working directly on the building. Take the Alhambra, in Granada; widely regarded as one of the most beautiful structures ever built, its labyrinthine complexity and ornate artwork inspired the bizarre, recursive fantasies of Jorge Luis Borges and MC Escher. It was also built by enslaved Christians, who were then rewarded for their back-breaking labour by being walled up in subterranean cells for the rest of their lives.

Maybe Graham Hancock and that lot are correct, and ancient lost civilizations used sound as an anti-gravitational force that allowed them to lift gargantuan stones without cranes or slaves. Possibly; but nobody knows how to do that now, so if you want a densely populated centre with a broad-ranging infrastructure and massive buildings that are really cool, someone at some point is probably going to suffer for it.

POV: You just finished building the Alhambra, and your new home is at the bottom of those stairs.

Don’t misunderstand the messenger, folx. I’m not saying I think Edward Colston should be reinstated because slavery is fine, actually, and we can’t levitate things by chanting, like what the Atlanteans did.¹ Ultimately, though, the people who pulled his statue down were not motivated by a principled, if over-zealous, opposition to slavery; they were motivated by a confused and incoherent opposition to Western civilization in general.

In any case, it seems as though the BLM-XR-C19 trifecta of 2020 might be seen in retrospect as the high water-mark of Woke, now that its gradually being replaced by Based Techbro Zionism or whatever. Who will replace Colston on his plinth? Elon Musk? Nigel Farage? The chill guy who lowkey doesn’t give a fuck?

Bristol: behold your new totem.

For now, Bristol remains a congenial enough place. It has managed to preserve a degree of local character despite decades of cultural and demographic upheaval, and the distinctive North Somerset accent can still be heard. This accent is one of the few left in England that are ‘rhotic’ - that is to say, they pronounce the ‘r’s in the word further. Rhotic speech declined in England after the 18th century, accelerated by rapid cultural and economic centralization, media technology, and class prejudice - particularly against the rural poor.

What the future holds for Bristol, only the gods know. As I mentioned above, the outlook for Airstrip-One doesn’t look too promising, and the thought of leaving - as painful as it is - has crossed my mind once or twice in the past year. As it stands, though, we’re facing a global crisis, so somewhere that looks like a safe bet now could go haywire in a decade or two, and vice versa.

For now, I plan on staying put. We may be placed at certain locations for reasons we’ll never understand; right here, there’s a lot of work to be done.

1. …possibly.