Oh hai world
Or, my first Substack post
Hello. Welcome to my Substack, and to my Substack, welcome.
I knew that writing the first post would be hard, so I edited the welcome email first, and I added the below.
Below is Substack’s generic greeting. A long time ago, I had a blog, and I even wrote all the code for it, so I should understand how Substack actually works better than I do. However, I really don’t know how it works, so I leave all it their capable (I hope) hands. If you get bored, unsubscribe, it’s easy. I’m very unlikely to paywall any posts (unless things change unexpectedly: this is not a promise or guarantee) so you should be able to read any posts while unsubscribed.
On the subject of boredom, I’ve been reading Substacks for a couple of years now. There comes a point with just about everyone I’ve read when you feel that when you’ve read one post, you’ve read them all. I’ll try not to repeat myself, but everyone else does…
I don’t know what I’ll write about, although the books that currently haunt me the most are Tom Holland’s Dominion, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, Joseph Henrich’s The Weirdest People in the World, and perhaps especially (now that Dominion’s spell has worn off, anyway), David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin's Cathedral.
This is to say that while I’m literally an atheist (I don’t believe in a creator, supernatural or otherwise), I’m increasingly interested in religion and how it relates to society. It’s not just that the word religion comes from (probably, according to Collin’s Dictionary) “religāre to tie up, from re- + ligāre to bind” — ie that religions unite or bind people in some way, and they provide a common frame of reference. Whatever society is, it is not simply an aggregate of individuals and families (to borrow from Margaret Thatcher).
Ed West says, in How to write a substack “in my experience the longer the time between first draft and publication, the better the piece.” I’m very bad at following advice (I’m fine at giving it; I’d give myself A+ for that), but I tried this, and it works! (Not good now? You should see what it was like before.)
Thanks for reading, and I’ll try to do better next time.