THE great surprise of a week spent in Jeddah was the discovery that the traffic system has been designed by an ecclesiastical lawyer to make any change of direction impossible. Roundabouts and traffic lights are almost unknown; so is their use when they appear apparent to the drivers. Instead, there are periodic gaps in the central reservations of the dual carriageways that run everywhere.
The very widest can shelter two cars side by side from the fast lanes on each side of them, but most are narrower, so that, to use them, you must slow to a complete stop on your approach in the fast lane and sit there waiting for a gap in the onrushing traffic.
At the first opportunity, you must lumber into the fast lane of the oncoming carriageway and mash the accelerator for dear life. This would be even more frightening if Saudi drivers had any conception of the fast lane other than whichever they find themselves in; but they are just as happy to undertake as to overtake.
Why would anyone want to do this? It is the only way to make a left turn off a main road: you must drive past the turn-off that you want, make your U-turn, and then swerve from the fast lane across two or three lanes of traffic to get to the left (now right) turn that you wanted in the first place. It is an odd thing to say about such a devoutly Muslim city, but anyone who has tried to get the Church of England or the General Synod to change anything will feel entirely at home on these roads.
STILL, it was good to get home, where I found 777 unread Substack posts in my inbox. At least it wasn’t 666; someone is going to have to reinvent the magazine, and fast, to make the flood of stuff that’s actually worth reading manageable.
Among the things that caught my eye was an elegiac piece by Ross Douthat in The New York Times about the threat of the virtual world.
“The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete,” he writes. “In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity.
“Languages will disappear, churches will perish, political ideas will evanesce, art forms will vanish, the capacity to read and write and figure mathematically will wither, and the reproduction of the species will fail — except among people who are deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the things they love are carried forward.”
As with most forms of digital doomerism, this is more about the intensification of pre-existing trends than it is about the newest technology. A cultured pessimist could have written the same warnings 50 years ago, and some of the most prescient science fiction of the 1950s struck the same note. But what’s important is that all of them are right. There must be some cause for this which predates digital technology and shaped its uses. I blame advertising.
THEN there was Colm Tóibín, in the London Review of Books, with what was far and away the most penetrating and thoughtful analysis of the situation bequeathed by Pope Francis to Pope Leo: “The Church needs to change; the Church cannot afford to change. The new pope needs to oversee this mixture of change and no-change without looking foolish or weak.
“On matters to do with women and gay people, the Vatican hasn’t a clue what to do except from time to time recognise that women are part of God’s will and we, poor gay people, are special and should be loved when we are not being told — one of Benedict’s epithets — that we are ‘intrinsically disordered’.”
But there were also paragraphs that brought nothing but pleasure to the reader: “Since [Pope Francis] was ill, he had every excuse not to see [J. D.] Vance. While it’s tempting to claim that the sight of Vance, all humble and obsequious, might have hastened Francis’s demise, it would be more plausible to suppose that seeing Vance for a few minutes, and hearing his expressions of gratitude, allowed the pope to die slightly more content. The footage of Vance being received by the ailing and unsmiling pope, with Vance looking like an attack Chihuahua who had lost the will to live, must have given the pontiff and his followers some comfort.”
