Of course, the first instinct of a writer is to stick your nose into other people’s business. There is no point in bemoaning this, but it can have unpleasant manifestations, in the way they criticise, judge and misrepresent those around them. The same thing applies, to a certain extent, when people write about countries other than their own.

When I first arrived here, I tried to focus on foreign reporting, by challenging hysterical Western perspectives of Poland. The Government and, sometimes, the people here are often portrayed as being backwards and xenophobic — and I objected to such characterisations. To the extent that Poles are more right-wing than Western Europeans, moreover, I argued, they have the right to be. A lot of American and British commentary appeared to embody what the social scientist Richard Hanania calls “woke imperialism” — the aggressive promotion of progressive pet causes in countries where there is little appetite for them.

I take none of my criticisms back. But on the flip side, it would be unfair of me to obscure the existence of Polish progressives, who have more right to make prescriptive judgements about their homeland than I, an immigrant, do. On the fringes of Right-wing Western opinion there is a caricature of Poland as an ever-strengthening, “BASED”, traditionalist Catholic idyll — leading one conservative commentator from the USA to claim that “the mood [in Warsaw] is unmistakably buoyant”, as if Polish public opinion is not as divided as anywhere else — and I have no wish to feed such clichés. To be a valuable observer you must tell the whole truth and not just part of it.

You must also bear in mind our view of foreign lands tends to be a matter of ideological projection. Nations which appear to represent our beliefs are happy, thriving sunlit uplands, where the rain never falls. They are often presented in striking contrast to one’s own bleak, grimy, cloud-ridden homeland. Communists romanticising far-flung revolutions are an obvious example: Malcolm Caldwell, a British academic who idealised Pol Pot’s Cambodian regime, was invited to Phnom Penh and then murdered by the Khmer Rouge. Perhaps, in their paranoid bloodlust, they mistook him for an enemy.

But there are less blatantly irrational examples. Consider how British advocates of remaining in the European Union portrayed continental Europe as a saner, smarter, more compassionate place — less because they were interested in life there, and more to make a comment on Britain. John Kampfner’s Why the Germans Do It Better, which bore the insufferable subtitle Notes From a Grown-Up Country, was essentially a book-length stick to beat Brexiteers with. Kampfner contrasted Britons’ “monolingual mediocrity” with Germans, who are “taught two languages at school”. A moment’s thought should have made it obvious that British people are likelier to be monolingual than Germans not because they are less curious and cosmopolitan but because English happens to be the lingua franca in modern Europe.

More from this author

Hypocrisy is not the worst thing on earth

By Ben Sixsmith

A more comic case is provided by a man who call himself RS Archer on Twitter. Archer, who is nearing 100,000 followers, claims to be the author of the “David Saunders” book series (which does not exist). He has constructed a fantasy life as an English expat in France, satisfying Remainer prejudices with his tales of civilised bourgeois domesticity in the Dordogne — all wine, snails and jolly local mayors, and the stupid, backwards Brexiteer tourists who bother him. Perhaps “Archer” does live in France (and he certainly has the right to anonymity) but he is not interested in France as it is but as Remainers imagine it — as, in other words, the antithesis of England. They want to sink into a warm bath of oikophobia with a cool glass of “1983 Case Basse di Gianfranco Soldera Brunello di Montalcino Riserva”.

When a country defies our ideological preferences, of course, we cannot hear enough about what a cruel and benighted place it is. A telling example of the sort of credulity this encourages emerged during the Trump years. In perhaps the most outrageous case, an award-winning reporter for Der Spiegel, Claas Relotius, was found to have “falsified his articles on a grand scale”. Relotius’s pieces, many of which explored life in Trump’s America, contained such comically obvious fabrications as a town in Minnesota having a “Mexicans Keep Out” sign on display. You would think Relotius could never get away with printing such unbelievable stories, but he did, for years, because he told his audience what they wanted to read.

And when a reporter for the Right-leaning Wall Street Journal went looking for horror stories in Sadiq Khan’s London, meanwhile, he amusingly mistook an “alcohol restricted zone” sign in Whitechapel as evidence of Islamic rule in the British capital. Unlike in the case of Claas Relotius, this appears to have been an innocent mistake, but it illustrates the dangers of projecting your expectations onto a place.

More from this author

Where are Britain's conservative philosophers?

By Ben Sixsmith

Accuracy may be a difficult standard to reach, given the incentives against it, but it is also a basic one. A more difficult problem is whether it’s justifiable to make value judgements about nations that are not your own. Almost no one is a pure cultural relativist; can anyone, for example, observe Kim Jong-un’s North Korea with ice-cold detachment? But a newcomer to a country should not dictate how it should be run, as if there is a single means of ordering societies and their enlightened perspective transcends that of their hosts.

Consider the beleaguered Americans. They have had to watch the English Piers Morgan tell them to give up their guns, the English Milo Yiannopoulos tell them who to have as president and the English Prince Harry lecturing them on the First Amendment. (The poor souls even have to deal with James Corden obstructing traffic.) It seems like you can’t turn on the TV in the US without hearing an English voice telling you what to do and what to think, which must be grating if you have no platform from which to project your American opinions about your own country.

Suggested reading

The EU's secret empire

By Matthew Olex-Szczytowski

An outsider’s perspective can be valuable, inasmuch as if offers a sideways look at familiar problems. And of course, observers can become participants, visitors settlers. It would be wrong to think that a migrant cannot — like a native — love and criticise a country simultaneously. Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, for example, combines social criticism with a deep affection for the people and culture of the mafia-assailed island, to beautiful effect.

As for me, I hope to write more about Poland, but as someone who is learning rather than lecturing. To do otherwise would be to do a miserable disservice to the many varied people who have helped me feel at home.

Humility is key — a humility which never places judgement before knowledge, nor assumes that one’s preferences must take precedence merely by the fact of being one’s own. That does not mean saying what you do not believe — an act which would be worse than saying nothing at all — but being careful with when, how and how much to say it.

First, I should declare an interest. At the risk of being hyperbolic, I believe that Professor Richard Dawkins’s tweets are some of the greatest cultural monuments of the 21^st Century. Combining a natural gift for surrealism with a blissful indifference to how people will react to him, they inspire both amusement and outrage — as strange and yet perfectly formed as diamonds falling from the Heavens.

“Saw a down-and-out in Seattle last night,” the great science writer told his followers once. “His sign said not ‘I need food’ or ‘I need a job’ but ‘I need a fat bitch’. What could this mean?” What indeed? The funniest aspect of this was the thought that a vagrant’s love of women on the curvier side had troubled an Oxford don all night.

“Good idea to beam erotic videos to theocracies?” Professor Dawkins asked on another occasion, “NOT violent, woman-hating porn but loving, gentle, woman-respecting eroticism.” It’s the “woman-respecting” that elevated this already mad proposal to the heights of genius, as if a male performer would be rattling off the names of women who had received Nobel Prizes mid-coitus.

Yet not everyone is a fan. The American Humanist Association has decided to withdraw its 1996 “Humanist of the Year” award to the ethologist. Dawkins, the AHA claim, “is no longer deserving of being honoured by the AHA”. His crime? A tweet which asked about the difference between “transracial” people like the infamous activist Rachel Dolezal and transgendered individuals.

Provocative? Of course. But did the tweet deserve such a pearl-clutching public disavowal? Not in the slightest. If anything, the most striking thing about the whole saga is the AHA’s own hysteria, which, somehow, is reminiscent of fundamentalist religion.

Dawkins, the AHA claim, implied that “the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent”. But this is wrong. Professor Dawkins asked if identifying as X means one can be said to be X — which is surely a valid question. Even if the answer to it is “no”, that does not imply that one’s identity is deceptive in the sense of being dishonest. But apparently one’s innate sense of gender is sacred, disqualifying scepticism. Again, there are echoes of religious absolutism.

Suggested reading

O come, all ye faithless

By Boyd Tonkin

Even if one thinks Dawkins’s question was insensitive, one has to marvel at the scale of the AHA’s overreaction. Why, for example, should the possession of a Humanist of the Year award be contingent on one’s future behaviour? Have they forgotten what the word year means? If Michael Owen was footballer of the year in 2001, that was not made less true by his sub-par performance for Newcastle in 2009.

It is also interesting to consider who has not had their title revoked. Alice Walker won Humanist of the Year in 1997, a year after Dawkins, and has spent much of the time between then and now promoting David Icke and speculating about whether Jews plan to subjugate “the goyim”. I do not think Ms Walker should be subjected to this sort of handwringing denunciation either. But it is curious to see which questions prompt a hysterical backlash and which do not.

In the case of Dawkins, his abandonment certainly seems a fitting postscript to the new atheist project. In the noughties, believers found it obnoxious that he compared a religious education to child abuse — going so far as to suggest that “physical abuse of children by priests… may do them less lasting damage than the mental abuse of bringing them up Catholic in the first place.” Combined with stonking ignorance of the philosophical arguments that underpin religious belief — such as mistaking summaries of Aquinas’s Five Ways for the real thing — this made for an unwholesome stew of undeserved pomposity.

Back then, though, there was a lot of sunny optimism that books like Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and Christopher Hitchens’s god is Not Great were heralding a rational, peaceful areligious time. The term “Brights” was invented to bring together a “community of reason”. Buses zipped around bearing the message, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Fewer people believe in God now but if there has been a decline in worry then it has been imperceptible. If someone were looking for a word to describe our age, I doubt their contenders would include “relaxed” or “carefree”.

Indeed, it was always destined to be a fad. There are only so many times you can debate the existence of God without getting bored, especially if you are not interested in the actual arguments involved. But to the extent that a “community of reason” ever existed it was also destined to fracture because it had no shared moral language. “I f**king love science” is not the stuff on which a substantive, inspiring worldview is built — and new atheists began to fight about foreign policy, sexual equality, trans issues and a variety of other subjects where “there’s probably no God” did not make it much easier to stop worrying about life.

Suggested reading

Why aren't we all atheists?

By Elizabeth Oldfield

The first major schism in the atheist movement took place almost ten years ago, when Rebecca Watson, a prominent atheist blogger, was propositioned in a lift at the World Atheist Conference in Dublin. After she posted a video about her experience, highlighting how atheists should care about “social justice”, Dawkins poured petrol on to the flames by sarcastically comparing her plight with those of an oppressed Muslim woman.

Cultural Anglicans, like Dawkins, and hawkish Enlightenment liberals, like Sam Harris, who essentially admire Western culture except for its few religious holdouts, soon found themselves in heated conflict with radical progressives. The latter, such as PZ Myers, came to advocate something they called “Atheism Plus”, which held: “We are… Atheists plus we care about social justice; Atheists plus we support women’s rights; Atheists plus we protest racism; Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia; Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.”

In time, the “atheism” part grew less important compared to the other values. Advocates of “Atheism Plus” became more or less indistinguishable from other fiery advocates of cultural egalitarianism, just as in some cases right-leaning new atheists became indistinguishable from conservative Republicans. Each side, naturally, insisted that they were still representing truth and reason, though an elementary point is that a worldview demands more than that.

However, the bigger problem Dawkins faces is that our religious instincts are not reducible to the question of whether God exists. We hunger for community. We thirst for meaning. We celebrate idealised concepts and lash out when people question them. Even problems which are not explicitly religious — those of borders, and families, and resource allocation et cetera — cannot be solved by pure scientific reasoning. You can take God and the church out of the equation but people will imbue other concepts and communities with the hope of transcendence.

Well, people certainly found their tribes, and their hopes for transcendence, and many of them have none of the tolerant and curious spirit of the clerics and theologians who engaged Professor Dawkins in debate 15 years ago. Heresy must not stand. It demands public denunciation and disavowal — removal from the public space and from the bounds of civilised inquiry. The likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens could sell millions of copies but the likes of Ryan Anderson and Abigail Shrier cannot have their books sold. Richard Dawkins cannot even hold onto an award that he won 25 years go.

In such a world, Professor, keep posting your tweets. Keep asking us why we do not treat spider webs with the astonishment that we would treat “lions…weaving antelope-catching nets ten lion-lengths wide.” Keep declaring that “Bin Laden has won” because of the confiscation of your little jars of honey. Keep asking unpopular questions. There is surreal comedy in being so blind to social convention. But there can be dogma-busting value in it as well.

Suffering often means suffering alone and it was this that first inspired the creation of awareness days and, as inflation inevitably happens with these things, weeks. So, although not everybody might be aware of it, this week is Eating Disorders Awareness Week, one of a diverse array of awareness weeks on the awareness week calendar.

There is clearly some value in such events. It is good for people to know that they are not alone and to have easy access to resources that might be of help. Still there are aspects of them — specifically those concerning mental health — which annoy me.

As writers like Jonny Gleadell have argued, modern discourse around “mental health” can pathologise quite normal behaviour. “Many issues have become medicalised,” Gleadell says, “No matter how far the symptoms are from meeting the threshold for diagnosis.” Professor Joël Billieux and colleagues suggest in an entertaining essay on overpathologisation that by the loose standards of some mental health scholars, we could diagnose them with “Research Addiction”. The market for shouty headlines about crises and epidemics ensures that this kind of sensationalism finds a home.

At its worst, this can provide a smokescreen for miserable, fixable material conditions. As students have been confined to their grief holes in British universities, for example, doing seminars online and thinking of the money they will have to spend for the privilege of having been there, we have heard a lot of talk about protecting their “mental health”. But this threatens to conflate a symptom with a disease. One trainee psychiatrist wrote, “I’m struggling to find the mental illness here. There’s no DSM code for being locked in a cupboard. CBT worksheets aren’t going to let students hug their parents again.”

Another problem is how simplistic the messaging can be. There is no doubt that British institutions need a renewed focus on eating disorders as experts warn of a “tsunami” of urgent referrals, and there is no doubt that the loved ones of people who might succumb to anorexia, bulimia et cetera should be aware of warning signs. But the valuable goal of communicating this demands some awareness of their complexities. “Awareness” is not an instant revelatory experience. It takes time and thought.

Some years ago I suffered from bulimia, which developed into anorexia — growing serious enough that I was dangerously underweight and experiencing awful cold, even in June, and obsessive, monomaniacal thought and behaviour. I stubbornly told myself and everybody else that I did not have a problem — accepting that I was sick and had to seek recovery only after working out that I was more emaciated than Christian Bale had been in The Machinist.

I do not believe there was any single cause of this. It would be marvellous, as a writer, to latch onto some unkind remark or anxiety-inducing image that set all of these events in motion — but it would be a lie. I had struggled with my weight for years, but I had struggled with everything: school, university, relationships and, above all, myself. The food I ate, or did not eat, was one thing I could control.

More from this author

It's time to stop blaming boomers

By Ben Sixsmith

When I read about eating disorders in the media, though, everything comes back to body image. That one factor is zeroed in on out of a whole spider’s web of causes. A recent well-intentioned BuzzFeed article addressing EDs among men talked about “body insecurity”, “unrealistic body standards”, “ideal paradigms” and “the pressure to have Captain America’s washboard abs and bodies devoid of an ounce of body fat”. Endless think pieces  debate the effects of social media, and fashion models, and the nebulous concept of “diet culture” on people’s sense of self.

As Hadley Freeman wrote in a perceptive article, “Eating disorders are the only mental illness that people still assume is caused by something identifiable and external.” Of course, that does not mean these things are insignificant. Body image plays a role in eating disorders and it is influenced by the people we look up to. Did it help me that one of my favourite albums was the Manic Street Preachers’ Holy Bible and its song “4st 7lbs”? Probably not. But did Richey Edwards take a cheerful and confident young man and make him ill? Absolutely not. The problem is what these articles do not mention. Body image is one factor but it is not alone.

Genetics could be another. According to a 2020 article in Science, “reports showed that 50% to 60% of the risk of developing anorexia was due to genes.” Different reports have claimed that anorexic people often have a specific kind of metabolism that makes them more vulnerable to mental illness. Professor Cynthia M. Bulk, a veteran researcher into eating disorders, suggests, “the processes in the body that normally regulate metabolism, including weight regulation, may be malfunctioning in anorexia nervosa patients.”

More from this author

Hypocrisy is not the worst thing on earth

By Ben Sixsmith

This is all interesting, though not much help to people who have the conditions. But there are other psychological factors at play. Are we witnessing a dangerous rise in young people seeking treatment for eating disorders more because of Captain America and Instagram or because their lives have been upturned by a pandemic which has thrown their education, their social lives and their future into chaos? I suspect that it has more to do with the latter. Food restriction, in such a bewildering and depressing time, is one thing that is in their hands.

I do not want to poeticise illness here. At some point an eating disorder becomes far less of an exercise in self-control than an exercise in addiction. In anorexia, for example, one’s mind and one’s metabolism create a vicious circle in which the more underweight one becomes, the less one is capable of appreciating the need for sustenance. It is as if one is a car in which the emptier one’s petrol tank becomes, the more petrol one sees on the fuel gauge. That is why treatment of the most severe cases focuses on getting people’s weight up. Physiological changes tend to be a precondition for psychological changes. It is a terrible illness.

Still, even if one rejects the idea that someone with an eating disorder controls their illness more than the illness controls the person with an eating disorder, that does not mean one should be so reductionist as to shrink a complex phenomenon down to a single element. That is unhelpful, and more than a little patronising.

Suggested reading

What men get wrong about masculinity

By Sarah Ditum

It would be unfair to expect attempts to raise awareness of mental health problems, or any health problems, to reflect their every nuance. After all, these campaigns are not aimed at turning average people into experts, but making them more mindful and empathetic. Yet just as I have the nagging sense that a lot of the discourse around depression is aimed less towards people suffering from its clinical varieties and more towards people suffering from gloom, listlessness and self-doubt, I have the nagging sense that a lot of the discourse around eating disorders serves less to illuminate the lacerating self-abuse of mental illness and more to illuminate sad, common dissatisfaction with oneself. That dissatisfaction is not trivial. But it is not the same.

If you know someone who might be slipping into an eating disorder it is good to be aware of what they eat and what they say about themselves, and their relationship with food. It is also good to be aware of everything else in their life and how it might be contributing to their state of mind. Otherwise, one might miss the forest for the cold, bare winter trees.

If you’re worried about your own or someone else’s health, contact Beat on 0808-801 0677 or beateatingdisorders.org.uk

Puerile as he was, he was witty and audacious. Eminent Victorians, his most famous book, might have been unfair to its subjects but it was entertaining and original, and tore through staid post-Edwardian propriety. Bertrand Russell, who was in prison for his pacifist activities when he read the book, wrote to a friend that he had been laughing so merrily that a warden had had to remind him that prisons were places of punishment. Strachey’s portrayal of the Victorians as being rather foolish and hypocritical helped young Britons to believe in progress more than tradition, and not to be bound by reverence for the past. As World War One thinned their ranks, the older people who had got them into such a mess seemed especially deserving of criticism.

Boomers, the debut book of the brilliant American critic and commentator Helen Andrews, takes a similar form to Eminent Victorians. Notable representatives of the titular generation, including Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin and Camille Paglia, are dissected. Like the Victorians, boomers steered the West through a time of great technological and societal change, taking in the Space Race and the internet age, as well as rock n’ roll and the sexual revolution. The history of their time, as Strachey wrote of the Victorians, could “fill innumerable volumes.” By examining certain “characteristic specimens”, however, Andrews can illuminate important tendencies.

An editor gave Andrews the idea for the book, she writes, because, “You’re like Strachey. You’re an essayist, and you’re mean.” I don’t know if “mean” is the right word but Andrews has certainly displayed lemony wit, from her early years writing at “The Cigarette Smoking Blog” to her erudite and iconoclastic essays for journals like First Things and the American Conservative, where she is now editor. You can never guess what Andrews is going to write about — it might be the suffragettes, or Zimbabwe, or the films of Paul Schrader — but you bet that it will be challenging and entertaining. No one is better placed to fuse insights with insults.

Suggested reading

The generation betrayed by Boris

By Louise Perry

Whereas Strachey insisted that he wrote “without ulterior intentions” — in much the same style that a liar will loudly preface a mistruth with “to be honest” — Andrews is openly critical. Unlike Strachey’s subjects, her targets are less than sacred (Jobs was, perhaps, but his reputation has taken a bit of a posthumous beating). Millennials, never mind Generation Z, have not been raised to respect their elders. “Boomers” are a running joke, the target of a million irreverential memes. What Andrews hopes to accomplish, though, is not just to puncture inflated reputations but to explain where people went wrong, and how to avoid making similar mistakes.

What Andrews finds most pitiful about her subjects is the hubris of their attempts to reshape the world. In a tightly argued, cheerfully one-sided opening chapter, she suggests that their liberatory enthusiasm birthed a world of savage economic insecurity, chronic fatherlessness, pill-popping, depression and porn. Rather than being freer, Andrews maintains, many of us are inhibited by poor education, addicted to screens and immiserated by a lack of ownership. Would anybody want to argue that there is not a significant amount of truth to this?

Pop culture is one of Andrews’ biggest targets. Aaron Sorkin, she writes, saw television as a means of mass enlightenment. Camille Paglia saw pop stars and actors as being icons of a chain-breaking sexuality. Andrews, like Richard Hoggart in the innocent 1950s, sees popular culture as a stage for “mass publicists”, promoting “group individualism”. Sorkin, she writes, failed to appreciate that “pseudo-knowledge might be worse than no knowledge at all.” His characters are archetypal “upper normies”: endlessly scornful of the received wisdom of the masses and sycophantically devoted to the received wisdom of the liberal bourgeoisie. The dangers of this were easy to identify in 2020, where sophisticated opinion held that masks were comically useless in March and essential in May.

Paglia, meanwhile, waxed lyrical about the glamour of pornography as men and women scrolled mindlessly through ever more bizarre sex scenes in search of something they had not grown numb to. She celebrated the provocations of her muse, Madonna, but ended up griping about her “juvenile Instagrams [and] her trashy outfit” as the pop star followed erotically charged attention-seeking to its ignominious endgame. What is sold as freedom can become captivity.

One expects swipes at hippies in a book like this, but Andrews, cleverly, holds her fire when it comes to flower power and the Grateful Dead. It would have been easy to do a line-by-line analysis of “Imagine” but it would also have been cheap. She is far more harsh on hippie ideals infusing corporate and bureaucratic institutions. She is damning, for example, and righteously so, on how the sunny universalism of Silicon Valley has been exploited by hard-nosed Chinese nationalists. Imagine all the people, sharing all the apps. It hasn’t quite worked out. As a spicy Wall Street Journal article put it in March, “Tim Cook and Apple Bet Everything on China. Then Coronavirus Hit.”

Boomers, Andrews writes, thought that they could wield the power of their predecessors without all the nasty bits. Adventuring economists like Jeffrey Sachs, for example, believed that they could teach foreign governments how to run their countries without actually having to subordinate them. Andrews argues, however, that such meddling was not less but more hubristic and presumptuous about the world than that of honest old-fashioned imperialists. It is only a shame that the neoconservatives, who planned short, painless wars to make space for the flowering of liberal democracy and ended up with long, attritive wars making space for snake oil salesmen and ethnic strife, don’t get more of a look-in here.

More from this author

Hypocrisy is not the worst thing on earth

By Ben Sixsmith

Perhaps to the disappointment of Andrews’ editor, Boomers isn’t that mean. Andrews scorns Camille Paglia’s verbose sexual utopianism, for example, yet also salutes her intellect. While her chapter on Steve Jobs laments the overvaluation of the temporal, Andrews seems to quite admire him as a man. This is admirable, and makes her critiques more incisive for being so measured.

When Andrews wants to make a point, though, she makes it mercilessly. A chapter on Al Sharpton assaults the idea that “white flight” was a symptom of prejudice and leaves it twitching. Even Left-wing activists moved to the suburbs, Andrews writes, so their children “would no longer have their liberal opinions beaten out of them.”

Unlike Strachey, Andrews writes with moral seriousness and no illusions about the future. Millennials “seem intent on making the boomers’ same mistakes”, fetishising self-expression, oikophobia and iconoclasm. Nonetheless, she sympathises with their predicament, working in jobs beneath the status they would have expected from their education, and without prospects for home ownership until they have paid for that same education. One can disagree with their conclusions but one has to empathise with their discontent.

Boomers, understandably, is longer on diagnosis than prescription. Andrews defends older institutions, but many of those institutions are long dead. Modern technology does serious harm, meanwhile, but it is hard to imagine people getting rid of it.

Suggested reading

Our decadent society has ground to a halt

By Niall Gooch

The least we can be is honest. As this witty, truthful book makes clear, there is no sense in pretending that modern sadness is the result of too little freedom from tradition rather than perversities of technological and cultural innovation. There is no point in elevating identitarian opportunists who exploit without ameliorating demographic tensions. There is no point in blaming dysfunction in developing nations solely on the errors of colonial and not also post-colonial rule. There is no point in Big Tech issuing calls to build without more contemplation of what to build and why. Even the best treatments could be useless if a condition has been misdiagnosed, and Andrews is an excellent diagnostician.

Although all of the social ills described apply equally to Britain, it is interesting that “boomer” discourse cannot be smoothly recreated in a British context. Who would British boomers be? Pink Floyd? Monty Python? Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis? It doesn’t quite work. Hitchens actually wrote one of the earlier, funnier critiques of the boomers himself for Vanity Fair almost 25 years ago, writing: “In the therapy generation, which scripts even its own lenient satires, you are by all means allowed, if not encouraged, to feel guilty. Just as long as you don’t feel responsible.”

In truth, while boomers are often attacked in Britain over the widespread tendency to prize their pensions and unblemished view across the fields over the need for young people to have functioning institutions and affordable homes, they have not the cultural prestige of their American cousins. America, after all, was in the ascendance. It was slightly younger people — born too late for the heydays of Bob Dylan and Beatlemania but early enough to witness Bowie and the Sex Pistols — who left a boomeresque imprint on Britain with New Labour. Caustic online critics in the dark corners of Twitter have dubbed this phenomenon “Britpoppers”, and defined them as people whose political imagination never escaped 1997 and whose cultural imagination is stuck in 2012. The archetypal Britpopper hates “toffs”, “cranks” and “populists” and loves smooth-speaking managerialist, Science(TM) and a limp, Richard Curtisesque conception of British soft power.

What is the point of generational analysis? Of course, not to indict each man and woman born in a specific period. Most people who complain about “boomers” love their grandparents after all. Instead, it is to isolate styles of thinking and behaving — and, where necessary, to reject them.

Further reading

Charting the decline of the American Republic

By Ed West

Of course, everything seems clearer in retrospect — and there is a danger of this generational critique descending into a childish, screw-you-dad petulance. Millennials, such as myself, have to take some responsibility for the world as we advance into our thirties. GenZ is already TikToking their own scornful critiques of us. But being responsible means understanding one’s conditions, and who and what was responsible for them.

We are all both architects and victims of our times, shaping them and being shaped by them simultaneously. Dwelling on blame might be unhelpful. But we must still understand causes and effects.

Now, about those good-for-nothing Generation X-ers…

Wiedźmin, which had swelled in popularity in Poland after beginning life as a one-off short story, had been optioned for a video game before and the former sales representative Sapkowski was dubious about its prospects. As he later said: “They offered me a percentage of their profits. I said, ‘No, there will be no profit at all — give me all my money right now! The whole amount.’”

Sapkowski’s scepticism was understandable. CD Projekt Red were an obscure company, and their demo for the game, renamed The Witcher, was, by their own admission, “a piece of crap.” Besides, Poland was not exactly known for its video games — and who outside of Central and Eastern Europe would be interested in a series based heavily on Slavic myths?

The Witcher and its sequels were a gigantic success. People across the world loved the dark, rich and morally ambiguous stories. More than fifty million copies of the games have been sold. A Netflix adaptation has been developed. In 2018, Sapkowski took CD Projekt Red to court to belatedly try to get more money than the few thousand dollars he had initially accepted.

Last month, CD Projekt Red released another game, Cyberpunk 2077, to critical and commercial success (if marred, on some consoles, by technical bugs). Even before its release, Poland, surprisingly, was the world’s fourth largest exporter of video games, behind only China, Japan and Hong Kong.

This belies the image many have of Poland as a backwards post-Soviet newcomer to the first world: grey, industrial and sad. Of course, while not entirely false, this was something of a reductionist stereotype. It was misleading visually, when Poland had the grandeur of cities like Kraków and Gdańsk and environmental riches like the lakes of Masuria and the mountains of the Tatras, and it was misleading culturally.

Cultural activity survived throughout more than a hundred years of partition, and even the horrors of Nazi occupation. Amid industrialisation, and beneath the cold eye of the communists, Polish creativity endured. Western film aficionados could have told you about Andrzej Wajda. Television connoisseurs would have spoken of Kieślowski’s magisterial Dekalog. Poetry readers would have been acquainted with Wisława Szymborska, who would win a Nobel Prize in 1996. Literature buffs would have known the dazzling reportage of Ryszard Kapuściński. In general, though, state censorship and inadequate distribution meant that Polish art left a shallow imprint on the Western imagination — and that continued to exist in the years following communism’s downfall.

More from this author

What my Polish town taught me about localism

By Ben Sixsmith

That seems to be changing. Over the past few years, Polish cinema and literature, as well as video games, have earned international acclaim — bringing modern craftsmanship to the nation’s history, and welcoming people to landscapes as brooding and mysterious as Scandinavia’s, cities as beautiful as France’s, and industrial wastelands as poetic as the North of England’s.

Ida, a loss-scarred film about people coming to terms with the Second World War, won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2015, while Zimna wojna (Cold War) was nominated in 2018. Last year, the veteran director Agnieszka Holland was elected president of the European Film Council. Olga Tokarczuk, a novelist, won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018 for her fragmentary humanist novel Flights — and the Nobel Prize for Literature a year afterwards.

Polish productions have also earned more attention on the small screen. In 2018, Netflix produced its first original Polish series, 1983, based in an alternative timeline where the Cold War did not end. This month, Netflix announced that it is producing an animated series based on the classic communist-era Kajko i Kokosz comic books.

Poland has seen an economic golden age in the past decade, achieving annual growth rates of 4%, at least until the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and established as a tech hub. With almost 40 million people and closing in on western European GDP per capita, it looks set to a significant economic power and with a cultural power, too — enriching its once monochromatic international image with colours and shades.

More from this author

How Global English became a source of division

By Ben Sixsmith

None of this has come without controversy. As Polish art has achieved more international recognition, Poles have been divided on the image of their nation that is being portrayed. Take Ida: many conservatives were troubled by the film’s dwelling on the complicity of some Poles in the persecution of the Jews. Activists campaigned for text to be inserted to emphasise that countless others struggled and suffered to protect Jewish people.

Countless Poles did struggle and suffer, but the demand confused art and history. Artists can tell stories without telling everybody’s stories — and if viewers take films about particular time periods to reflect the whole truth of those time periods that is their fault. The same mistake was made by different critics who thought the inclusion of a Jewish prosecutor who had been a post-war Stalinist fed anti-Semitic stereotypes. If viewers drew sweeping conclusions from one fictional character that would be unfortunate but it is not an artist’s duty to shepherd us around unreasonable conclusions.

Still, that does not mean one cannot be concerned about the conclusions people draw. It is true that American and Western European critics tend to take an interest in those books and films which flatter their prejudices — and can instrumentalise creativity towards ideological ends. For example, Olga Tokarczuk is an extremely talented and original writer whose work deserves attention, but it remains true that much of the attention she is given in America and Britain is attributable to progressive symbolism.

“Olga Tokarczuk: the dreadlocked feminist winner the Nobel needed,” blared one patronising Guardian headline. A New Yorker profile falsely claimed that Poland’s government had “passed a law forbidding discussion of Polish collaboration with the Nazis,” and described Polish progressives as people who seek a “truthful reckoning with Poland’s past” — the implication being, it seems, that conservatives do not seek the truth.

One could hardly pass over the political implications of art but one should avoid being incorrect, or condescending, or opportunistic. Filip Mazurek, a Polish critic, has written that “English language reviewers have ignored or even denied” the “metaphysical, quasi-religious” elements of Tokarczuk’s work, choosing to focus on “Tokarczuk as an anti-nationalist.” (Polish critics, Mazurek argues, did the opposite.) Again, this is not a criticism of Tokarczuk, but one can hardly be shocked that conservative Poles have been less than enthused about her international acclaim when it is premised, to a large extent, on her status as a symbol of opposition to their beliefs.

Suggested reading

Europe's deplorables have outwitted Brussels

By Wessie du Toit

Yet one hopes there can be some extent to which people can put aside their differences. Frenchmen can be proud of Zola and Claudel, after all, and Britons can be proud of Orwell and Eliot. Besides, for all their disagreements about history and politics, Poles can remember what Henryk Sienkiewicz said at his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Then, in 1905, Poland had endured a century of foreign rule by Russia, Germany and Austria, throughout which its culture and its language had been suppressed. The award, Sienkiewicz said, “…bears witness that that nation has a share in the universal achievement, that its efforts are fruitful, and that it has the right to live for the profit of mankind. If this honour is  to all, it is infinitely more so to Poland. It has been said that Poland is dead, exhausted, enslaved, but here is the proof of her life and triumph.”

That Polish art has endured at all is a triumph, and that it has spread across the world is doubly so. Still, one hopes and expects that future triumphs will not be measured in relation to past suffering — that, for example, it will not be a surprise if a sales representative living in Łódź writes a story and ends up having an audience of millions across the world.

Hypocrisy is the easiest vice to diagnose because one only has to hold one’s rhetorical opponents to their standards and need not articulate one’s own. If you charge me with a sin, moreover, but then prove to have committed it yourself, your shame spares me the burden of defending myself.

This is not to claim that hypocrisy has no immoral implications. It is almost inevitably an act of deception — and a demand that others meet standards one is either unwilling or incapable of meeting. All of us are hypocrites, to some extent, inasmuch as it is easier to say something than do it, but that does not make it right.

Yet I think in most cases it is one of the lesser vices. Consider two men: John and Joe. John is a habitual and callous cheat with no pretensions to virtue and Joe is a religious family man who once betrayed his wife. I think most of us would agree that John’s behaviour is more condemnable — and that Joe’s worst sin was cheating and not hypocrisy. Joe might be more satisfying to condemn, because dragging the righteous from their perch has a thrill which denouncing the lowly does not, but that isn’t quite the same thing.

People on the Right love to talk about hypocrisy, in its undeniable and contentious forms. Check out any Right-wing website and you will find article after article about hypocrisy — and, more specifically, staggering hypocrisy. The “staggering hypocrisy” of the BBC. The “staggering hypocrisy” of Jean-Claude Juncker. The “staggering hypocrisy” of Labour.

But then I love to criticise hypocrisy as well. On the Right, our red meat is an environmentalist who takes a plane, or an advocate of socialism with a second home, or a male feminist who gets handsy after dark. Progressives idealists and scolds who cannot, or will not, live up to their own lofty ideals are entertaining archetypes, who make for good copy, but there are limits to this kind of rhetorical manoeuvre.

First, instances of “hypocrisy” can be nothing of the kind. For example, this year Dan Hodges of the Mail declared that Labour politicians “have to stop being a bunch of holier-than-though, self-serving hypocrites”. What makes them hypocrites? Hodges wrote: “Two years ago, Corbyn announced he was launching a campaign to oppose plans for a range of new grammar schools, roundly endorsed by his Shadow Cabinet. Corbyn attended Haberdashers’ Adams Grammar School in Shropshire. Sir Keir attended Reigate Grammar School in Surrey.”

More from this author

Why American lives matter most

By Ben Sixsmith

How is this hypocrisy? What are Corbyn and Starmer meant to do, go back in time and insist on their parents sending them to different schools? Left-wingers who rail against private schools while sending their own kids to them can be accused of hypocrisy, perhaps, but I don’t think we can hold Corbyn and Starmer’s education against them.

A classic example of misplaced hypocrisy-hunting came when Tory MP-cum-“Never Trump” fanatic Louise Mensch scoffed on Have I Got News for You about “Occupy” protestors who had iPhones and bought drinks at Starbucks, prompting Ian Hislop to ask whether one needs to advocate a return to the Stone Age to oppose state cuts. One must be careful that one’s charges of hypocrisy are not just hymns for the choir, intended to affirm Right-wing impressions of coddled progressives without illuminating the smallest substantive insight.

Another weakness with charges of hypocrisy is that using someone’s failure to uphold their standards as a means of discrediting those standards is a classic example of the ad hominem fallacy, or, in British English terms, playing the man and not the ball. I don’t want to be too much of a debate nerd. Such accusations can reveal some things about those standards — not least that they are hard to keep. But it does not prove that they are wrong to hold.

If Harry and Meghan use private jets while handwringing about climate change, for example, it might say something about Harry and Meghan but it says nothing about climate change. If Neil Ferguson meets his girlfriend while in lockdown it might say something about Neil Ferguson but it says nothing about epidemiology. If I tell people smoking is dangerous but indulge in a quiet cigarette behind closed doors, that does not mean tobacco is a health product.

More from this author

Where are Britain's conservative philosophers?

By Ben Sixsmith

The ubiquity of these charges would be more understandable if they were effective. The biggest problem with Right-wing hypocrophobia, however, is that it acts as a cheap and toothless substitute for explicating and defending principles and policies. When Gary Lineker attacked people who oppose Britain accepting immigrants who illegally travel across the English Channel, for example, MP Lee Anderson called him a hypocrite for not accepting immigrants into his own home. Lineker then took the wind out his sails by inviting migrants to, yes, live in his home.

To be fair to Anderson, it is relatively easy for Lineker to say this when he has a mansion. Yet it is still lazy and weak to hunt for examples of personal inconsistency when he could have mentioned how accepting such immigrants encourages dangerous, illegal crossings, enables people smugglers, runs the risk of Britain accepting hostile actors, strains public resources and makes a farce out of British border control. Perhaps the latter would have made for a more strenuous and controversial argument but it would have been more honest and more effective — that is, to a conservative illegal immigration in itself is a bad thing, whatever the personal conduct of those advocating for it.

Right-wingers often argue, correctly, that Left-wingers use charges of personal bigotry as a means of avoiding difficult debates. Yet conservatives often do the same with the charges of personal inconsistency. The difference is that bigotry is a powerful charge, while inconsistency has fewer such damning connotations.

Again, this does not mean that charges of hypocrisy are worthless. For example, the enthusiasm with which many leftists greeted Black Lives Matter protests in the midst of lockdowns they had tended to ferociously support might not have proven anything about coronavirus but it was a powerful indictment of their priorities. Yet the Right should recognise their limits, since their opponents use charges of hypocrisy too. Long before the #metoo’d male feminist, the Christian moralist with a colourful sex life, for example, has been a classic archetype, as Jerry Falwell Jr. recently reminded us.

Suggested reading

Manners maketh the society

By Niall Gooch

Back-and-forth accusations of inconsistency have a lot to do with the decline of a shared moral language. In her book Ordinary Vices, Judith Shklar wrote: “This is the normal character of political discourse between irreconcilable ideological opponents… the contempt for hypocrisy is the only common ground that remains, and that is what renders these accusations so effective.”

Leftists, however, are far less reliant on accusations of hypocrisy, preferring charges of cruelty, prejudice and intolerance. This is because progressive values are more fashionable than conservative principles, so leftists have fewer qualms about articulating their own worldview.

This makes it more understandable that Right-wingers hope their opponents will hang themselves with their own cord. But it can also be tedious and ineffectual. It allows progressives to lead the conversation — with their values front and centre, even when they are being criticised — and reduces conservatives to the role of anklebiters. One should have enough pride in one’s own beliefs not to spend all of one’s time holding others to theirs. I mean, if your opponents lived with scrupulous consistency, would you have to admit that they were right all along?

“Runaways and detractors find that America is inescapable. William S. Burroughs lived abroad from 1948 to 1974, but never defined himself as an exile. ‘One can hardly say that one is in exile from the United States as a whole,’ he explained; it would be as absurd as claiming to be in exile from the world.”

This much is unarguable. Even using the word “Americanisation” feels a bit clichéd. One could talk about McDonald’s, or Friends, or Kobe Bryant — and many have — but what is more interesting is how America exports not just its products but its causes. For example, the #MeToo movement spread around the world in 2017, beginning with a tweet by the American activist Tarana Burke and ending up everywhere from Spain to South Korea. True, the concept was adapted to be relevant to the different circumstances of different countries, with local instances of sexual assault being discussed, but the phenomenon demonstrated the ability of American culture to direct the course of social change.

So it has been with #BlackLivesMatter. The protests that followed the horrific death of George Floyd have spread not just around the United States but across the Western world. This is strange, on the face of it. Whatever your stance on American law enforcement, it is at least predictable that a nation with a militarised police force and a bloated incarceration system would experience such crises. One might not be very sympathetic but one cannot be surprised, especially after lockdowns have left people to stew in their own frustration.

But why did such large, intense protests take place in Britain, where last year just three people were shot to death by the police? Why did sizable protests take place in Iceland, Poland, and the Czech Republic, which all have small or miniscule non-white ethnic minorities? No doubt, people in these countries could point to local factors to rationalise the demonstrations. But there are more structural factors at play.

Both #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter began life as hashtags, and their global reach can be explained partly by the international nature of social media platforms. Through Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube et cetera, people, and especially young people, across the world are plugged into the same conversations. “Influencers” like Charli D’Amelio — with 60 million followers on TikTok — and Logan Paul — with 25 million followers on YouTube — speak to a global audience on a scale that stars of radio and television could never match.

More from this author

How Global English became a source of division

By Ben Sixsmith

Their opinions — and those of many, many others — not only shape their followers’ perceptions of world events but, like their clothes and music choices, become status symbols, signifying contemporary, cosmopolitan tastes, especially in nations where the cultural mainstream is more traditional and conservative. “Influencers” become sales representatives of woke capital, for which social rather than economic causes are a useful means of prettifying one’s brand image without threatening one’s bottom line.

Even the aesthetics of protests in the non-English speaking world often take their lead from English-speaking media. I recall seeing photos of a climate march in Warsaw, where young people carried posters bearing slogans like “The Earth is Getting Hotter Than Shawn Mendes” and “Let’s Fuck Each Other Instead of Planet”. These seemed like the kind of posters which had a good chance of going viral on US Twitter and no change of convincing a Polish family to convert their coal-burning furnace into something more environmental.

Yet the global adoption of US causes has a more explicitly political function as well. As James Hunter, the first theorist of the “culture war” has argued, a culture war is also a class war, built around the controversial accumulation of status by educated and urban representatives of cognitive-cultural capitalism. Some form of contest will always occur when industry and agriculture decline, and when higher education swells in response, as there is so much status, and wealth, waiting to be claimed. But American media directs these contests onto battlegrounds of cultural values.

#MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter are essentially memes, and the US culture war provides effective memes around which international members of the progressive classes are able to construct their identity. When a twenty-something European representative of the creative industries attends BLM protests, they are not just explicitly supporting black people but implicitly defining themselves against elements of society associated with parochialism and neophobia. It is an expression of self-image as much as a meaningful protest.

More from this author

How to survive in an over-complicated world

By Ben Sixsmith

Some might call this a cynical interpretation, and instead argue that protesters are expressing solidarity with victims of authoritarian governance, where they happen to live. Doubtless, some at least intend to do that. But an interesting question is why the Chinese state does not inspire half the outrage of that of the US. After all, if foreign instances of racial prejudice demand our opposition then there can be no more striking an example than the Chinese government locking up to a million Uighur Muslims in re-education camps.

A simple explanation for this not being a fashionable cause is that China is not an English-speaking country. This makes events in China less globally explicable, but also less relevant in a world where, as I have written before, English is not just the global language but a class signifier, denoting wealth, education and awareness of popular culture.

But it is also explained by censorship. Chinese people could not build an online presence accessible to the Western world. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter are all blocked in China, and even TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company, was not made available in China. If a Chinese person tried to start a #UighurLivesMatter campaign they would be arrested before you could say “hashtag”.

Moreover, the Chinese government even endeavours to limit the extent to which Westerners can criticise its policies. TikTok, unsurprisingly, removes videos which are critical of the Chinese government, and even Western organisations bow in the face of Chinese soft power. Zoom deleted the accounts of pro-democracy campaigners in the US on behalf of the CPC. Blizzard Entertainment suspended a Hong Kong gamer for supporting protests. LeBron James felt obliged to offer cringe-making criticisms of the Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey for his “misinformed” endorsement of the protestors.

Suggested reading

Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

The English actor John Boyega speculated in his speech to London’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations that he might lose his career over participating in the protests but criticising the Chinese would have been considerably more dangerous for his career prospects. LucasFilm loudly applauded Boyega for speaking in London but did not raise a squeak of protest when the Chinese casually erased the black actor from Star Wars promotional materials in China. My point is less to beat a snare drum marked “hypocrisy” than to point out that this censorship works. “Free Tibet” was a prominent cause in the 1990s, but almost no one in the West spares a passing thought for Uighur Muslims today.

To restate the arguments over the values that underpin culture wars would be pointless. It is done enough elsewhere. But the Americanisation of culture wars deserves resistance in itself. It homogenises national priorities, obscuring cultural and political differences, to such a ludicrous extent that British people end up arguing about police violence in a year when, yet again, it was revealed that the police had sat back and done next to nothing as a gang of men had groomed and raped young girls in Britain. Police brutality and overzealousness might be a particular problem in a Midwestern US state, while not being a priority in a northern English county; the globalisation of politics obscures local conditions.

It also distorts our understanding of the world, limiting our awareness of international affairs to those which are the focus of the narrow spectrum of social media trends. Whether you are a progressive or a conservative, you should be so in the terms of your national circumstances, and with broader frames of references than those which have been provided by social media monopolies.

Throughout the decade, however, the Canadian academic Thomas Homer-Dixon was working on what would become his great work The Ingenuity Gap. Published in 2000, the book warned that the human ingenuity which has allowed for complex mass societies and technological progress may at some point not be matched by the human ingenuity required to avert the crises that this change could conjure up.

I would like to call this book “curiously neglected” but to be honest I can understand why it slipped into obscurity. It is overlong, and a little rambling, and marred by the presence of some lumpy liberal shibboleths. Nonetheless, Homer-Dixon was formidably prescient.

At one point he noted that “violent insurgencies and terrorist groups are becoming more high-tech, transnational and powerful relative to the states they oppose,” meaning “rich countries will see more homegrown terrorism” and conflicts in third world nations will “become… generators of waves of outward migration, and havens for transnational terrorist and criminal networks.” One year later, planes smashed into the Twin Towers, and a decade aftewards Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was announced as the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq.

More from this author

Where are Britain's conservative philosophers?

By Ben Sixsmith

Coronavirus would have provided an interesting case study for Homer-Dixon’s book. In The Ingenuity Gap, he used the example of the United Airlines Flight 232 air disaster to illustrate how crises can develop in complex systems.

“When the plane’s tail engine disintegrated, the flight crew immediately faced a staggeringly complex task,” he wrote: “Multiple, simultaneous, and interdependent emergencies converged in the cockpit. Some were recognized and understood, some were misunderstood, and some didn’t even cross the crew’s threshold of consciousness. As the crew members tried to make sense of their instruments and the data they received via their eyes and ears, problems cascaded into other problems with almost overwhelming speed.”

When COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, multiple interdependent emergencies exacerbated the crisis. Chinese authoritarian paranoia obscured the magnitude of the threat; neoliberal openness helped to spread it around the world; Trumpian electioneering produced a lack of American seriousness.

Meanwhile, the virus appears to have continued to mutate, with Chinese scientists now suggesting that it has developed into two strains, one significantly more aggressive than the other (although others have disputed this). While one could justifiably observe that diseases have ravaged mankind for millennia — and once with a slow, grim inevitability — it is still concerning how ill-prepared we are for such outbreaks.

There are two ways of facing an ingenuity gap: maximising ingenuity and minimising risk. Of course, an optimist could point to all the times that human ingenuity has averted crises. As the professionally cheerful Steven Pinker has written:

“As long as we are entertaining hypothetical disasters far in the future, we must also ponder hypothetical advances that would allow us to survive them, such as growing food under lights powered with nuclear fusion, or synthesizing it in industrial plants such as biofuel.”

Suggested reading

Stop looking for coronavirus 'super-spreaders'

By Tom Chivers

This is true, but it also reminds me of what the Irish Republican Army said to Margaret Thatcher in the aftermath of the Brighton Bombing, which the British Prime Minister thankfully survived. “Today we were unlucky,” the IRA reminder her, “but remember, we only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky always.” My point is that human ingenuity can, and will, spare us from calamity. But it has to do it again, and again, and again, whereas it would only take one crisis to spell our doom. As Peter Franklin wisely wrote for UnHerd last month:

“It doesn’t matter that, on average, epidemics (or even pandemics) aren’t that bad; it only takes one extinction level event and it’s game over. For this reason and others, [Nassim Nicholas] Taleb, with his colleagues Joe Norman and Yaneer Bar-Yam, argue that we must transform our thinking. When it comes to a novel pathogen like coronavirus, over-reaction is the only rational response.”

As Franklin also observes, though, dealing with a crisis might not be as important as transforming a world in which people are “creating the conditions in which new diseases frequently emerge”. Minimising risk to keep our ingenuity gaps small can involve difficult trade-offs. I think research into artificial intelligence, for example, carries the intolerable risk of creating a monster with capacities that dwarf our own, but I realise that its blessings, such as the recent discovery of new antibiotics thanks to machine learning, make this a difficult question.

But if mankind has an ingenuity gap, we also have one between our creativity and our common sense. We all know heavyweight boxers have a tendency to make hundreds of millions of dollars and then blow the lot. Their incredible talent for training and fighting is not matched by long-term financial sense. Similarly, modern man has had the genius to invent antibiotics and the stupidity to make them far less effective thanks to their large-scale use in fattening livestock to produce cheap animal products, or, farcically, their common use as a treatment for the common cold.

Suggested reading

Farewell free trade, and good riddance

By David Goodhart

Similarly, the Chinese government has developed an extraordinary authoritarian apparatus — which appears to have achieved astonishing feats of containment since COVID-19 began to spread — but for years did almost nothing about pathogen-rich wildlife farms and wet markets because they posed a threat to public health rather than the stability of the regime.

Curbing these practices would have involved no greater suffering than some kinds of rare meat being unavailable and other kinds of meat being more expensive. I appreciate that this might sound vexing to some but as the alternative is significantly greater pandemic risk it seems like a small burden to bear. We cannot expect our ingenuity to always pay off debts that our irresponsibility has incurred.

Of course, it could be said of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book that major outbreaks, and plane crashes, have become significantly rarer. For all of our errors, there is truth to that. Still, one difference between our societies and aircraft is that the latter have all kinds of fail-safe mechanisms. There are, for example, system redundancies, which means that planes can function without pieces of equipment, as well as frequent procedural checks. COVID-19 has exposed the fact that our societal fail-safe mechanisms are exceedingly outdated.

Unlike Singapore, Western societies were not prepared for strict border checks. Unlike South Korea, we were not prepared for large-scale testing. Unlike China, we were not prepared for drastic containment. No one was prepared for the necessary closure of some supply lines and travel routes. While disasters have become more rare, we have neglected our ability to withstand them once they suddenly occur.

But as well as minimising risk in order to avert catastrophes, we can maximise experience. In one paper, Thomas Homer-Dixon returned to the example of United Airlines Flight 232, and specifically its captain, Alfred Haines, whose composure and skill helped to ensure that many lives were saved. Haines suggested that he had landed the plane, against all the odds, thanks to luck, but Homer-Dixon did not believe him. He said that it was Haines’ intimate familiarity with the machine that gave him the experiential knowledge he required.

Experiential knowledge, Homer-Dixon argued, is what we need, and “to cultivate wisdom in our societies, the wisdom that comes from working with complex systems for long periods of time so that you can recognize their patterns of behaviour, so that you have an intuition for what they’re going to do and how they’re going to respond.”

We do not know how destructive COVID-19 will be, but I hope we are learning from it: learning about how such pathogens develop, and how they are spread, and how they are treated, and how politics and economics affect their containment and are affected by them. If there is another outbreak it could be even more disastrous, but experience might help us to respond effectively.

With the death of Sir Roger Scruton on Sunday the Prime Minister paid tribute to “the greatest modern conservative thinker.” This view was shared by many commentators, with Michael Brendan Dougherty of National Review calling him “the most important conservative thinker of his generation.”

This is a fine tribute to Scruton, and well-deserved. But there is a mournfulness to the sentiment that transcends even the sadness of the great man’s passing, reflected in Douglas Murray’s justifiable observation that Scruton seemed “bigger than his age”. The question lurking behind these sentiments is: who is the next greatest British conservative thinker?

I am sure some names could be produced: Murray himself, Peter Hitchens, Theodore Dalrymple. All of these are fine men for whom I have great respect. All of them, however, are polemicists. There is no shame in that. I am one as well, and in a lower division. But if “intellectual” means anything then it means something else.

Niall Ferguson? I disagree with his more neoconservative politics but no one can deny his skill as a historian. John Gray? His primers for pessimists – like Enlightenment’s Wake and Black Mass – are required reading for anyone on the Right but I am not sure that he would have time for the label. No, the sad truth is that Scruton was in a class of his own. All of his rivals — Oakeshott, Quinton, Cowling and Butterfield — were dead and his loving peers were in his shadow.

More from this author

How Global English became a source of division

By Ben Sixsmith

The Left has its intellectuals. We like to characterise leftists as emotional if not hysterical — and that is by no means always an injustice — but they also have a deep, if narrow, emphasis on learning that the Right does not share. Read the London Review of Books and you will find a depth of literary and historical erudition that cannot be found in Right-wing publications. You can argue that the likes of Perry Anderson and David Harvey are wrong but they combine scholarship with contemporary analysis on a level that few if any British conservatives could match.

“Good!” might be the response of some, not entirely without justice. The twentieth century was not exactly kind to intellectuals. As Raymond Aron, Pierre Ryckmans and others documented, many of them inhaled what Aron called “the opium of the intellectuals” and backed bloodthirsty revolutionary movements in the name of utopian abstractions. Of course, such intellectuals are still with us today. Understandably, then, conservatives have emphasised the extent to which intellectualism can be a cloud of verbiage floating above the real world. We love nothing better than to listen to the gaseous ramblings of pensive Frenchmen and blow giant raspberries. Paul Johnson got a whole book out of it — called, appropriately enough, Intellectuals.

Yet we still need intellectuals, or, at least, we need historians, philosophers, scientists, economists, critics and political theorists who understand and explain the relevance of their studies to the world. We polemicists stand on the mountain of scholarship that they have built. Without them, our perception of the world is superficial.

Why are British conservative intellectuals so thin on the ground? We have a richer conservative history than the United States and yet we have no cousins of their journals like American Affairs or The New Atlantis. Granted, their influence on the President might be limited to non-exist but at least they are there.

Suggested reading

Raise your glass to Roger Scruton, the terroiriste

By Giles Fraser

This makes some explanations limited. The Thatcherite focus on liberal economics above all else — which Roger Scruton, for one, resisted — led to a dearth of conservative cultural thought in Britain but Reagan-era American conservatism had the same affliction and our American peers have done more to overcome this intellectual decline.

I think we have suffered from our tendency to romanticise instinct over intellect. Michael Oakeshott was a genuine conservative intellectual, whose writings about history, education and political theory were rich in erudition and insight. Oakeshott opposed “rationalism”, or the tendency to abstract political thought from political practice. In an elegant metaphor he observed that reading theory to understand politics is like reading recipes to understand cooking. There is no substitute, in other words, for experience.

Still, recipes have some use. (Try making a soufflé without one.) As the Catholic conservative philosopher Edward Feser has written:

“Human life certainly cannot be reduced to the abstractions of political philosophy, but it doesn’t follow that such abstractions have no place.” 

Besides, intellectuals do not trade solely in abstractions. Historians systematically document and interpret past experiences. Scientists, and social scientists, do their best to explain the factors at play. One cannot become a doctor without practical experience but nor can one master medicine without textbooks.

Suggested reading

Roger Scruton: Conservative lodestar

By Danny Kruger

Oakeshott’s most famous words came when he tried to define conservatism as a “disposition”. In an oft-quoted paragraph, he said that to be a conservative:

“…is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

This is true, but without more solid foundations of epistemic and ethical principles it tends to collapse into a shallow presentism that defines the “familiar” and the “tried” as whatever happens to be the status quo. “Present laughter” is continually upheld, however novel it is in historical terms and however much value it has for the future. We need depth in our historical, scientific, societal, philosophical and aesthetic understanding to know what should be conserved and what may be destructive and degrading in the long term.

What is to be done? Young people on the right should acquaint themselves with their intellectual heritage. By this I do not mean that we should encase ourselves in tweed, suck pipes and make vague references to Reflections on the Revolution in France but that we should acquaint ourselves with Scruton on aesthetics, Oakeshott on rationalism, Butterfield on history, Eliot on tradition and so on.

But one cannot just immerse oneself in the past. Time brings new circumstances, scientifically, culturally, and institutionally, and one cannot burrow into old achievements like a badger seeking warmth. The intellectual combines old wisdom with new knowledge, and either one can be misleading without the other. The magic is in the synthesis.

English is indisputably the global language. More than three times as many people speak English as a second tongue than speak it as a first. It is, as my student knew, the language of international business, and multinationals increasingly use it as a common corporate language to improve communication across diverse and complex organisations.

English is the main language of international tourism, being a required skill for employees in the hospitality sectors of nations from Thailand to Argentina. It is the language of international gaming. Once, when I was having Easter breakfast at a Polish friend’s house, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and his 11-year-old brother, who had said nothing up to that point, blurted out, “Good luck, we’re all behind you”, learned from playing online. The only other English word he knew was “headshot”.

With its ubiquity stemming from British imperialism and American popular culture, and its relative simplicity, the pre-eminence of English does not seem likely to change. Learning Chinese as a foreign language is becoming more popular but it is neither as common nor as widespread, and there seems to be no institutional drive towards challenging the status of English as the lingua franca. Even China’s neighbours in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have English as their working language.

What native English speakers will see, however, is the diversification of the language as non-native speakers from different countries communicate and form patterns of speech. Young French, German and Italian people, for example, might have “Euro-English”, where shared misconceptions are baked into the language, like the overuse of the present continuous (“I am coming from France”). Indians already have “Hinglish”, a stew of Hindi and English which might become more widely spoken than English itself.

By the same author

What my Polish town taught me about localism

By Ben Sixsmith

Millions of non-native speakers will add this local spice to a stripped-down form of the language along the lines of what Jean Paul Nerriere calls “Globish”. Globish is simplified English, reduced to its most functional elements. This, Nerriere says, is important to “bridge the communication gap” between different non-native speakers but also to ensure that English does not supplant their native languages. Globish can therefore be useful in business and tourism spheres without excessively diminishing the cultural importance of native tongues.

A cheap response to this is that Nerriere is French, and the French are not delighted with the spread of English. But he has a point. Imagine, if you are an English speaker, how you would feel if your employment chances and your social status were dependent on your fluency in French.

You could appreciate, if French was the global language, the economic and social opportunities that you were gaining, and the intrinsic charm of written and spoken French, but you might feel a bit resentful. In a Harvard Business Review report on how all global firms now use English as standard, a French woman recalls “…walking into [a] meeting with a lot of energy — until she noticed the translator headsets. ‘They’re humiliating,’ she says. ‘I felt like an observer rather than a participant at my own company.'”

Suggested reading

A vision of Britain's polarised future

By Daniel Kalder

But as well as being a burden on individuals, English proficiency can be a driver of polarisation within societies. English skills are much higher in urban than rural areas, and much higher among the children of middle class families than working-class ones. This affects their life outcomes, and in Korea, for example, commentators speak of an “English divide” between those who can work for international businesses, or work in tourism, or successfully migrate, and those who cannot.

Last year the Korea Herald reported on an enterprising charitable effort by Bruce Lee (no relation) to teach underprivileged kids. The enrolment policy is guided by the organisation’s vision of narrowing the “English divide” in South Korea by helping underprivileged children practise English. According to Lee, the divide stems from unequal opportunities in studying English, which reduces access to jobs and further education, ultimately widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

In India, even greater concern has been raised about the gap between the masses and the “English-speaking elite”. There, wealthy families can value the economic and cultural potential of English proficiency to such an extent that it is the language families speak at home. Sajith Pai called “affluent, urban, highly educated” Indians such as his family “Indo-Anglians”, describing them as being “clustered in certain pockets” of the nation’s larger cities and falling “well within the top 1% of India economically”. Sunil Bhatia has said that English proficiency has “emerged as one of the most crucial determinants of social status, income, prestige, and employment.”

As well as economic disparities, this exaggerates cultural stratification. First, English speakers consume Western media, which can foster “Western” values. A study of television viewing in Russia, for example, found that the more Russians watch American TV shows the more they adopt Western liberal norms, while a study of urban residents of China found that the more Chinese people are exposed to Western media the more enthusiastic they become about consumerism. English speaking also functions as a status symbol. A draft National Education Policy prepared by Indian scientists has claimed that one’s fluency in English is used as a “test for entry into the elite class and for the jobs that they control”.

This policy statement, an article in Business Today reports, argues that “large sections of society are marginalised” and insists: A major effort… must be taken by the elite and the educated to make increased use of languages native to India, and give these languages the space and respect that they deserve.

On the other hand, the British-born, Indian-raised writer Aatish Taseer — son of the Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer, who was assassinated for defending Pakistani Christians — has argued that this campaign against the “English-speaking elite” is symptomatic of the “Chavezian” populism of Prime Minister Modi.

Suggested reading

I'm sick of fighting moronic culture wars

By Lionel Shriver

Certainly, there is potential for English speaking to be a scapegoat for deeper structural problems, while English-speakers are not necessarily members of an “elite”. Indeed in Cameroon English-speakers are a minority fighting for separatism from their more numerous French-speaking compatriots, a decades-old conflict known as the Anglophone Problem, one which still rages today.

Still, while we should be aware that complaints about English-speaking could be based on xenophobic opportunism — the construction, in other words, of an outgroup on which to project grievances — that does not mean significant inequalities do not exist.

The adoption of English as the global language has had many advantages. It enables business deals, political dialogue, tourism, academic work, friendships and romances. Yet we should be aware of its second order consequences. Native speakers must accept, if we have not already, that English has escaped our absolute authority and will be twisted, truncated and transformed in different ways that will make the American insistence on calling crisps “chips” and trousers “pants” look like trivialities.

People from non-English speaking countries, meanwhile, should be aware that English is not always a neutral tool but can divide people along class and cultural lines. If it is not to be a force for stratification and resentment then it should be integrated into societies in a manner that makes it accessible for different kinds of people, and does not subordinate their own linguistic heritage. Otherwise the world’s language will prove itself to be yet another dividing force within societies separating the elites from the people.

I came to Tarnowskie Góry, in Upper Silesia, back in 2013, knowing almost nothing of Poland and absolutely nothing of the town. What would it be like? How could I live there? Would there be reliable Wi-Fi? “There is our new bus station!” my new boss cheerfully announced as we drove through the centre. This came as a relief. How bad can a place be if it has a new bus station?

I soon realised that Tarnowskie Góry was not bad at all. In fact, over the last six years of living here I have come to love it. This is partly with the slow-cooked subjectivity with which most of us love our homes. Could I convince somebody of the charms of the old communist-era estate I used to live on? Probably not, but I liked it because I was there.

What I also love about my town, though, is its character: the way the Polish reserve melts into Polish warmth once an acquaitance has been made, the shady parks, the murky pubs, the cluttered old antique shops. It has taught me, a native of Bath, about localism in a large-scale world.

Suggested reading

How communities lost their soul

By Nicholas Boys Smith

The post-communist and increasingly post-industrial world forced Polish towns and cities to sink or swim. In some places, layers of dirt have accumulated on grand old buildings; employment has dried up and streets have emptied. People are leaving their hometowns in search of distant wealth.

Tarnowskie Góry might have lost the income that mining equipment, lead and zinc brought in but its economy has diversified. Many people commute to larger cities in the Katowice Urban Area; new businesses have emerged and thrived. In 2017, a nearby silver mine gained UNESCO heritage status and tourism became a larger industry. The town has swelled, as the fields I walked through in my first years have become dense with housing. (This seems rather sad as I veer around new fencing but one day, no doubt, I shall want a house as well.)

This is great news, but prosperity, even on a modest scale, brings new problems. Economic progress enables the homogenisation of urban spaces as multi-nationals, chains and developers move in, vulture-like. I have wondered if the distinctive character of Tarnowskie Góry can survive the town’s success.

This might sound like privileged NIMBYism but locals were concerned about it even before I moved here. In a book of personal reflections, Krzystof Mazik, owner of the much-loved local bar “Galeria Inny Śląsk”, where little has changed in 25 years except the coffee machine and the art exhibitions, writes of how following Poland’s entrance into the EU, “behind marble facades…representatives of the most serious banks and insurance companies sat in former meat and vegetable shops.” The commercialisation of the town centre, Mazik writes, meant that “after dusk even a lame dog did not go out onto the streets”.

Suggested reading

Can Europe learn from communism?

By Roger Scruton

Globally, men and women have been struggling to find a place for local character and human scale amid modernity. Localism is a term that has nostalgic connotations, conjuring up images of traditional communities which, for all their charms, are hard to recreate: rural hideaways, farmers’ markets and fêtes. In practice, localism can be an elite exercise. Wealthy citizens can isolate themselves from society with local produce, services and cultural establishments that are prohibitively expensive for the common man.

In a recent BBC article on the controversy surrounding McDonald’s decision to open its first restaurant in the county, for example, we are told:

The picturesque county of Rutland boasts a Michelin-star restaurant, dozens of gourmet eateries and regular farmers’ markets – but what it doesn’t have is anywhere to pick up a Big Mac.

Now, in fairness, I am no expert on the restaurant scene in Rutland, but people who want quick, affordable meals are hardly going to frequent gourmet eateries. At the very least, there has to be something between a Big Mac and a medium-rare steak. For localism to be at all scalable it must have broad appeal.

Here is a small example: there is an independent coffee shop on the market square of Tarnowskie Góry, Cafe Silesia, that is so popular it seems to have cornered a market that might have filled a tedious Starbucks. Its magic lies in having good, cheap coffee: not Don Pablo Columbian Supremo infused with almonds, cinnamon and turmeric for twice the average hourly wage but tasty coffee, made quickly, which most people could afford. It is characterful, but also accessible.

Suggested reading

The invisible refugee crisis on Poland's doorstep

By Aleksandra Lipczak

Since our silver mine earned UNESCO heritage status, local shops have benefited from a lively trade in “I TG” shirts and accessories, with the red heart of the classic “I NY” brand replaced with hearts in TG’s traditional colours, black and yellow. At the annual town festival, in September, one could see dozens of people in such shirts, swarming around ice cream stands and fairground rides like honeybees.

This may strike people as kitschy, and to some extent it is, but in a post-modern world identity inevitably entails some level of knowingness. In-group solidarity is fostered through a cheerful absurdism, which acknowledges our smallness in the face of the grand metropolises of Poland, Europe and the world that we see through television and the Internet — but also embraces that smallness as a proud alternative. It might not be New York City, but it is ours.

Few engines of international homogenisation have been as powerful as social media, through which we find the same music, the same movies, the same fashions, the same opinions and the same desires, all wrapped up in the superficial glamour of the high status. Social media can be channelled for local purposes, though. In Tarnowskie Góry, for example, we have a Facebook community page which has a good sixth of the town’s men and women as members — a page which publishes beautiful drone footage of the region, and a page which publishes old images of the town throughout the decades. People can be connected to the past, connected in the present and connected for the future — not deeply, perhaps, but it is something at least.

Suggested reading

How the EU infantilises national politics

By Tim Parks

Advertising and social media, as obnoxious as they can be, have also given local businesses the chance to band together to raise their profile. Independent cafés, restaurants and bars barely have money to open their doors, let alone enough for a marketing department, but the organisation Tarnowskie Gòry Smakuja, or Tarnowskie Góry tastes, has emerged to promote the little bistros and backstreet pubs that might otherwise have escaped people’s attention.

Of course, coffee shops, t-shirts and Facebook pages are the venues and accoutrements of community and not community itself. None of them would be at all valuable if people did not meet, talk, laugh, share, work and love. Still, the sense of home that cradles our relationships depends on the refreshment of tradition — new experiences mingling with old memories. “The book of events,” as the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska wrote, “is always open in the middle.”

In the lovely city park there is an old pavilion. When I came to Tarnowskie Góry I wondered why no one seemed to use it except for groups of teenagers on skateboards and bikes. Now it seems that every weekend there are film screenings, open-air theatre productions, charity events or picnics. And the kids still come to meet there, as they always should. Nothing will survive without them, after all.

As with most Western democracies, however, the fruits of success are not apportioned equally. Some places, and some people, have done better than others. The success of the Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland’s 2015 elections had a lot to do with voters’ frustration with the Civic Platform (PO) government’s perceived complacence in improving the communities and lives of those left behind. This, combined with cultural change, is producing an increasingly divided Poland.

The most famous conception of Poland’s sociocultural divides is “Poland A” and “Poland B”, with the former being richer and more metropolitan and the latter being poorer and less developed. Geographically, “Poland A” is traditionally described as being to the west of the Vistula (and including Warsaw and Kraków as well as Łódź and Wrocław) and “Poland B” to its east (including Lublin and Białystok as well as much of Poland’s agricultural land).

More on flyover country...

Flyover France – the forgotten frontier

By Peter Franklin

There is some truth to the divide between the west and east. Historically Poland was divided, literally – between Prussia, Russia and Austria. “Prussian” Poland, which now makes up much of Poland A was industrially powerful while “Austrian” and “Russian” Poland, which now make up much of Poland B, were poorer and less developed. Infrastructure – which now includes roads, airports and Internet access – has remained stronger in the west, cities in the west attract greater investment than those in the east.[2. Grzegorz Węcławowicz, ‘Urban Development in Poland, from the Socialist City to the Post-Socialist and Neoliberal City’, 2016]

The divide has also been reflected in voting patterns. The more socially and economically liberal party, PO, dominated in the west in the 2007 elections while the socially conservative and economically populist PiS dominated in the east.

Yet, it would be wrong to think of Poland in these sweeping binary terms. Ideas of the richer west versus the poorer east are compromised by the existence of struggling regions like Warmian-Masuria in Poland A and thriving cities like Rzeszów and Lublin in Poland B. Nor is Poland A uniformly liberal – PiS made significant inroads into the west during their triumphant 2016 election campaign.

While Poland A and Poland B retain some conceptual power, the starkest class and cultural divides in Poland are now between the rich and relatively cosmopolitan major metropolises, which have enjoyed the fruits of a globalised economy, and the poorer rural areas and smaller towns and cities which have struggled to replace declining industries and trade.

It is this that has led to rural Poland being described as “the second Poland” and “the different Poland”, characterised by poverty and cultural conservatism. PiS are most popular here, winning more than half the vote with promises of economic redistribution and traditionalist Catholic principles. Despite government and European Union investment, economic improvements have been “temporary and fragmentary.”[2. Dariusz Żmija, ‘Economic Poverty in Rural Areas of Poland’, 2015]   Jobs are still in short supply and education is still lacking inadequate.

But it is not just rural communities that are being left behind, urban areas are at risk as well. I live in the Katowice Urban Area: a group of towns and cities that make up one of the most populated regions in Poland. A bus ride through the area reveals serious inequalities. Katowice is thriving, with its mines and steelworks, and national and international businesses, yet smaller cities suffer from what Dr Robert Krzysztofik has called “multiple and overlapping problems: economic, demographic, social, infrastructural and spatial.” Jobs and people have disappeared, leaving these cities struggling to fulfil their human, cultural and economic potential.

New developments have brought new opportunities, such as the construction of a giant shopping and entertainment centre in nearby Bytom, but investment alone is not enough. For rural and provincial Poland to thrive – as Henry Olsen points out in relation to Pennsylvania’s Levittown –  meaningful development cannot be achieved top-down. Local people, businesses and institutions must be given the power to reform their communities according to themselves.

In the future there will be new divides, between Poles raised after communism and before communism. The UK has seen a rift between left-leaning and remain-voting millennials and their far more conservative and Brexit-sympathetic elders. Poland is unlikely to have a clear political divide, but it is on course to have a generational one.

Poland has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, and an ageing population. Young Poles, still struggling with some of the higher youth unemployment and youth poverty rates in Europe, will face steep social care costs in the future.

Also like the UK – and other advanced economies – many young people are struggling financially. But there is also a clear cultural divide. Poles who lived under communism had access to Western culture, as well as their own art and entertainment, but Poles who were raised after communism have been saturated with Western music, television, cinema and social media.

Suggested reading

The flyover town that dodged decline

By Henry Olsen

These engines of secular individualism have had a mixed effect on generational opinion. Young Poles attend church in lesser numbers than their parents and have more liberal opinions on matters of personal choice. On the other hand, they still oppose abortion on demand and are hostile to non-European immigration. It remains to be seen how these opinions will evolve, but one effect that Western media has undeniably had is to make emigration even more attractive.

Youthful dissatisfaction with “traditional” politics was reflected in the fact that more than half of Poles between the ages of 18 and 26 voted for outsider candidates: the maverick rock star Paweł Kukiz, the eccentric Eurosceptic Janusz Korwin-Miike and the struggling parties of the Left. Differing opinions on social and economic matters are unlikely to make young Poles a coherent voting bloc but their animating concerns of self-interest are likely to disrupt Poland’s social and political life if they are not given a real stake in the nation’s future in terms of jobs, homes and the potential to start families.

Poles are patriotic people and despite their political disagreements, as fierce as they are, they have maintained a remarkably stable and cohesive nation. But as new divides take hold – between the haves and the have nots, and between the young and the old – there is no place for complacency.

Populist Sweden...

Is Sweden about to have its Trump moment?

By Tino Sanandaji