In truth though, I think the old aloofness has less vanished than mutated. If we’re now reluctant to wallow in the glories of our ancient Parliament, or lambast Papists on the Continent for their garlic and their tyranny, Britain today can feel as myopic as it did 200 years ago. That’s clear enough over our mindless worship of the NHS, and our utter reluctance to countenance something better. You might say the reverse about the EU. Never mind that it ships migrants to Libyan hellholes: for a tiresome kind of British liberal, it remains a progressive Utopia.

Yet I think it’s in the railways that our modern insularity is most pronounced. For years, Britons have tolerated shockingly low standards from Glasgow Central to Exeter St Davids, even as we seem bewilderingly unaware of the vast possibilities just across the sea. But whatever we’ve grown comfortable accepting, another world is possible, one that not only makes train travel cheap and easy — but also a sheer delight. For that to happen here, it’s finally time to look beyond our islands, and embrace foreign efficiency not just in the grand principle of nationalisation, but also in engineering and food, and simply too in grasping the fundamental point of a railway.

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The romance of sleeper trains

By Niall Gooch

Labour partly won the election on a promise to renationalise the railways, all under the banner of Great British Railways. The mangled status quo of semi-privatisation is clearly no longer sustainable: compared to similar European countries, our railways underperform to an extraordinary degree. That’s clear, if nothing else, in the development of high-speed rail (HSR). Britain hasn’t added a single mile of high-speed line since November 2007, when the 67-mile dedicated link from St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel opened. Since then, we’ve had five general elections and seven Prime Ministers, but not a single mile of new HSR.

It took well over a decade to approve the HS2 project, which is still almost 10 years from completion — it is finally projected to open in 2033, over a quarter of a century on from HS1. The Spanish have had HSR since the early Nineties, enjoying almost 2,500 miles in total, much of it added in the last 20 years, even as British politicians twiddled their thumbs. France, for its part, has about 1,700 miles, while Germany boasts over 1,000. Despite growing pressure from reforming groups like Britain Remade, which publicises the endless systemic barriers to getting infrastructure built, there seems to be remarkable resistance among transport planners to learning from other countries.

When John Major’s government privatised British Rail in the Nineties, it separated private ownership of the track and infrastructure from private ownership of the train-operating companies. This approach had very few precedents anywhere on earth, and, sure enough, problems quickly arose. Railtrack, the company that initially held responsibility for maintenance, collapsed after a spate of crashes around the turn of the century, ascribed to poor repair and monitoring. It was later revealed that fragmented privatisation had led to a severe loss of expertise and institutional experience right across Railtrack, as experienced British Rail engineers weren’t retained.

Nor is the curious parochialism of British railways limited merely to technical issues or a consistent failure to deliver large projects. A constant bugbear of many British rail passengers is poor punctuality, and a lack of information about delays and other problems. If you pass through large London railway stations, you will occasionally see senior rail company managers enduring a “listening” session, with passengers invited to come and ask questions or express their frustrations. While I admire the intent and the willingness of high-ups to meet the public rather than leaving harassed station staff to their fate, it’s hard to see how this is much more than cosmetic. Persistent unreliability is a problem of systems and culture, and there are other countries, other rail operators, that operate much better in this area than Britain.

That’s clear enough from the statistics. The most recent figures suggest that only about 80% of British long-distance trains arrive on time. By contrast, the Baltics, Scandinavia and the Low Countries all enjoy a rate of 90% or higher. Spain and Austria are in the same boat, and even Bulgaria, the poorest country in the EU, manages 89%. Further afield, the Japanese railways are famously proud of their punctuality: delays of just a few minutes, which British passengers would barely notice, are treated as serious failures in Kyoto or Osaka. How exactly the Japanese achieve this is unclear, but it appears to be a combination of powerful cultural norms around service and excellence, and a demanding management style where individuals are rigorously held to account.

In fairness, there have been stories of fact-finding missions abroad by British rail bosses and politicians. The late John Prescott visited Japan during his time as Transport Secretary. Executives from Avanti West Coast, the firm that currently operates the West Coast Main Line and is 30% owned by Trenitalia, are said to have visited Italy for consultations, while British officials also visited the Nordic countries to discuss rail operations there.

The difficulty here is translating useful observations into concrete improvements. But that would require serious changes in mindset, attitude and working practices; it certainly can’t be claimed that technical barriers are an insurmountable problem. Consider something like wifi, with one recent report finding that Britain has among the worst onboard access on earth. Having travelled by train, I can entirely believe this. But other railways, many of them in places we might once have regarded as less prosperous or sophisticated than ourselves, provide first-class internet as a matter of course. Eastern European nations, which have only experienced real prosperity in the last two or three decades, have not had the time to become complacent about their wealth and comfort. They therefore understand the need to keep developing and innovating in infrastructure and service.

Not that all of Britain’s railway woes are technical. Long-distance rail travellers in, say, Italy, will hardly fail to notice the high quality of the food on offer. Trenitalia menus advertise “light recipes packed with flavour” and dishes created by culinary luminaries like Carlo Cracco. In practice, that encompasses everything from salads and charcuterie to beer, bubbly and fresh Illy coffee. It’s a far cry from the lukewarm sausage rolls and pre-packed sandwiches typical of British railways — but surely it shouldn’t be impossible to prepare some decent English fare in a train galley.

Other amenities are clearly better elsewhere too. Finland, for instance, provides play areas in some carriages. That’d obviously be useful in Britain, especially when childcare is so pricey. At any rate, introducing such perks here would require not so much a leap of technology as a shift in mindset, an openness to learning and developing rather than a “computer says no” assumption about how things are done.

Comparisons with other countries might also involve reflection on the kind of society that shapes the passenger experience. In a sense this is the hardest challenge of all. Culture is just so hard to prod in a positive direction; people get stuck in their ways, and find it hard to move the assumptions and perspectives which dominate beyond the station forecourt. Yet, shifting the dial isn’t impossible, if the will is there, and this is yet another arena in which British offerings can improve — especially if the newly renationalised Great British Railways can truly grasp the public’s imagination. One option is that GBR launches with explicit commitments to specific improvements, dovetailed with a public plan for how they’d be delivered. This would establish a clear expectation of accountability from the start.

Money, of course, is always a factor here. Running a railway line at a constant profit has always been tough, ever since the first routes were built 200 years ago. In the laissez-faire Victorian era, companies were forever going bust or being swallowed by larger competitors. Even now, private companies struggle without various forms of direct or indirect subsidy, partly explaining Starmer’s commitment to bring trains back under state control to start with.

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It's time to re-enchant the world

By Niall Gooch

The principle behind nationalisation — that the railways are something akin to a public service, and a fundamental good even if unprofitable by the laws of the market — is clearly largely true. Yet here, again, it would be good to see Labour look across the channel as they grapple with this bewilderingly complex policy area. Though both are state-controlled, France’s SNCF and Germany’s Deutsche Bahn enjoy different structures: while the former is entirely owned by government, the latter does have some private ownership, as does Trenitalia in Italy. Japan has an almost entirely private system, but a very impressive one that requires little subsidy, not least because private firms can also develop housing and other services on the land they own. Nationalisation, in short, is not a magic bullet. Among other things, it can incentivise under-investment, something Starmer should be conscious of as Great British Railways chugs out the station.

Beyond all this, though, I think there’s one more reason to examine the neighbours: to decide what railways are actually for. A weakness of Keir Starmer’s style is that he’s focused on procedures, not outcomes, perhaps unsurprisingly for a human rights lawyer. But ultimately, it’s very hard to quantify the precise benefits of a well-functioning rail system when constrained by a spreadsheet mentality. The gains are diffuse. They show up in different domains, in different ways, at different times. To commit yourself to achieving them requires stepping away from “process brain” and thinking about the common good, unseen costs and benefits, and gradual advances in public health and social contentment. Given the way Britain’s been run for the last several decades, that’s perhaps the fog that needs lifting most.

I had this aphorism in the back of my mind all through Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder, an argument for a more spiritually aware mode of living, and against the successful but ultimately incomplete materialism that dominates the modern world. “Enchantment” is the key word Dreher uses here. By this, he means preparing your mind to see beyond the everyday things presented to our eyes and ears, and to sense what Christians would regard as the underlying reality of existence: the grace and goodness of God, and the unity of creation.

Dreher is a devout and observant Orthodox Christian. This naturally gives him a certain appreciation of why modern life can feel so disenchanted. In his telling, the dovetailing of the everyday and the transcendent, so common in the high medieval imagination, was dealt successive blows. The first came from nominalism: the philosophical position which denied the existence of an underlying metaphysical unity behind the physical world. Then came the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution of the last few centuries. 

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This is a familiar story, though Dreher’s train of thought does call at some unexpected stops. His discussion of the potentially sinister spiritual significance of UFOs and AI — quoting many reasonable people open to the idea that such phenomena could represent a vector for malevolent immaterial entities — is both fascinating and unnerving. That’s doubly true for those who believe, or half-believe, in a world beyond our everyday experience. 

Non-believers will surely raise an eyebrow here, as perhaps might proudly rationalistic believers. Yet Dreher’s book contains many examples of people who are non-religious but nonetheless suspicious of dogmatic materialism. One good example here is the philosopher Thomas Nagel. At any rate, sceptics shouldn’t let their unease with what Dreher himself calls “woo” blind them to a core problem of modernity: the crisis of attention. The best parts of Living in Wonder deal squarely with this issue, and even doubters can gain much by taking it seriously. 

The challenge posed by visual media to our collective capacity for serious thought has plausibly been building since TV became widespread in the second half of the last century. This arguably intensified with the rise of computer gaming, and became irresistible with the spread of mobile internet access. Who can honestly say that social media and smartphones haven’t affected our ability to concentrate and focus our intellectual energies? Certainly not the scientists, with academics like Jonathan Haidt making a strong case that smartphones are one of the chief culprits in mounting anxiety disorders among children and young people. 

It’s not just the kids. With titles like Deep Work and Stolen Focus, there’s now a cottage industry of self-help books marketed to help people escape the ephemeral diversions of the information age. To put it differently, then, Dreher’s thesis about the need to reinvigorate our spiritual senses is not just compelling — but can also be considered in a wider context of near-permanent mass distraction.  

On platforms like TikTok, “overstimulation” is a common explanation of the problem. A particularly popular form of self-diagnosis for the mothers of young children, I can certainly sympathise with the exhaustion that descends at the end of a day spent dealing with the questions, demands and crises that typify parenthood. All the same, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that these people are making the problem worse: by spending much of their time scrolling and scrolling, keeping their minds constantly racing, never settling on a single topic. No wonder they feel drained by bedtime. 

The Atlantic recently ran a long essay lamenting the decline of longform reading among university students, drawing on the experiences of several educators. While this is admittedly anecdotal, I’ve heard similar concerns from teachers and academics. Even allowing for a degree of “kids these days” middle-aged grumbling, their essential complaint seems entirely plausible. Anyone who doubts this needs only look up from X or Instagram next time they’re on a bus or train with teenagers. You won’t spot many books, and few Kindles either. Not that adults are much better. I’m continually astonished at how parents will simply ignore their children in favour of their phones.  

Living in Wonder tackles all this in a chapter called “Attention And Prayer” — but again, religious sceptics needn’t roll their eyes. Much of what Dreher discusses here isn’t specific to religious thought. Quoting Iain McGilchrist, a distinguished polymath, the author claims that “how you attend” to the world changes what you find there. 

Obviously, the argument here is not that the physical world literally changes according to the psychological disposition of the observer. Rather, the idea is that our ability to notice important things — a flower, a bird, the emotional states and needs of our friends and families — is a learned skill, and one we neglect at our peril. Matthew Crawford, another advocate for abandoning the virtual, and to whom Dreher refers extensively, put it this way in January 2023: “When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular. To be present with those I share life with is then one option among many, and likely not the most amusing one at any given moment. It’s hard to be grateful for loved ones when they keep interrupting my feed.” 

If, in short, we allow ourselves to be buffeted by sensation and novelty, we lose track of what really matters. Dreher clearly understands this, at one point describing a strict prayer rule demanded by his parish priest. Obliging the writer to spend an hour each day in silent contemplation, the exercise was meant to help him regain lost focus. As someone who is, like Dreher, beset by an ill-disciplined and wide-ranging curiosity enabled by the internet, I feel his pain. 

In my view, there’s a political aspect to the crisis of attention. One striking thing about contemporary politics is how focused it is on the nature of discourse, on moral categorisation, on personal identity. What’s ignored are material conditions and the world as it really exists. The American Marxist writer Freddie de Boer has often written about his frustrations with the highly moralistic state of Left-wing activism. In his telling — and he’s surely right — progressives are much happier carving out new personal identities, or else policing problematic speech, than they are improving the lives of everyday people. 

It’s not just the Left either. A common Right-wing critique of the most recent period of Tory rule has been that ministers had no understanding of political action, instead preferring the safe and cathartic path of punditry. Fair enough: how much easier to lament the “Woke Blob” on X than actually putting in the hard work of defeating your political enemies with quiet, deliberate action unimpeded by the news cycle?

Disenchantment, then, can’t be untangled from the insistent clamour of the media. There are clearly other factors too: most obviously the slow decay of Christianity across the Western world, despite a recent spate of high-profile conversions and a minor trend of books proclaiming the return of faith. Yet above all, it is the almighty screen that undermines the normal human impulse to take an interest in the world around us in all its glory and strangeness. 

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The Trad case for Brutalism

By Niall Gooch

Speaking from personal experience, it can be very hard to simply appreciate a beautiful sunrise, or a special moment with the children, accepting the transience that’s inherent to such encounters with transcendence. So often now, there’s that little voice urging us to record the moment, or to present to an audience, despite the ultimately inadequacy of photos or video clips.

Some time ago, my young son asked why we impose strict screen-time limits on him and his sister. I ended up giving him quite the spiel, about how for his generation, the ability to sit quietly with a difficult book, to be alone with your thoughts, to work through a tricky problem without your mind wandering incessantly, will be a form of superpower. Without a deep and intentional awareness of the world around us, there can be no poetry, no science, no great paintings. Even more crucially, the most basic and life-enhancing human connections, from friendship to romance to marriage, can’t be sustained without paying close and careful attention to the other. Sometimes the leaf is really all that matters. 

Brutalism had a brief heyday in the decades after the Second World War, an era of cultural optimism, new ideas and technological advance. But it has never exactly been popular, despite the best efforts of a small band of devotees. One such devotee is Barnabas Calder, an architecture academic and writer. In his passionate and well-written book Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism, he makes a strong and learned case for the style, focusing on its vigour and monumentality.

The book is a refreshing read. It was also a challenging one, given my own convictions about architecture, which are rather more on the Roger Scruton-reading, tweed-adjacent end of the scale. It certainly made me rethink some of my former prejudices towards the style.

For one thing, we cannot level against Calder the charge often faced by modernist architects, that they expect other people to live in their unprepossessing creations while they themselves retreat to classically proportioned Georgian townhouses or the gothic splendour of Victorian villas. When selecting a Cambridge college for his doctoral work, Calder chose Christ’s, on the basis of its famous Brutalist accommodation block, called New Court, and caused considerable bafflement to an admissions officer by specifically asking to live in it. He even spent a night in the “Hermit’s Castle”, a mysterious but fascinating bunker-like structure near Achmelvich in the remote north-west of Scotland, built in the Fifties for now-obscure reasons by a largely forgotten architect, David Scott.

Raw Concrete is akin to Richard Taylor’s classic How To Read A Church, in that it teaches the reader to begin to appreciate something that may at first feel incomprehensible and alien. Calder does an excellent job of putting Brutalism in its historical context, noting how the unprecedented abundance of cheap energy in the years after the Second World War meant that public projects could become much more structurally ambitious. He draws parallels with the huge reforming impulses that had been unleashed in post-war Britain, which involved reconstruction of the physical fabric of the big cities, the growth of the welfare state, the expansion of the middle-class, and the new universities.

It is easy for conservative-minded people to forget all this. The temptation is to look back on mid-20th century Britain through the distorting prisms of the economic disruption of the Seventies and the failure of the post-Sixties social settlement. However, life must be lived forwards, even if it can only be understood backwards. It is an injustice to the early Brutalists to associate them too directly with the things that went wrong in the years to come.

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Calder gently pushes back against other anti-Brutalist arguments, principally the suggestion that it was an excuse for fast, cheap and shoddy construction. This was undoubtedly the case in certain places, but he demonstrates quite conclusively that many of the most striking and prestigious projects were expensive and time-consuming. The Barbican took 20 years to complete. The New Court at Christ’s, Cambridge, by no means enormous, took four years, with a long lead-in of planning and development.

Brutalism, he makes clear, was in some ways a reaction against the early modernists, particularly what is now known as the International Style — think white square boxes, with large expanses of unadorned flat wall and large windows, and a certain sense of fragility and lightness, often heightened by the use of thin support pillars. These early modernist buildings, like the American Farnsworth House or the incomplete estate at Frinton-on-Sea in Essex, tended to be relatively modest, lacking the audacity that came to mark Brutalist construction.

It is the ambition and scale of Brutalism that really seems to inspire Calder, just as it has inspired members of Brutiful Birmingham. He writes movingly about his years teaching in Strathclyde University’s architecture school, and his first time seeing London’s Trellick and Balfron towers “in the flesh”. Even for a sceptic, it is hard not to get carried away by his delight, although I cannot take as much joy as he does in the limited and functional ornamentation of stairwells and roofs. The drama and uniqueness of buildings like the National Theatre is hard to gainsay, even for the doubter. I am also a fan of Dunelm House, the now-listed Brutalist HQ of the Durham University student union, which narrowly escaped demolition last year. It is a fine example of a medium-sized modernist building that looks good in a comparatively spacious setting, where it doesn’t intimidate or overwhelm its neighbours, nor ruin the harmony of a street.

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This was not the case for every Brutalist scheme. Some of the best-known were, or are, too gargantuan, and embodied a kind of monumental disdain for the city around them. The Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth and Gateshead’s Trinity Centre, both praised by Calder and both now demolished, were in this category, as is the Cumbernauld Centre in the Scottish new town of the same name. Of course, defenders of Brutalism might counter that the replacements for both Tricorn and Trinity are mere bland boxes with no vision or ideals behind them, anonymous additions to the steel and glass canyons that dominate early 21st century commercial architecture. At least Brutalism was about something!

It’s a reasonable point. Plausibly, the growing popular disillusionment with Brutalism since its heyday is not always the result of a specific dislike of the style, but of a more generalised fatigue with the uninspiring and tedious buildings that have become so prevalent in British towns and cities. It is also unfortunate that the high point of Brutalism coincided with the start of many disastrous trends in town planning, and the rise of car dependency which we are still struggling to manage today.

This doesn’t get Brutalism off the hook entirely. It’s hard to escape from the fact that concrete tends to age poorly, and as a material is generally ill-suited to a country that is often overcast and gloomy. (Calder, to his credit, uses very ordinary photos of his cherished masterworks, not the deceptive kind taken on cloudless sunny days that you find in coffee-table books.) Grandiose concrete construction is often highly inappropriate for British townscapes, which have gained much of their charm and attractiveness from harmonious and organic interrelations between neighbouring shops, houses and offices. Calder’s much-loved New Court was a sharp break with the rest of Cambridge’s King Street, presenting a stark and imposing bare façade. There are people who find such dramatic statements thrilling or even sublime, and I can see why, but to many others it is unsettling and unwelcome.

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Architecture is unlike the other arts, in the sense that it is inescapable. I don’t like Jackson Pollock paintings or Marvel films or overwrought high Victorian poetry, but they are very easy to avoid. The built environment is not like that. It belongs to all of us, because all of us have to make our lives within it. The aesthetic preferences of the ordinary and unsophisticated may be frustrating to the more educated and advanced, but when it comes to their homes and their workplaces and their communities, it is unjust to ignore them.

So I am not a convert — not exactly. For one thing, just as Calder insists that we must disentangle aesthetic judgments about Brutalist buildings from the social and political problems with which they have become synonymous, we can be grateful for the achievements of post-war governments — in sanitation, living standards, and a more equal society — without accepting that Brutalism was inseparable from, or intrinsic to, those achievements.

Maybe I am simply too conservative to truly love austere innovations in architecture that represent such a radical rupture with the past. Calder notes that some Brutalists, like Denys Lasdun who designed New Court and the National Theatre, were influenced by classicists such as Nicholas Hawksmoor, and he draws some lines of continuity between pre-modernist and modernist styles. This may well be true, but it’s hard for the non-specialist to see such continuities, and one should not have to be a specialist in order to feel at home in an urban setting.

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The romance of sleeper trains

By Niall Gooch

There is much to think about in some of the key tenets of architectural modernism. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the emphasis on “honesty”: the belief that buildings should as far as possible reflect the technologies and spirit of their own times, that they should not hide the materials or techniques used in their creation, and that they should reflect a democratic and liberating spirit. This is why they are so little adorned, and why they often seem stark and confrontational, and why they are so different from what came before. Basil Spence’s new Coventry Cathedral, completed in 1962, is a good example of a mostly successful attempt to come up with an appropriate idiom for Christian churches in a fractured and uncertain modern world where older forms feel exhausted or inadequate.

All the same, there are traps lurking in the background. Several times in Raw Concrete, Calder contrasts one of his favourite Brutalist landmarks with the ordinary, comfortable suburbia in which he, like so many of us, grew up. The impulse behind the comparison — the need to break from home and form our own tastes, to experience the grandeur and variety of the world — is perfectly natural and normal. The moment in the book where Calder describes fulfilling a long-held ambition, by visiting the top of one of the Barbican towers and peering down a dizzying triangular staircase, was spine-tingling.

But there is a danger in taking this instinct too far, and making the rejection of the traditional and the mundane a cornerstone of our thinking. Man does not live by magnificent concrete set pieces alone.

Hollywood has long understood this. Hitchcock’s classic, North By Northwest, for instance, finds Cary Grant seducing Eva Marie Saint — or is it the other way round? — aboard The Twentieth Century Limited, a luxurious overnight service that ran between New York and Chicago for more than sixty years. And James Bond, of course, has found himself speeding through the dark with a lady companion on more than one occasion.

The golden age of sleepers is behind us, of course — in Europe, anyway. They arose in the open and cosmopolitan atmosphere before the First World War. Then, there was a service that ran all the way from St Petersburg to Paris, a distance of some 1700 miles. It was known as the Nord Express. Because of the difference in track gauge between the Russian and German Empires, you had to change at their border, in an East Prussian town called Eydtkuhnen. But once you were past that obstacle, it was plain sailing across the North European Plain, via Berlin and Cologne, to the City of Light.

Like so many good things that thrived before 1914, the inspiringly international sleeper fell victim to the twin cataclysms of war and totalitarianism. The Nord Express, for instance, never fully resumed after the Great War, because the Bolshevik revolution had closed off Russia. Between the wars its eastern terminus was Warsaw, by then the capital of a newly independent Poland.

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But at the same time the Nord Express was in its pomp, Tsarist Russia was completing the infrastructure for what remains the longest sleeper service in the world, the Trans-Siberian Express, which travels more than 5000 miles from Moscow to Vladivostok in Russia’s Far East.

And then there was the Sud Express, a service which connected Lisbon, Madrid, Paris and London until the late 1930s. Before the arrival of Covid-19, the Sud Express still existed as an overnight service — albeit in curtailed form, between Lisbon and the extreme west of the Franco-Spanish border. But at that time, it seemed as though the era of the night train was drawing to a close. In March 2017, The Guardian published “A requiem for the overnight sleeper”. Back then Deutsche Bahn, the German national operator, was said to be discontinuing all overnight services, while in France — home of the famous Blue Train, which ran from Paris to the Riviera for more than a century — the SNCF was suspending sleepers from the French capital. No more thrilling nights in sleeping cars with mysterious, scantily clad mademoiselles!

The future of the sleeper was threatened not only by cheap air travel but also by the development of high-speed rail, which was radically reducing journey times. Even the Orient Express, most celebrated of long-distance trains, which celebrates its birthday today, vanished from European timetables in 2009, having gradually reduced its range over the years. Once upon a time it had taken passengers between Paris and Istanbul, but by the end it was plying the Strasbourg to Vienna route — a sorry diminishment from the service’s heyday.

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Happily, it now seems like the requiem to the European sleeper may have been premature. A couple of weeks ago, Train Twitter was alight with excitement at the German Green Party’s plans to create a whole new generation of trans-European sleeper services — from Oslo, Stockholm and Tallinn in the North to Barcelona, Naples, Athens and Istanbul in the South. It is unclear whether all these planned routes are entirely realistic. One of the suggestions is for trains to run direct from London to Berlin, Warsaw, Rome and Madrid, using the Channel Tunnel — but some have pointed out that the logistical difficulties of running further services through the tunnel, on top of the existing Eurostar and freight traffic, are considerable.

Whatever the practical difficulties, the ambition is striking, and it follows other promising developments. January 2020 saw the debut of a Brussels-Vienna sleeper run by Nightjet, meaning that you can have lunch in London and be at the Wien Hauptbahnhof by breakfast-time the following day, with a single change in the EU capital. With a bit of luck you might catch a glorious sunrise along the Danube. This spring the same company launched a Brussels-Prague service, via Berlin and Dresden.

There’s also talk of night trains between Hamburg and Stockholm, making use of the magnificent Oresund crossing between Denmark and Sweden, a remarkable piece of civil engineering that combines both tunnel and bridge. Meanwhile, a company called Midnight Trains has proposed overnight services from Paris to all points of the compass, including Edinburgh and Venice.

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These signs of resurgence may be linked to the growing recognition by governments that short-haul flying is a serious environmental problem. But the pandemic’s evisceration of the airline industry — proving how vulnerable it is — may also be a catalyst.

Perhaps, though, travellers find the adventure of the sleeper train irresistible after all. Unlike flying, taking a long-distance sleeper allows you to really feel the distance you are traversing. At stations en route you will hear new accents and languages, and see different architectural styles. Depending on the time of year and what time you decide to turn in, you can watch the landscape change around you. Getting a solid night’s sleep and still not being at your destination is a semi-conscious reminder that the world is actually a big place. Whereas flying compresses distance and flattens diversity, the sleeper, with its gradual change and human scale, tends to emphasise variety. It makes the traveller more curious.

And as often as not, when it is finally time to leave, you walk straight out into the heart of a new city, with all its unusual rhythms and sights — rather than into a sterile airport terminal, all of which look the same. Even in an age when Big Steel and Big Glass are trying to make all cities look identical, many places retain a distinct character in their historic centres — which is where you tend to find railway terminuses.

Without doubt, reports of the death of the night train was greatly exaggerated. Indeed, we are potentially looking not at a mere stay of execution, but a fully-fledged revival. What may not survive, of course, is the “city break”, developed at the turn of the millennium thanks to super-cheap flights. But that may be no bad thing. Flying deprives us of much of the adventure — the glamour — of travel. Surely anyone with even the slightest glimmer of romance in their soul will feel a frisson of excitement on the day when the likes of Copenhagen, Barcelona and Stockholm join Paris and Amsterdam on the departures board at St Pancras.

As in personal life, so too in business and civil society. Each year hundreds of thousands of businesses cease trading. In 2019, even before the pandemic, there were 336,000 business “deaths” — 11% of all British businesses. Factories and workshops close, while industries decline and sometimes vanish completely. Once-vibrant clubs and churches gradually dwindle.

Even at the level of states and governments, nothing lasts forever. Countries and languages and whole peoples disappear with tragic regularity. Over lockdown, I read Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms, a series of elegies for various European states, or statelets, that are no more. Some are widely known, like the Soviet Union or the Byzantine Empire. Others are much less celebrated, even among history buffs. Davies includes a chapter dealing with the Visigothic state that existed in eastern France in the century after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. It lasted less than a century before being subsumed into the Kingdom of the Franks. But perhaps his most obscure case study is the Republic of Rusyn, a short-lived attempt by Carpatho-Ukrainians to carve out an independent nation from the ruins of Czechoslovakia, as it was being dismembered by Nazi Germany, Hungary and Poland in March 1939.

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As I read about these statelets struggling to survive, Covid-19 was causing human suffering and misery on a massive scale — not simply deaths, but strain on medical staff, family separations and ongoing disruption to normal life and health system operation. The Government and the health service were making serious and repeated mistakes. Vital organs of the state were hesitant and sclerotic, highly susceptible to groupthink. It was easy to think: this is how a nation collapses.

Indeed, there has been a widespread sense that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining event, that the world has changed irrevocably, that we must re-examine our assumptions about numerous aspects of modern life. The giant consulting firm McKinsey produced a report called “The future of work after Covid-19”, while its rival EY issued one focusing on the changes to globalised supply chains. The Economics Observatory asked “What is the future of commuting?” The Centre For Cities think tank investigated whether cities themselves have a future anymore.

But Vanished Kingdoms — I hesitate to use the dread phrase “putting in perspective”, because that sounds glib — made me reflect on what it takes, really, to destroy a way of life. Not to trivialise people’s grim experiences, but when you read about, say, the Russian invasion of East Prussia in the last year of the Second World War — invasion is almost too antiseptic a word; destruction would meet the case — it does inevitably offer a new baseline for the consideration of terrible events.

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Obviously, its’s little or no comfort to someone who has lost a family member to Covid — or a job or a home — that it could be worse: they could be living in a chaotic post-Roman kingdom menaced by enemies on all sides. But when we come to reflect on the specific political-historical-civilisational questions raised by the pandemic — the future of work, of the health service, of global trade — it’s important to have some kind of benchmark. Particularly because, in the modern West, there is a prevailing sense that we have little to learn from history, because we are so advanced. My generation grew up during the 1990s “holiday from history”, when the power of liberal democracy was unchallenged and its future seemingly secure. No wonder Covid-19 feels like the end of the world.

But one very obvious lesson of history is that we are fortunate, even during a plague, to live in Europe in the early twenty-first century. We are lucky to have strong nation-states, able and willing to look after their people, and well-established norms of diplomacy and international co-operation. However badly her Majesty’s Government has failed in its responsibilities, the nation has not yet been annexed by neighbouring powers, as happened to the venerable Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the late eighteenth century, weakened by infighting and loss of trust in government.

That said, it is worth noting that Davies, writing in 2011, does argue that the United Kingdom in its current form is not long for this world — mainly because of the loss of confidence in the shared beliefs and institutions that held its four nations together: Crown, Empire, and Protestant Christianity.

Covid, by itself, is not going to bring an end to the largely orderly and peaceable Europe of 2021, in the way that — for example — the World Wars were catastrophic for so many of the peoples of central and eastern Europe featured in Vanished Kingdoms. The disease remains a serious problem, but most continental nations have now reached high levels of double vaccination — and cut their death rates accordingly. Seven European nations were added to the British government green list over the weekend, meaning that travellers from them do not need to quarantine. The suggestion by UnHerd’s Ed West, at the very start of the pandemic, that the long-term consequences might not be very severe, now seems very prescient.

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Possibly, of course, I am too optimistic. One of Davies’ subjects is the Byzantine Empire, which endured for more than a thousand years, but whose long-term fortunes were seriously affected by recurring outbreaks of plague from the sixth to the eighth centuries. Those plagues, of course, were much deadlier than Covid-19, and spread through populations without access to modern medicine; but perhaps the pessimists are right that we can expect more globalised outbreaks of serious disease. It is entirely possible that not all such diseases will be as treatable and relatively non-deadly as our current foe.

And optimism can be dangerous if it tips into arrogance. Vanished Kingdoms carries a dedication to i’r anghofiedig, a Welsh phrase which Davies translates loosely as “those whom historians tend to forget”. He explicitly frames the book as dealing with our collective tendency to absent-mindedness, our complacency in looking back on our ancestors.

It has been argued that some of the misjudgements made by the British public health establishment in the early weeks and months of the pandemic stemmed from a kind of instinctive resistance among highly educated, high-status people to solutions that were redolent of historical responses to disease outbreaks. Why did it take so long to impose any kind of meaningful border restrictions? Why did it take the best part of a year for masking and good ventilation, rather than mostly pointless hand-washing and surface cleaning, to be strongly prioritised in advice to the public and to hospitals, schools and shops?

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The answer to these questions, perhaps, is that closing the borders and emphasising the importance of fresh, clean air sounded too simple to be true. It’s what people did in the age of the plague — when our allegedly simple-minded forebears still believed in dirty foreigners, miasma theory and bodily humours — so it must be rejected by sophisticated moderns. As the great Theodore Dalrymple has noted, intellectuals are incentivised to avoid obvious conclusions, because their status depends on the elucidation of non-obvious truths. And liberal modernity encourages us to throw out the baby with the bathwater: to reject the wisdom of past ages, as well as the unscientific mistakes and prejudices.

Davies would, I fancy, dislike such disdain, even if held unconsciously or instinctively. He is a humane writer, concerned not with ideology, but with truth and historical drama — and with helping us know what the past was really like. At a time when the public square is full of rancour and misinformation, inflamed by people’s understandable fears and concerns about the spread of disease and the undoubted, if unavoidable, downsides of our chosen anti-Covid strategies, his proposal is tempting. We must focus on the lessons of history, and so prioritise truth and fact — and proportion.

While reading Sohrab Ahmari’s The Unbroken Thread, I kept thinking of the quotation — which I only know from Postgate’s novel; I confess to not being familiar with Marx’s doubtless very exciting A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

Ahmari’s book is a collection of 12 chapter-length essays, each focused on a different aspect of traditional wisdom. Like me, he is an older millennial and an adult convert to Catholicism, although our journeys to the banks of the Tiber could hardly be more different. Mine was a comparatively gentle and unspectacular movement between Christian denominations, after an Anglican upbringing in quiet rural Kent. By contrast, Ahmari, now a New Yorker and a US citizen, grew up in post-revolutionary Iran, in a secular Muslim family, and became a Catholic in 2016 after moving to the US in the Nineties.

One thing we do have in common is that we are fathers to young sons, and worried about the kind of world in which our boys will grow up. Ahmari’s son Maximilian is named after the Polish priest-martyr Maximilian Kolbe, murdered in Auschwitz, and concern for his future animates the introduction to the book. Here Ahmari reveals his fear that Max will drift into the kind of disorderly, anodyne, atomised life in which so many modern Westerners find themselves, and goes on to frame The Unbroken Thread as a sort of guidebook. The great examples of the past can light our way through the gloomy swamp of liberal modernity.

Ahmari has made rather a name for himself in the USA as a determined critic of liberalism, by which he means a constellation of overlapping ideological commitments, united by the belief that whether in economic or social policy, the most important subject of political concern is the sovereign choice-making individual, determining what is best for himself by his own lights. As the American Supreme Court judge Anthony Kennedy phrased it, earning the ire of conservatives: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The Unbroken Thread is a critique of that idea.

Ahmari seeks to show that there are alternatives to the Kennedy view, and that these alternatives have enduring power and weight. The challenge for those who write about such matters is to find fresh ways to defend and illustrate the Great Tradition; he achieves this by blending references to conventional conservative heroes such as CS Lewis, Pope Benedict XVI and John Henry Newman with discussions of lesser-known or unexpected figures. I was fascinated to read about the husband-and-wife anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner, who spent many years studying the religious rituals of African tribespeople and later joined the Catholic Church, having left behind their youthful Communism.

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In the chapter dealing with the virtue of filial piety, i.e. respect for parents and family and established communal customs, Ahmari turns not to the Romans, but to ancient China and Confucianism. He even has praise, albeit qualified, for the second-wave feminist Andrea Dworkin, who shared with social conservatives a hostility to pornography and prostitution, and a clear-eyed understanding of the need to control and regulate the male sex drive.

Ahmari wisely does not focus on specific hot-button issues, which can raise the argumentative temperature. He does not hide his views, but The Unbroken Thread is really about the high-level questions that are conceptually upstream of individual culture war battlefields. The existence and significance of God, the importance of keeping the Sabbath, duties to parents, the meaning of freedom and sex; Ahmari invites his readers to good-faith consideration of these questions that are too often crowded out in modern discourse.

Which brings me back to that quotation from Marx. Like many books of conservative cultural criticism, The Unbroken Thread is implicitly premised on the idea that if we can persuade people to adopt better ideas, we can improve things for the better. In the terms used by Marx, a change in consciousness can re-engineer social conditions and social relations. Ahmari is essentially appealing to individuals to rethink and re-imagine their lives. What conservatives also need, however — to put it as Marx did — is a change in social relations to change men’s consciousness.

It is undoubtedly true that, as the title of one famous conservative polemic noted, ideas have consequences. Nevertheless, you don’t have to be a Marxist to see that the technological and economic structures of a society can strongly determine the ways in which people understand the meaning and purposes of their lives. For instance, the aims, rhetoric and substance of modern British progressive activism are heavily influenced by events in the USA; this would not be the case to anything like the same degree without the internet, social media, smartphones and so on.

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Similarly, the explosion in gender fluidity over the last decade or so is indisputably the consequence of how the internet works. Not only does the web enable people who are physically remote from one another to form communities of interest or identity, thereby binding them more closely to those interests and identities, but social media gives us all of us a heightened sense of our lives as curated performance and presentation. WiFi and mobile internet, and the associated hardware, have compelled people to inhabit the world in a particular way, and there is unlikely to be a mass return to the old modes of analogue existence, even if we have excellent rational arguments against the new.

Or to take an example from The Unbroken Thread: it is easy to lament the decline in people caring for their infirm or aged parents, and ascribe this to the loss of Christian faith or heightened selfishness. Yet we must realise, too, that it is the material conditions of the modern world, its hypermobility and the nature of the economy, that make it possible and indeed necessary for people to live far away from their parents. Medical and scientific advances that have extended lifespans, and new geriatric treatments, mean that looking after frail elders at home is in many cases a much more demanding and longer-lasting task than it once was. The plausibility structures around the old-fashioned understanding of filial piety have been badly weakened, just as the Pill’s promise of “safe sex” helped to destroy the plausibility structures around the prohibition of pre-marital sex.

This is not meant as criticism of Ahmari. I am quite sure he would agree with me about the need to overhaul social relations alongside persuading individuals of the merits of traditionalism. Having spent his early life in Islamic Iran, he understands that civilizational questions matter, that the underlying material incentives and scaffolding of a society make a difference. He is closely associated with integralism, a political ideology in which the Catholic religion is privileged and protected by the powers of the government and in which Catholic teaching forms the basis for law-making. The recognition that political power can be used to reshape and adjust social norms and the basis of social relations is central to this worldview. And perhaps he would say that he is hoping that his book will persuade people with their hands on powerful political levers.

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Conservatives have done sterling work in tracing the roots of bad ideas, and have often presented compelling and powerful arguments for good ones. Yet people’s identity in any given society at any given time is not simply a matter of individual rational thought and the effective use of the “marketplace of ideas”. Rather it is shaped by all sorts of technological and material factors. Consider how the televising of British parliamentary proceedings has changed the way MPs behave, in the same way as the very existence of TV has changed politics. “The medium is the message”, in Marshall McLuhan’s words — new ways of communicating change human society, regardless of the content.

We cannot undo technological or material changes; the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, as the Persian poet Omar Khayyam said. What we can do is match well-written, thoughtful and true arguments like Ahmari’s with serious thinking about how to make the material incentives match them. Many on the contemporary Right, for example, are coming round to the idea that if we reduce house prices by relaxing supply constraints, we will incentivise earlier and larger family formation. This may not work, but in the current climate it is more likely to be effective than moral exhortation. After all, Marx was not too far wrong when he said that “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.

“The children now love luxury,” it says: “They have bad manners, contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room.”

Normally this passage is used to score a point off conservatives who express reservations about some new cultural trend. Ha, they say, you people are always moaning about decline, but old curmudgeons have been doing so since the dawn of Western civilisation. Chill out, grandpa.

We might call this the Elvis Hips Fallacy, after the way in which cultural commentators tend to dismiss those who object to, say, hypersexualised music videos marketed at children and adolescents, because old squares grumbled about Elvis’s dancing corrupting youth in the 1950s.

Everyone sniggers at the TV company bosses who supposedly ordered that Elvis not be filmed from the waist down, or the retired colonels who complained to the Daily Telegraph about hysterical teenage girls and Beatlemania. Sir Lawrence Byrne, the judge who heard the Lady Chatterley trial and made that famous remark about wives and servants, will forever be remembered as an archetype of stuffy repression.

Yet while the more absurd and archaic concerns of the time have become part of popular folklore, most of the warnings made by less excitable social conservatives have proved largely accurate. It is hard to deny that the emergence of mass youth culture, as represented in its early phase by Elvis and The Beatles, and sexually explicit books such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, did a great deal to transform sexual attitudes and habits. Looking at our high rates of, say, abortion or divorce, you don’t have to agree with anti-abortion or family campaigners to accept that their predictions were more accurate than those of well-meaning reformers.

Drawing attention to these kind of matters is sometimes referred to dismissively as “moral panic”, a phrase popularised by the sociologist Stanley Cohen to describe a period of excessive mass concern over some supposed social problem. Obviously the term has its uses, and there are undoubtedly times when collective preoccupation with a particular problem reaches a wildly disproportionate level. This was certainly true of the high-profile media campaigns focused on “satanic ritual child abuse”, or the supposedly deleterious effects of children playing Dungeons & Dragons.

More recently, it appears that a great deal of British activism, rhetoric and commentary in support of the Black Lives Matter movement fits the definition of a moral panic. There has been apocalyptic coverage in the news and on social media, and endless self-interested corporate auto-flagellation, suggesting that Britain is a seething hotbed of white supremacism. The data, meanwhile, suggests that Britons are increasingly relaxed about immigration and intermarriage, and shows that British police barely ever kill anyone, never mind targeting black people specifically. Even in the US, polling reveals that large numbers of respondents wildly overestimate the prevalence of fatal police violence against unarmed black civilians.

All the same, moral panic is such an easily understood and politically useful concept that it inevitably suffers from concept creep — to the point where it functions as a thought-terminating cliché whenever anyone expresses any reservation. Inevitably, it is also used pejoratively to delegitimise conservative arguments, acting as a kind of mental roadblock.

Status positioning is in play too. For people whose self-image is based on their membership of the sophisticated, educated classes, it no doubt feels a bit below the salt to care about any issue that might exercise the indignation of the Daily Mail. We saw this last year with the Netflix film Cuties, which featured 11 and 12-year-old children dancing like strippers and having graphic conversations about sex. One British film critic gave it a glowing review, calling it a “provocative powder-keg” which “pissed off all the right people”, a take that was defended on Twitter by other members of the film critics’ guild.

In the US, The New Yorker also praised the film, framing their opinion as defiance of what they suggested was a cynical and puritanical assault by sinister reactionary forces. They claimed that it was a “remarkable first feature” and intimated that those who criticised the film were “scandal-mongers” linked to the “far-right”. Many critics seemed willing to embrace and praise something which was at best very dubious, rather than risk their reputation for sophistication, or allow that their cultural enemies might have even a smidgen of a point.

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This curious episode came to mind again recently, after it emerged that a musician who sings about Satanism and takes his stage name from a multiple murderer might be a bad person. Numerous women have made serious allegations against Marilyn Manson (real name Brian Warner), including various forms of sexual assault and coercion. In his heyday in the nineties and early noughties, Manson was the focus of considerable criticism over the aggressively dark and nihilistic tone of his performances and his confrontational taboo-breaking persona. He was not the first, nor the last, pop culture figure to be the subject of such objections, and nor was he alone in being defended by cultural gatekeepers who were totally uninterested in moral concerns being expressed by the wrong sort of person.

The accusation of fomenting a moral panic is frequently levelled against conservatives who make a stand against taboo-breaking. Mary Whitehouse, the widely derided but courageous and in many ways prophetic morality campaigner, was constantly accused of doing so because of her objections to swearing, violence and sex on TV.

Whitehouse’s long battle with the BBC was also indicative of the class dynamics at work. She was a suburban housewife from the self-consciously upright provincial middle class — the same background as that other hate-figure of the progressive intelligentsia, Mrs Thatcher. Whitehouse’s bete noire Hugh Greene, liberalising Director General of the BBC from 1960 to 1969, was an archetypal liberal elite figure, born into a well-off upper-middle-class family and educated at private school and Oxford (his brother was the novelist Graham). Mrs Whitehouse knew a simple truth, which Greene either didn’t know or didn’t care about, namely that the prosperous, well-educated and well-connected are insulated from the damaging consequences of radical social experimentation in a way that others are not.

For example, being left to raise three children by an unreliable partner is bad for any woman, but an intelligent, well-educated woman with strong support networks is much better placed to make the best of such a situation than a woman with few qualifications and little social capital. Similarly, middle-class students who develop serious drug problems do not always escape their addictions and the attendant dangers, but they have a much better chance of doing so than those lower down the income scale.

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We almost all rely to a greater or lesser extent on the norms of our surrounding society to give us “scripts” for our behaviour. The lifestyles and behaviours celebrated in popular culture are a key part of those scripts, so it is entirely reasonable for people to be concerned about the values promoted in TV, film or music. It’s easy to cry moral panic over these concerns — about, say, sexual content or bad language or the portrayal of married families as hotbeds of misery and abuse — but they come from a deep and honest, if inchoate, sense that good and enduring norms are under attack. The taboos that exist in a society act as philosophical signposts. They tell us what is sacred, what we ought to value and work for.

For a long time now, transgression, liberation and novelty have been valorised in the arts above all else. Épater la bourgeoisie, as the radical French poets of the late 19th century had it: scandalise the respectable people. And pushing boundaries has its place. JMW Turner is now firmly domesticated in the popular imagination, but caused great controversy in the second half of his career when he abandoned normal figurative painting. Prints by Monet and Manet adorn many a conservative living room, and yet in their day the Impressionists were widely perceived as avant garde radicals. Nevertheless, what we have not seen until relatively recently is sustained public advocacy by artists for moral and social transgression as an end in itself, and widespread approval for that stance from institutions, critics and the media.

The problem with a society that valorises transgression for its own sake is that it provides highly effective cover for people who want to do genuinely bad things, rather than just shock. This was certainly true of numerous figures from the world of music and entertainment who have been exposed as serial exploiters of women, if not outright abusers. Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones notoriously told the judge at a 1967 drugs trial that “we are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals”. To which one is tempted to reply that petty morals might have kept a lot of young women – and young men – safe from the dubious attentions of rock stars, DJs and producers in the years following the sexual revolution.

We might think of Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious. When the Sex Pistols used the f-word on TV in 1976, it no doubt provided a thrill of vicarious rebellion for plenty of viewers. But Vicious lived up — or rather down — to his stage name in private life, at the very least badly beating Spungen more than once, and quite possibly stabbing her to death in a drug-fuelled haze. Rock ‘n’ roll, man. So edgy.

Some people ventured to suggest that the Marilyn Manson revelations were not perhaps the most surprising news they had ever heard, and were in turn chided for having a “round up the usual suspects” approach to oddballs and weirdos.

Don’t judge a book by its cover, as the saying goes. Lots of performers have grotesque or edgy stage personas but are perfectly charming and pleasant in private life, and lots of respectable people turn out to be murderers and child abusers. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

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No-one is suggesting that we should invariably judge by appearances, or by initial impressions. But we do need to confront the reality that wrongdoers and predators will exploit our celebration of boundary-breaking, our reluctance to be seen as boring or conventional or part of a moral panic, to get away with their crimes. And often these individuals will be hiding in plain sight — think of Jimmy Savile, or Gary Glitter. Sometimes floorboards that look fine turn out to be rotten; that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tread carefully on the ones that actually look like they’re falling to bits.

Deriding people’s intuitions and instincts about dangerous people and corrosive trends, by labelling their expression as a moral panic, amounts to little more than the avoidance of serious discussion. Fundamentally, we need boundaries for ordered liberty that do not simply leave people at the mercy of their own impulses and weaknesses. We regulate gambling and alcohol sales and restrict the amount of paracetamol you can buy at one time; on the same principle, it seems quite sensible to think that we can and should take an interest in the cultural climate in which individuals form their habits and desires and manners, and their expectations of how they should interact with others.

As any parent knows, you can relax much more easily, and allow your children much more freedom, when they are playing in a carefully fenced park. It’s not moral panic to get upset if you see someone breaking down the fence.

Days later, it was reported that the Metropolitan Police were investigating Darren Grimes, the Conservative activist, because of a racially insensitive remark made by Professor David Starkey during an interview on Mr Grimes’ YouTube channel at the end of June.

In the United States, meanwhile, the company Yelp, whose website features crowd-sourced reviews of millions of businesses, announced that they were introducing a new feature on their website: a “Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert,” which will be accompanied by “a link to a news article where they can learn more about the incident.”

All of these stories broke while I was reading Rod Dreher’s new book, Live Not By Lies: A Manual For Christian Dissidents. These were immediately followed by two further developments from the other side of the Atlantic. First, Webster’s online dictionary responded to a manufactured row over Amy Coney Barrett’s use of the phrase “sexual preference” by changing the entry for the word “preference” to state that it was an “offensive” term when used in connection with sexual orientation.

On the very same day it became clear that Twitter was refusing to publish any Tweet linking to a story in the New York Post concerning corruption allegations against Hunter Biden, son of the US Presidential candidate Joe Biden.

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All of these occurrences illustrate Dreher’s central thesis: that inhabitants of Western countries are seeing the development of a new soft totalitarianism. Under this dispensation, interpersonal freedoms — those related to sexual expression and sexual self-definition, to the actualisation of a Self created by an individual for themselves — are sacrosanct, whereas old-fashioned concrete liberties of speech and thought and assembly and debate, are up for grabs. This is Philip Rieff’s “triumph of the therapeutic”, where the state will protect us from disapproval, challenge and criticism — even if that requires the destruction of proper freedoms.

Dreher quotes Hannah Arendt’s definition of a totalitarian society as “one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under the control of that ideology”. This can be distinguished from authoritarianism, where a state aims to monopolise political control but does not seek a more thoroughgoing and intrusive transformation in its citizens’ worldviews and habits of mind.

Many people will raise a sceptical eyebrow at this. As with Dreher’s last book The Benedict Option — to which Live Not By Lies is a sequel, or companion piece, of sorts — there have already been accusations of paranoia and alarmism. However, the evidence he marshals is compelling and hard to rebut, and any intelligent and honest observer of current affairs will find it hard to deny that in Western countries the list of things that simply cannot be said without provoking a possibly career-ending storm of controversy and denunciation is growing by the day.

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A problem for people like Dreher who wish to sound the alarm about soft totalitarianism — and a useful rhetorical tool for their critics — is that the phenomenon is not always clearly defined. There is no party whose programme explicitly outlines their support for it (although of course it has the implicit support of most mainstream parties in Western countries). It has never been put to any electorate. There is no Mein Kampf or Little Red Book for this movement, if indeed it can be described as a movement at all. It is hard to define and hard to pin down, despite its vast power.

Various attempts have been made at description. “Political correctness” was popular for a while, but suffered the terrible fate of many terms coined to describe Left-wing censoriousness: it quickly became low-status, endlessly mocked by cultural gatekeepers. Nowadays we have “cancel culture”, which is a useful term without quite capturing the way in which soft totalitarianism works. The writer Dan Hitchens calls it The Thing; the US intellectual James Poulos calls it “the pink police state”. In some internet circles the loose and informal but extremely powerful alliance between the media, academia, the public sector and the political Left — which polices and dictates the parameters of acceptable opinion — is known as The Cathedral.

Terminology per se is perhaps less important than a clear understanding of what exactly “soft totalitarianism” means. It can be best defined, I think, as a legal and cultural regime in which the expression of morally and socially conservative ideas and opinions is aggressively policed and punished by a combination of legal and social sanctions, backed up by corporate power.

The deepest animating impulse of what writer Wesley Yang calls the Successor Ideology is a ferocious egalitarianism, based on what has been called the “blank slate” view of human nature. This results in a furious hostility to hierarchy, natural distinction, traditional Western cultural norms, or any concept of limits on the perfectibility of human societies. Its most precious taboos are those around ethnic characteristics, sexual expression, relations between the sexes, and comparisons between cultures. The ruling presumption is that differences in outcome are ipso facto evidence of structural injustices.

It has become a cliché of conservative rhetoric to point out that modern progressive belief and activism has many of the characteristics of religious doctrine and ritual. Nevertheless, I do think this is a useful insight, because it helps us to understand what exactly it is that we are dealing with. Contemporary progressive activism resembles religious belief insofar as it provides an all-encompassing epistemological and moral framework into which everything else must be incorporated, and a set of moral standards against which people and their actions and thoughts must be judged.

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This means that it is extremely hostile to the normal business of politics: the consideration of empirical findings about what the world is really like, the recognition of trade-offs, and the necessity of compromise between competing interests. To approach politics with a religious sensibility is dangerous, because it leaves no room for the obvious reality that in political deliberation we must pay attention to people’s differing conceptions of what is good and important in life. The ideologue, of course, will find it hard to admit this fact, because to reckon with it honestly is to reject the totalising, moralistic fervour which is so central to a great deal of progressive politics and activism.

Dreher approaches the problem of the totalising ideology under which we increasingly live from an unexpected angle, in light of the experiences and concerns of people who lived under Communist dictatorship in the Eastern Bloc in the years before 1990. Live Not By Lies features testimony from many such individuals, including some who fled to the United States many years ago and now say they are concerned by the resemblances between the cultural-political atmosphere in the USA and the stifling control they thought they had left behind.

The title of the book refers to a message published by the Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the day of his arrest by Soviet authorities in 1974. He had come to realise that one of the most powerful supports for Communist dictatorship came from the willingness of people to passively co-operate with the official lies published by the regime. The propaganda put out by tyrannies is very often not meant to convince people, so much as to humiliate and demoralise them by surrounding them with obvious nonsense that they dare not contradict.

Solzhenitsyn said that you can stand up to this by refusing to co-operate with official dishonesty and deception. He knew that most people cannot be heroic public dissidents, but he did challenge them to live in truth in a small-scale way as far as they were able. He gave several examples of how his readers might do this: avoid speaking lies themselves; leave or boycott meetings where lies are told; refuse to support demonstrations that they do not genuinely believe in.

This way, he argues, you can begin to live with integrity against a regime that tries to make this impossible, and you can strengthen others by your example.

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The relevance of the imperative to live in truth to our current plight is not hard to see. We too are asked to swallow many lies — not just Christians, to whom Dreher’s book is principally addressed, but cultural and social conservatives of all kinds. In resisting the spread of such lies, we face what game theorists call a co-ordination problem: a situation where lots of people are trying to make decisions about the best way to act based on incomplete information.

Perhaps other people in the meeting also think privilege theory is mostly nonsense, or have read the papers debunking the science behind implicit bias training, or believe that ethnic minorities don’t need to be patronised with special treatment. Maybe all the parents at the school think that six-year-olds shouldn’t be learning about gay marriage and transgenderism. But who is going to dare to say that? Who will speak first? Solzhenitsyn has the antidote; we must speak up, we must be willing to take the risk and bear the cost.

This is easy in theory, and much harder in practice. For many of us resistance in these areas is liable to affect professional advancement and prestige, even our ability to earn a living altogether. It may lead to social ostracism and rifts with family and friends. Equally, we must ask ourselves whether we can live with the alternative, of compliance and endless white lies and ultimately the surrender of all public space to fanatics and those willing to bend to them.

There is a certain bracing comfort in having the choice presented so starkly. Dreher’s book is sobering, and clarifying. As I put it down, some words from Evelyn Waugh’s Sword Of Honour trilogy came to mind: “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.”

Well, it seems not. Seek out the National Trust’s Strategy to 2025, and the first words you read are: “Our 21st-century ambition is to meet the needs of an environment under pressure, and the challenges and expectations of a fast-moving world… Underpinning this is our renewed commitment to diversity and inclusion and playing our part to create a fair, equal society, free from discrimination.”

In their “10-year Vision”, written in the same hideous identikit jargon, they talk about a “revolutionary” move away from the “outdated mansion experience”. The Trust provides little evidence that stately homes are becoming less popular; reading between the lines the main problem that the Vision’s authors seem to have with the English country house is that it is old and traditional and popular with comfortably-off white people.

I don’t particularly want to get stuck into the National Trust. But they do provide a particularly interesting example of a problem afflicting institutions in modern Britain, namely the relentless politicisation of parts of life which should represent an escape from politics.

The Black Lives Matter summer has revealed the extent of this phenomenon. We had the frankly bizarre spectacle of British footballers and rugby league players being compelled to kneel before they started playing, in obeisance to a protest movement that began in another country, on another continent, in response to something that barely ever happens in the UK. A number of police chiefs also took the knee, including Alan Pughsley of Kent Police. Art galleries and theatres and universities rushed to signal that they too were supportive of BLM, with many rushing out statements confessing that they were guilty of institutional racism.

Meanwhile, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, the Scottish women’s football team Glasgow City will play the entire 2020-21 season in a strip adorned with her name. In support of this gesture, the club manager stated that “We champion change and equality”. What a dilemma for Glasgow City players who favour an originalist approach to interpretation of the US Constitution.

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These developments should be highly disturbing to all those who favour a free and open society. Such societies cannot function without mediating institutions, i.e. civic organisations that exist independently of the state and are devoted to non-political purposes. These groups are of many different kinds but the one thing they have in common is that exist as an end in themselves, not as a means to something else.

People come together to form, say, a chess club because they wish to play chess together, not because they wish to oppose Brexit or lower the voting age. A chess club which limited its membership to socialists, or to monarchists, would in an important sense no longer be a chess club. A constant feature of totalitarian regimes — of both the Left and the Right — is a strong hostility to groups that exist for their own sake, and independent of state ideology. They recognise, rightly, that such organisations represent alternative focal points for loyalty and affiliation, and that they are places where ideology is subdued and put in its proper place.

Consider, for example, the crushing of independent trade unions in the Soviet bloc — hence the bitter struggles over Solidarnosc in Poland — or the way in which Nazi Germany refused to tolerate any competitors to the Hitler Youth. Scouting, with its strong emphasis on internationalism, has frequently been suppressed under dictatorships.

Obviously modern Britain is not any kind of authoritarian regime; by comparison with most countries, we retain a healthy and vibrant civil society. However, it does not follow from this that we need not be concerned about the encroachment of politics on voluntary associations that have, or should have, what Roger Scruton called “purposes internal to themselves”, rather than existing to promote a particular view of how the world should be organised. When a police force in Wales can insist that a male-voice choir made up of police employees should no longer officially associate itself with the police because they do not accept women as members, it is not unduly alarmist to think that we might have a problem.

Opportunities for people to come together outside of political commitments are hugely important because it is in such contexts that we get to know each other as individuals, rather than as bundles of ideas or opinions, and to develop the social capital and trust that makes such a difference to whether countries are pleasant places to live or not. The independent institution is a little haven of peace away from the rancour that inevitably accompanies politics.

It is a chance for us to focus on one thing, not many things, and this is healthy for both individuals and the wider society because it encourages the pursuit of excellence and the development of virtues. At the cricket club, our aim and purpose is to become the best cricketers we can be, and to build fellowship with others through that process. It is not a failure of a cricket club’s purpose if it does not have a position on Black Lives Matter or the nationalisation of utilities.

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For some people the very idea of a non-ideological sphere, or a non-political space, is effectively a myth. A standard progressive reply to the kind of argument I am making here is that what looks like an absence of ideology is often nothing of the sort, and that conservatives tend to ignore the ideologies embedded in established or existing practices and norms. The status quo is political, so by not challenging the status quo you are already taking a political stance whether you like it or not. “Silence is violence”, as one of the slogans of the past summer, has it. If you do not state your support for whatever movement is currently demanding it, then you are effectively throwing your weight behind whatever injustice — real or purported — the movement claims to oppose. Black Lives Matter supporters agree with President George W Bush: You’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists.

Nevertheless, there is clearly a need for spaces where political demands can be ignored as not relevant, as not part of the purpose of that space, for the reasons noted above. And there is plainly an important distinction between the ideological and the non-ideological, even if by non-ideological what we really mean is “minimally ideological”. To take a political or ideological view of an event or organisation, of an utterance or argument, is to view it through the lens of an organising principle, to consider it primarily as an instance of a general rule and to allow our conclusions to be dominated by already existing prescriptive commitments.

The non-ideological approach to life, by contrast, approaches each case on its own merits; it considers, as the Stoic Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius said, “the thing itself”. It is humanist, seeing people and their situations as standing alone rather being slotted into a neat pre-existing box. It also recognises the existence and importance of customs, traditions, institutions and ways of living that are beyond the reach of organised compulsion. It is the basis of authentic pluralism, because it enables us to carve out room for minorities and dissenters.

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This of course is anathema to the dominant modern way of thinking. Liberalism today is fervently universalising, hence the ever-expanding empire of “human rights”, and the “equality duty” imposed on all public bodies by the 2010 Equality Act. It is this equality duty that is at the bottom of so many cases of once-neutral or apolitical institutions feeling compelled to wade into political areas where they do not really belong. The Act has given a rocket boost to Conquest’s Second Law: “Any organisation not explicitly Right-wing sooner or later becomes Left-wing”.

What we have seen this summer is the continuation of an attack — not necessarily intentional or co-ordinated, but an attack nevertheless — on the very idea of the independent institution or body, that can stand apart from political debates because politics is not part of its function and nature. The demand is, as it were, that everything is about everything all the time. This is not healthy, and it is not conducive to building the kind of society where people of many different backgrounds and opinions can rub along together harmoniously.

We need to have domains where politics — that is, debates about how the nation as a whole lives together, how the government should or shouldn’t act, what we must and must not be compelled to do — can be put to one side, and we focus on the particular, not the general. There is a great swathe of life that is not political, and there is so much joy and richness to be found away from politics and away from ideology; history and the arts and sport, hobbies and films and family life. If we bow to the demand that all human activity must be understood and mediated through a political lens, we will live to regret it.

You notice the chill at either end of the day. The dewfall is heavier. You still get hot days here and there but the heat doesn’t start early and linger into the evening as it does in high summer. There is a change in the light. To adequately describe it is far beyond my poetic powers, but in the evening, when the long shadows fall on the hills behind the house, the glow from the sinking sun seems somehow richer and deeper.

I do regret the end of summer. It means no cricket on the radio and no picnics with the children; no early morning cups of tea in the garden, listening to the dawn chorus before the rest of the family are awake. It means no more pleasant evenings sitting outside with a cigar and a beer after the children are in bed, watching the stars come out and hearing the owls hooting in the trees on the hillside.

More than other seasonal transition, the end of summer feels a little sad. Winter into spring is joyous, exciting, a triumph of colour and warmth and fertility. Spring into summer is a promise fulfilled, a glorious unfolding. Autumn into winter is often almost imperceptible. But the fading of summer is unmistakeably the end of something. Possibly it’s an artefact of childhood memory, when the second half of August meant that the long carefree days of the summer holidays were drawing to a close.

The approach of autumn is undoubtedly also a symbol of the passage of time, especially at my time of life, when middle age is starting to loom on the horizon in a mildly alarming fashion. It is a reminder that the children are growing up, nothing ever stays the same, beauty is fragile. If you’re anything like me you think of other summers long ago, old friends neglected or departed, the roads not taken. As Housman puts it, “The happy highways where I went, and cannot come again”.

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All the same, autumn is my favourite season. The best part of the year, for my money, is the stretch from Michaelmas (30 September) until Epiphany. To some extent I think it’s my North European soul. I remember with great fondness the exhilaration of walking across the causeway to Holy Island in Northumberland as a fierce wind whipped in off the North Sea. I like bare trees and storms and empty moors and big waves crashing on to windswept beaches. I like how the world feels shortly after dawn on a grey, clear morning, when there’s been rain overnight.

I like returning to the warm glow of the front door on a cold, drizzly evening, that magical moment of homecoming. I even find a sort of contentment in the slightly melancholic mood of October and November, which is tempered by looking forward to Advent and Christmas. It’s probably also nostalgia: I look back very fondly on my university days, and my first term stands out particularly in my memory as a time of promise and excitement and novelty. Nor can I deny the pure childish satisfaction to be gained from crunching leaves underfoot or aiming a big kick at a pile of them. It is a longstanding theory of mine, strongly confirmed by having children, that one of the secrets of a happy life is to cultivate your delight in simple, innocent pleasures.

On a less poetic level, autumn is more promising on the fashion front than summer. Like most Englishmen, I am not at my sartorial best in the warm months, heavily dependent on ageing T-shirts of uncertain shape and lurid Bermuda shorts. One such pair is lively enough that a fellow cycling commuter once said that she noticed me every day on the Clapham Road. Greyer skies and cooler temperatures offer the opportunity for a more varied and elegant wardrobe — jackets and jumpers and scarves, subdued colours and an air of sophistication that is only achievable in summer by dressing in a white linen suit like the villain Belloq from Raiders Of the Lost Ark.

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In my childhood, a highlight of the season was always Bonfire Night, that old and strange English celebration, full of dramatic historical resonance. I wonder now whether mine was one of the last generations to experience proper Guy Fawkes celebrations. Just in my adult life — the last two decades — the Fifth seems to be fading away, partly of course due to being overshadowed by the hideously ersatz commercialised ghoulfest of Halloween, but also, I suspect, because the cultural and demographic revolution in Britain since the 1960s has rendered it more and more incomprehensible to modern people.

We are no longer defined by Protestant Christianity, and the virtues that supposedly or actually flow from that. What does it really matter, then, if the Protestant Settlement and national independence were saved from destruction at the hands of plotters working for a foreign Catholic power 400 years ago?

Nevertheless, in those places where 5 November is going strong, like Sussex and west Kent, which have a venerable and robust tradition of extremely raucous Bonfire Nights, you can get a sense of an organic institution deeply rooted in our shared history. The notorious Lewes Bonfire commemorates the Lewes Martyrs, Protestant dissidents burned in the 1550s under Mary I, but its historical significance goes well beyond that.

In later centuries it became a focus for anti-establishment radicalism, and an opportunity for the kind of occasional tolerated mayhem that was a feature of earlier feasts — think Lords of Misrule on Twelfth Night. So perhaps there is hope for its survival. After all, it falls at the right point in the calendar, halfway between the end of summer and Christmas, soon after the clocks go back to make the evenings darker still. It is a moment when a cheerful, boisterous communal event, rooted in what remains of our collective memory, is much needed.

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The subjects of memory, and the more sinister and bloody parts of the past, bring to mind another wonderful feature of autumn, namely that it is undoubtedly the perfect season for the classic ghost story. The steadily darkening days and the unsettled weather, the increasingly stark landscapes, and the way in which each house becomes a small island of light in a great mass of darkness; they all combine to create the ideal atmosphere for settling down with M.R. James or Sheridan Le Fanu or Algernon Blackwood.

James is a particular favourite of mine. On those late November days where it barely seems to get light at all, I might find myself thinking of Dennistoun, the protagonist of Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, who uncovers a gruesome supernatural secret after poking round a church in a sleepy Pyrenean town one dark afternoon. Or Archdeacon Haynes from The Stalls Of Barchester Cathedral, who undergoes a gruelling winter, alone and tormented by a guilty conscience, in in a large and poorly lit house.

There is a comfort in the unceasing cycle of the seasons. Like religious liturgies, these reliable transitions give a rhythm and pattern to our lives, providing a counterpoint in the natural world to the changes and chances of our human existence. Autumn is reassuring in this way; the obvious glories and delights of summer are gone, just as everything we know and cherish in this world is ultimately transient, but there is nobility and beauty in the change, and the sure and certain hope of renewal in the midst of decay and loss.

C. S. Lewis’s clever, timeless book, The Screwtape Letters, is best known as a work of Christian devotion. This is unsurprising: its very conceit rather presumes the truth of Christianity. The book is a series of letters from a senior devil (the eponymous “Screwtape”) to a junior one (“Wormwood”), with instructions on how to corrupt the soul of a human being.

However, it is one of those texts that can profit almost any reader, because it is fundamentally about self-knowledge and examining one’s conscience. I once heard a Catholic priest say he was amazed that Lewis could write with such insight into human weakness and temptation despite having never heard a confession in his life.

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Politicians need to learn the discipline of looking at themselves with an unflinching critical eye. So many of the incentives in politics push those in power towards sophistry and deceit, and habitual dishonesty towards others very often leads to self-deception. Or is it perhaps that lying to oneself is a necessary precondition of lying to others? Either way, I find it very hard to believe that any person with even a modicum of self-awareness, whatever their religious beliefs, could read Screwtape without wincing in recognition at least once or twice as Lewis identifies yet another way in which we behave badly or foolishly while convincing ourselves that we are doing nothing wrong.

As our political masters arrive back at their desks after the summer, they will have to start trying to decide what on Earth we do next. They will need prudence and courage and understanding. They will need to take unpopular decisions and face fierce criticism. They will need to be confident that they are genuinely acting for the public good rather than to enhance their own reputation or that of their party.

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On the face of it, Screwtape is not about such matters. Many chapters deal with domestic themes, notably the unnamed human’s relations with his mother, and later with his girlfriend. There are some striking insights into the difficulties of harmonious living between different people in the same household, and into the bad habits which couples easily develop.

But there are some searing sections on what you might call sins of the intellect, which are a great trap for politicians. In an early chapter Screwtape instructs Wormwood to distort the thought processes of his subject, to encourage the man not to ask whether something is true, but to ask if it is “strong, or stark, or courageous.” In our age the equivalent would be to keep politicians’ mental focus not on whether some policy is right or necessary, but on whether it places them “on the right side of history”.

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Several times, Lewis explores another human weakness against which politicians in particular must guard: sentimentality, that is, a preoccupation with the display of correct feelings instead of the carrying out of our moral duties. Screwtape often instructs Wormwood to keep his “patient” obsessed with his feelings rather than his conduct. For the modern government minister the lesson here is to be on guard against foregrounding your good intentions and your socially acceptable prejudices, rather than thinking about and publicly defending what is the right course of action.

I do not think there are many serious Christians in Boris Johnson’s Cabinet. But there are 22 human beings, with all the normal flaws and blindspots that human beings have. Few books would be as effective as The Screwtape Letters in helping them get to grips with those flaws and blindspots, as we look for a way out of this unprecedented crisis.

Dungeness is an odd sort of place, to put it mildly. To get a sense of what it is like, think of an artists’ community in a near-desert of shingle, consisting of houses built from driftwood and old train carriages, all on a storm-battered headland in Kent, with a globally unique ecosystem, a tiny steam railway, and of course those two gigantic nuclear plants dominating the view to the south.

Its remoteness and unique atmosphere has proved irresistible to artists, most famously the film director Derek Jarman, who moved to a cottage there after falling ill with AIDS in the 1980s. One of my favourite painters, Eric Ravilious, executed a striking picture of the old lighthouse in 1939. The year after that, Dungeness Point was the scene of a darkly comic vignette of wartime history: two Nazi spies who were landed there blew their cover by attempting to buy alcohol before noon at a pub in nearby Lydd, and were later hanged.

Had there not been a war on, it is easy to imagine that the landlady who reported Herr Meier and Herr Waldberg might not have been such a stickler. Romney Marsh, of which Dungeness forms the southern boundary, had for many years the reputation of a place where the law’s writ ran a little unevenly.

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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries smuggling was rife. It is one of the closest points to the continent on the whole English coast, conveniently furnished with numerous gently sloping beaches, and in past centuries was inaccessible and hard to navigate for the stranger. Rudyard Kipling, who lived not far away, at Burwash on the Sussex Weald, contributed to the image of the Kentish smugglers as charming rogues with his famous poem ‘A Smuggler’s Song’:

“Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark —
Brandy for the Parson, ‘Baccy for the Clerk.
Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie —
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!”

Another builder of the romantic legends was the author Russell Thorndike. He wrote the Dr Syn series, splendidly preposterous old-fashioned swashbucklers about a mild-mannered Church of England cleric, the Vicar of Dymchurch, who moonlights as The Scarecrow, feared chief of a gang of smugglers. They lead the Revenue a merry dance over the course of seven novels. I was introduced to the books by my father, who is himself a mild-mannered Church of England cleric living on Romney Marsh, but not as far as I am aware a notorious brandy smuggler.

People who have heard of the Marsh are often familiar with its two most famous institutions. Firstly, the Romney breed of sheep, which is now farmed all over the world, from South America to New Zealand, where it makes up more than half of that country’s 40 million-strong flock.

And secondly, the narrow-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, the 1920s brainchild of millionaire enthusiasts Captain Howey and Count Louis Zborowski, and now a popular attraction for tourists from all over the world. Its fame has spread considerably — there is a Shuzenji Romney Railway in Japan, closely modelled on its English namesake. During the Second World War, a special armoured train ran on the railway’s line, acting as a sort of mobile anti-aircraft unit; it scored only one success, but certainly looked good in propaganda newsreels. Indeed, the entire line was taken over for military purposes, which was hardly surprising given that the enemy lay less than 30 miles away.

The proximity of Europe has been pivotal in the Marsh’s history. Those original continental troublemakers the Romans had a port at Lympne, a village which now lies some distance from the shore following the retreat of the coastline. You will still occasionally hear the chauvinistic local legend that William the Conqueror initially attempted to land near New Romney, but was seen off by the hardy locals, and only then tried his luck further west at Pevensey, where he made his successful landing against the (by implication) soft and irresolute Sussex men. The tale has a kernel of truth: it seems that some of the Bastard’s men did disembark at New Romney by mistake and were rebuffed, but it was a small scale engagement.

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Long after the ructions caused by the Normans, the French continued to be a source of unquiet, as well as informal duty-free booze, on the Marsh. From 1800, the coast was heavily fortified against a feared Napoleonic invasion, with the building of the Royal Military Canal at the foot of the surrounding hills to delay any invading French army, and a chain of small gun-emplacements called Martello towers, alongside larger forts at Dungeness and Hythe. Later, the district was expected to be one of the sites for a Nazi invasion; inspection of captured plans after the war confirmed that this had indeed been the enemy’s intention. The field next to my parents’ house contains a concrete bunker dating from this time, presumably intended to defend the road into town from the beach.

Romney Marsh is not nowadays marshland as most people would imagine it. There is no great Grimpen Mire waiting to entrap the incautious traveller, and no squelching bog. For some centuries, most of the Marsh has been grazing pasture. This has not always been the case: well into the second millennium AD, what is now the Marsh was a mix of shallow tidal lagoon and true marshland, with the River Rother snaking through the southern parts.

The lay of the land was radically altered by a series of fierce Channel storms in the second half of the thirteenth century, culminating in the notorious Great Storm of 1287. Old Winchelsea, a substantial place with an estimated population in the thousands, was entirely obliterated and most of the island on which it stood submerged, Atlantis-like, by the surging sea. The modern town of Winchelsea, founded by the survivors of this event, stands on top of a hill: they weren’t taking any chances (although their eventful history wasn’t over — Winchelsea suffered French and Spanish raids during the Hundred Years War and was burned by the French in 1360).

The aftermath of the Great Storm was tough for the place in which I grew up, New Romney. Not only was it severely damaged but, having been a thriving port at the mouth of the Rother, the town’s economic fortunes also declined rapidly after 1287, as the course of the river had shifted well to the south, rendering the harbour useless. Whether the storm itself was directly to blame, as local folk history suggests, or whether the lower Rother and the harbour had become gradually choked with silt and shingle over many decades, and the storm was simply the last straw, the town became something of a backwater.

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The fluctuating shape and extent of the Marsh, and changing patterns of land use, have resulted in numerous once thriving communities being abandoned. Within a day’s walk of my parents’ house, there are at least four ruined churches situated far from any modern settlements. One such example is the dramatic All Saints, which served the long-extinct parish of Hope.

Not all these lost communities vanished as suddenly and dramatically as Old Winchelsea. Broomhill, close to Dungeness, gradually became uninhabitable due to the encroachment of the sea in late medieval times. Many villages and hamlets were badly affected by the Black Death or by the malaria which seems to have lingered well into the eighteenth century.

Other relics reflect the more recent past. Close to the trackbed of the partially dismantled Appledore-New Romney branch line, a casualty of the Beeching Terror — the rails remain in place as far as Dungeness, for the sole purpose of transporting spent nuclear fuel — stand three very strange concrete structures. One is a large convex vertical wall, measuring about 200 feet from end to end. The other two resemble giant satellite dishes, set in sturdy stone bases. One is about 30 feet in diameter, the other about 20 feet. They are acoustic mirrors, the legacy of interwar experiments with creating an early-warning system for enemy aircraft crossing the Channel. Similar installations survive at Hythe, and on the cliffs near Dover, but they were never used in anger, having been superseded by radar by the mid-1930s.

The mirrors contribute to the somewhat eerie beauty of the Marsh, with its long unimpeded views and big skies. Perhaps too the precariousness of the Marsh’s existence adds a certain drama and savour to the contemplation of its landscape. After all, most of the land between the Royal Military Canal and the Channel is at or below sea-level: everyone who lives on the Marsh depends on the coastal defences. In the Dr Syn books, Russell Thorndike quotes a fictional though highly apt motto for the Marshfolk: “Serve God, honour the King, but first maintain the Wall.”

It’s hard not to draw lessons for what we might think of as our uniquely modern dilemmas: the inescapability of some kind of entanglement with our European neighbours, however secure we may feel in our island redoubt; the imperative for humility and flexibility in our dealings with the inexorable forces of nature; and the need to accept inevitable change to maintain the broad shape of a way of life.

It’s a reasonable question, on the face of it. Why should anyone listen more carefully or be better-disposed to me because I took a couple of minutes out of my morning to fasten the top button of my shirt and secure a length of cotton or silk round my neck? Why don’t we just relax and show up in T-shirts and flip-flops? After all, the argument goes, we’re all just shaved monkeys underneath, and it’s the ideas in our heads and the goodness in our hearts that matter.

I’m not sure this quite settles the matter. As I said to my son, albeit not quite in these words, taking time to make yourself smart is a signal that you are going to take someone seriously. It’s a gesture of respect, an indication that you are treating this encounter with the weight it deserves.

I’d make a similar defence of manners. Michael Gove ruffled a few feathers last week when he stated that, given the coronavirus situation, wearing a face mask while shopping was “basic good manners”. It struck me that it’s quite unusual to hear senior politicians talking sincerely about the importance of manners and politeness.

Like formal dress, manners — understood in the broad sense, as shared codes for personal conduct, common expectations of how one should react and behave in particular situations — are often derided by a certain kind of pseudo-sophisticated person. Why bother with the artifice? Aren’t manners simply hypocrisy, encouraging us to conceal our real feelings and thus stifling our authentic selves? Wouldn’t it be healthier if we said what we thought, so everyone knew where they stood?

This latter question arises from what the writer-doctor Theodore Dalrymple calls “the hydraulic theory of human behaviour”, where repression, so-called, is seen as very dangerous because it will eventually result in a great uncontrolled outburst of pent-up emotion, and prevents us from showing our true self, that is to say our most strongly-felt impulses. Much healthier, in this view, to let it at all hang out and not take the risk of leaving a thought or feeling unexpressed.

But this comes at the matter from the wrong direction. The sceptical position on manners suggests that we shouldn’t care about mere forms of speech, as what matters is substance. On the contrary, being careful to put others at ease, to show them that you consider them an equal, and that you value their time, is deeply substantial.

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To say “please” and “thank you” to someone, to listen carefully to them, to not impose on them your noise or the odour of your food or the obscenity on your T-shirt, is not mere prissiness. It is an act of humility and kindness. It is a way of making clear that you prioritise their comfort over your own convenience or your own self-expression.

Taking your litter home, being quiet on public transport, and friendly and considerate to people who serve you in shops, are never going to be lauded in the history books, but they do contribute massively to the public good. They help people relax and find contentment and peace. They help others feel at home in the world. They treat the world as if it is genuinely a shared place, where we must take into account the needs of others, rather than one  dominated by the loudest and strongest and least considerate.

Manners can have another role. They are part of how we distinguish between the different roles which we play in public life, and between our public roles and our private lives.

A good example of this can be found in the final episode of the television show Band of Brothers. Quite by chance, the main character Dick Winters encounters his old adversary Captain Sobel. As a major, Winters now outranks Sobel, but when he was a lowly second lieutenant in basic training Sobel, his commanding officer, was extremely unpleasant to him; a strong antagonism exists between them, not helped by the fact that by this point Winters has proved himself a brave, effective and popular leader of men and Sobel has been prevented from going into combat. As they pass, Sobel does not salute Winters, as he ought to do, and Winters rebukes him: “We salute the rank, not the man”.

The point here is that sophisticated human societies and organisations, such as armies, cannot function without the willingness to separate the private individual from his or her public role, and without a clear conception that there are certain behaviours, attitudes and demeanours befitting a public role regardless of what the individual in that role might believe or prefer.

When I call a judge “Your Honour” or an MP refers to an opponent as the Right Honourable Member, this is not a judgment about the personal virtues of the person addressed — it is a sign of respect for the role itself. A judge is the representative of the Crown and of the law. A Member of Parliament fills an ancient role in the British constitution. A policeman or a doctor or a teacher are entitled to our deference to their professional expertise not because all police officers or doctors or teachers are especially admirable people in private life but because that particular profession is a creditable vocation, and because that role in society must be treated with respect.

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The formal dress and unusual patterns of speech associated with particular positions help to reinforce this distinction, and the broader point that the office is larger and more significant than any particular person who holds it. Some people chafe against this — differing attitudes to the interplay between individuals’ private and public roles are both cause and effect of political difference.

One thinks of John Bercow, former Speaker of the House of Commons. During his decade in the role he shed almost all the last vestiges of traditional dress, while simultaneously (and not coincidentally) thrusting himself and his own views into the forefront of political debate in a way that rode roughshod over the numerous conventions and traditions governing the neutrality of the Speaker.

We might equally consider the case of the UK Supreme Court, whose judges do not wear formal court dress. When the UKSC handed down its enormously controversial judgment on last September’s prorogation, the President Lady Hale was wearing a large spider-shaped brooch, which subsequently became a symbol of opposition to the Tory government. It cannot be healthy for a free law-governed society if figures such as judges, whose job is to interpret the law without fear or favour, become rallying points for one side of a partisan divide, and such an outcome could easily have been avoided by having the members of our highest court wear sombre formal clothes without individual accoutrements.

If proper dress is worn, the individual becomes more clearly subsumed in the role. The same is true with regard to the forms of words used in civic and religious ceremonies; they constantly remind us the focus of what is going on is not the individuals currently present, but something greater, more enduring and more important.

I wonder whether some of the modern antipathy to cultivating good manners is that they are generally a quiet and unshowy form of virtue. It’s difficult to post on social media about how impressive your manners are, because they so often consist of what you don’t say, what you don’t do, and of small gestures and minor sacrifices known only to yourself. Observing socially beneficial taboos can feel like ploughing a lonely furrow, but it is worth it.

For one thing, an enormous amount of great art has been generated by the need to approach certain matters obliquely or euphemistically. Much classic love poetry is of this kind; or consider the books of Jane Austen, where so much of the drama and humour arises from the gap — inevitable in a world of numerous taboos — between what is said and what is meant, between the things that characters want to do and the things that they must do. Consider even film noir, where stars like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall electrified the screen with sexual tension. Filmmakers were so limited in what they could show that they had to find all sorts of clever ways to portray attraction and generate chemistry between their leads.

I don’t doubt that there are downsides for societies that become excessively or obsessively focused on correct form and external proprieties. But it is worth noting that even apparently restrictive codes of behaviour can have unexpected benefits. Take, for instance, a workplace that insists on smart business clothing every day. On a superficial level, this is exclusionary. What about people who don’t want to dress that way for whatever reason?

Equally, however, it is a fair, explicit and visible statement by an organisation of what constitutes appropriate and professional behaviour. It is arguably much more egalitarian than the realistic alternative, where all sorts of dress are allowed and so assessments of professionalism are based instead on individuals’ knowledge of implicit and invisible norms and codes of behaviour and language, knowledge that may only be available to people from certain backgrounds. It’s better to have strict but clear open rules than strict and opaque secret rules.

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It’s also worth thinking about the ways in which social taboos, even when resented, can benefit individuals. In the film Brief Encounter, for instance, the keenly-felt and strongly-enforced expectation of decent behaviour helps to stop the lead characters from making the terrible mistake of running away together, and the lesser but still potentially serious one of consummating their relationship.

Obviously Brief Encounter is fiction, but it is a very good illustration of how social pressure to conform to certain behavioural patterns can help to save you from yourself — and save other people from the consequences of selfish or reckless behaviour. Indeed, one general problem for defenders of social conservatism is that so many of the benefits of our worldview are effectively invisible, because they are things that don’t happen.

A significant political objection arises here, one which motivates many critics of manners. To follow social norms is to accept, at least to some extent, the authority of society over the individual. Implicit in the very concept of manners is the admission that how you present yourself to the world matters, that you cannot simply write off other people’s impressions of your behaviour and of the way you present yourself in the world. It is easy to see how this might be unpalatable for a generation of individualists, who view freedom as synonymous with self-actualisation and to whom no unchosen obligation can possibly be truly binding.

Nevertheless, the discipline of manners is worth the effort. It is good to develop the habit of not treating your moods, preferences and impulses as cosmic imperatives which cannot be challenged or gainsaid. For me to keep my feelings to myself is a decision not to treat the world merely as a stage for my own personal drama. It is a blow against the mentality where everyone else is a supporting character in the Story Of Me. And in the age of social media, that doesn’t sound so bad.

Like much of Tolkien’s fiction, Roverandom was not published during his lifetime, finally appearing in print in the 1990s. It is little-known, except among serious devotees. But it does help to show the way in which Tolkien’s imagination tended to work, and how his ideas developed. Roverandom blends the mundane with the magical, taking familiar places or people and making them part of a much larger and stranger canvas.

In this respect it foreshadows the creation of hobbits, who closely resemble rural Englishmen and women of Tolkien’s early life. They are extremely insular in a good-natured way, fond of ale and soil, and enjoy a peaceful, complacent existence under the barely-necessary authority of sheriffs and mayors. And yet, the Shire is a little enclave of quiet normality in a vast and dangerous world of magic and mystery.

Everywhere the hobbits move in Middle Earth, they are moving through the ruins of an ancient and decayed civilisation, inhabited by all kinds of dark creatures. It is stressed several times in The Lord Of The Rings that the hobbits’ lifestyle is maintained only by the vigilance and sacrifice of others outside their borders. Even the hobbits’ own history hints that their bucolic idyll is brought at a high price and is part of a much wilder and harder world — it tells of attacks by goblins and wolves. As Aragorn says to the landlord of The Prancing Pony in nearby Bree, there are enemies within a day’s march who would chill their blood.

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This trick of Tolkien’s, of taking the familiar and making it into the stuff of high fantasy, is one of the subjects explored in considerable depth in John Garth’s The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien. Given the bewildering array of influences that fed into Tolkien’s work — personal, geographical, historical, linguistic and poetic — it is no mean task to gather up the threads and create a coherent narrative of how different parts of Tolkien’s life and work fed into the creation of what Tolkien eventually called his “legendarium”.

By this he meant not just The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit, but the entire fictional universe he created which forms the background for those stories. The sheer scale of Tolkien’s creative endeavour is indicated by the fact that after his death, his son and literary executor Christopher published not just The Silmarillion — a sprawling blend of creation story and epic history — but also 12 volumes in a series known as The History Of Middle Earth, based on his father’s notes and unpublished manuscripts, as well as a stand-alone novel, The Children of Hurin.

Garth makes clear that Tolkien’s approach was that of the magpie. Rather than drawing on one particular place or one particular tradition, he drew on all sorts of landscapes and legends. For example, the existence in Middle Earth of a quasi-heavenly enchanted land far across the Western sea – Valinor, the Undying Lands – echoes the beliefs in such places found all across Europe.

Tennyson alludes to such beliefs in his great poem ‘Ulysses’, in which an ageing Odysseus imagines one last adventure with his crew:

                                 …for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

The mention of the Happy Isles here is a reference to the Isles of the Blessed, which in Greek mythology lay far out to the West beyond the known world. The Irish Tír na nÓg and the Arthurian Avalon occupy a similar place in the mythical imagination. Ireland, perhaps unsurprisingly, had a very well-developed tradition of stories about fantastical sea voyages into the West, often in search of some kind of paradise.

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Other writers and commentators on Tolkien have speculated on the experiences and locations that might have fed his creative energies, especially the Worcestershire and Warwickshire countryside he knew as a boy. Famously, Sarehole Mill is known to have inspired the mill at Hobbiton, and the steady destruction of the woods and fields of the Midlands to make way for industry and modernity finds an echo in Saruman’s destruction of the countryside close to Isengard as he creates his industrial war machine.

Garth goes far beyond these familiar topics, and opens up whole new fields of thought about what stimulated Tolkien’s enormously fruitful imagination. In a particularly fascinating section he traces how Tolkien’s original conception of his fiction changed. Initially he wanted to create a mythology which was quite specifically tied to the British Isles, and particularly to the English. His wide-ranging academic interest in literature, myth and philology — the study of how languages develop through history and storytelling — had highlighted for him the relative paucity of English myth.

The Scandinavians and the Icelanders had their sagas, and the well-developed myths of Asgaard and Ragnarrok. The Irish and the Britons too had their stories. The Germanic world, where the English originated and whence Tolkien’s family had come to England in the eighteenth century, had its own rich tapestry of legend, notably Beowulf — which blends Christian and pagan themes, and on which Tolkien was an acknowledged expert. Ultimately many Germanic themes made their way into The Lord Of The Rings, most obviously swords with their own names and their own powers, and the perils of the forest.

Tolkien saw a gap in England’s pre-history. There is English folklore. However, this tends to be local and on a rather small scale. There are Hengist and Horsa, the legendary first Anglo-Saxons to lead an expedition to our shores, but nothing with the grandeur and drama of the sagas mentioned above. Tolkien planned to fill in the gaps before Hengist and Horsa with a highly-developed imaginary world that harked back to a time of elves and fairies.

Some early versions of the Middle Earth stories use a framing device of a traveller to an enchanted land, which turns out to be an antique and otherworldly Britain inhabited by the Elves who were the predecessors to the human inhabitants. Indeed, a great deal of the Tolkienian fiction not linked to Middle Earth has a similar setting: a kind of uncanny fantasy England, where people are called Tom and Bob and have village greens and summer fetes, but where dragons are in the offing and towering mountain ranges full of bizarre creatures loom on the horizon. Smith of Wootton Major, Leaf By Niggle and Farmer Giles Of Ham all have this kind of atmosphere.

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Over time, as Garth shows, Tolkien’s vision changed. He had difficulties pulling together all the elements he wished to include in his re-imagining of pre-historical England, while still keeping it connected to, and congruent with, the existing myths of the peoples of the British Isles. So he moved to a more purely fictional setting, that of Middle Earth.

Here, he had more creative room for manoeuvre, although he retained a lot of the initial scaffolding that he had created for the earlier iterations of the story, not least in the term Middle Earth, which is a derivation in English of the Old Norse Midgard, meaning the world. The earlier influences also show up in personal names, which are often directly borrowed from Old English. Theoden, the name of the Lord of Rohan, means “King of people” in that language. Earendil, one of the heroes of The Silmarillion, is named after the evening star. Frodo is a variant on an Old English name Froda, meaning one who has gained insight through toils and snares. This means that the stories still have a feeling of being organically connected to England or English experience.

This allusive kind of connection never feels forced. As Garth stresses, Tolkien did not simply take incidents or people or settings from life and insert them straight into his legendarium, but created a “layered” fictional world that feels supremely well realised because so many influences are present. The truth of this point is well demonstrated by the still-ongoing conjectures and debates about what different places might represent. It has been suggested, for example, that Gondor might loosely equate to Byzantium, in its role as a centre of learning and culture, the last bulwark of an ancient and largely vanished civilisation, menaced from South and East, a rallying point for those who wish to defend their lands and their way of life.

I did not know before I read Garth’s book that Tolkien had spent time in the Alps as a young man, and that many of the descriptions of the mountain ranges of Middle Earth can be traced back to his experiences, via his sketches, paintings and notebooks. This makes perfect sense: there are some wonderfully dramatic mountain scenes in The Lord Of The Rings and its accompanying works, which help to give them an epic scale and feel.

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Garth also discusses the impact of Tolkien’s war experience on the final shape taken by The Lord Of The Rings: this is one of the most fascinating areas of discussion. Tolkien was invalided back to Britain after fighting at the Somme, and the First World War appears to have given him not simply a renewed appreciation for the joys of a peaceful life, but a keen sense of the fragility of what he held most dear at home in England, and the great sacrifices that must be made to protect the best things in life.

After all, in The Return Of The King, Sauron’s power is only defeated at great cost. As Frodo says towards the end, “[the Shire] has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them”. The story of Frodo’s inability to truly return to normal life — his alienation from the Shire — is surely influenced by Tolkien’s having been a soldier returning to a much-changed and much-disturbed home country, one of millions in the same position.

Home, and the desire to return there, is of course one of the great recurring themes in The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings. Indeed the very last words of the 1,000-odd pages of the latter work, spoken by that archetype of hardy Englishness, Sam Gamgee, are “Well, I’m back.”

As Tolkien well knew, there is a great human desire for quiet and security, for return, for what we once knew. He would no doubt have seen that as a reflection of an even greater and deeper need, for final reconciliation and entry into the true Undying Lands. But even for those who cannot share that aspect of his thought, we can appreciate his grand project: to underpin a nostalgic vision of a pre-industrial England, a land of enchantment and possibility and freedom, with a powerful and complex mythology that would bear comparison with those of any other country.

It seems especially sad to me that he should have died so far from home, for Ravilious was one of the painters who caught something of the eternal essence of England. This has sometimes been called Deep England, a counterpart to the French conception of la France profonde — a phrase used to refer to an idealised, authentic France, rural and traditional, in touch with history and unpolluted by the modern world of industry, progress and rationalism.

Similarly, the idea of Deep England is focused on the England of the village church and the manor house, the maypole and the inn, the stone circle and the hedgerow. It is a place of stillness and peace. The landscapes of Deep England are beautiful and sometimes wild, but never overwhelming. Except in a few cases, it has never been a conscious ideology. However, it is undoubtedly there, as a powerful background for many of our artists, an unmistakeable vision of the country as something very ancient, with a distinct charm, a specific atmosphere.

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Perhaps because of his unusual style — essentially figurative but with a dreamlike quality — Ravilious caught this well. Not for nothing did that (hopefully) immortal English institution, the Wisden Cricketers Almanack, choose his woodcut of Victorian gentlemen to adorn their front cover.

One of my favourite paintings of his is called ‘Shepherd’s Cottage’, which portrays a man hoeing the garden of an old house. In the foreground runs a lane, separated from the garden by a stone wall overgrown by ivy. In the distance the fields rise up to the slope of the South Downs.

It could easily be trite or twee, but the surrealist influence, and slightly odd use of perspective, means that it lacks the bucolic idealism of a sentimentalist. Ravilious generally avoided this trap. In his work there are no rosy-cheeked children tramping home to snow-covered cottages, and no buxom milkmaids leaning on five-bar gates while a handsome lad takes the cattle home in the soft light of sunset.

Ravilious was not alone among his contemporaries in making the English countryside his special subject. Between the wars he was part of a circle called the Great Bardfield group, a loose association of painters, sculptors and engravers based in and around the Essex village of that name. He was also friends with Edward Bawden and the Nash brothers, Paul and John. The Great Bardfield artists were highly diverse, yet one of the things they had in common was a love for the scenery of their native soil.

What comes through very strongly from a great deal of their work is a settled, secure Englishness. Crucially, this is unsullied by any kind of dubious politics. This was not always the case with exponents of English ruralism between the wars; love of people and land can easily shade into blood and soil nationalism of the aggressive and sinister kind.

Henry Williamson, the writer and countryman best known for Tarka The Otter, who wrote the most wonderful lyrical descriptions of Devon and Kent, became a follower of Oswald Mosley, and was briefly interned at the start of the Second World War. He retained an unsavoury ambivalence about Nazism for the rest of his life. Ravilious, by contrast, was a strong opponent of fascism, as one might expect from his light and playful sensibility. He raised money for the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, and apparently had to be dissuaded by friends from enlisting in the British Army as a private soldier when war broke out.”

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His pictures put me in mind of a largely forgotten poem by Dorothy L Sayers, written in 1940 after the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk. It is called ‘The English War’ and, while not brilliant, conveys a sentiment which I find very interesting: a curious relief and relish, despite the disasters of Norway and Dunkirk, at the prospect of our once again fighting alone from our island redoubt, as we had so often done before. “This is the war that England knows”, she writes, when “men who love us not, yet look / To us for liberty”.

The poem refers to Drake and Napoleon and the Armada, the Cinque Ports and Plymouth Sound, appealing to a deep folk memory of being fundamentally an island race, and an old country. Sayers describes an England where terrains and environments have serious meaning and resonance because of the long continuity of the nation. This is why it is connected in my mind with Ravilious. His not-quite realist style gives the woods and hills and fields of England a fantastical air, a sense of mystery and enchantment, especially when he paints scenes or features that have endured for a very long time.

Arguably his best-known work, ‘Train Landscape’, shows the Westbury white horse from a carriage window. The Westbury white horse is not, in fact, enormously ancient — it was apparently created in the mid-eighteenth century. But it feels like it should be. It looks like something that has been there forever, and is redolent of the mingling of history and legend and myth. Many of our spectacular places have this same character — Tintagel, Lindisfarne, the fen country, the great Welsh castles.

Those Ravilious pictures which do not portray famous landmarks somehow retain a mood of magic and possibility. Looking at compositions like ‘The Causeway’, the modern world of speed and steel and the aeroplane seems to recede from view. You might easily expect to see King Arthur or Alfred the Great or Hereward the Wake emerge from the trees. A personal favourite of mine, ‘Wet Afternoon’, features nothing more exciting than a man walking down a country lane in a rain shower. Nevertheless, the hedges on either side of the lane are imbued with an air of fairytale anticipation.

In this connection, it is worth touching on Ravilious’ woodcuts and engravings. They use big bold shapes and overlapping interlaced patterns of black and white to create landscapes that are at once familiar and odd, natural and unnatural. Sometimes mythical creatures appear. A few of them are rather eerie because of the strange silhouettes of trees and hills, after the manner of the illustrations in a Brothers Grimm story. But those ones with a heightened impression of the uncanny are securely tied to real places. They are the product of a vision that was formed in, and continually inspired by, particular locations in a particular country — England.

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Even when Ravilious took up his brush in the service of his country, as a war artist, his approach never become bombastic or jingoistic. He painted the nation at war with the same understated, and unconscious, patriotism that informs his earlier pictures. The men in the wartime pictures, whether Royal Navy sailors braving the North Sea, or members of the Royal Observer Corps scanning the skies over the Channel, are carrying out their difficult and dangerous tasks with a minimum of fuss. You can almost hear the whispered banter and smell the steaming mugs of hot strong tea. The gentle, unshowy determination and grit that was for so long a part of the English self-image radiates out from the canvas.

One picture in particular touches on one of the paradoxes of the traditional English character. In ‘Convoy Passing An Island’, a track passing a cottage garden is contrasted with a long line of merchantmen steaming out into the North Sea. The homely blends with the grand and warlike. One might view this as an artistic attempt, deliberate or not, to reconcile one of the great tensions in our national self-image, between the conception of ourselves as a nation of no-nonsense islanders minding our own business — “this happy breed of men, this little world” — and the reality of our being a global superpower.

We will never know what Ravilious might have accomplished had he survived the war. The poignancy of his premature death is heightened for me by the erosion over the last few decades of the quiet, peaceful, modest, whimsical England that he recorded so beautifully. As Philip Larkin put it in his ‘Going, Going’:

“And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.”

One final thought: a fancy of mine is that he might have been a good choice to illustrate The Lord Of The Rings. Tolkien created fictional geographies that closely resembled those of this island, except with a heightened wildness, strangeness and antiquity. Ravilious, with his instinct for conveying the true nature of the English landscape, for giving his paintings and prints a strong sense of place and history and majesty, might just have been a perfect match.

My secondary school years, 1994-2001, seemed to be a busy period for such obituaries. Perhaps this was just my impression, but it was the age when men who had been in the prime of life during the war years were entering their eighties.

Over the course of my life the generation of people who actually fought in the Second World War has been gradually leaving us. I entered the world shortly before Mrs Thatcher’s stonking general election victory in 1983, and VJ Day, the end of the war, was not so very long ago. Factories and officers and schools still contained plenty of people who had served, some of them relatively young and vigorous.

Anyone in their late forties or older was likely to have some clear recollection of the war years. We were still living in a decidedly post-war world; there were four British armoured divisions permanently stationed in Germany, and Rudolf Hess remained a prisoner in Spandau, 42 years after his flight to Scotland.

Public life in 1983 was full of people who had been in uniform between 1939 and 1945. This included two of the previous three Prime Ministers, Ted Heath and James Callaghan, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. Runcie, indeed, had won the Military Cross during the advance to the Rhine, a distinction he shared with the popular cricket commentator and broadcaster Brian Johnston and the former Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, who had honourably resigned the previous year after the Foreign Office failed to foresee the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands. The Chief of the Defence Staff during the Falklands War, Terence Lewin, served with great distinction in the Royal Navy during the Second World War.

Such links are now extremely rare. In 2020, anyone who saw active service against Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan is well over ninety. Almost the only prominent people in public life who served in the war are the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who saw some lively service in the Mediterranean as a young naval officer.

This chronological distancing has been accompanied by a curious change in the way that we collectively remember the Second World War. It’s hard to describe this change precisely, or say exactly where it has come from. But if I had to try, I’d say that a folk memory of the Second World War as essentially a war fought for patriotic reasons against other countries to defend the British national interest, as part of a wider ongoing national story, has been substantially replaced by one that regards the war as an idealistic conflict fought in defence of universalist moral values, especially those that nowadays form the bedrock of high-status elite thinking — equality, diversity, non-discrimination, anti-nationalism and so on.

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Now of course there is some truth in this account, and some incompleteness in the older version. As the war went on it was framed increasingly by Allied leaders and populations as a fight for civilisation against barbarism, and of course this was a strong theme in British propaganda from the very early days of the war.

In Churchill’s famous speeches in 1940 he referred to the “odious apparatus of Nazi rule” and the “abyss of a new dark age”. The horrific revelations at the end of the war about the death camps and the atrocities throughout Occupied Europe made it very clear that the war had in some sense truly been a struggle against a diabolical evil.

But this is not the whole story. The Finest Hour speech appealed to a fundamentally patriotic understanding of the war, noting with regard to the Battle of Britain that “upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire”. The “Fight Them On The Beaches” speech explicitly situated the danger from Hitler in the context of a long series of threats to British independence from Continental tyrants, and declared the Anglo-French intention to “defend to the death their native soil”.

And Britain had entered the war for old-fashioned strategic reasons; not to defeat a country with a wicked government that was oppressing its population, but to stand up to a continental power that threatened to dominate Europe and so undermine the British national interest.

There is also, of course, the little matter of our alliance with the Soviet Union, a savage tyranny which had killed far more of its own citizens during the 1930s than Nazi Germany had managed. If the war was straightforwardly a crusade against barbarism, it is hard to account for our forging a jewel-covered ceremonial longsword as a present to Joseph Stalin, who had carved up Poland with Hitler in 1939, and whose armies raped and murdered their way across Eastern Europe in 1944-45, shadowed everywhere by battalions of secret policemen ready to shoot local dissidents, and indeed terrified peasant boys who fled the front line.

The Soviet alliance is intelligible and defensible in the context of a war for national survival and the national interest; less so if we conceive of the conflict as a grand battle of good versus evil.

A useful concept here, I think, is the neologism “retcon”, a portmanteau of the words “retroactive” and “continuity”. Retconning is a term originally coined by comic book readers, and it refers to the retrospective revision of completed fictional works, typically with the addition of new information to make us understand previous events in a different way.

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Something similar has been happening to the Second World War over the last few decades. Not only are the events of the war itself being repurposed to tell a simplistic tale about an idealistic war, but additionally the war is treated as an origin story for all that is considered good in the post-war world, from the NHS and the welfare state to our ability to rise above primitive notions like patriotism and national interest to the sunlit uplands of universal benevolence.

This retooling of the popular imagination is necessary partly because of sweeping demographic change complicating conceptions of national history and popular memory, but also because what you might call “old-fashioned” wars, entered into and fought for reasons of national self-interest, are seen as increasingly problematic.

To celebrate a hero because he fought or died for Britain, for King and Country, for the land from which he sprung, makes people uneasy; to celebrate him because he fought for “freedom” or “against Fascism” is much more acceptable. Ironically, this suspicion of national feeling is a result of the terrible events of the war, which have forever tainted patriotic energy with the horrible shadow of genocide and racial bigotry.

The semi-conscious move to the story of the war as a morality tale has surely also contributed to the curious transformation in our attitude to veterans of conflict, and not just the world wars. Across great swathes of public conversation, we seem to have only two cultural templates for those who have served in war; hero, an appellation now applied freely and therefore uselessly to anyone who has spent time in uniform, and victim, the man left emotionally and psychologically scarred by the experience of battle, grappling with addiction or PTSD and unable to function effectively in civilian life.

While it is very good indeed that we now take more seriously the mental health of service personnel, there is little evidence that veterans have worse mental health than the general population, once you have controlled for possible confounding factors.

Thus surviving Second World War veterans — such as Captain Tom Moore, NHS fundraiser extraordinaire — are held in the most exaggerated reverence, treated almost like holy objects rather than normal people who lived through an incredible chapter in our history and have had the good luck to live to a grand old age.

This is in line with the reimagining of the war as a high moral endeavour and the catalyst for the dawning of a new Britain freed from the shackles of an unenlightened past. It doesn’t help that there is no-one left alive who had any kind of senior or strategic role in the conflict, to temper the impressionistic, partial and fragmented recollection of the poor bloody infantry with a wider perspective that makes clear the difficult choices constantly faced by military commanders.

I am fairly sure that this exaggerated reverence is something new. I don’t recall it from the big wave of Second World War remembrance in the early 1990s. Then veterans were still treated with great respect, of course, and their recollections listened to with attention, but the very fact that there were so many of them, and that so many of them were still of an age to be actively engaged in normal life, arguably meant that we had more of a sense of them as normal people, for good or ill, rather than enormously aged relics of another world.

There is another reason for this pivot to extreme deference to Second World War veterans, and it was neatly summed up by an astute Twitter correspondent of mine, who noted that the wartime generation have become less culturally threatening as they have aged. Discussing the recently-discovered footage of Captain Tom Moore on the TV show Blankety Blank in 1983, he suggested that at that time he was the right age (63) to be a resented authority figure, liable to tell you to get a haircut and turn that bloody racket down, rather than in the category of enormously ancient and hence admirable sage from times long past.

This seems like a very plausible dynamic to me. The generations who have grown up since the war have complicated psychological attitudes to those who fought in it. They are compelled to admire their sacrifice and their resilience, especially if the cause for which they fought can be reconfigured as a war for modern liberal shibboleths, but also keenly convinced of the moral backwardness of the world which the wartime generations stood for, and which they still to some extent represent. It is entirely plausible, then, that the younger generations’ attitude to the few remaining survivors of the old world, should become more indulgent when any meaningful political and social threat from them has entirely passed (as it had not done in 1983).

The effect of the various phenomena noted above is to make it increasingly difficult for people to have a nuanced, realistic understanding both of our military history in general, and of how we should think about particular soldiers’ experiences. It’s always a delight, therefore, to see pushback against the sentimentalist or simplistic presentation of such experiences.

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For example, one of the great strengths of Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, released in autumn 2018 to coincide with the centenary of the end of the First World War, was that it avoided a clichéd over-emphasis on what you might call the “muddy futility and tragic poetry” view of that war.

Over the end credits we heard not the usual sad piano music, or a famous actor reading Dulce Et Decorum Est in their special Shakespeare voice, but a jaunty and – it must be said – filthy British Army marching song, Mademoiselle From Armentieres. Jackson, if I remember correctly, included voices noting that we did actually win the Great War. Not alone, certainly; the immortal French heroics at Verdun and the arrival of the Americans in the last year or so cannot be ignored. But the British Army and its imperial allies — and the Royal Navy’s blockade of Germany — played a decisive role in actually defeating the Germans in the field.

Also featured were testaments to an under-discussed aspect of the modern presentation of remembrance and popular history: i.e., that a large proportion of soldiers actually rather enjoy the experience of battle. This insight is fascinatingly explored in Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, among other works. However, it struggles to get much discussion time in the modern media environment because it runs so strongly against the grain of our conception of human nature.

It will be intriguing to see how the remembrance of the Second World War develops over the next two decades, as the conflict passes out of living memory altogether. I fear that the trend towards an ahistorical and politicised folk memory will only intensify, and that our collective endeavours to memorialise that great struggle will become ever stranger, as we try ever harder to cling to the mythologised version of the war, one of our few remaining collective reference points for the vanished past.

It’s not a normal springtime, of course. The volume of cars on the road through the village is noticeably diminished, and the normally bustling pub closed its doors nearly a month ago. Much to my daughter’s dismay, the swings and slides in the park are out of bounds, by order of the parish council. Unless you count the odd short walk up into the hills, I haven’t left the village at all for more than four weeks, since I nipped up to the magnificent Shrine of St Augustine at Ramsgate for a last Mass before the churches were locked up for the duration.

Life has taken on a slightly hobbitish air, albeit without the consolations enjoyed by the Shirefolk at The Green Dragon. The garden centre up the road has branched out into selling produce from local farms. There are more people out and about on foot, and everyone seems a bit more willing to pass the time of day, at an appropriate distance. Without much fuss or fanfare, arrangements have been made to help those who might need it.

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Some people have seized on these unusual conditions to suggest that the politics and economics of a post-coronavirus world may look very different to the status quo ante.

Here at UnHerd, David Goodhart echoed many sceptics of liberal globalism, when he argued that the pandemic will accelerate the move away from that system. He notes that “neat theories of free trade and comparative advantage have been oversold”, mentioning for example the loss of good jobs in Western economies, and the potential damage done to national security from a lack of strategic capacity in steel or power generation.

Goodhart also notes that in the United States, attention is turning to reducing its logistical dependence on China. President Trump has been rightly criticised for the federal government’s chaotic and inconsistent response to the pandemic, but he may yet benefit from increased suspicion of Red China in November’s election, especially as his opponent is Joe Biden, long associated with the trade liberalising policies that have seen so many US supply chains relocate across the Pacific. Many of the pieties of multilateralism have come under strain in the past few months: Ian Birrell made a powerful case against the WHO, bitterly criticising that organisation for its subservience to China.

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Away from the level of national governments and high politics, here in the UK there are signs of a resurgence of localism and community feeling, and a more human-scaled life. Hundreds of thousands of people have volunteered to help the NHS and to pick fruit and to deliver food and medicine to isolated neighbours. I hear reports from north London of children playing in the streets unimpeded by motor traffic (all sorts of statistics from 2020 are going to make fascinating reading, but I’m looking forward to seeing those on pollution and car deaths).

How much of this is permanent? Here my heart and head are in conflict. I am broadly sympathetic to the strain of thinking sometimes called “post-liberalism”, that seeks a renewed focus on localism, community, human solidarity and national sovereignty, which opposes the often destructive logic of ever-increasing choice and freedom, and seeks to transcend and tame the harsh imperatives of the market.

I would like to see more people spending more time in their communities and with their families. I think it would be good for all of us to make do with less, for our food consumption to be more closely tied to the rhythms of the year and the nature of our land. It is heartening to see so much energy devoted to protecting the health of vulnerable people.

But on the other hand, I need to keep in mind the old dictum cited by John Locke, “quod volumus, facile credimus”; what we wish to be true, we easily believe. We are undoubtedly living through an Event, but who knows what the consequences might be?

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There is enormous momentum behind the economic and social liberalism that has dominated Britain for much of the past half-century. Is the general mass of people really looking on these changed conditions as a glorious experiment, as a demonstration that another life is possible, rather than as a grim time of insecurity, confinement and frustration to be endured only for as long as necessary?

It seems quite possible that an extended lockdown may in fact increase the attractions of the liberal economy. I would not be surprised if people were very keen to get back to the old way of life — back on Tinder and JustEat, back to the pubs and the clubs, back to their autonomous urban lifestyles, to the low prices and huge range of options enabled by modern technology, global supply chains, and hyper-efficient business practices.

It’s worth remembering, too, that huge economic damage is being done by the lockdown. Post-liberals may argue, with some justice, that the economy should be structured differently, such that we are more resistant and resilient to shocks like the coronavirus but that is easier said than done.

To a considerable extent the renewed communitarianism that we are seeing, the quiet streets and the lack of travel, is making the best of a bad situation, rather than a straightforward sign of a new order. While they can be viewed as experiments in living that may provide inspiration for future change, we need to be wary of glorying in them too much, because there is going to be a serious and grim recession over the next couple of years.

Reductions in consumption, and a reliance on more local and restrained economic activity, will have many losers, unless we see permanent and foundational changes to economic and social policy, perhaps along the lines envisaged by thinkers like EF Schumacher, known for his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful. In that work Schumacher lays out his manifesto for a humane and human-scale economic system, premised on careful stewardship of the environment, the dignity of labour, and the undesirability of excessive consumerism and materialism. It is a splendid vision in many ways, but we are a long way from achieving it. Similarly, without a revolution in moral and social attitudes, people will not be willing to accept the ethical conservatism without which post-liberalism is unintelligible.

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I am confident that there will be certain permanent after-effects. Short-haul flying will struggle to recover to pre-crisis levels: national governments will have an unmatched opportunity to increase the operating costs of short-haul routes, as part of efforts to reduce carbon emissions, providing a shot in the arm for operators of long-distance European rail routes.

Increased middle-class movement out of large cities seems likely too, as does a greater tolerance for a larger government role both in the economy and in shaping public behaviour (for good or ill). Rishi Sunak’s economic aid package, involving enormous public spending, was broadly welcomed across the political spectrum. It is hard also to see how the pandemic doesn’t strengthen the hands of China hawks in Western capitals.

Nevertheless, my instinct is that what we are seeing is a holiday from the modern world rather than a thoroughgoing repudiation. Despite the disruption and upset, there are very few voices in politics offering a sustained and coherent challenge to the assumptions about the good life and human nature that dictate the structures of modern society.

These assumptions are well-described by the US writer Rod Dreher, in his book The Benedict Option. He talks about “liquid modernity”, by which he means the situation of constant moral and cultural flux in which we find ourselves. The range of acceptable values and attitudes changes with baffling speed and frequency. Within liquid modernity, consumption is king, and the amount of choice across all areas of our lives is vast, often paralysing or even damaging for individuals. For businesses to survive in the liberalised, globalised economy demands constant adaptation and a ruthless attitude.

The system is extremely resilient, not least because it is not consciously a system. But without the political clout to strike some severe blows against it, the green shoots of a better way of life that we have glimpsed in this otherwise difficult time will remain uncultivated.

Alternatively I suppose there’s always Star Wars — 43 years and 11 films — or the Bond franchise, soon to celebrate its sixtieth year and twenty-fifth film. If none of those are quite your cup of tea, fear not: the interminable Marvel Cinematic Universe grinds on and on.

Looking at popular culture, it is not difficult to see why a thoughtful observer of the Western world in this Year 2020 might think we are reaching a point of exhaustion and repetition, of endlessly revisiting and rehashing past glories, of creative dead-ends and diminishing returns from increasingly sterile forms of art.

Ross Douthat, writing in The Decadent Society, is such an observer. And he is indeed concerned that the developed world is grinding to an existential halt. Forget, by the way, any idea you may have of a modern-day Savonarola denouncing sensual indulgence. For Douthat, decadence is primarily understood as the condition of a civilisation that has come, or appears to have come, to an end point, to a culmination beyond which there is no clear path forward. As he says in the introduction, developing the ideas of the historian Jacques Barzun:

“Decadence, deployed usefully, refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.”

This has the advantage, for Douthat, of helping to “define decadence as something more than just any social or moral trend that you dislike”, that is to say it introduces an element of testability into his diagnosis. He is aware of the temptation to simply lament decline, to see incompetence, wickedness and impiety everywhere, and thus to deaden the impact of his critique by tendentious unsubtlety. As a result he makes his case carefully, citing evidence from a range of disciplines, and noting the difficulties and weaknesses of his own position as he goes.

Unusually for a social conservative, he concedes that most currently available evidence does not support a link between consumption of violent media and pornography and subsequent violent or sexual offending — although he does, plausibly, argue that the retreat by large numbers of young men into virtual worlds and sexual fantasy is part of decadence, representing as it does a turning inward and a retreat from the challenges of the real world.

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Perhaps unexpectedly, The Decadent Society begins and ends with discussions of space exploration. The opening pages chart the steady decline in spacefaring ambition since December 14, 1972, when the last man to walk on the Moon, Gene Cernan, climbed up into the lunar module (Cernan — like all but four of the other 12 men to have walked on the lunar surface — is now dead).

This steady decline was symbolised and accelerated by the Challenger and Columbia disasters of 1986 and 2003, the latter of which precipitated the grounding of the Shuttle fleet, which has left NASA reliant on the ancient Russian Soyuz rockets to get astronauts into orbit.

Towards the end of the book, Douthat returns to the final frontier, to muse on the question of whether we can, or will, ever establish a human presence on other worlds. These discussions are not so tangential to a book about decadence as one might think; the significance of space travel stems from Douthat’s plausible theory that one of the causes of our civilizational ennui is the sense that there is nowhere left to go, no stones left unturned, no great adventures to be undertaken.

The expansion and discussion of Douthat’s definition of decadence takes up most of the first half of the book. Douthat offers evidence for this thesis under four main headings: stagnation, sterility, sclerosis and repetition. By stagnation he means a sharp slowdown in economic progress broadly understood, using metrics such as labour force participation, fair distribution of wealth, household incomes and levels of debt, and also a technological slowdown, a failure to achieve any breakthroughs that might unleash a new age of innovation and renewal. The evidence he accrues here is often USA-centric but many of the trends obtain across large parts of the developed world.

Under sterility he notes the steep decline in birth rates across both the developed world and emerging economies, and ties this into his overall argument with the hard-to-prove but probably true observation that lack of civilizational confidence is both cause and effect of low birth rates. Willingness to reproduce is a fundamental sign of the health of a society.

By scleroris, Douthat means the increasing inability of governments across the Western world to get things done, whether legislatively or administratively. By his calculation, the US government is just not as competent as it was 30 or 40 years ago, with systemic failures more common. He extends this critique to the EU, noting its inherently bureaucratic and glacial processes, and its struggle to resolve or even adequately manage the growing problem of Right-wing populism that is fundamentally opposed to the liberal universalism espoused by EU leaders.

Then we come to repetition. Here Douthat focuses particularly on culture, noting that popular music is becoming observably less sophisticated, both technically and thematically, than it was even 20 or 30 years ago, to say nothing of 50 or 60 years ago. He notes the increasing reliance of Hollywood on sequels and franchises.

The idea of decadence as cultural exhaustion, as constant repetition of what we already know because of uncertainty about where we go next and because we are not sure there is anything new to add, is an extremely fruitful one. To Douthat’s elaboration of it I would add that the great cultural and social rupture of the 1960s has left artists and intellectuals cut off from many of the great wellsprings of their culture, with the result that their work and their art has become stunted and boring and shallow.

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The theory also helps to explain the insistence of elites on attacking an opponent that has long since ceased to exist. When Guardian columnists demand a school history curriculum that shows pupils the full horrors of Empire, what forces do they imagine are ranged against them? The professions of educationalist and teacher are not exactly renowned as bastions of conservative patriotism these days.

And who exactly do modern artists believe they are shocking with their confrontational conceptualism? The proportion of the gallery-going classes who are the reactionary squares of the avant garde imagination must be tiny. Duchamps’ urinal was daring and provocative in 1917, but that was 103 years ago. What is there now to conceptualism except a wearisome revisiting of the same tired clichés, the same boring gestures against an imagined traditionalist enemy whose power vanished decades ago?

Deconstructionism and anti-traditionalism, in their various forms, have become intellectual cargo cults, continued because their practitioners do not know how to do anything else except bomb the rubble of the dead past. There may be no decent new ideas, but the one thing we do know is that The Olden Days Were Bad.

Douthat’s account of civilisational exhaustion reminded me strongly of another book I read recently, Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death Of Europe, a reflection on — inter alia — the European crisis of self-confidence, which has been rumbling on since the First World War and only intensified after the diabolical horrors of the Second.

One of the shared concerns of the two books is the great, looming, unavoidable question: what happens next? Douthat sketches several possible futures, starting with “sustainable decadence” where in the medium-term Western governments simply continue to muddle along in the absence of any meaningful solutions to the problems of sluggish economies, low fertility rates, cultural boredom and inefficient government.

Alongside this, he envisions various ends to decadence, focusing particularly on Europe, which is the part of the Western world most affected by decadence as he defines it, and — crucially — most vulnerable to huge demographic pressures from the continent most resistant to decadence: Africa. One possibility is that Europe is simply overwhelmed by economic migrants and climate refugees from the south and more or less collapses.

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Alternatively, we might see the emergence of a stable, well-integrated and non-decadent “Eurafrican” civilisation, with the risks and losses of demographic transformation mitigated and balanced by Christian revival as envisaged by putative Eurafricans like Cardinal Robert Sarah. Douthat sketches other scenarios too, some more likely than others but all rather speculative; as he stresses throughout the book, both the problem of decadence and its possible solutions or consequences are enormously complex and multifaceted.

The solution to decadence by which Douthat sets most store, however, is founded on two great hopes: God and science. The final section of the book envisages a human civilisation that is both technologically reinvigorated, perhaps even fit to venture to the stars, and also spiritually renewed, turning back to God to discover the transcendent purpose and lofty view of the human spirit that decadence has undermined.

Is this realistic? It’s hard to say, and indeed it’s hard to say whether Douthat believes so himself. One of the weaknesses of this part of the book, as with several earlier sections, is that Douthat retains a little too much ironical detachment. One can almost see the raised eyebrow and the wry smile, an impression not helped by a closing line whose glibness feels like a bit of a cop-out: “So down on your knees — and start working on that warp drive”. I for one would have liked a more consistently engaged analysis that explicitly approached decadence and its discontents from Douthat’s traditional Catholic perspective.

These are quibbles, however. This is an endlessly provocative and fascinating book, both in the conclusions to which it comes and in the evidence it adduces. I can see this starting a thousand dinner party arguments, and for good reason: it’s hard to think of a more important question than whether our civilisation can survive on its current trajectory.

Liberals, eh? Dontcha just hate ‘em? Or should I say ‘so-called’ liberals, who aren’t really liberal at all because they want to silence their opponents. And whatever happened to John Stuart Mill? He’s been taken off the curriculum of course — because he’s a Dead White Male and the Cultural Marxists who control the universities don’t think their snowflake students will be able to read him without bursting into tears…Want to hear more? Sign up to my YouTube channel…

Of course, I don’t really have a YouTube channel, but a lot of people do. And this sort of Right-wing dissent from liberal orthodoxy proliferating on social media and video-sharing websites these days.

The raucous and antagonistic online culture has sprung up as traditional media’s gatekeeper role has diminished. And such are the financial incentives — rewarding controversy and gotchas rather than reasoned debate — that decent money can now be made from stoking the Right-wing id with jeremiads about millennial snowflakes and Cultural Marxism and post-modernist wreckers. It’s a problem.

The circuit of this alternative media is now pretty well established: mostly YouTube-based discussion programmes, broadly opposed to the progressive cultural consensus. There are different styles. For example, the Triggernometry podcast is presented by two very funny comedians and has a fairly informal approach, full of jokes and occasionally quite profane, whereas Conversations, hosted by former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia John Anderson, is more polished and old-fashioned. Nevertheless, the programmes have the same kind of guests, who tend to make the same kind of points, in the same kind of way. 

There are two topics that arise time and time again. First, cultural decline, i.e. the gradual loss of knowledge and understanding of the great art, the great literature, the great achievements of Western civilisation. This is usually ascribed to the dominance of the academy by highly politicised Left-wing academics with a bad case of what Sir Roger Scruton called “oikophobia”, that is a strong feeling of dislike and repugnance towards their own cultural and religious inheritance. 

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The second subject is the increasing censoriousness of culturally dominant progressives, who are keen to silence and delegitimise critics of the Current Year social consensus. A stern and humourless progressive piety reigns in the citadels of the British cultural establishment, empowered and encouraged by the dynamics of social media. 

These are important subjects. However, they cannot be the only topic of conversation. Clearly there’s a problem. What about the solutions? 

When I worked for a pro-life organisation, we used to grumble about media bias, how big broadcasters stacked the deck against pro-lifers in interviews and debates, and how the print media gave endless column inches to outright liars and propagandists. Such complaints were all rather futile. We should, instead, have been asking: “Given the media landscape, what are we actually going to do?” It’s hard to fight a battle on a field you didn’t choose, but you do still have to fight.

In his thoughtful piece for UnHerd after the death of Sir Roger Scruton, Ben Sixsmith noted, correctly, the lack of intellectual heft within British conservatism. The problem isn’t just in the academy; it’s in virtually every field of cultural endeavour. Where are the conservative painters and poets and sculptors and TV writers? Perhaps more importantly, where is the institutional infrastructure to support conservatives in the arts?  

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If conservatives genuinely want to challenge the progressive hegemony, they need to get serious and they need to get organised. They can’t afford to get bogged down in cultivating resentments. Resentment, as Scruton himself often noted, is a corrosive and dangerous dead end. 

Of course, tweaking the nose of the po-faced consensus, with its bizarre, ever-changing shibboleths and bureaucratic vindictiveness, is great fun. There is a glorious heritage in Britain of robust opposition to hectoring officialdom. People who stand at the back and hurl tomatoes at the stage will always be needed. But conservatism can’t be just about that. 

Sure, it might feel good to say the unsayable and to get hundreds of RTs for a devastating put-down of Polly Toynbee or some withering remarks about the suffocating piety of BBC drama. But, generally speaking, the juggernaut rolls on regardless. The task is not to make the drivers of the juggernaut feel embarrassed or angry, but to actually stop the juggernaut. This is one reason to be concerned by the preponderance of comedians among the heroes of the anti-woke counterculture; while comedy can advance dissident goals to some extent by breaking progressive taboos, it is ultimately a destructive force, not a constructive one.

Maybe conservatives should take a step back from the day-to-day combat of the culture war. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those conservatives who retires to the fainting couch with a glass of sherry when the culture war is mentioned. 

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In Western countries in the modern era, it is entirely natural and reasonable for there to be culture war, i.e. a rigorous, ongoing debate about the attitudes, expectations and moral imperatives that should govern public and private life — especially in areas such as education, entertainment and the media. The alternative is so-called Tory pragmatism, the school of thought whose main principle seems to be “whatever the Guardian editorial page says, but four years after the editorial appears rather than 18 months”.  

The point is not that the culture war shouldn’t be fought; rather, conservatives need to fight smart, and remember the culture bit as well as the war bit. This means thinking about strategy and not just tactics. One tendency in the world of Right-wing podcasters and YouTubers is to seek out the latest person to fall foul of the dreaded libs and thrust a microphone in front of them. 

The problem is that those people don’t always have anything very interesting to add, and that giving them more publicity simply feeds into a reactive and antagonistic atmosphere of snark and counter-snark. It also contributes to a climate where grifters can flourish; it is very easy to carve out a niche for yourself as The Person Who Says What They Don’t Want You To Say, without contributing much of value to conservative thought and action. 

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Which brings us to another difficulty. There are really (at least) two factions on the Right-wing side of the culture war: classical liberals or libertarians, and traditional conservatives. They have overlapping concerns and shared enemies, but fundamentally they have quite different aims and so want to fight different battles in different ways. 

Traditional conservatism, my own part of the political forest, is not simply concerned with removing restraints on speech and clearing obstructions from the public square. It has a vision of the true and the beautiful, a particular understanding of what a good and orderly society should look like. For adherents to this philosophy, the future cannot simply lie in joining forces with the libertarian loudmouths and provocateurs. 

Imagine a podcast or YouTube video series that wasn’t content to condemn the decline of Western civilisation or the absurd censorship attempted by academic liberals, but actually sought out conservative artists to interview them about their work. Imagine a new media show that was not a lament about how X university won’t teach Dante or Plato or Shakespeare, but instead gave a voice to a young poet seeking to write within the great tradition, or an up-and-coming architect seeking to build beautifully and creatively, or a painter rejecting the sterile conceptualism of establishment art.

It won’t be enough on its own — not without the impressive and enviable institutional support available for conservative artists in, say, the USA — but it would be a big step in the right direction.

A second knock follows; the friar repeats the question. The herald replies with the achievements and honours of the deceased. Once again the friar says “We don’t know him”. After this comes a third knock, and a third demand for identification. This time the herald simply states the given name of the deceased, followed by the words “a mortal, sinful, human being”. The friars of the Kapuzinerkirche then open the door and admit the coffin.

The symbolism is obvious. Be ye ever so mighty, you will face God’s judgment as surely as anyone else, and all your wealth and power and grandeur will avail you nothing. Even for those who do not believe in God, or who view the ceremony cynically as a bit of slick PR by the rich and mighty to sweeten the pill of their dominance for the downtrodden masses, it is surely an impressive moment.

It beautifully illustrates the same point as the old joke about the mourner at a rich man’s funeral, who asks the priest “How much did he leave?” and receives the unbeatably laconic reply “All of it”. The Book of Common Prayer puts it this way: “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out”.

One of the great benefits of formal Christian liturgies, especially those that have not been cackhandedly modernised by well-meaning barbarians, is that they regularly confront the churchgoer with three absolutely fundamental truths of the human condition, namely the fact of our sinfulness, the certainty of our death, and the universal need for mercy and forgiveness. Which is why I think that, to aid national unity and reconciliation in post-Brexit Britain, as a New Year’s resolution we should oblige MPs to attend church on a regular basis.

I have it all planned out. There would, of course, be exemptions for MPs who are members of other faiths. But as for everyone else, from the Prime Minister down to the lowliest backbencher, once a week or so they would be herded over the road to Westminster Abbey, with the Serjeant-at-Arms close behind to make sure no one sneaks off for a cheeky cigarette on College Green.

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It would be an ecumenical service, to avoid any sectarian quibbling. The main thing would be to have an old-fashioned full-blooded confession of sin, with lots of kneeling, alongside some well-chosen Bible readings focused on the universality of the Fall, the inevitability of judgment and the dangers of power. The story of the Pharisee and the Publican would get a run-out once every three or four weeks, to make sure that it haunted the dreams of the inveterate moral show-offs who litter the green benches.

Maybe we could also have a recurring role for Romans 3: “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.” Ideally the service would be led by one of those tall, severe clergymen with a resonant and faintly intimidating voice, although they are in short supply nowadays. Possibly we could tempt Richard Chartres out of retirement.

I am being a little bit facetious. But if you truly want to address political, cultural and social polarisation, and to start healing the divides exposed and exacerbated by the Brexit convulsions, you could do a lot worse than getting our elites back into church.

At its best, Christian worship is a great leveller. Walk into the main Sunday service at any church in London, and you will almost certainly find more ethnic diversity than in practically any other setting you care to mention. I dare say this diminishes a little as you move further out from the centre, but these days even the most suburban parishes will generally have a more varied racial mix than, say, the Liberal Democrat membership. I attend Catholic Mass in Folkestone, a mid-sized seaside town in Kent, and the congregation is significantly more ethnically diverse than the town itself.

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The same applies to class, certainly in the Catholic Church. In many places the social mix in Catholic parishes still bears the mark of the history of the faith in England, with observance kept alive by a small number of upper-class recusants and their loyal dependants, and mostly abandoned by the rising middle and commercial classes, then reinforced in the last couple of centuries by working-class Irish immigration and converts from the intelligentsia.

One of the great things about church is that you don’t get to choose who is there with you. The person next to you may be a fiery Marxist or a staid Tory; they could be a repentant murderer, or a blameless widow who has never missed a Sunday service in seventy years. They could be an immigrant who only arrived at Heathrow three weeks ago, or the second son of a Duke whose family came over with the Conqueror; they could be a brilliant intellectual or someone with profound learning difficulties.

All the same, you pray the same prayers. In churches with traditional liturgy, you turn to them and you offer them Christ’s peace. You kneel together and you ask for the same mercy from the same God. In the Catholic Mass the Confiteor, the confession, is addressed not simply to God but also to our “brothers and sisters”.

And just as in church there is no escaping human equality before God, there is no escaping from human frailty and the reality of our own wrongdoing. “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts”, says the Church of England’s General Confession, “and there is no health in us.” “I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof”, pray Catholics before receiving Communion. To the non-churchgoer this all perhaps sounds a little excessive and gloomy, even masochistic. But it’s not really: it’s an honest reckoning with the extent of our wrongdoing and the depth and persistence of our imperfections.

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For politicians in particular — to return to my modest proposal — it is very important to be conscious of their temptations and flaws. Power does funny things to people, and it is no bad thing to have some humility thrust upon you. One of the most striking and inspiring stories from early Christianity is of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, refusing to celebrate Mass for the Emperor Theodosius until the latter repented of an atrocity which his troops had carried out. It is a fantastic example of the Church standing up to worldly might, and one might wish Ambrose’s example had been followed more consistently by other bishops in later eras.

A common jibe against Christianity is that it is a way for The Man to control the masses. Maybe getting politicians to kneel before God and admit their weakness might mean Christianity helping the masses to control The Man.

What father of a son would disagree? And it’s not just fathers and sons. Most people want their children to develop the same sort of loyalties, beliefs and attachments that they themselves consider important. Of course, life doesn’t always turn out that way. One thing I have realised as I get older, and have ever more experience of a wider range of people, is that my contented, relaxed upbringing in a cheerful home overseen by happily-married parents was quite a bit rarer than I had once imagined. I have always felt that I owe my parents a great debt of gratitude.

What exactly do we owe our families? It’s a thorny question, not least at this time of year when many people are visiting family, and girding their loins for a big row about Brexit, or Boris, or Extinction Rebellion. Recent years have seen the emergence of a genre of article that encourages people to pick fights with their families at the dinner table (in the US, at Thanksgiving as well as Christmas).

One widely circulated tweet this year contained a picture of a T-shirt that a woman was planning to wear to Thanksgiving dinner, declaring her support for abortion rights, transgender rights, gay marriage and the rest of the progressive sacraments. Presumably the plan was to throw these beliefs in the faces of her backward, bigoted relatives, and storm away from the table basking in the warm glow of self-righteous satisfaction. Another was from an academic who quite openly scorned and mocked the idea that he should feel any kind of affinity or attachment to his relations just because they shared some DNA.

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I have no idea whether this social media fad means anything in the real world. Are thousands of angry students and young people really heading home for the holidays determined to harangue their families for their insufficiently progressive political views? It’s anyone’s guess. Anecdotally, it seems fairly common for young people who are well-educated, or who have at least been through university-level education (not quite the same thing these days), to have a kind of performative disdain for their parents’ views, especially if those parents are from the dreaded suburbia.

It’s hard to deny that the dominant stories in our culture encourage dissatisfaction with, and suspicion of, home and community. From sex education to pop music to children’s TV and cinema, the message is clear: to find happiness and contentment, you must break away from the world into which you were born, and from the people who raised you, and seek your “real self”.

The foundation to this way of thinking is a form of hard liberalism, wherein the only attachments and obligations by which we are truly bound are those which we freely, and continually, choose for ourselves. If we don’t see eye to eye with our parents, if they’re not providing us with the requisite affirmation of all our choices or the appropriate number of hedonic units, then we should shut them out of our lives in favour of people whose company and politics we find more congenial.

Suggested reading

Eight ways to unite the nation

By Polly Mackenzie

If your interest in your wife has waned now that you have a bright and bubbly young secretary, don’t you have a right — a responsibility, even! — to pursue your own happiness, regardless of all those boring old vows you made twenty years ago? This hard liberalism is also increasingly applied to the concept of the nation-state: patriotism both as source of pride and as source of obligation is simply unintelligible where all moral and political choices are assessed through the prism of the individual and his currently existing desires and preferences.

There is, of course, another extreme, an over-emphasis on family loyalty to the exclusion of all else. Some years ago I read a fascinating short book arguing that one reason why the creation of stable modern states in the Arab world has been so difficult is that the traditional culture in that part of the world retains a strong focus on the clan or tribe, rather than any broader grouping. You cannot build a liberal democracy with the rule of law if people do not feel a strong primary loyalty to the nation, and feel able to trust outsiders. A world with an absolute and unqualified duty of loyalty and deference to your family would be unbearable.

Nevertheless, it is worth resisting the assumptions embedded in the view that it is generally praiseworthy or admirable to adopt a stance of disdain and superiority towards one’s family and community.

For one thing, the family should be a shelter from the political. The non-political way of life includes associations and interactions that are maintained not from above but by voluntary co-operation. It’s about maintaining customs, traditions and institutions — such as the family — whose normal operation is in a fundamental way beyond the reach of organised compulsion by the state. It’s about organisations that are ends in themselves rather than vehicles for some other goal, i.e. the point of a chess club is for people who like chess to get together to play chess, not to promote equality or capitalism or membership of the European Union.

Suggested reading

Can our shattered nation survive this election?

By Giles Fraser

The non-ideological view of life is an essentially humanist one, because it sees people and their situations as standing alone to be considered on their own terms, rather than being slotted into a neat pre-existing box. It is the basis of authentic pluralism, because it enables us to carve out room for minorities and dissenters. In some ways the family is the archetypal non-political institution, and to only value your family insofar as they are politically congenial to you is to miss the point.

To cultivate a positive stance towards your family also helps to develop two of the great virtues: humility and gratitude. A key part of humility is entertaining the possibility that you have something to learn — perhaps a great deal — from most people you meet, even perhaps your dreadful conservative dad. Gratitude is about taking seriously the things which other people have done for you; the sacrifices they have made, the security they have created, the help they have given. Both humility and gratitude are ways of breaking free of resentment, which is one of the most corrosive poisons in human affairs, whether at the level of individuals or in politics.

I don’t want to idealise family. I wouldn’t deny for one moment that many people are quite justified in their anger at, or suspicion of, theirs. Families are, after all, made of human beings, those strange, fallible, infuriating creatures.

But I suspect that many more people have poor relationships with their families because they have disordered priorities, or a mistaken idea of the relative importance of politics. Many seem to have swallowed whole our culture’s obsession with self-actualisation and its hostility to what you might call bourgeois normality; that is to say, the widespread view — often expressed indirectly — that there is something pitiable and inadequate about living quietly and honestly in a small-scale way and attending to the particular and the local.

This is, of course, quite false and damaging. But I fear that many people only realise its falsehood when the opportunity to repair the damage is long past. Cherish your family over this Christmas period; sometimes you don’t appreciate good things until they’ve gone, and it’s too late.

Such is the inherent safety of rail travel that Boris Johnson’s three most recent predecessors as prime minister all served their entire time in office without a single passenger being killed. Indeed, it is a tribute to recent advances in design that only one person died at Grayrigg, a very serious accident in which several carriages fell down a high embankment.

Trains are an extremely safe way to travel. Safe, environmentally friendly and, in many ways, more civilised, yet our system is still geared towards the car and rewards its use, and has been at least since the 1960s when the then Conservative government commissioned huge cuts to the rail network — the infamous Beeching Axe.

The “Axe” was seen as inevitable and forward-thinking, yet half a century later the tide of expert opinion may be shifting, and with it the serious possibility of undoing some of the cuts. It is an idea with serious merit, and growing in popularity as the problems of a car-dependent society become clearer. Only recently, former transport secretary Lord Adonis, a man who probably knows more about trains that anyone else in Britain, laid out how part of the Beeching Axe could be reversed, with a special focus on the revitalisation of regional economies.

It’s not just about the deaths, injuries and illnesses that result from car accidents, pollution and sedentary lifestyles; cars also distort urban environments and make cities and towns worse places to live, damging communities and the economy. As car numbers have increased and population density risen, the external costs of car use have increased each year.

I’m not sure anyone really likes driving. I don’t mean driving as it appears in adverts for flashy 4x4s, where a square-jawed male model speeds effortlessly through the Highlands on deserted roads in the light of a perfect sunset. I mean actually existing driving, the kind that we motorists spend most of our car miles doing; pottering along urban clearways to get to Tesco or pick up the children; stop-start progress on ring roads and one-way systems to get to work; cursing silently as we see a huge sea of brake lights ahead of us on a congested motorway.

And there is no escaping that cars are bad for us, a major source of urban air pollution, and a threat to health and wellbeing. Air pollution can seriously damage memory in later life, has been shown to worsen children’s health and is even linked to low achievement at school.

There is some evidence that the dominance of public space by cars makes children and the elderly less likely to get out and about, while Britain has some of the worst traffic congestion in Europe.

On top of the thousands killed in road accidents since 2007, hundreds of thousands have been hurt, and this is with road deaths at historic lows — between 1,700 and 1,800 per year. In 1926, when records began, there were almost 5,000 road fatalities, at a time when car ownership was still very low, and the population about two-thirds of its current level. This had increased to just over 7,000 by 1930, reaching its nadir in 1966 when 8,000 people in Britain were killed by cars, the worst peacetime year for road deaths (road deaths during the war were even higher, due to the blackout).

Since 1900, a staggering 400,000 people in Britain have been killed by motor vehicles, while total fatalities on the railways since their introduction in 1830 are are less than one per cent of that number. Even if you look at deaths per passenger mile rather than raw numbers, trains do far better than road vehicles, especially cars.

There are other, less material, issues involved. It is often said that trains are the most civilised means of transport yet devised, and it is hard to disagree. Trains can incorporate restaurants, bars and beds. You can get up and wander about. You can write. You can look out of the window and have a sense of being part of the landscape in a way that just isn’t possible on a motorway or on a plane. By comparison with, say, a six-lane motorway, train lines cause relatively minimal disruption to the environment, and are responsible for far less noise and light pollution.

But railways have often had a bad deal from policymakers, stretching back a century. For instance, competition from road freight became a serious problem for the train companies in the years after the First World War, not least because railways were legally obliged to accept all freight at unprofitable fixed prices, under what is sometimes called the “common carrier” rule.

Road haulage companies were not bound by this rule and so could cream off the most profitable work. Road freight operations also received a heavy indirect subsidy from local and national government in the form of high spending on road infrastructure and almost no taxation on roads.

Suggested reading

How to make Britain One Nation again

By David Skelton

After the Second World War came nationalisation. British Rail was not itself run badly, but for much of the latter half of the century government policy heavily favoured cars. Parking was cheap or free, and roads free at the point of use, with the cost of building and maintainance exceeding the income from motoring-related tax.

Urban populations declined, cars were considered icons of freedom and success, and any interference with “motorists’ rights” was opposed with great vigour. By the 1970s around 90% of all journeys were made by car, and rail journeys had fallen to half their 1913 levels.

Dr Beeching, the industrialist whose 1963 report recommended a huge programme of closures on the British rail network, has always been a bête noire to rail romantics like me, people who regret the loss of charming branch lines and once-famous routes. But in the political-cultural context of the post-war period, the belief in the inevitable death of the dense traditional city, the mania for Le Corbusier-style “modern” urban centres dominated by wide multi-lane roads, and the seductively misleading idea that the car brought freedom — it made a sort of sense for Beeching to slash railway lines.

Of course, this conventional wisdom was wrong. The city was far from over; the worst insanities of Brutalist urbanism have passed; the car eroded freedom and quality of life in important ways. Rail did, after all, survive and thrive. Passenger journeys have more than doubled since privatisation, returning to their 1913 peak.

Suggested reading

The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

Today some high-profile Beeching casualties are effectively having to be built all over again: HS2, with a price tag of around £100 billion, is in many ways a resurrection of Sir Edward Watkin’s Grand Central Main Line (the world’s first dedicated high-speed line). The planned new route between Oxford and Cambridge is a recreation of the old Varsity Line, the destruction of which is one of the most incomprehensible transport policy decisions of the post-war era.

And it is not just these high-profile lines whose closure now looks remarkably short-sighted. The loss of some smaller regional routes may have been equally foolish, given the issues facing modern Britain, one of which is the increasing concentration of high-skilled, high-status jobs in a small number of large cities and the economic falling behind of the regions.

The best hope for many mid-sized towns within commuting range of large urban centres lies in fast, reliable transport connections, but the cuts to rail infrastructure in the second half of the last century have made this more difficult.

Research suggests that areas affected by the Beeching cuts suffered permanent population decline afterwards, especially of skilled workers. The attempt to replace train routes with buses didn’t work, since road congestion and circuitous routes meant buses were slower and passengers gave up on them.

Suggested reading

The pulling power of Tyneside's great steam train

By Allan Mallinson

One needn’t be a reactionary standing athwart history yelling stop to think that it may have been a mistake to close hundreds of miles of railways around Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, and Cardiff. It is indeed possible to maintain an extensive network of railways serving relatively small population centres in a modern developed economy; in Japan, small private railways support almost every tiny village in the country.

Partially reversing the Beeching Axe is not some romantic eccentricity, a quixotic return to a real or imagined golden age of steam trains, rural branch lines and avuncular stationmasters. There is a real, practical need to reduce road usage in general and private car use in particular, and there is a hard-headed business case for better rail links.

Excessive dependence on roads is harmful to individuals and communities, to the fabric and aesthetic appeal of our cities, and to the economy. It is increasingly hard to deny that the governments that chopped the railways chose the wrong future. Perhaps it’s time to think again.