Back then, the father was a central figure both in culture and children’s development. He stood for authority, hierarchy, boundaries and individuation. He was both exemplar and competitor for a developing boy. This view underlies Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex, and was also central to complex civilisations: in Moses and Monotheism, Freud argued that a hero “is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him” and that this is a keystone of Judeo-Christian culture.

Today, though, psychoanalytic theory is more likely to view the symbolic father as a reactionary holdout to be dismantled. Meanwhile, as I discovered when I took a four-year psychotherapy training course a decade ago, men have retreated almost entirely from talking therapies, whether as clients or practitioners.

Does this disappearance matter? A new book by Wall Street Journal writer Abigail Shrier suggests that it may have far-reaching ramifications. Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up is an uncompromising study of therapeutic child-rearing across individual therapy, pedagogy, governmental data-gathering and the culture as a whole. Bad Therapy argues that far from helping, these practices make everything worse. The children and young people raised by boundary-negotiating, feeling-validating, trauma-exploring, “talk it out” parents and educators, marinaded in the therapeutic worldview are not, as hoped, happier, more confident, and more emotionally literate. They’re neurotic, anxious, and self-absorbed; alternately fearful of the outside world and adept at exploiting soft-authoritarian therapeutic institutions for personal advantage; above all, they are profoundly unhappy.

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Shrier doesn’t suggest a causal relationship between the retreat of men from therapy, and the emergence of therapeutic parenting. But both are clearly aspects of the same wider trend, toward a symbolically fatherless world. And this has left the field to a monolithically maternal style of child-rearing: one of nurture, understanding, care, and boundless empathy. Paradoxically, though, this has not empowered mothers but stripped them of agency too. For as Bad Therapy shows, the turn away from authority has not resulted in greater emotional literacy or even more kindness, but anxious, uncontained young people, and a ballooning field of increasingly intrusive therapeutic professionals.

Bad Therapy takes a sledgehammer to every article of therapeutic parenting and pedagogical faith. No, setting boundaries and punishing does not traumatise children. And even early difficulties usually produce not “trauma” but “resilience”. No, “trauma” is not “stored in the body”. Validating children’s feelings does not make them feel safer. No, asking children how they are feeling all the time does not produce more capable, confident children. Making allowances for “Adverse Childhood Experiences” does not produce better results for children who genuinely need to overcome adversity; nor does giving children endless meaningless choices while constraining their options to the sanitised and risk-free.

But these beliefs have become holy writ for liberal America — and, by extension, wherever American culture propagates. Shrier documents the mushrooming body of school counsellors, psychologists, social workers and other auxiliaries who have proliferated in response, dedicated to helping children according to their precepts. Among wealthier Americans, therapists are routinely hired to help a child “work through” losing a pet, or kept on retainer as backup for every emotional glitch. For those unable to afford a private on-call therapist, the same worldview produces batteries of semi-trained educators delivering a “trauma-informed” pedagogy.

Shrier shows that this culture encourages children to forsake resilience for introspection at every turn. Emotional “check-ins” at the beginning of school days seem designed to yank children from an “action” mindset to a helpless, introspective one. Maths lessons have to crowbar in “social-emotional learning”. And kids barely into puberty are routinely subjected to questionnaires that invite criticism of their parents, encourage them to self-identify as mentally ill, and in some cases provide so much information about methods of self-harming or attempted suicide in the course of enquiry that, to a suggestible child, they might easily be confused for instructions. And lest anyone suggest that a shortage of therapists will curb this all-out push to make everything therapeutic, relax; Tech startups are proliferating, promising “Therapy For Every Child” delivered by AI or text message.

Is this producing a nation of happy, well-adjusted kids? Not so much. Shrier argues that far from encouraging resilience and emotional literacy, it’s incentivising under-performance among the genuinely disadvantaged, by encouraging teachers to bend the rules for the very pupils who benefit most from clear boundaries and high expectations. And among the well-off, it’s creating a generation of young adults who need a therapist to make a phone call, or to prepare them for trying to make friends in high school or college. Reports today that British workers under 40 are considerably more likely to take time off for mental health difficulties suggests that something similar has already spread as far as younger adults in the UK.

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Bad Therapy argues further that therapeutic parenting has coincided with an explosion of psychic distress at home and bad behaviour in schools: “Kids having utter meltdowns, tantrums, screaming, yelling, throwing things, crying, threatening to kill themselves” in “a school regime that demands no self-discipline from students, believing such expectation unreasonable if not unevolved”. In this authority-free regime, playground violence goes unpunished save through “restorative justice”, in which attacker and victim sit in a circle and talk about their feelings. The result, in extremis, is violent young people left at large, until sometimes — as in the case of the “Parkland shooter” — they kill.

Even the ones who aren’t violent are learning to be “mean as hell” — by weaponising institutional empathy. From girls ostracised at expensive private high schools for causing “harm” with a careless social media post, to the adolescents screenshotting their peers’ “problematic” online utterances as ammunition for future interpersonal conflicts, Shrier describes this superficially cuddly culture with cold anger, as “corruption of character” and “sustained flirtation with evil”.

Bad Therapy paints a grim picture of young people simultaneously under- and over-parented. Of adults who both want to be involved in every detail of their children’s lives but who shrink from being seen as authority figures while they do so, preferring to be their child’s “best friend”. Why is this happening? Why are we Gen X “latchkey kids”, left to fend for ourselves while both parents worked, so fearful either of taking an authoritative stance with our own children, or of seeing them experience the slightest discomfort or obstacle?

Bad Therapy is a work of cultural criticism, not social history. But in Shrier’s view, close to the heart of the so-called “youth mental health crisis” is Gen X and Millennial parents’ aversion to being the symbolic — and literal— Father for their children. Instead, she argues, anxious “gentle parents” hover with platitudes about “big feelings” while their toddlers screech and bite, or defer to experts when their teenagers are struggling. These parents reject the “more masculine style of parenting” Shrier characterises as “knock it off, shake it off” — an approach that rebuked misbehaviour briskly, and expected minor setbacks to be dismissed. Instead “all traces of tough love and rule-bound parenting have been supplanted by a more empathetic style, the one once associated with moms.”

Less explicitly spelled out is the way the same dynamic has also outsourced mothering — and opened the door to its replacement by what Jordan Peterson calls the “dark mother” or “devouring mother”. For Freud, this “Oedipal mother” stood in contrast with the “good mother” who, for Freud, “necessarily fails” at nurturing, thus setting the child on a path to independence. Instead of setting her children free, though, the devouring Oedipal mother keeps them tightly enmeshed forever.

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The plot twist, in the therapeutic childrearing and educational cultures excoriated by Shrier in Bad Therapy, is that today this dark mother is not an individual but a set of institutions, norms, and practices. For, as Bad Therapy argues, it’s less that these unhappy children are tied to their literal mothers’ apron strings, than that they’re enveloped by the devouring mother of institutional “care”. Over time, it can end up displacing literal and symbolic parents of both sexes.

Shrier doesn’t speculate as to why or how. But somewhere along the way, Gen X and Millennial parents allowed themselves to be persuaded that the way forward was deferring to paid parenting “experts” — and, in return for ceding authority, hoped their kids would like them. Except, as it turns out, it’s had the opposite effect: children don’t like their parents more for being needy and permissive. Nor are they even freer, but — often — simply more radical. Shrier draws a straight line from the loss of authority in parenting to political extremism, noting that extremist movements from BLM to the far-Right often attract young people from homes where authoritative guidance is lacking. She quotes Myrieme Nadri-Churchill of the deradicalisation nonprofit Parents for Peace, who puts it starkly: “It’s almost like extremist groups have replaced parenting.”

What, then, is to be done? The book’s central message could perhaps be summed up as: less tech, more agency, better boundaries. In her view, the first course of action is to remove the factors obviously making adolescents’ lives worse: the therapy-speak, the climate alarmism, the “hunt for repressed trauma”, the suffocating micromanagement, and the anxious reluctance to allow children to develop independence. Crucially, she argues that the most obvious intervention of all for improved youth mental health is not more institutional devouring Mother, but an authoritative “no” by the symbolic Father: specifically, banning smartphones from schools.

But this would mean employing the very authority that makes Gen X wince. “Teens manage fine with flip phones. They aren’t weaker than you — unless you make them so.” She leaves the question implicit: are you Father enough to hold the line? We can perhaps infer from Bad Therapy that if anyone needs (good) therapy it’s not the kids but their parents — most centrally, in making peace with the symbolic Father. For if Shrier is correct, my generation has killed him — only to turn away from being the hero who takes his place. In his stead, we’ve enthroned a faceless, institutional devouring mother.

And perhaps, again, the only way to escape this dark, smothering pseudo-mother is to make peace with the necessity, as Freud put it, of failing as real mothers. In any case, grappling with our own anxieties and disappointments as adults and parents is easier said than done, as Shrier acknowledges. She describes how effortful she finds it to grant her own children increasing access to independence.

Nonetheless, she argues, it’s on parents to do battle with our own deep-seated fears: about harm to children, about failing as nurturers, about being hated for saying “no”. What is preventing Gen X from doing so? Perhaps the “latchkey generation” carries more childhood wounds than we realise.

This is the nearly 400-page case Marie Favereau lays out in The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World — and it’s a convincing one. A professor of history at Paris Nanterre University, Favereau’s previous published work focused on the wide-ranging geopolitical connections the Mongols made, and subtle cultural revolution that transformed them from an alien, conquering elite to deeply-rooted imperial administrators who shaped the societies they ruled. Though Favereau occasionally fixates excessively on the internecine dramas of Genghis Khan’s family, on the whole The Horde is both brisk and dense with facts and analysis about a period and people that remain unknown to most Westerners.

The Golden Horde emerged during the Pax Mongolica, when the various divisions of the Mongol Empire — Khanates —were ruled separately by the descendants of Genghis Khan, but united by treaties based on Mongol tradition. Marco Polo traversed the length of Eurasia, from Europe to China, and back, when the Mongol Empire was at its peak in the late 13th century. But the Golden Horde was the most geographically expansive of the Khanates. It stretched from modern Bulgaria and Romania in the west, to the vast Eurasian steppe north of the Black Sea, and yet further eastward still to the western edge of Mongolia. Beyond it lay the Great Yuan, who ruled most of the landmass of China and Mongolia, while the modern Middle East and southern Central Asia were under the two smaller Khanates.

The high noon of the Golden Horde’s power came between 1250 and 1400 AD, when it had unquestioned hegemony over all of the Russian principalities, northern Central Asia, Siberia and the Caucasus (Moscow remained a nominal vassal of the Horde until 1480 AD). This was an empire at enormous scale, with a vast reach — like Augustan Rome, or Spain during el Siglo de Oro, or Victorian Britain. For centuries, the Golden Horde stood athwart the trade routes of Eurasia. It was colossal.

But before there was the Horde, there were the four sons of Genghis Khan: Jochi, Chagatai, Ogedei and Tolui. It was from Jochi that the Horde would come. The eldest, he had a checkered relationship with his father, and with good reason. His mother, Börte, had been kidnapped by an enemy of Genghis Khan eight months before his birth. Although a shadow was cast over Jochi’s paternity, Genghis claimed him anyway. (Favereau straightforwardly accepts that Jochi was likely not Genghis Khan’s biological son.) After a great conference of Mongol leaders in Central Asia was held to determine the succession, and passed over Jochi, he marched his forces west, pitching his tents on the far fringe of the Mongol Empire north of the Caspian Sea.

Jochi’s self-exile set in motion a long train of consequences, and the real narrative of The Horde begins with Jochi’s sons, Orda, Batu, and Berke. Their lives illustrate three principles that reoccur again and again in The Horde. First, there is the principle of consensus and coexistence. Batu ruled the western half of the Golden Horde, while Orda ruled the east. These were the Blue and White Hordes, due to the association of these colours with the west and the east, and for over a century they respected each other’s territory. Second, the ascension of the younger Batu over Orda as Khan reversed expectation and reflected pragmatism.

Rather than slavishly following rules and customs, the Golden Horde embraced flexibility in its culture and political organisation. Finally, after the death of Batu, the youngest brother, Berke, became the Khan. Berke was the son of a Muslim woman, and he eventually converted to Islam, anticipating the later wholesale conversion of the Horde’s Mongol elite. Berke’s religious choice was also reflected in his geopolitical decision-making: he had no compunction about aligning with fellow Muslims against other Mongols. But Berke was also a pragmatist, not a fanatic, and he valued Mongol legal precedent and accepted the importance of religious toleration within his empire. The Golden Horde eventually became Muslim, but the empire it dominated was never Islamic.

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One of the major themes of The Horde is that the wealth of the ruling class of the Golden Horde was uniquely fuelled by trade, and this drove much of its diplomacy and war-making. Unlike China, Europe or the Near East, the territories of the Horde were sparsely populated. The Khans of the Golden Horde could not tax vast numbers of peasants to sustain their wealth. Rather, their economic activity was geared toward exploiting natural resources, as with furs shipped to Europe via the Hanseatic League, and customs collected on overland trade passing between Europe and China, as well as exports of slaves south to Egypt via Constantinople.

Some actions of the Khans that seem ideological on their surface turn out to have straightforward material explanations. Berke’s conversion to Islam cemented an alliance with the Mamluk regime in Egypt against the Mongol Il-Khanate. The Golden Horde supplied the Egyptians with slave soldiers to battle their Il-Khanate cousins, resulting in the first major defeat of the Mongols, which stopped their military advance. But those slave soldiers were also a major economic commodity that powered the financial health of the Golden Horde. The conflict with the Il-Khanate was not just ideological or geopolitical, but driven by the reality that the Golden Horde’s trade routes were constantly threatened by enemies — in this case, other Khanates. Berke and the Khans who succeeded him were engaging in literal trade wars.

Similarly, the amity between the two major divisions with the Horde, the Blue and the White, was not just a matter of sentimental familial bonds between the descendents of the brothers Batu and Orda. It reflected business savvy. The Golden Horde invested heavily in a Silk Road route that began at ports on the Black Sea, like the Genoese colony of Kaffa. The route continued eastward, grazing the southern fringe of Siberia, and moving onward all the way to the rich lands of the Great Yuan (Mongol-ruled China).

Cooperation between the Blue and White Hordes was necessary, not simply preferred, for this Silk Road to function. Additionally, propagandists in the service of the Horde whispered in the ears of merchant houses in Europe that the southern route that snaked through the rugged lands of the Il-Khanate was more dangerous and expensive. The ruling class of the Golden Horde wanted the world to know they were “open for business,” and offered a favourable tax regime for merchants willing to traverse their peaceful and well-ordered territories.

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But trade-fuelled prosperity is subject to the vicissitudes of globalisation. The collapse of the Il-Khanate in the 1330s resulted in the northern route achieving even greater prominence, as the southern Silk Road fractured between numerous hostile states. This monopoly was short-lived. In 1368, the great engine of west-east trade was turned off; the Mongols were expelled from China, and the ascendent Ming Dynasty shut the door to the rest of the world. If agriculturally-based empires were vulnerable to weakening in times of famine, merchant prince fortunes soared at the pleasure and caprice of foreign potentates.

Additionally, the 14th century saw the lucrative global trade in furs across the lands of the Horde facilitate the spread of the Black Death to Europe and the Near East from the eastern steppe. As we keenly feel today, one downside of globalisation is that a much larger human population can be a potential host for a pandemic. More than 30% of Europe and the Near East died from the bubonic plague, and the impact was significant on the Horde itself, as some of its leaders succumbed to the disease. The paradoxes and discontents that emerge from globalisation are long-standing.

Favereau’s narrative makes much of the reality that the Golden Horde was religiously pluralistic, a phenomenon immediately intelligible to contemporary readers. This was a legacy of Genghis Khan himself, who exempted clerics from taxation and left all houses of worship intact. He believed that the sky god, Tengri, had given him the world. Genghis and his descendants looked favourably upon all religions as the expression of the same divine principle.  Most earlier Khans were not Muslim, but devotees of Tengri. Nevertheless, they patronised Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity to cultivate relationships with subject people, most of whom were Christian or Muslim, and encourage the migration of other Mongols, many of whom were Buddhist. However, 1313, the Khan of the Golden Horde declared Islam the religion of the Mongols in the Blue and White Hordes.

Even after the Khan of the Golden Horde demanded that Mongols in his domain convert to Islam, he continued to encourage Christians to practise their religion (in contrast, Buddhist Mongols were expelled and their temples torn down). The Golden Horde exempted Russian Orthodox Church lands from taxation and encouraged European Roman Catholics in the trading cities to build their own houses of worship. Even when the Mongol ruling class became thoroughly Islamicised, they accepted religious diversity for both principle and profit.

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Though the global commercial orientation and religious tolerance of the Mongols are nothing to sneeze at, perhaps the biggest direct impact of the Golden Horde was upon the nascent identities of their subjects. Almost as an aside, Favereau notes that the Mongols liberated Wallachia from its nomadic overlords, laying down the foundation for modern Romania in the 13th century. But this is nothing, compared to how the Golden Horde played inadvertent midwife to the rise of the modern Russian state. Traditional accounts date the origin of Russia to the Christianisation of Kievan Rus’ under Vladimir the Great at the end of the 10th century. Though 1,000 years later this culture and society may seem exotic to us, Kievan Rus’ was oriented to the west and Europe, which explains how Anne of Kiev became queen of France in 1051. The deep separation between Russian culture and that of Western Europe only emerged during the period under the Golden Horde, as the ruling elite shifted its focus from Kiev in the west to Moscow in the east.

By the time the Mongols arrived, the Rus were ruled by a patchwork of more than a dozen principalities. Their main southern trading partner, the Byzantine Empire, was in sharp decline, and the Northern Crusades by German knights were impinging upon the prosperity of the Baltic-facing trading cities. The Mongol invasion was even more traumatic. In 1246, an envoy of the Pope traveled through Kiev and observed that “it has been reduced almost to nothing, for there are at the present time scarce two hundred houses.” The only major city to avoid being sacked by the Horde was Novgorod in the far north, which survived through preemptive surrender.

Modern Russia was built upon the ashes of cities the Mongols burned. The imperial Russian state of Ivan of the Terrible that rose to unprecedented power in the 16th century was not shaped by Kievan Rus. It did not face the European kingdoms to the west, but the Golden Horde to the east. Instead the rulers of Moscow were positioned between the core territories of the Rus to the west and the lands of their steppe rulers to the southeast. A perfect location to be cultural and geopolitical go-betweens.

Just as Batu had been promoted over Orda, so the Khans of the Golden Horde strategically promoted Moscow’s junior princely lineage, the Danilovich, above the others. The House of Moscow did not have the pedigree, but they got the job done, collecting revenue and suppressing revolts. In the process, Moscow accrued enormous power and influence, eventually overthrowing the “Tatar Yoke” to impose its own domination on what became imperial Russia. While 11th-century France obtained a queen from Kiev, 18th-century French asserted that if you “scratch a Russian… you find a Tartar.”

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Favereau’s contention that you cannot understand the Russian imperial order without considering the formative impact of the Golden Horde is just one aspect of her argument. A broader thesis explicit in The Horde is that the empires that arose in the last 500 years mimicked and adapted many of the features of the steppe polities they dismembered. Russian historiography speaks of the period of subordination to the Golden Horde, but the centuries of disgrace were erased only with the conquest of the lands of their erstwhile oppressors: Siberia and Central Asia.

The Russian Empire also assimilated the Horde’s ruling class. Much of the Mongol military elite became Christian and part of the Russian nobility, while Jochid princesses married into the Russian ruling houses. A tradition of autocratic rule arose that was different from the more decentralised model that had characterised Kievan Rus. Ivan the Terrible took the title Tsar only in 1547. Before that he had simply been a prince, a reflection of the Kievan legacy. His assertion that he was a Tsar reflected an imperial ambition more in keeping with the traditions of the steppe than the nation-states emerging in Western Europe.

Though there are occasions in Favereau’s narrative where fixation on the political and social intrigues of the Jochid lineage overshadow the broader lessons, The Horde is most deeply understood as a cultural and social history. Like many histories which centre the steppe, it attempts to roll back the erasure of nomadic empires from the genealogy of modern states and societies. This process is clearest in the case of Russia, but applies pervasively across Eurasian history.

Historians of the steppe observe that the kingdoms of Europe and the emirates of the Near East may have built vast stone cities which withstand the test of time, but the religious tolerance and the global mercantile orientation of the Mongols are much more in keeping with the values of modern cultures. Like the Horde, modern developed societies are not fundamentally agricultural.

Also like the Horde, modern developed societies tolerate a wide variety of religions, often with the unspoken understanding that this will be socially useful. And, like the Horde, modern nation-states tend to exhibit a centralising and expansive tendency, with an explicit hierarchy of administrators and decision-makers. The Horde argues that multicultural global empires have much more relevant lessons for modern nation-states than the agrarian societies which the Mongols ruled. Without recognising it, we all still travel on a path the Mongols carved out for us centuries ago.

The same year, the Emperor Justinian closed the Platonic Academy in Athens, making 529AD a symbolic turning-point: the year pre-Christian philosophy lost its place as the dominant worldview. For the thousand-odd years that followed, institutions such as Monte Cassino represented the centres of knowledge production, which from then until relatively recently was inseparable from the Christian faith.

It took the philosophers of the 18^th century to unpick intellectual life from religion. The completeness of their eventual victory is demonstrated by the very term “Enlightenment”, which frames everything that preceded it as darkness.

Even the word “medieval”, a coinage of modern intellectual historians, implies a sort of historical flyover country between the enlightened ancient and modern worlds. And our modern world was only freed from this no man’s land of superstition, squalor, and theocratic violence by the brave rejection of religious authority, and rediscovery of the classical learning whose light was for so long hidden under Christianity’s bushel. Or that’s how the story goes, anyway.

Another few centuries later, we once again live in an age characterised by the sort of disagreement Benedict or Justinian would have recognised: a conflict as profound as “Apollo vs Jesus”, or “Church Authority vs Science”. Except this time, it’s the Enlightenment on the back foot  as new ideas and beliefs overwhelm the old. As these theories have come to engulf not just academia but growing swathes of our political life, increasingly agitated commentators predict a new dimming of the light, perhaps even the end of western civilisation itself.

Reading Material Girls, Kathleen Stock’s new book on the increasingly radioactive transgender debate, my sense is that prophecies of apocalypse may be overblown. But also that the Age of Reason is indeed firmly in the rear-view mirror — a fact that presents the author herself with some difficulties.

Stock herself is a professor of analytic philosophy at the University of Sussex, and approaches the discussion of trans activism with the patient lucidity you’d expect of someone immersed in that most reasonable of disciplines. She defines her terms: “sex”, “gender”, “gender identity” and so on. She clarifies some of the things she is not saying, such as that trans people are delusional, or lying, or predators. She provides a brief outline of some key moments in cultural (and particularly feminist) history that have contributed to trans activism. And she presents, in relatively neutral terms, her understanding of the position she wishes to argue against.

Then, having defined her terms and excluded confounding issues, she argues that humans cannot literally change sex but only “gender” — and that conflating the two has a number of damaging effects.

Having, as it were, set out her own intellectual stall, and provided a whistle-stop tour of the feminist and queer-theory lenses usually applied to this debate, she employs neither. Instead, she borrows from her own area of academic expertise: the philosophy of fiction. Trans identification is a form of immersion in fiction, she argues, which can enrich human life in many ways. It’s both real and not-real.

“Immersion” is also both real and not-real: a state of awareness halfway between full belief and full disbelief. Both these states matter in different ways. We may be absorbed by a film at the cinema, and find a particularly good one deeply satisfying and life-enhancing, but that wouldn’t stop us from leaving in a hurry if the fire alarm goes off and the room fills with smoke. But, she suggests, recent activism has sought legislative changes that in effect compel everyone to act as if we believe these fictions in all ways identical to reality.

And this, she argues, has negative effects, especially for women and same-sex attracted people, because underlying realities continue to be politically salient. Redefining them as unmentionable or irrelevant does not make them go away, any more than making it socially unacceptable to mention the smell of smoke would do anything to prevent a fire at the cinema.

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To illustrate, consider the now-notorious case of “Karen White”. This individual, a convicted sex offender, is in all respects physiologically male but was moved to a women’s prison after claiming to identify as a woman. White then sexually assaulted several female inmates.

In her commitment to free speech, good-faith debate, clear and careful argument and upholding reason over dogma, Stock writes faithfully in the tradition of the Enlightenment. The example of Karen White is a textbook instance of the warning sounded in On Miracles by one of that era’s foremost thinkers, the humanist Voltaire: “Once your faith […] persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life […] Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

But here, exactly, lies the rub. The activism she seeks to challenge is the political wing of a contemporary cultural movement committed to dismantling the Enlightenment’s intellectual foundations.

As you’d expect from an analytic philosopher grounded in Enlightenment moral and intellectual priors, Stock wants us to see the world as it is. As she puts it: “Features of the world, and our collective human interests in them, are not arbitrary, and that’s what we should be trying to make concepts responsive to”.

But her antagonists dissent from this basic premise: as they see it, our ideas about the world do help to create “the world as it is”; and to make matters worse, it is arbitrary. What emerges in Material Girls is a tussle between these radically mutually incompatible understandings of the relation between knowledge and power.

When University of Edinburgh students recently censured the anthropology lecturer Neil Thin, they saw the aim of studying as “to learn how to decolonise our thinking and create an inclusive society and environment”. It’s a view that more closely resembles the medieval fusion of intellectual study and religious faith than it does the critical Enlightenment stance that supplanted it.

But for Stock, knowledge is what matters, while power can and should be relegated to background enabling condition for the production of more and better knowledge. So, for example, the “main point” of universities is in her view “to produce and disseminate socially useful knowledge”.

And yet the most compelling section of Stock’s book concerns, in fact, precisely the operations of power: specifically, of those powers (including some at her own university) currently going all out to suppress her worldview in favour of their own.

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She lists, for example, the use of institutional power to enforce “preferred pronouns”, and social taboos against “misgendering” in educational contexts. She further details what she characterises as “propaganda” employed by activists in pursuit of their political aims: statistical sleight of hand, emotive talk of suicide risks, and the growing institutional popularity of the startlingly pseudo-religious Transgender Day of Remembrance.

And even as she expertly wields the discursive tools of the Age of Reason — its careful logic, efforts at good-faith representation of the opposing argument, and so on — to dissect this emerging paradigm, Stock herself deftly (and enjoyably) spikes her own guns. She does this rhetorically, through acerbic wit, outbreaks of exasperation (“Frankly, this is mad”) or first-person interjections into otherwise dispassionate analysis.

The same implicit acknowledgement of the limits to rational analysis emerges even more powerfully in her account of the “gender-critical” resistance to trans activist policy capture, in which self-organised groups of activists “held meetings, made websites and wrote blog posts, marshalling their tiny resources highly effectively against well-embedded organisations like Stonewall, Mermaids and the Scottish Trans Alliance”.

Somehow, by dint of determination, these groups pushed back against well-funded and politically connected lobbies to effect meaningful change. In other words: it wasn’t reasonable persuasion as such that moved the needle. It was leaning as hard as possible on every available lever of political power.

This isn’t just about those wicked postmodernists (of which I probably qualify as a member). It’s more that we are now, as a culture, losing such faith as we ever collectively had in facts and reason. In its most grounded version, this manifests as a dizzying discourse of political claim and counter-claim, all supposedly backed by objective statistics. At its more baroque end it drives the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories. The point is that it’s not just angry students with “woke” ideas who think reality is old hat: it’s everyone.

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The first Benedictine abbey was built over the ruins of a Temple of Apollo, and a thousand years later the monuments of Christianity found themselves sidelined by a renewed worship of Reason. Today, once again, we’re seeing Reason dethroned, by a form of cultural criticism that first used the Enlightenment’s own weapons against it, and is now committed to demolishing its altars and erecting its own in the rubble.

I’m unconvinced that this new paradigm can be effectively contested using the tools of the old one. Stock’s analysis is razor-sharp, in Enlightenment terms, and her prose is finely-honed. But it doesn’t matter how exquisitely crafted your knife is, if you’re bringing it to a gunfight you’re still going to lose.

For our emerging post-Enlightenment politics has abandoned even the pretence of persuasion when it comes to pursuing cultural and political change. Today’s modus operandi is a pincer approach characterised by policy capture backed by the threat of social sanction, whether enforced by HR departments or by punitive online mobs. And evidence so far – including that cited by Stock — suggests this works just as well in defence of “reality” as in undermining it.

What doesn’t work is pretending we all still agree on what reality is. For that, as the postmodernists are fond of pointing out, you also need power.

He also killed a lot of people, or at least his policies did. Of course, all presidents kill people, by commission or omission, but to some the sins of George W. Bush are egregious, unforgivable. I told some jolly stories about him at a conference once and a young woman came up to me afterwards to object, “how could you say such things of a war criminal?”

I assume she will not be buying Mr Bush’s new book, Out of Many, One. Or she’ll at least give the autographed deluxe edition, retailing for $250, a miss. (It will be clothbound, we are told, and contained within a slipcover.) She will miss, then, pictures of dozens of oil paintings Mr Bush has fashioned. His subjects are immigrants to the United States, sensitively and lovingly portrayed, celebrated and humanised.

“Bush’s painting style is inelegant,” as one review in Art in America elegantly put it. “His subjects’ eyes are often misaligned … and even though he attempts to create depth and shadow, the facial features ultimately fail to convey anything resembling human warmth.” But of course it’s not really about the art. It’s about the politics, which are met with approval. “The book, providing an honorific framing, bestows a dignity upon his subjects that his presidential policies did not.”

Out of Many, One doesn’t tip-toe around the subject of immigration or suggest there are good people on both sides of the argument. It comes out, instead, 100% in favour; it tells anyone who opens its pages that immigration made America, and will continue to make it, and anyone who doesn’t believe that is wrong. Brown and black faces stare out, proudly: safe in the knowledge that the author, the 43rd president of the United States, wants them to belong.

George W. Bush is taking on the nativists in his party, the cruel wing of Republicans. Taking on Donald Trump. Calling them all out. Introducing his book in the Wall Street Journal last month, he wrote: “We should never forget that the desire to live in the United States — a worldwide and as powerful an aspiration as ever — is an affirmation of our country and what we stand for. Over the years, our instincts have always tended toward fairness and generosity. The reward has been generations of grateful, hard-working, self-reliant, patriotic Americans who came here by choice.”

“My hope,” says Bush, “is that this book will help focus our collective attention on the positive impacts that immigrants are making on our country.”

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Which is good. And because (I am relieved to say, given my previously lonely affection for him) it is no longer eccentric to take a generous view of George W. Bush, the book will contribute to the debate about immigration in America from a humane perspective. It will bring people together and that, in the modern United States, is no mean achievement.

But it misses the point. And the risk is that it encourages others to miss the point too. These bromides about the decency of immigrants may well be important correctives to the un-American hostility of the Trump era but they fail totally to address the perfectly reasonable question that Trump raised. A question that hangs over the Biden administration as it tries to work out its immigration policy, but more important a question that hangs over the whole United States.

Midway through his term of office, not in a tweet or a campaign rally but in the calm of an almost conventional speech, Donald Trump said: “America is a cutting-edge economy but our immigration system is stuck in the past.” Many Americans, including some who cannot stand Trump, would agree with that. The immigration question of the next decade is not, “should America be welcoming to immigrants?” Or even “what do we do about the southern border becoming overwhelmed by desperate people?” No, the question is whether America welcomes the wrong type of immigration and needs to change. “Is it time to favour computer programmers over gardeners?” That’s the question. Same numbers — a million a year, legally — but different people.

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But the question is not posed. Not because Americans fear people speaking other languages or cooking with strange ingredients or praying to other gods. The problem is not them, many Americans say: the problem is us. Our society, our community, has become — with the best intentions — a more dangerous place. The anti-Trump campaigner and former Bush aide David Frum made the point in a piece in The Atlantic magazine a couple of years ago: “More and more of the people who live among Americans are not on equal legal footing with Americans. They cannot vote. They cannot qualify as jurors. If they commit a crime they are subject not only to prison but to deportation. And because these noncitizens are keenly aware of those things, they adjust their behavior. They keep a low profile. They do not complain to the authorities if, say, their boss cheats them out of some of their pay, or if they are abused by a parent or partner at home.”

This is the result of the array of an immigration policy that broadly allows family ties — and ingenuity in hopping across the southern border — to trump skills. A policy that brings in adult siblings of already poor, semi-legal residents. As a result not everyone in America gets the full right to stay: some will be legal temporary residents, some students who should not be working, some came illegally but can stay (like the Dreamers whose parents brought them to America illegally as children) on some kind of sufferance.

Of course, there are plenty of wealthy Americans to whom this doesn’t matter much. They lead lives insulated from the masses. They have cheap gardeners on tap: cheap labour — desperate labour — which enables the low-wage America that keeps so many people so poor. Bernie Sanders used to point out that open immigration policies were very much the plaything of the rich — of faceless, placeless corporate America. There are sociologists who point out, too, that a nation desperate for labour, having to pay more for it, might not have incarcerated so many black men so readily in recent decades.

What is unquestionably the case is that America a few decades ago was almost entirely filled by citizens with equal rights. It has morphed in recent years into a place with graded citizenship; in some big states, like California, fully 10% of residents are not full citizens. As Frum put it, “No intentional policy has led the US to accept more low-wage low-skill labourers and fewer cancer researchers. Yet that is what the United States is doing.”

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Here we get back to George W Bush. Because although he avoids it in his picture book, he knows all of this. He knew it back in 2007 when he tried to get Congress to agree to act and do so in exactly the direction Donald Trump wanted. He brought together the liberal lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, and the Republican John McCain. In exchange for the decent treatment of people already in America they proposed that future immigration be limited by skills not family ties.

The effort failed. Among those who scoffed was the then presidential hopeful Barack Obama. “How many of our forefathers would have measured up to this points system? How many would have been turned back at Ellis Island?”

The answers were a surprise. On the points system, “almost all of them.” And on Ellis Island: “virtually none.” The reason is that the whole “bring me your huddled masses” schtick is a bit of a con. Nearly 30 years ago, a taskforce led by then congresswoman Barbara Jordan, a hugely respected African American Democrat, blew it apart with a detailed study of the people who actually came to Ellis Island. Jordan pointed out that they were in fact more skilled than the average American at the time. They were seamstresses and stonemasons, tailors and bricklayers. They had, in other words, the skills the nation needed. They were the cancer researchers of their time. This was not charity; it was nation building.

Now, the argument goes, American immigration is the opposite of nation building. The immigration system actively pulls at the threads of community. It overburdens services and it underserves the wider causes of the nation. It’s lovely that George Bush’s book contains such an array of faces but they may be — to be brutal — quite often the wrong faces.

Bush knows this, and Biden does too. The current President is fast becoming a president of consequence. Above all a president who understands community and place. If Biden moves on immigration — goes for big reform — at least one former president will have his back. Even if he can’t paint.

I googled this so you don’t have to (and so suffer the consequences, in the form of bizarre targeted advertisements). It turns out that men don’t write much about their bodies at all, and when they do, they keep it above the neck. Their memoirs focus on matters of the mind: mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism, even a lobotomy. (Okay, Mark Wahlberg did dedicate his book to his penis, but that doesn’t count.)

It makes a sort of sense. Despite their anxieties about pattern baldness and matters of size — as in, does size matter? — society has always valued men for their minds at least as much as their bodies. If a man’s head is filled with great ideas, his ability to fill out a tight t-shirt hardly matters.

It’s different for women, and the body memoir is a genre in which they dominate. Beauty standards have always been a pressure point in women’s lives, but the waning days of second-wave feminism plus the dawn of the internet — and the confessional style of writing that proliferated there — led to a glut of literary oversharing as women turned their body issues into book deals. At their best, these books were brilliant: Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Judith Moore’s Fat Girl, Roxane Gay’s Hunger. The female reproductive system was a rich vein of inspiration unto itself, as shelves filled up with pregnancy, infertility, or menopause memoirs. Stagings of The Vagina Monologues became a regular event.

These books are like written dispatches from an endless, unwinnable war, a running tally of fleshy mortification. A woman’s body is both battleground to be defended and enemy territory, friend and foe. We try to torture it into submission, to make it an acceptable shape and size — a paradoxical fight we win by losing, whether it’s weight or our inhibitions about it. Women reclaimed their bodies by writing about them, asserting their right to take up physical space. And not just a sliver: a lot of space. Size XXL, double D, skin-for-miles space.

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Leslie Lehr’s new memoir, A Boob’s Life, feels like a time-travelling artifact from this golden age of women’s writing. Frank and feminist, it’s one woman’s account of living her best (breast) life. By 2021 standards, it’s already a huge success: an announcement came in February that Salma Hayek would be developing the book into an HBO series in which a woman’s life “gets turned upside down when her boobs start talking to her”. But the book itself features no talking teats. It’s not really about boobs; they’re just the framework, the structure, the foundation garment that shapes the narrative. Lehr goes from wanting breasts, to getting them, to getting implants, to getting cancer. She gets angry. She gets perspective.

Many parts of A Boob’s Life read like a throwback to the early aughts — when the rise of plastic surgery reality shows, digital airbrushing, and newly ubiquitous internet porn had unleashed a new and particularly punishing standard to which women were supposed to aspire: a state of hairless, poreless, plastic perfection. In this era of the obligatory Brazilian wax, a woman could write in gritty confessional detail about her body and be considered brave for doing so. And had it been released just ten years earlier, A Boob’s Life would have been seen as radical and empowering — a much-needed rejoinder in a culture that celebrated boobs but hated women.

The days of raunch culture and lad mags are just far enough behind us that we’ve all developed a collective amnesia about how out-there some of it actually was, especially in a world where everything before 2016 is often dismissed as equally problematic. We forget that before Jimmy Kimmel claimed the mantle of moral authority in late-night comedian’s clothing, he was the co-host of The Man Show, in which one of the regular segments featured slow-motion footage of big-breasted women (lovingly nicknamed “the Juggies”) jumping on trampolines. When a mainstream, primetime TV programme thought that the spectacle of a woman getting slapped in the face by her own boobs was the height of comedy, we could in fact have done with a reminder that the boobs had a woman attached to them.

This is the era of American culture at which A Boob’s Life takes aim (hence the subtitle: How America’s Obsession Shaped Me―and You), but it’s just a little too late — like thinking of the perfect cutting rejoinder to an insult when the person who insulted you has not only left the room but also been dead for years. We’ve moved on, not just from turn-of-the-century raunch, but also from the blowback to it. The time for the body memoir is over; the confessional has been replaced by the political.

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The conversation about women’s bodies has become strange and stilted. Talking frankly about things like boobs or vaginas used to be a riposte to the prudery of American social conservatism; now women are being shushed from both sides of the aisle, and occasionally from inside their own metaphorical house. Twitter tampon advertisements devolve into a mess of 240-character feminist infighting about the acceptability of referring to users as “menstruators”. Planned Parenthood has issued a series of mindblowing apologies — including for focusing “too narrowly on ‘women’s health’.” The organisation’s entire reason for being — its unapologetic commitment to women and their bodies and their ability to care for them — was transformed overnight into an embarrassment, hopelessly out of touch with what really matters.

“We must take up less space, and lend more support. And we must put our time, energy, and resources into fights that advance an agenda other than our own,” wrote Planned Parenthood president and chief executive Alexis McGill Johnson.

Once, women bravely fought for the right to live bigger, to be bigger, to take up as much space as we deserved; now, apparently, the feminist position is to be as unobtrusive as possible. In 2008, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler declared that “Bitches get stuff done!” and were met with a wave of roaring approval. In 2021, an assertive woman is just another manager-calling Karen, centring herself at the expense of everyone else. Leaning in is out. Empowerment has been replaced by abnegation. The head of one of the country’s most historic feminist institutions now instructs women to take up less space, and lend more support. Like a bra. Or a folding step stool.

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One gets the sense that A Boob’s Life knows it is arriving into a hostile landscape. It’s trying to negotiate the contemporary, complex and evolving attitude toward women and their bodies by leaning into a very particular brand of pink-pussy-hat-wearing feminist outrage (even as those hats, and the vaginal double entendre they represent, have themselves come to be seen as the totem of the embarrassing basic white woman).

Perhaps anticipating the calls to sit down, shut up, and stop taking up space, the book periodically tries to dress itself up as something more, something bigger and more political than just a memoir about one woman’s life (and breasts). Lehr offers historical sidebars and bulleted lists to contextualise America’s purported breast obsession: a list of actresses who have bared their breasts onscreen, a timeline of lingerie-based trivia, a loose history of cheerleading as a microcosm for women’s oppression. The 2016 election looms especially large, as Lehr attempts to connect her father’s vote for Donald Trump to his various failings as a parent and husband, all of which is connected (somehow) to her complicated relationship with her own womanhood. One remarkable passage takes an earlier anecdote about a happy childhood moment in which Dad taught her to dive for her lifeguard training certification, and recasts it as something sinister and symbolic.

“He taught me I could do whatever I set my mind to, as long as I worked hard,” Lehr writes. “Now I understood that when he hung me by the ankles and dropped me off the high dive all those years ago, it was a baptism into the deep pool of patriarchy.”

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But despite Lehr’s best efforts and colorful phrasing (a baptism! In the deep pool of patriarchy!), the historical sidebars and rhetorical flourishes about privilege, white men and patriarchy only weaken the narrative, vainly attempting to politicise the personal. The strength of a memoir is in the specificity of it, in the intimacy. To position A Boob’s Life as a feminist polemic is a defensive crouch that unwittingly undermines its appeal — but the fact that the author felt it necessary is also revealing.

The great awokening in American culture is supposed to represent the apex of progressive enlightenment, and yet the rules that dictate how a woman should speak, write, be, are stricter than ever. What are we to make of an era where a woman can’t write frankly about her body without endless apologies, caveats, privilege acknowledgments, and permission-seeking?

In this way, it seems that feminist progress has taken us for a long walk around the same well-trodden circle. But until we come around again to being unembarrassed about asserting our right to take up space, authors like Lehr will find ways to adapt, shaping their work to the demands of the culture just as they shape their bodies according to the current vogue. The truth, as always, is that you can punish your body, politicise it, write about it, make it into a temple or a battlefield or both at once. The biggest question, eternally unanswered — and yet, we try—  is how to live graciously inside of it.

So I remember being surprised when, after falling out of touch, I found he had turned into a hardcore libertarian, of the requiring-driving-licences-is-infringing-my-freedom type. But people go through phases. I was sure it wouldn’t last.

Indeed, John’s views did change. He popped up on Twitter in around 2016, suddenly a huge fan (and emulator) of Milo Yiannopoulos and his flamboyant brand of Right-wing trolling. Grimly fascinated, I checked his page every so often, and over the years watched him become more and more extreme, until there was no further he could go. He was a slavish fan of Donald Trump, before getting disillusioned and attacking the President for “betraying” his supporters. Having previously flirted with the alt-Right, he went all the way, making and posting anti-Islam jokes, then anti-Semitic memes, then straight-up White Nationalist propaganda. Eventually, Twitter banned his account. He seems now to have disappeared (though could easily still be posting under an anonymous account).

John’s journey from milquetoast liberal to foaming-at-the-mouth Neo-Nazi genuinely disturbed me. His profile didn’t fit that of the stereotypical online troll: he wasn’t some asocial basement-dweller who couldn’t make it in the real world. He came to mind as I was reading a new book by Cardiff University’s Professor of Criminology, Matthew Williams. The subtitle of The Science of Hate is “how prejudice becomes hate and what we can do to stop it”. Was there something inherent to John’s brain or psyche that made him a prime candidate for the slide into extremism? Or would the kind of internet radicalisation he clearly received have the same effect on any of us?

After describing his own awful experience of being assaulted by homophobic thugs in London, Williams presents other horrific hate crimes, such as the 2016 stabbing attack at a disability care home in Japan which left 19 dead and many more injured (the perpetrator faces the death penalty). He then digs into the research from psychology, neuroscience, and elsewhere to try to explain the fear-anger-hate-suffering conveyor belt.

The trouble is, a lot of that research just isn’t very good. Although he is at times sceptical of results from neuroscience — the brain is an absurdly complex organ and our best attempts to understand it are as yet pretty primitive — Williams lets his guard down for a whole host of dodgy-looking or now-debunked studies. We hear, for instance, about a study where white people’s brain “fear centres” lit up in a scanner when they were looking at a black person’s face — but only while they were listening to N.W.A. and not Slipknot. This is a silly study for several reasons, not least that it had a mere 23 participants and has never been replicated.

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We also hear about the “Macbeth Effect”, where people made to remember one of their past immoral deeds were more likely to think of cleaning-related words on a verbal test and were more likely to wash their hands as they left the lab (just as the eponymous queen washed out the damned spot). It hasn’t held up well in follow-up research, and might not really exist — but you wouldn’t know that from Williams’s treatment of it.

And we hear, similarly uncritically, about the Implicit Association Test, which is widely used to identify unconscious biases in the lab and at work. Williams informs us that people’s culturally-shaped automatic preferences for one race or another on this computer-based test can predict prejudiced behaviour (which might include, he says, voting for McCain rather than Obama in 2008). But a review of all the data from 2019 showed that changing people’s implicit attitudes appears to have little-to-no overall effect on their explicit views or behaviours.

And so on. Williams does cover some better studies on prejudice and hate, but The Science of Hate — and perhaps by extension, the science of hate — is shot through with veins of low-quality, unconvincing research. If so many of our attempts to apply scientific methods to understand prejudice fail so badly — and yet are still written up by one of the UK’s foremost authorities on hate as if they explain a great deal about our behaviour — we’re in trouble.

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In the past year, we’ve seen with greater clarity than ever before that we can’t always rely on published scientific research. The problem is not confined to medical studies, like those of Covid-19. The patchwork of highly-variable studies cited by Williams reminds us that, wherever we turn, scientific literature fails to provide us with a sure footing.

This is partly a result of the perverse incentives that pervade science: the pressure that so many scientists feel to publish more and more research, with flashier and flashier results, regardless of how solid or robust that research is. Williams could’ve shown a few more doubts about the studies he cites, but the problem goes beyond him: we should be able to rely on the contents of the scientific literature to help us understand the big questions — it has, after all, been through the peer-review filter. But alas, peer-review fails so often that it’s no longer a reliable signal of quality — if it ever was one.

Interestingly, by the end of his book, Williams appears, at least partially, to agree. “There is no getting away from the reality”, he writes, “that predicting the behaviour of individuals is an imprecise science, full of known unknowns, and unknown unknowns”. Quite. But he then assures us that in the book he’s relying on solid, “state-of-the-art” science — a statement that, given the studies I mentioned above, rings rather hollow.

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Having given those caveats, Williams goes on to offer advice on how we might prevent and deal with hate before it gets out of hand. One of the more specific ideas is based on so-called “Terror Management Theory”, a concept from psychology stating that reminders of mortality will tend to make people want to defend their worldview — and maybe lash out at those who are different. On this basis, Williams suggests that to reduce hate we should educate children to better cope with death. But (you guessed it), Terror Management Theory has come under serious fire in recent years when large-scale attempts to replicate its basic tenets failed.

So much for that. What about Williams’s other solutions? They include: questioning our instinctive, stereotyped thoughts about other people; putting ourselves in other people’s shoes; bursting our filter bubbles; and always reporting incidents of hate that we encounter. These are good ideas. They’re also common sense. A scientific study is hardly going to conclude that reinforcing our stereotypes is the best way to reduce prejudice. But, as Williams notes, most of these solutions will only work on “suitably motivated people”. Try telling the aforementioned John to put himself in the shoes of the Muslims he’s berating online. Try telling him to emerge from his filter bubble when he believes that a worldwide Jewish conspiracy controls the internet.

Of course, a list of common-sense ideas for dealing with hate doesn’t hurt, but one does worry that the “scientific” framing ultimately devalues the science itself. If you were always going to come up with those same recommendations, but pretend (or convince yourself) that you arrived at them through scientific investigation, it raises some fairly serious questions about the point of all that research. It risks reducing science to a mere prop: something that can be used to buttress pre-existing beliefs and commitments, but which you’d never really think of using to question them. This “conclusions first, research later” approach is, of course, a long way from the ultra-sceptical, disinterested ideal of science.

There’s a clichéd way to title an academic paper that begins with “Towards…”. “Towards a dynamic theory of strategy”. “Towards controlling of a pandemic”. It’s intended, I think, to emphasise that the research is far from final, and is merely a stepping-stone on the way to a larger theory or a more solid answer. Perhaps Williams’s book should have been titled Towards a Science of Hate, since — on the basis of the research he cites — there is not, yet, any solid scientific explanation for what goes so tragically wrong for people like John.

We once had a compulsory company mass choir where we had to learn “Don’t Stop Me Now” in three-part harmony. Fun! And we had a talk from a mountaineer who had climbed Everest, which I assume was supposed to be an inspiring exemplar of determination in a hostile environment that is a bit like the current media environment. But I remember left me worrying about the frozen barrels of human waste just off to the side of the slides.

And then we had this email, which offered a guaranteed way of lifting our beleaguered spirits to new heights of productivity. All we had to do, it explained, was assume powerful poses, and we would become powerful! Out with slouching, in with wide-legged stances and chins held aloft. Astonishing, yes, but there was science to support it — as you would find, if you watched a 2012 TED Talk by psychologist Amy Cuddy, which has now been viewed over 60 million times.

Power posing, as laid out in a 2010 paper co-authored by Cuddy, is one of the great success stories of popular psychology. It didn’t hurt that it “fit neatly into the established self-help niche in American life”, as Jesse Singal explains in his new book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Fix Our Social Ills. And nor was it any disadvantage at all that Cuddy was a brilliant speaker with a powerful story of overcoming personal adversity (she recovered from a traumatic brain injury to achieve a PhD from Princeton, and then a job at Harvard). The power posing theory had almost everything to recommend it — apart from the solid basis in experimental science that it was claimed to have.

Hear Jesse Singal discuss his latest book with Freddie Sayers

The peak of power posing’s influence, in the UK at least, probably came at the 2015 Conservative conference, when George Osborne appeared on stage with his legs splayed as though he expected a train to run through the middle of them. By the time it was being offered to me as a corporate pick-me-up, its reputation was already on the skids. The two keys claims Cuddy made were that, compared to a control group, power posers saw increased levels of testosterone, and an increased propensity for risk-taking. A 2015 attempt at replication (that is, rerunning the experiment to see if the result stood) had failed; and then in 2016, one of Cuddy’s co-authors on the original paper disowned the findings entirely.

The apparently empirical effect the researchers had observed was actually generated by something known as “p-value hacking”, in which results are included or excluded until something that looks like statistical significance is achieved, and the work becomes suddenly of interest to academic journals (who, like everyone else, are much more excited by a sexily counterintuitive finding than no finding at all).

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And so the story of power posing, and its journey from one paper that ought to have been challenged at peer review, to near-universal acceptance and an appearance in my work inbox, is a parable for the way bad ideas promulgate themselves — and a perfect example of the kind of bad idea that prospers.

Something like power posing appeals because it makes you feel like the success is a matter of volition. Reading about it at my sad strip-lit desk, in an email from the same address that had announced multiple rounds of redundancy, looking round an office haunted by the empty chairs of the ones who’d already gone, I did not feel any filip to my sense of self-command, however. I felt that I was being cheated, played, fobbed off.

Like all the examples looked at in Singal’s book, power posing sold an individual solution to an institutional or structural problem. After all, if you feel powerless, the most likely reason is that you are powerless. Even if it made you take more risks, which it apparently doesn’t, and even if that were obviously a good thing, which it isn’t necessarily (as Singal wryly asks, “Does American society, and the American economy … suffer from a dearth of pointless risk taking?”), it’s not clear how that would ultimately protect you from the vicissitudes of the market, to which all but the absurdly rich (like Osborne) are beholden.

Similarly, the doctrine of self-esteem pitched the idea that people would do better if they just felt better about themselves. It turned out this was wrong in many ways, but one of the most grimly amusing pieces of evidence against it is this: some research, explains Singal, found that “criminals actually had higher self-esteem than law-abiders”.

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Later, the concept of “grit” — meaning “determination” — was picked up by the American education system as the secret of student success. Cultivate “grit” in the individual, and you could save them from failure. The shadow side of that faith, of course, is that failure must come down to a lack of grit: rather than addressing the gross inequalities that stymie children’s chances, interventions focused on changing the child, despite the fact that no one could convincingly explain what “grit” was measuring or how it was critical to achievement.

What’s fascinating about many of the “fads” Singal highlights is that they drew support from Left and Right: the Left could see an effort to mitigate unfair circumstances, and the Right could see the empowerment of the individual. Anyone in a position to control budgets could see that such interventions were blessedly inexpensive compared to other ways of approaching these problems. And so long as they seemed plausible and exciting, the question of whether they actually worked could be left to one side, like the unpleasant sewerage barrels no one wants to think about when celebrating their triumphant ascent of Everest.

Several of Singal’s examples have already started their slide towards irrelevance, but one of them is still going strong. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) caught the wave of Black Lives Matter-inspired corporate concern to address racism, and has been widely adopted by businesses. Its promise is that, by assessing your reaction time to certain words or phrases, it can judge the depth of your “implicit bias” against certain races. Once confronted with a numerical measure of your own racism, you can — the theory goes — begin to undo it.

The IAT’s claim is excitingly bold: “a ten-minute computer task with no connection to the real world could predict subtle forms of real-world discrimination,” Singal writes. But a connection between IAT results and in-practice racist attitudes hasn’t been established. The depressing conclusion is that an awful lot of people, who say that they awfully want to fix racism, are throwing resources at something that will not and cannot do the job.

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There are two ways to read that, one of them generous and one of them cynical. Perhaps people simply don’t know that the IAT is a flawed implement, and if you explain that to them, they’ll move onto something else. But that hasn’t happened. In fact, expressing scepticism about the IAT is, as Singal found, treated as tantamount to trying to debunk the existence of racism itself (which, the logic goes, only a racist would do). The more you want to be perceived as anti-racist, the more fervently you are required to advocate for something that is no threat to racism at all.

So the cynical view is this. Things like the IAT and self-esteem and power posing and grit appeal precisely because they don’t work. At the institutional level, no one sincerely wants things to change, and when everything stays the same, and psychology fads make it possible to pin that on personal deficiency: you weren’t gritty, and you failed to address your implicit bias, and you slouched too much. Its nobody else’s fault that the same old messes persist. The real beauty of quick fixes — and the reason they’ll keep coming back, despite Singal’s entertaining and elegant broadside against them — it’s that they’re not really any kind of fix at all.

The battle between Lawrence and the rest of the world started in 1915 with the censorship of The Rainbow. He called it his “big and beautiful book”, a biblico-mythico epic about the sexual awakening of three generations of women on the borders  of Nottingham-Derbyshire. Beginning in 1840, when men were still in wordless communication with nature, it closed in 1905 when railway lines, mineshafts, and a rash of new houses were corrupting the landscape. The novel was sentenced to death before the bench at Bow Street magistrate’s court, where Dr Crippen had recently been charged with murdering his wife; the 1,011 remaining copies were removed from the offices of Methuen, Lawrence’s publisher, and burned by a hangman outside the Royal Exchange.

The Rainbow, the court concluded, was “a mass of obscenity of thought, idea and action” although the prosecutor had difficulty specifying precisely what it was he had found so obscene. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, written 12 years later when Lawrence had nothing left to lose (he died in 1930) contained words like fuck and balls and arse, but The Rainbow was about as offensive as Thomas Hardy.

The real problem with the novel was the author himself, a working-class upstart with a German wife whose own morals were debatable. Frieda Lawrence, it was rumoured, had left her middle-class husband and three children in order to run away with this sex-obsessed miner’s son. Added to which Frieda’s cousin, Baron von Richthofen, AKA the Red Baron, was the only German fighter pilot whose name was known to every Englishman.

After The Rainbow fiasco, Lawrence began a new life as an outlaw. “One must retire out of the herd and then fire bombs into it” he announced, and as soon as the war was over he exiled himself to Europe and then America, firing bombs all the way.

Like Blake, D.H. Lawrence spoke in prophecies, many of which have been proved — not least his anticipation of his own afterlife. This is dramatised for us in a remarkable scene in The Rainbow’s sequel, Women in Love, published 100 years ago this May. Birkin, Lawrence’s alter-ego, is reading quietly in the drawing room when his girlfriend, Hermione Roddice, approaches him from behind with a lapis lazuli paperweight which she brings down with full force on his head. When she sees he is still breathing, she brings it down again but Birkin takes cover beneath his book. It is curious that Hermione Roddice did not become a cult heroine, because women have been bashing Lawrence on the head ever since.

The most lethal blow was delivered by Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (1970), which was effectively the first list of “Shitty Men” in Literature.  Millett argued that Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer were guilty of misogyny and while Miller and Mailer rode the storm,  Lawrence did not.  He became, and remains, one of those writers whose name triggers a mental lockdown; in the Seventies and Eighties, for a woman to reveal that she liked D.H. Lawrence was akin to saying that she liked being roughed-up by her boyfriend. Until Burning Man, I kept my own interest in him quiet.

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Kate Millett’s bludgeoning of Lawrence was based on her reading of a short story called The Woman Who Rode Away. Written in 1924, when Lawrence was living — or rather dying — in New Mexico, the tale is a dreamlike parable about a bored American housewife who rides off into the desert in order to offer the Chilchui people her heart. Her death, an offering to the Gods, will save the tribe. She is taken by them on a long climb to a cave behind a frozen waterfall where she is laid out for her sacrifice. Lying on the rock slab, she watches for the sun to hit a column of ice, at which point the blade of the knife will be struck into her. It is here that the story ends.

Unlike the prosecutor of The Rainbow, Millett was able to say what she found obscene in The Woman Who Rode Away. It was, she argued, “sadistic pornography”, a snuff movie in “MGM technicolour”. She is right that the story is sick but then, as Lawrence said, “we shed our sicknesses in books”. But should it be read as a story? Lawrence also said that if we read his stories “simply as stories we should not get much satisfaction from them”. This is because he thought in symbols. His own symbol was the phoenix and The Woman Who  Rode Away is another allegory of regeneration: modern America sacrifices itself for the cosmic world it has lost. The woman’s death ensures the movements of the planets; the movements of the planets ensure the life of the tribe, and the tribe connects capitalist America to its roots.

The savagery of the tale was its purpose. Lawrence argued in Studies in Classic American Literature, the most dazzling experiment in literary criticism ever written, that the distinguishing feature of American literature was “unconscious duplicity”. In each case a nice-as-pie upper-consciousness disguised a turbulent under-consciousness: “Destroy! destroy! destroy! hums the under-consciousness,” Lawrence wrote, “Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper-consciousness. and the world hears only the Love-and-produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction underneath. Until such time as it will have to hear.” In The Woman Who Rode Away his quintessentially American tale, Lawrence makes us hear the destruction underneath. It is Uncle Sam’s ego, and not the woman’s heart, that is being knifed out.

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In another of the insights of Studies of Classic American Literature, Lawrence counselled critics “to save the tale from the artist who created it”. And ye gods, does his own writing need saving.

Lawrence had the same concerns as we do today: democracy, free speech, sexuality, the sickness of the modern world, the decay of civilisation, how to be alone. But the voice in which he expressed himself was more startling and original than that of any of his peers.  Take the opening sentence of his essay on free verse: “It seems when we hear a skylark singing as if sound were running forward into the future, running so fast and utterly without consideration, straight on into futurity.” Lawrence, too, is breaking into song here. A lifelong claustrophobic, forward movement was his great subject: “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move”, begins his travelogue Sea and Sardinia.

His oeuvre largely confounds genre, but if we have to categorise it we can say that he wrote 10 novels, three of which, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love, were recognised as game-changers while two — Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo — are, I suggest, the first examples of autofiction. He also wrote 70 short stories, four of the most innovative travel books of the century, two bonkers studies of the unconscious,  thousands of poems, dozens of essays on subjects ranging from syphilis to the novel of the future, a collection of plays set in miners’ cottages that anticipate the work of the Angry Young Men, a history book for school children and, of course, the incomparable Studies in Classic American Literature.

He was less a modernist than the last of the Romantics: Byronic in his audacity, Wordsworthian in his ego, Coleridgean in his mysticism, and Blakean in his insistence that there is no progress without contraries. Contraries were what Lawrence was built upon: remove them, and you take away the structure of his being. His contradictions were numerous: he was an intellectual who valued “mindlessness”, he was a profoundly religious agnostic, he both revered and feared homosexuality. The greatest contradiction of all, however, was his belief in the wisdom of the very body that was failing him. Lawrence had consumption from his youth, and every winter was a near-death experience.

No novelist before him had considered the body as a part of consciousness, but the Lawrentian body bore little relation to the anatomy described by doctors. Lawrence believed, for example, that the solar plexus was the home of the unconscious and source of all wisdom: “I just don’t feel it here”, he said of Darwin, pointing to his stomach area. He similarly believed that we are composed of magnets which lead us hither and thither, and that tuberculosis comes from an excess of maternal love. In other words, Lawrence believed that his mother had literally crushed his lungs.  Denouncing science in what his friend Aldous Huxley described as “the most fantastically unreasonable terms”, Lawrence would refuse to be vaccinated today. But at the heart of his eccentricities lay the need to hold onto the mystery and wonder that were fast disappearing from the mechanised world.

So what does the most silenced male writer of the modern age have to tell us? He wrote his own epitaph is in his late poem, ‘Phoenix’:

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?

Lawrence suffered all of those things, but he will rise again.

Frances Wilson’s ‘Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence’ is available to pre-order. 

I wrote two of them, both hugely optimistic about the place. One is literally called Have A Nice Day. I hailed Americans’ sobriety and the gentle virtues of their system of government. It was published in 2009. How was I to know they were about to get high on Fentanyl and elect Donald Trump?

Anyway, it is with some annoyance that I have to tell you my friend Nick Bryant, the BBC’s New York correspondent, has written the antidote to all these vapid takes, mine included. Nick comes across on the news as a bit of a lad — actually he is a bit of a lad — but he is also a historian with a deep understanding of what makes America tick. And When America Stopped Being Great is an absolutely belting achievement for a hack, and an Englishman to boot. It is, as the title suggests, an elegy for a lost nation and a lost cause. The Washington Post gave the book a long and favourable review, calling it, “riveting, often revelatory, crammed with facts, occasionally personal, and almost always depressing”.

It is also wrong.

Not in its description of modern-day America, which Bryant knows well and captures superbly. The inequality, the intellectual poverty, the extremism, the mass shootings, the end of civility in debates on abortion or guns or anything. But he is wrong about the constitution. He points out — rightly — that it’s under pressure from modernity. A good example: Democrats can win the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but the Republicans have nominated 15 of the last 19 Supreme Court justices. “That is why,” Bryant writes, “talk of a reboot or a reset of the current obsolete operating system is so misplaced.”

Really? Tinkering could sort things for another hundred years or so. Fixing the Senate to reduce the impact of the rural minority won’t be decorous or easy, but is it impossible? Might an America that conquered the empty(ish) spaces in the first place not manage to reinvigorate them, repopulate them with businesses no longer tethered to coasts — or physical places at all — and so rebalance political power?

Others have also thought the place was going to the dogs. I mean properly believing the system to be broken. So perhaps the answer to the current crisis, as Dennis Rasmussen suggests in his thought-provoking book Fears of a Setting Sun, can be found in the fears of her founders. The men who invented America mostly thought their invention a disaster, a mess from the start. As Rasmussen points out, even in George Washington’s time hatred poisoned everything: “The two main parties saw and treated each other not just as opponents who advocated the wrong policies, but rather as enemies of the Constitution who actively sought to subvert the basic principles of the Revolution… Newspaper polemics included ‘some of the ripest vituperation in American literary history’, in the words of one scholar. Cries of treason entered virtually every political debate, fears of foreign plots abounded, and physical violence was lamentably commonplace.”

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Perhaps we became too used to the idea, in the post-Watergate era, of America as stable. A nation always there, indispensable, wise, mostly well run. But it was not in its early years and it has not been oftentimes in its history. Nevertheless: hey, it survives. And, with a few twists and turns, it prospers.

Rasmussen’s book is important because it reminds us not only that the founding fathers were disappointed with their creation but that they had reason to be. It really was a basket case (a “shithole country”, to use Trump’s terminology). With the notable exception of James Madison, Rasmussen writes, all of America’s early leaders, including Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, were pessimistic that the American experiment in republican democracy would endure. They thought that Americans were too venal or stupid to cope with politics. They thought the federal system would buckle. They thought factions would bring the whole edifice down.

“The founders,” Rasmussen tells us, “frequently predicted that the republic that they had established would not last beyond their own generation — that the union would soon be sundered, that a new constitutional convention would have be to called, or that the government would gradually lapse into a hereditary monarchy.”

They also thought foreigners would interfere with American elections and affect the results. Ok, not Russia, but still, the idea of “intrigue” from abroad is not new. Nor is the idea of hereditary rule — of the kind that pits Trump children against Biden children or Clinton children or perhaps even Obama children into the distant decades. Adams predicted it; he thought it inevitable. He would not be delighted by the news that Rudy Giuliani’s son Andrew wants to be New York state’s next Governor, but he would not be surprised.

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And on and on the jeremiads go; down the ages they echo. Even Jefferson, the most optimistic of the founders, succumbs to disillusion in old age. Only Madison stands up for America and thinks it might work out alright, and he does so because, Rasmussen says, he compares the place to other regimes, not to some idealised perfect system of government.

Perhaps that is the key.

So how are they doing now, the Americans, post Trump? Better or worse than China on freedom; than Russia on state sponsored crime; than the EU on technological achievement? America is indeed badly governed and horribly divided, but is it moribund, as Nick Bryant argues, or merely troubled? Bryant suggests that if his young daughter wanted to see the most thrusting nation in the world, China might be the place to visit — though he hopes she would recognise the cruel authoritarianism of its system. Otherwise she could go to Australia for its lifestyle, an Asian mega-city for a glimpse of the future.

These places all have their strengths — though China will strike many as a pretty unconvincing role model — but none is anything like as vibrant as America, where everyone has come to play. America, where anything might happen — from a school shooting to the conquest of cancer. A nation that can combust with coronavirus but then invent and manufacture multiple vaccines and distribute them in huge numbers. A nation that can delegitimise government and then (perhaps, under Biden) rediscover its importance. A nation often deranged, but seldom stumped for long.

Madison’s other gift to modernity was a belief that politics could be a constant, unending argument without any shared understanding of the common good — but still work. He saw all America’s bipartisan talk as nice to have but unnecessary. Perhaps America was never meant to be united, free from factions, common in purpose. Perhaps it was always best seen as a herding of political cats, hissing and fissiparous from the start.

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Seen through that lens, Donald Trump looks less frightening. As Rasmussen suggests of the modern era: “We no longer face repeated, serious threats of secession and civil war. Political violence is far less common today … No contemporary election can compare with the presidential election of 1800 — a contest between Jefferson and Adams, two of our most revered founders — in terms of sheer viciousness. Today’s much-maligned ‘mainstream media’ is in reality far more responsible and fact based than the newspapers of the 1790s.”

America’s problems are more intractable but less existentially threatening than many suppose. They were there from the start. They are there today. And tomorrow?

I am not betting against the place. Nick Bryant says he fears more American Carnage, to use Donald Trump’s memorable phrase from his inaugural speech. It is true that some on the American Right have given up on their fellow citizens — particularly those with darker skin who have more recently arrived. It is also true that plenty on the Left have done the same thing, with rural white folk, whose “deaths of despair” can feel rooted more in lost status than lost life chances. It is true, too, that too many people are shot — or shoot themselves — though you have to be careful here. Most American lives are free of violence and the number of households with guns — around 42% — is not much changed from decades ago: they just have more of them.

Neither Rasmussen nor Bryant reach firm conclusions. This is wise. There is no American denouement in the offing. Any properly terminal decline, or reset towards revivification, will be imperceptible at first, and argued over forever. That’s always been the point of the place. The argument about the best path to political progress is not always edifying but is always, and forever, worth having. And America, forever, will be the place to have it.

In December 1972, Hunter’s mother Neilia was driving her three children — Beau (“Beautiful”), 3; Hunter (self-explanatory), 2; and Naomi, the baby, to buy a Christmas Tree in Delaware. Her husband Joe, newly elected to the Senate at just 29, was interviewing staff in Washington. Perhaps Neilia, with three children under 3, was exhausted. She ignored a stop sign and crashed into a tractor. Neilia and Naomi died. Beau and Hunter awoke in a hospital room. Their father was sworn into the Senate there. They subsequently lived inside the narrative of Joe’s rise to power. Willingly or not, they were seconded to public service. “Delaware’s residents placed their sorrows and their hopes in a dashing young widower suddenly left with two toddlers,” Hunter writes. “Our survival became a source of state-wide pride”. Delaware “adopted” the children. Gratitude was the only polite response.

But it wasn’t a truthful one. Two things interest me about Hunter’s childhood. The first is that he was, in his words, “practically raised” by his aunt and uncle. He was also “raised on politics like farm kids raised on sweet corn”. So, they were raised by an extended family, or the people of Delaware, or politics. I suspect Joe was so overwhelmed by Neilia’s loss he abandoned his children for office. He took them to the Senate — where they played in the sauna — and to endless public meetings. But is that, really, presence?

He couldn’t save Neilia or Naomi, so he would save America. It isn’t exactly selfishness, but it isn’t exactly sacrifice either. It laid on his children a terrible guilt, for having childish needs. “Beau and I never really grieved the loss of our mother and baby sister,” Hunter writes. “We were almost ashamed to admit to any sadness we might have felt because of how enveloped we were in that familial embrace.” There is withholding in that kind of love. It concealed Joe’s grief, but it concealed him, too.

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Hunter has the misfortune to be surrounded by saints. His father is the anti-Trump. His mother is sanctified by death. His brother Beau was saintly too: he was attorney general of Delaware, scourge of sex offenders, preparing to run for governor in 2016. (If Joe didn’t win the presidency, Beau was next in line, his father’s choice). But Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 and is likewise beyond reproach.

If you are among saints, and you are not like them, what are you? A sinner, and Hunter couldn’t exist without his better half. When Beau dies, he asks himself: “If we weren’t the three of us anymore, what were we?” His father, meanwhile, “sat on his porch for hours and took one call after another from current and former leaders from every hemisphere and every country.” This repression is the family way. Hunter and Beau never asked each other what they remembered about the accident. And here again, “Dad and I never really sat together to have a heart-to-heart, to talk about what we were going through. Words,” he writes, “almost felt risky”.

Instead, emboldened by the public response to his eulogy, he asked his wife Kathleen if he should run for office on the wave of grief and sympathy. (It’s the other family way). She replied: “Are you serious?” After that, “We didn’t say another word to each other for the rest of the ride. Or, really, ever again”. Bereft of both Beau and Kathleen, his addiction took flight.

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The first part of the book deals with his childhood — the enforced gratitude for their privileges and the conditional love of the people of Delaware — and loss of Beau. This part feels stymied. Hunter describes the relationship between the three men like this: “It’s a Biden love story, of course, which means it’s complicated: tragic, humane, emotional, enduring, widely consequential, and ultimately redemptive.” They all talk like this: in broad concepts of love, loss and courage. Do they talk like this in private? They might do. How do they order soup?

There is also a defence of his business dealings in China and Ukraine, which were used to attack his father by his opponents. It’s an across-the-board denial of wrong-doing, too comprehensive and outraged in tone to feel true. But if it isn’t entirely true, he cannot say otherwise. He is, again, constricted by his father’s need for power. (There are no politics in this book at all. It is the most telling blank.)

Only in the second part — when Hunter details his relapses and half-life inside hotels rooms with criminals — is the prose alive. For using is his most vivid life, the only place where he is allowed to be angry at the things that are denied him. His writing on this is raging and horrifying. His description of his relationship with Rhea, a street homeless crack addict who moves in with him, is the best thing in the book: a bizarre and functional marriage, with crack as their beloved child.

Hunter is not long sober, if he is at all. He gave a long interview to the New Yorker in 2019 but reveals here that he was high during every interview. (He has been using, with gaps of varying length, since his father became Vice President; since he ascended to the mountain-top.) I would not comment on a fellow addict’s sobriety, but he is a Biden and therefore public property: I am invited to comment.

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Hunter does not sound well. He still hates the drug dealers he was dependent on, though they were as addicted as he, and with none of his privileges. If he had what recovering addicts call emotional sobriety — or if he were truly a progressive — he would try to understand their behaviour. He married a second time, to Melissa, who had “the exact same eyes as my brother”, after knowing her for a week. He did not thank his first wife Kathleen, who suffered at his hands, in his acknowledgements. His thanks to Melissa, “the love of my life”, feel like whiplash.

And he never tells us what I most want to know as he tells of hotel tabs and hangers-on and profligacy: where did he get the money? There is a seemingly inexhaustible supply for his using. Its source is not divulged.

He is honest, though, about his love affair with his brother’s wife Hallie after Beau’s death. It was a pitiful attempt to reanimate the man they both loved. He wanted, he writes, to be close to Beau’s children: “I was seduced by the idea of providing the same kind of extended family that surrounded Beau and me after we lost our mommy and sister.” It’s a re-imagining of the extended family he was gifted to after the death of his mother, but here it feels explicitly insane.

Joe is the most interesting character in this book, of course, and he is not in this book. He is God on his mountaintop. You cannot be angry with God, though watching God try to operate amid the wreckage of his own distant benevolence is bleakly funny. How would it be if your father the Vice President arrived at your crack house with his security detail to ask: “Are you OK?” It’s a weird question to ask a child you know is using drugs. It invites a positive response, a rescuing. Hunter has none for him. Joe cries once, when Hunter runs away from an intervention: “I don’t know what else to do, I’m so scared, tell me what to do”.

Hunter emerges from this rowdy memoir not as a kind man — look to Beau and Joe for that — but as an angry man destroyed, though guiltily, by the imperatives of those he loves. Joe Biden fused his personal narrative into political success long ago because people are sentimental. It worked for the father. It does not work for the son. Here is the evidence, and in his own hand.

That was the beginning of her voyage of discovery into the biases of computer code; one which would — as a new Netflix documentary, Coded Bias, shows — lead her to testify before lawmakers in the U.S. Congress. Facial recognition technology (FRT), Buolamwini proved, is often poor at identifying black faces and female faces — largely because it is “trained” on data sets with far more images of white men. The bias may be inadvertent, but, as Buolamwini points out, has very real consequences.

Still, in a biased world, do you really want FRT to perform well in recognising your face? If you’re trying to unlock your phone, probably yes. If you want to project a fearless lion’s face onto your reflection in the morning, I suppose so. But if you’re walking past a Metropolitan Police FRT van, possibly not. In Coded Bias, Buolamwini’s story is interwoven with that of Big Brother Watch, as the organisation challenges police use of FRT. In a sequence filmed on London’s streets, a 14-year-old black schoolboy is stopped and searched by plain clothes officers after his face is wrongly matched by FRT with a suspect on their database.

Previous surveys in the UK have found that ethnic minority respondents were less keen for the police to have unfettered use of FRT. Not just because the technology is less likely to wrongly tag a white schoolboy, though that is true. Ethnic minorities’ experience of bias — not their knowledge of the technology — makes them less likely to see the enhancement of police powers as a good thing. More accurate technology, trained on more diverse databases, won’t help that lack of trust in the police.

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“What is the purpose of identification?” asks Apartheid historian Patric Tariq Mellet when Buolamwini visits South Africa. Mellet displays the racial classification papers that allocated South Africans to categories — based not on who they felt themselves to be, but what the state decided they were. The purpose of this identification was clear: to control where the carrier could go, what they could do, even whom they could marry.

With facial recognition technology, there is no need to carry papers. Your face is your ID card. You could be sorted by any system, not just by visible characteristics like skin colour or sex, but by linking your face to all the unseen information sitting in databases. Not only your credit history, but your internet search history. Not just your home postcode, but your mood as expressed in walking speed.

This is where the visible bias of the inadequately trained FRT systems and the invisible bias of algorithms, trained on data from an unequal past, come together. It’s relatively easy to object that a program has misclassified your face or failed to recognise you as a person. It’s much harder to discover that you’ve been wrongly tagged with a poor credit history or tendencies towards political extremism.

In any case, “wrongly” becomes meaningless when algorithms apply population-scale predictions to individuals. The best predictor of your likelihood to turn to crime is your postcode. Is it fair to tag everyone from the same neighbourhood as future criminals? The best predictor of your future educational attainment is your school’s past performance. Is it fair for an algorithm to allocate exam marks on that basis, as the A Level algorithm did last year?

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Big data links together disparate sources of information to profile each of us. Systems using FRT can attach each data profile to a specific physical person in the real world. This is clearly a gift to anyone with power, political or economic. But it also threatens to transform our personal relationships.

In a beautifully simple and telling sequence filmed in China, a skateboarding young woman explains how she uses the ubiquitous Facial Recognition systems all the time. She uses her face to buy groceries, because her face is linked with her bank account. It’s also linked to her Social Credit score, which combines data from official records with “bad behaviour” like “making false reports” online. People with a low score may be denied travel on trains and aeroplanes.

Unlike most profiling in the West — where you may never know that you are paying more for flights, or that you are on a police watch list for domestic extremism — China’s Social Credit scores are public. Your trustworthiness is not a personal quality to be discovered by trial and error, but a numerical value calculated by an algorithm and available for anyone to see.

This is a good thing, says our Chinese woman. When she meets somebody new, she doesn’t have to use her own judgment to decide whether to trust him. She can save time by checking his Social Credit score before deciding whether to be his friend. But trust is not a substance to be quantified, like a bank balance. It’s a relationship. We trust our friends and family because we have built up bonds of mutual commitment, of empathy and intimacy, by getting to know them, by sharing our lives with them, by opening ourselves to each other and taking the risk of being let down or betrayed.

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Where in China the algorithmic sorting is compulsory, in the democratic West choices remain. Of course, applicants for welfare, and those arrested suspects seeking bail, can’t opt out of systems run by algorithms — systems in which the stakes are high, and algorithms encoded with prejudice. But because we live in democracies, we can object to how these algorithms are used. There is no reason, in principle, why algorithmic relationships between institutions and individuals should not also be subject to democratic oversight, and in some cases they are.

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But this brings us to the hardest, most important question: why don’t we object more often? Why are we so relaxed about being identified and sorted by machines? Most people in the UK do not think that police use of Facial Recognition Technology should be banned. The idea that we should all have digital “Vaccine Passports” or “Immunity Certificates” to resume public life is welcomed by many. In spite of repeated scandals about how our data is collected and used, most of us continue to use social media to interact with our friends.

Of course, when unfair outcomes emerge from machines programmed to learn from the past, like the Amazon hiring algorithm that discriminated against female applicants because past employees tended to be men, we object. But the general principle that machines should be able to recognise us and sort us into categories that will determine our options in life does not seem to bother most of us. In many ways, we still put our faith in machines to be fairer than humans, less biased, more objective.

Is this fatalism or ignorance of the true extent of the power relationships embedded in the algorithms? Or do we, like the Chinese interviewee in Coded Bias, simply not want to exercise our own judgment about the people we meet? Perhaps we like the ways that technology mitigates the riskiness of unmediated human life. Instead of taking responsibility for hiring this person and rejecting that one, why not write some code that can choose your next employee?

We tend to think of algorithms as tools in the hands of the powerful, guided by super-intelligent people to achieve their sinister ends. But although the technology has powerful effects on the lives of individuals, it also veils the weakness of those who use it. They lack the courage to exercise judgment. They lack a clear vision of a future to steer towards. They automate relationships with the people they should be persuading, or inspiring, or helping, or leading. It’s not just the bias in these systems that should trouble us. It’s the rush to abandon human agency to them.

For many critics — sometimes, admittedly, for Roth himself — that retort seems to account for Roth’s presence on the planet. He’s here for the girls. The erotic and emotional melodrama that fills the work, and fuelled the life, of the novelist from the Jewish suburbs of Newark, New Jersey enthralled, titillated and outraged readers from his 1959 debut, Goodbye, Columbus, through the epochal scandal of Portnoy’s Complaint a decade later, to the farewell verdicts after his death, aged 85, in May 2018. Hardly unjust, you might think, for an author who as a University of Chicago student in the mid-1950s had defined his ideal life as “bibliography by day, women by night”. Yet dreams, like deeds, have consequences. In 2014 he could lament after “thirty-one books of a writing career… the truly indelible mark that I made is as a dirty writer”.

Inevitably, the “dirty writer” and his tangled web of relationships has come to the fore in responses to the monumental authorised life produced — a mere three year’s after its subject’s passing — by Blake Bailey. True, it would take a heart of stone and brain of silicon to read Philip Roth: The Biography and not be swept up into the 24/7 floorshow-cum-car crash of the writer’s sexual life, from the two catastrophic marriages (to waitress-secretary Maggie Martinson and English actress Claire Bloom), through stormy long-haul affairs to passing dalliances with partners who stretch from Texan lasses who need to ask him “What’s fascism?” to Ava Gardner herself. With Jackie Kennedy, things never quite worked out, even though the widowed First Lady did apparently try.

Bailey’s narrative supplies bulging boxes of evidence for both prosecution and defence. Should the priapic titan from Newark go to “feminist prison” (“you serve twenty years to life,” he kvetched to co-offender Saul Bellow) or be remembered as at least (so he put it to Alison Lurie) “not just a shit (when I am being one) but an interesting and intelligent shit”? A shit he could certainly be, whether in the Strindberg-like horrors, both inflicted and endured, of his marriage to Bloom or the casual predations of his later-life pick-ups. You cheer for the dames who fought back, like the prospect he cruised in a Connecticut bar and blithely advised to read his spectacularly filthy (and deeply accomplished) 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater. When she then stood him up, he rang: “‘You are never to call me again,’ she said, and hung up.” That’s the spirit.

The best defence, perhaps, lies in Bailey’s roster of distinguished women whom Roth (genuinely) befriended and supported, from Lurie herself to Edna O’Brien, Hermione Lee, Mia Farrow — he even furnished the disaffected teenage Ronan with a reading list — and Zadie Smith. In her inaugural Philip Roth Lecture at Newark Public Library (to which he donated all his books), Smith cut to the core of Roth’s emancipatory, taboo-busting power. “I stole Portnoy’s liberties long ago,” Smith said. “He is part of the reason, when I write, that I do not try to create positive black role models for my black readers, and more generally have no interest in conjuring ideal humans for my readers to emulate”. Even in 1959, some Jewish readers of his early stories found in them a shanda fur die goyim — shaming ammunition for gentiles. Roth’s shamelessness printed a ticket to freedom for his heirs.

Faced with this career-long carnival of unruly desire, it sounds bizarre to switch attention from gender politics to geopolitics — the sort of soporific stunt pulled by the blockhead professors he loved to guy. Even sex, though, takes place in time. Yet Bailey’s supremely readable chronicle opens out into the world beyond the bedroom arenas where Roth’s gladiatorial couplings unfold. As Bailey suggests, Roth and his male literary peers came to maturity in a post-Second World War United States coming to terms with its role as a consumer cornucopia at home and global superpower abroad. Born in 1933, in the darkest hour of the Depression, he grew up in the belly of a strong young beast. America’s new hegemony showered at least some of its citizens with unimagined goodies, and bestrode the Cold War stage like an adolescent colossus. He and his high-achieving coevals were children of the long boom that saw US GDP soar from $243 billion in 1947 to $2.8 trillion in 1980.

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The fruits of plenty were unevenly spread. But this age of gold shone on striving millions – many, like Roth, the offspring of fairly recent immigrant families — as median household incomes rose (in real, inflation-adjusted terms) from $34,710 in 1954 to $62,153 in 1973. Despite the Vietnam imbroglio, racial unrest in the cities and youth revolt, US unemployment dropped to a historic low of 3.4 per cent just as Roth published Portnoy in 1969. The suburban plenty whose seamy side Roth unpicked reflected in miniature the zenith of US affluence and authority. If you want to understand why a serious literary novelist (albeit one with a satirical, scurrilous side) could hit such peaks of fame, look at the annual figures for the award of US first degrees. They shot up from 136,000 in 1945 to 1,094,000 in 1990, with a hike from 520,000 t0 840,000 between 1965 and 1970 alone.

Wealthier, better educated, better informed — as seriously written city and regional newspapers still competed with the TV networks — this new mass public amplified Roth’s voice, and his glory. The paperback of Portnoy sold 3.5 million within five years.

At least until his late-career reflorescence, Roth was aware that he stuck to the narrow patch he knew. “I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole,” he said. Reading Bailey, though, you grasp that this seemingly narrow shaft — Newark, Jewish suburbia, upward mobility, male sexual hubris and nemesis, American success and its discontents, time, age and mortality — contains not just of bedrooms, but boardrooms and war-rooms. In 1997, the masterly American Pastoral marked Roth’s second coming as a full-fledged historical novelist of epic, not just domestic, scope. Its narrator, Roth’s regular alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, reflects that the tragic hero “Swede” Levov must have been “baffled” by the question: “How had he become history’s plaything”. Even as they yearn, strive and plot, with the next lay, the next game, the next raise in view, Roth’s heroes remain history’s playthings.

He thought of calling the great turn-of the-21st-century trilogy that began with American Pastoral and continued with I Married a Communist and The Human Stain “Blindsided”. Its aghast protagonists find themselves ambushed and felled by unforeseen outcomes of the postwar American Dream of prosperity, progress and self-realisation. As early as his baseball fable The Great American Novel in 1973, Roth understood that he was telling mythic stories about the rise and fall of a superpower — not just the ups and downs of little guys. Baseball might serve, he said, as “a means to dramatise the struggle between the benign national myth of itself that a great power prefers to perpetuate, and the relentlessly insidious, very nearly demonic reality”.

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For writers, birth dates matter. Always in Roth’s sight lay the just-senior writers who had experienced the Second World War as young adults: Norman Mailer who served in the Pacific; Gore Vidal, a naval officer; Roth’s idol Saul Bellow, a Merchant Marine volunteer; or Joseph Heller, a B-25 bombardier. In contrast, he and 1930s-born contemporaries such as John Updike and Don DeLillo were (Bailey argues) “abstemious children of the Depression”. They eschewed grand gestures, “kept their noses to the grindstone”, and maximised their productivity. Not every one of these Depression wunderkinder stood an equal chance. Toni Morrison, born in 1931, only published her first novel in 1970 — however, her job as a New York fiction editor had to a degree lowered the formidable obstacles arising from her race and sex.

Roth was a compartmentaliser. His proneness to excess applied strictly in the bedroom. In a taste-defying metaphor, he compared the male sexual adventurers of the early Sixties to the GIs who vanquished Nazism: “I sometimes think of my generation of men as the first wave of determined D-Day invaders, over whose bloody, wounded carcasses the flower children subsequently stepped ashore”. With sex, Roth went over the top. Otherwise, he maintained his work-rate at a punishingly high level, like any harassed postwar corporate executive. Friends and lovers comment on his “monkish habits”, especially after he bought (cash down, $110,000) a farmhouse in Warren, Connecticut and shut himself away — girlfriends excepted — for seasons on end. He dubbed it “The Fiction Factory”.

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From their fiction factories, Roth and his Depression-born buddies delivered the goods: year after year, book after book, high-minded rivals to the suited stiffs at IBM, Standard Oil or Chrysler. (Roth, with his 31 volumes, even envied Updike his “fucking fluency”.) The kid from Newark, whose adored father Herman had served the Metropolitan Life insurance company for 36 years, adhered to a thoroughly bourgeois model of hard graft. His progress traces an all-American postwar gradient of social mobility, professional attainment, career milestones and late-life plaudits. “We’re hicks,” Roth said of his group, “It’s just because we’re such hicks that we’ve all become so sophisticated.” Ascent meant vindication, too. In Herman Roth’s day, Bailey reveals, a Jew could not hope to advance beyond branch manager at Met Life.

His son Philip rose along with Mad Men America, in an age of aspiration, reward and newly-bestowed entitlement – an entitlement that Roth drew on in the currency of sex. The money came in handy, too. His advances and fees soon skyrocketed. In 1968, Roth reckoned his income as $827,000 — more than $6 million today. Slacker times (relatively) ensued, but by 1989 his new agent Andrew Wylie could strike a three-book deal with Simon & Schuster for $1.8 million. In the heyday of corporate America, this was high literature as big business. Roth gave much of the dosh away: charitably, to exes, girlfriends, chums, or family; and, commercially, to the myriad doctors and hospitals who treated his chronic back pain and worsening heart conditions. That he could earn it in the first place shows how America’s postwar high tide lifted even the toughest, rudest critic of the puritan and philistine mainstream.

But all good things — and bad things — come to end. (After an 80th birthday gala hosted by Edna O’Brien, Roth wrote that “the meaning of life is that it stops”.) Decline, private and public, shadows his later fiction, often given burnt-out, strife-torn form in the recession-wrecked city of Newark. And with that geopolitical fall came the discredit and opprobrium that now attached to the kind of cocksure strutting that Roth the man (not Roth the novelist) had sometimes indulged. Shame once more dogged his heels, above all after Claire Bloom published her damning memoir Leaving a Doll’s House. One TV show, unimprovably, dubbed it “her thermonuclear dish-all”. Bailey draws on Roth’s unpublished “295-page rebuttal” of her accusations. Yes, 295-page.

Roth might deplore “this media eagerness to find culpability in matters large and small”. But it wasn’t just personal. The toppling of alpha male entitlement, literary and otherwise, partnered the eclipse of the alpha superpower as Cold War “victory” failed to stop the rot. Not for nothing did Roth call one of his final, frail novellas The Humbling. At least his gifts remained undimmed when it came to fantasy solutions for the American fix that wore a MAGA cap. In 2004, he spookily modelled the lure of Trumpish populism in the historical dystopia of The Plot Against America. When the real thing came along, he called the orange one a “massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac”. Even Nixon got off lighter.

In recent times, the reputation of Roth, Mailer, Updike et al has come to resemble a sort of crumbling rustbelt in itself. Their more modest American (and British) successors tend to play nicely, move in packs and — above all — stay in their appointed lanes. The upshot is a more wholesome if less ambitious literary scene — more Brooklyn artisan bakery than some flaming, roaring, polluting steel plant in Pennsylvania (or New Jersey). Bailey’s mammoth testament may, or may not, push the graph of Roth stock up a little. In any case, his biography shows that it took, not a village, but a clumsily confident behemoth of a victorious nation, to raise these wayward, favoured children. These flawed literary giants could grow so tall because a one-off confluence of historical forces nourished them. Their empire has now toppled. How are China’s best-known novelists behaving in private? We might soon need to know.

They treated serious things with irreverence, and irrelevant things with seriousness. They were slavish to America, ignored China and took Europe for granted. Many of them backed the Iraq War and don’t understand why that means they can never be trusted with anything important ever again.

This is a generation that hid, or squandered what intelligence it had. They believed in win-wins and public private partnerships, or giving each others’ talentless children plum jobs. Publicly concerned — no, obsessed — with equality, they presided over a society that became as unequal as the one Horace Walpole lived in. Incredibly, they oversaw a decline in the average life expectancy for the first time in 110 years. They never built enough houses. They thought Will Self was a novelist, and Amber Rudd a future Prime Minister. They answered every policy question with the word “education”, so now our cities overflow with miserable PhD-holding baristas.

Their greatest achievement? Maybe Britpop, or the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, which are both ways of saying they don’t have one. Their lowest moment? The great triggering year of 2016 — which is when they collectively lost their minds. Ever since, these centrist Dads and Mums have faced their cultural twilight and political downfall with whatever the opposite of bravery is.

d’Ancona, whose book Identity Ignorance Innovation came out recently, is a flawless minor representative of this generation, and the age they lived in. He edited the Spectator and wrote columns about Westminster for the Sunday Telegraph. Like so many of his peers, he was a cultural populist, a believer in high-low relativity who never connected the culture of the nation with the court politics he obsessed over. He thought Brexit the “idiot option”.

So, of course, Brexit happened.

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Then, from a new seat at the Guardian, d’Ancona dreamed his hideous dreams of post-Brexit Britain. We were duped. We were becoming a country in the mould of Philip Larkin: wintry, hopelessly nostalgic, ferociously bigoted, and alone — “an absurd and horrible vision”. He was finally finding his conscience as a peddler of big ideas, not backstage tittle-tattle. With Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back, d’Ancona successfully landed his vault into the world of sub-TED, high-altitude musing. Post-Truth was one of three books with the same title published in 2017. Each asked how 17 million fools could be so easily hoodwinked by a slogan on the side of a bus. The big idea in all of them was that politicians lie.

Identity Ignorance Innovation is more of the same from d’Ancona. Quite literally: there are whole anecdotes and phrases of the “Ignorance” and “Innovation” chapters that are hard to distinguish from sections of Post Truth. Sometimes, as with sections on racial injustice in Britain or how to make 20-somethings more employable, d’Ancona does a seal roll onto his side and burps his ideas out as bullet points, like a harried junior writing a summary for an executive, not a professional journalist writing non-fiction that retails for a mighty £20.

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Like many writers of his generation, he views his ideas as “fiercely contemporary”. The self-image is that of the truth-teller: the bold intellect riskily crossing the lonely and treacherous frontiers of modern thought. “Countercultural” is the word he repeatedly uses, as if the ideas between the covers of Identity Ignorance Innovation are dangerous, or provocative, or fresh.

What are these ideas? It is hard to say in the sections on “Ignorance” and “Innovation”. The former is a lament about education, and how stupid grade-chasing has made the under-30s. They are “brilliant but ignorant”. Their potential intelligence has been crushed by “the deranged pressures of the digital microsecond” — the what now? Is it bold to think that the young are scandalously dense? No, it’s de rigueur, not just for d’Ancona and his generation, but every one since the Pyramids were built.

Is there a big idea then? Well, d’Ancona argues that liberals should view identity politics as an “entirely constructive adrenaline shot to the body politic”. Despite apologetically declaring himself a “one man privilege carnival”, he wants to grapple with race, cancel culture, Trans rights, statue-toppling and all the other deathless culture wars issues that vex our banana kingdom.

He thinks that these are trip-wire subjects that nobody else will touch and regrets that other commentators have “in the interests of a quiet life… crept away from this particular field of inquiry”. Have they? Has Matthew Parris shied away from writing about these issues? Has Janice Turner? Has Trevor Philips? That’s just a few columnists at The Times. Even people who have only picked up a pen by accident in the last 12 months have probably fired off a thousand word think-piece about J.K. Rowling. It is practically a beloved national pastime for us to argue about these things at this point, like making jokes about Charles assassinating Diana, or letting Michael Portillo make his television shows about train lines in the Balkans.

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Identity politics is, d’Ancona thinks, at “an important and exciting moment in its development”. The rise of movements that place racial, religious and sexual identity at their core has encouraged “a little more humility and restraint”. Well, I read Identity Ignorance Innovation in the week when a group forced a teacher into hiding, and within a few days of David Lammy being told that he was not English by a call-in guest on his radio show. Both incidents were examples of where identity politics is taking us, and will continue to take us, if it is not challenged. Exciting moments indeed!

On behalf of no one in particular, except liberal-ish centrist Dads who he flies a flag for, d’Ancona wants to make an offer to the youngsters who will not “tolerate the quiet bigotries of the past”. Look to America — bastion of racial decency and good practice — and see what we could build as allies together. Affirmative action can be used to nudge cultural norms towards “benign outcomes” on racial issues. If that doesn’t end injustice, d’Ancona assures his younger readers, “stronger medicine” can be taken.

In return for affirmative action (we have to hope that, unlike America, these policies do not summon a splenetic white identity politics into being) d’Ancona would like Gen Z to let him undertake the modernisation projects he has been banging on about since the 1990s. An “overhaul” of parliamentary procedure; “a new second chamber”; “real power to metro mayors”; “a fully codified constitution”.

But these are the reforms of an old Westminster “moderniser”, not somebody who cares about young people. Will overhauled parliamentary procedure or petty tyrant metro mayors build ambitious, beautiful garden suburbs, where the young can live good, decent lives around our major cities? No.

I suspect the last time the young looked this scary was the late 1970s. And the Britpop generation, whether it is d’Ancona or Will Self, Rachel Johnson or Ian Hislop, are getting on a bit. They are approaching the same age Harold Macmillan was when Peter Cook began doing his humiliating impression of the Prime Minister. Nobody has really come after them, but all the material is there: Pooterish social climbing, Partridge-level crap ideas, Fawlty-like exasperation amid a changing world.

Ridiculously, they still carry on like they are hated by an establishment full of port-soaked aristocrats and Thatcherites who want Nelson Mandela to stay in prison. Wrong: all those reactionaries died a long time ago; they are the establishment and have been for decades. They will have their Macmillan moment.

Ultimately, of all the vague and uninspiring proposals in Identity Ignorance Innovation, it is that last one — the codified constitution — that is the funniest. Imagine the d’Ancona constitution being chiselled into stone tablets and hung around the land. His generation’s prejudices would be made into law, to bedevil the British for centuries to come.

It was bad enough to be their children. At least when their grandchildren write the histories of the Britpoppers, they may have enough distance to treat them with the fairness they scarcely deserve.

This tension came to a head when, having built a company worth more than £20m, he had to decide on its future. Selling it to venture capitalists who would maximise short-term profits would feel “like selling one of my children into prostitution,” he said. So he handed the company over to its 650 workers. Singh-Watson retains a 26% stake; the rest of the shares are held in a trust, and the profits go to the staff — or co-owners.

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These sorts of models have become increasingly common in recent years: according to the most recent figures, there are now 470 similar businesses, up 28% on the previous year. Research suggests employee ownership can boost productivity and profits as well as staff morale — and earnings.

“Covid, I’m slightly embarrassed to say, has enabled us to make profits that we’ve never experienced before,” says Singh-Watson. “Some of them will be shared with the co-owners, but they’re very keen that we invest large sums of money in improving our environmental credentials.” It’s the workers who get to decide how to spend it.

If anti-capitalism has become fashionable, it’s partly because the modern workplace often makes people feel disempowered. Joe Atkins, who works in the marketing department of Riverford draws a political analogy. “In a dictatorship, your voice is suppressed. And clearly that happens in so many businesses and sectors, and it’s why so many of us hate our jobs: we don’t feel like we’re contributing, we don’t feel like we’re listened to.” Riverford, he says, works like a functioning democracy.

At the moment, Atkins says, there’s a lively company-wide discussion about the pros and cons of working from home, and how to manage the post-pandemic return to office life. “I would imagine most businesses would have a little tick-box for consultation and might include a couple of stakeholders, and you’d get a tiny opportunity to give your feedback.” Being co-owners, Atkins says, influences how co-workers interact. And sharing directly in the profits is an extra motivation.

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The rise of employee ownership suggests a widespread desire for a different sort of economy: one less concerned with short-term profit, more with empowering people and communities. So does the continuing strength of co-operatives — and the growth of community businesses, where locals people take control of an institution which matters to them. Bramley Baths in Leeds is a textbook example: a council-run Edwardian bathhouse and fitness centre which, though much loved, was consistently losing money. In 2013 it was threatened with closure — until a group called the Friends of Bramley Baths offered to run it instead. The council agreed, and today the bathhouse turns a profit, while employing 41 staff on the living wage.

Bramley Baths was helped by a grant from the charitable trust Power to Change. “What’s interesting,” says PTC’s chief executive Vidhya Alakeson, “is that community businesses manage to make business models work that the private sector and the public sector don’t”. They really understand what their community wants and needs and will therefore participate in or pay for. Community businesses benefit from strong customer loyalty, and often from volunteers working alongside paid employees. It’s a model that works in everything “from gin distilleries to ferry boats, to farms to shops to leisure centres”, says Alakeson. Shuttered pubs have become a familiar sight around Britain, but where communities have stepped in to save their local, they have often become successful enterprises.

As well as being uplifting in themselves, these stories hint that a different kind of politics might be possible. Even though it ended in failure, there was a truth at the heart of David Cameron’s Big Society: if given the right tools, people can transform their areas, without needing to be ordered around by the state. It’s easy to assume that community businesses are the preserve of affluent areas full of well-connected retirees and comfortably-off stay-at-home parents. But Alakeson points out that the model can work anywhere: “67% or so of our funding goes to the 30% most disadvantaged parts of the country.”

Community businesses — the sector has more than doubled since 2014, and there are now more than 11,000 — and the rise of models like Riverford’s employee ownership are all different ways of shifting power, says Alakeson, “away from an economy where very few people hold power… towards an economy where power is much more broadly held, and many more people have a stake.”

Perhaps a democratic economy sounds like a nice but rather dreamy idea; a new book, Sara Horowitz’s Mutualism, argues that nothing could be more politically urgent. The mutualist impulse, says Horowitz, is simple: “If neither government nor market forces are solving a problem that you and the people in your community share, why not solve it yourself?” The American social safety net was born, in the 20th century, not just of state intervention, but also of unions, mutual aid societies, religious communities and co-operatives. Today, as the state either can’t or won’t maintain that safety net, these organisations are more necessary than ever. Horowitz herself founded the Freelancers Union, which has successfully campaigned for laws protecting freelancers. Crucially, it also has a sustainable business model, since it provides services such as health insurance in return for its members’ dues.

In Britain, there are hints that the Government is sympathetic to a more democratic economy. Last year Boris Johnson commissioned a report from Danny Kruger MP, “Levelling Up Our Communities”, which brought together dozens of ideas for empowering individuals and local bodies. Rishi Sunak’s budget launched a “Community Ownership Fund” for rescuing local assets along the lines of Bramley Baths. Is that a sign of a changing political culture?

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Vidhya Alakeson is sceptical. “The potential of the social economy isn’t that well understood in government currently,” she says. The sector has a lot of momentum, but where the government is happy to offer incentives, tax breaks and subsidies to favoured industries, community businesses tend to be overlooked.

Britain’s political conversation seems hopelessly stuck in an argument about the size of the state: you’re either on the Left and want the government to intervene more and spend more; or you’re on the Right, and want it to do less. The possibility that politics is also about empowering people and local institutions is largely ignored.

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Will Tanner, director of the think tank Onward — which can claim credit for the Community Ownership Fund policy — is slightly more upbeat. “Most of the relevant cabinet ministers — Rishi Sunak, Robert Jenrick, Oliver Dowden — they’re instinctively interested” in policies that support collective local action, he says. Onward is hoping that the government will take up other ideas — such as more support for community land trusts, and a “right to regenerate” which would make it easier for communities to take over empty retail spaces.

But, he adds, the language of common local endeavour struggles to resonate with politicians: “It doesn’t fit into an existing set of policies or an existing philosophical agenda.” So policies supporting community power tend to be “an afterthought. It’s often more about tweaking existing systems rather than decentralising and devolving power, which is anathema to the mindset of a technocratic state.” Tanner, who has worked for the Home Office and No 10, says it can be hard to jolt the state out of its bureaucratic, top-down habits.

“Ordinary people,” he observes, “have a lexicon of words to describe this: they might talk about the family, the group, about collective action. Often it’s old Anglo-Saxon words. But there’s a disconnect between the language of ordinary people and the language of politicians.” You have to start with the people, he says. “As soon as you start creating technocratic tools, you lose the magic.”

Before the 1979 general election, in a celebrated moment of fatalism, the Labour leader James Callaghan remarked to an aide that, “there are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea change in politics… I suspect there is now such a sea change and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”

Those of us who aren’t Thatcherites have long hoped for a sea-change in the opposite direction, towards a less ruthlessly competitive Britain. Is it possible that the next transformation could bring about a more democratic society? If so, then it will begin at the grassroots, with the spontaneous growth of new models, new experiments in working together for a shared purpose. And the politicians might be the last people to notice it.

On the very first page of Black Skin, White Masks — which has just been published as a Penguin Modern Classic, using Richard Philcox’s translation — Fanon states: “I’m not the bearer of absolute truths”. Which doesn’t sound very saintly. He was trying to emphasise his humanity instead of being seen solely for his race. The book is an investigation into neurosis and alienation; the crisis of a man who thought he was just a man, but discovers instead he is a nègre. “Look Mummy, a nègre,” a little child says and points to Fanon.

The text is often dense: Fanon mixes literary analysis of obscure novels with the jargon of phenomenology. He can be horny, sad, angry, introspective and playful — all on the same page. The sections that seem to be influenced by Hegel are particularly tough work. It is not entirely surprising that the book was a damp squib on publication. No major French newspaper or journal reviewed it; by the time Fanon died from leukaemia, at the age of 36 in a hospital in America, it had been out of print for many years.

Fanon did have aspirations to be a playwright. And the drama involved in the text is positively theatrical. He didn’t type the manuscript himself, but rather dictated it to his inamorata, Josie; this explains the sudden shifts in register and tone. This is not a contained book; it bursts with the energy of a young man.

Fanon was 27 when it was published, a Jacques the Lad who loved football, and as a teenager stole marbles and snuck illegally into cinemas with his friends. In a letter he sent to a friend about the book, which is quoted in Macey’s biography, he affirms: “I am trying to touch my reader affectively, or in other words irrationally, almost sensually. For me, words have a charge. I find myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question mark.”

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Another reason why Fanon can be called a saint was his strident moral universalism; but this universalism can be explained, at least partly, by his background as a black man from the French West Indies. As he puts it in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks: “As those of Antillean, our observations and conclusions are valid only for the French Antilles”. The rest of the book is, indeed, very French.

Fanon was born to a middle-class family in the French West Indian colony of Martinique. His father was a civil servant and his mother a successful shop owner. The family were so well-off they could afford servants. They even owned a second house in the outer suburbs of Fort-de-France, the capital city. Martinique was an old colony: many of its institutions, such as its schools and courts, were modelled on metropolitan France. Fanon attended a fee-paying lycée, a privilege that poor West Indian blacks couldn’t afford — neither could poor whites in France.

One might think, on knowing that a white population lived in Martinique, that they were the emissaries of mainland France. They would be wrong. The Békés — as the Martinique-born white population was called — were opposed to Martinique being integrated as a French territory in 1946, and they supported the Vichy regime during the second world war,

They were a clannish, endogamous minority composed of landowning families. Interracial marriage here, unlike in metropolitan France, was completely taboo. In a documentary by Stuart Hall on the nations of the Caribbean, an elder Béké man, with a grin on his face, compared them to the mafia. They lived in a hill just above Fort-de-France: there was a rivalry between the landowning Békés and the rising urban black and mixed-race middle-class families in the capital city.

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By Tomiwa Owolade

Fanon’s life was in many ways not just an embrace of republican France, but a rejection of the lifestyle and beliefs of Békés. He fought for de Gaulle’s Free France, and was decorated with a Croix de Guerre. He married a white woman. And, at a deeper level, his commitment to republican French universalism — which, of course, wasn’t fully practised in France, as he later found out when he moved there to study medicine — was in stark contrast to the American-style racial obsessions of the Békés in Martinique.

Fanon, in his book, is trying to affirm the universal brotherhood of man. In one passage, he states: “we must recall our aim is to enable better relations between Blacks and Whites”. It is no surprise, then, he is sensitive about anti-Semitism: “Anti-Semitism cuts me to the quick,” he writes. “They are denying me the right to be a man. I cannot dissociate myself from the fate reserved for my brother.”

He rejects being viewed as black person. He wants to be seen simply as a person: “The black man, however sincere, is a slave to the past. But I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the Compass.” Later he lyrically adds: “It is not the black world that governs my behaviour. My black skin is not a repository for specific values. The starry sky that left Kant in awe has long revealed its secrets to me.”

Unlike many self-described anti-racists today, who engage in performative demands for white guilt, Fanon states: “I have not the right as a man of colour to wish for a guilt complex to crystallise in the white man regarding the past of my race”. What he wants, instead, is respect and dignity: “I, a man of colour, want but one thing. May man never be instrumentalised. May the subjugation of man by man — that is to say, me by another — cease. May I be able to discover and desire man wherever he may be”.

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Yet Fanon is also often linked with the Négritude movement, a group of black Francophone intellectuals who wanted to cultivate a distinctively black consciousness. This is partly because the most famous Négritude intellectual was the poet and politician Aime Cesaire, who was not only a fellow Martiniquan, but also taught Fanon at the Lycée Schoelcher.  However, Fanon was largely ambivalent to the Négritude movement, and in Black Skin, White Masks he expresses views that run contrary to their ethos: “In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilisation unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past”. And he later states: “No, I have not the right to be black. It is not my duty to be this or that”.

What animates Fanon most was a deep curiosity. In the book’s conclusion, he asks: “Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?” Indeed, the final sentence is: “My final prayer: O my body, always make me a man who questions.” And so explicitly linking Fanon to his French colonial background has its pitfalls; it potentially blunts his wish to be free from his past, and to be, as he put it, “constantly creating myself”.

But while his background didn’t determine his views and attitude, it did, to a considerable extent, influence it. What can be more French — apart from the obvious things — than turning the act of asking questions into something sacred? On the front cover of the new edition of Black Skin, White Masks is a photograph of Fanon. He looks both proud and sceptical, embodying the most captivating features of French culture.

If Fanon was an icon of anything, it wouldn’t be Third World revolution, but rather republican France. But he was not an icon; he was simply a man. And his humanity was all the more transparent in the tragic gap between his universalist ideals and the reality of being seen as just a nègre.

It could have been a lot worse than threats: the good guys policing the piscatorial business are frequently murdered; some 18 fishery inspectors from Papua New Guinea were “lost at sea” in the space of just five years. Gerlie Alpajora, a Philippine government inspector, suffered a different fate. After exposing a raft of illegal tuna-fishing, she was assassinated in her sitting-room with a bullet to the head.

The reality for those working in the seafood trade — which is funded by a leviathan $35 billion from the world’s taxpayers — isn’t much better. Thailand’s coastal shrimping relies on slave labour, which is eminently expendable: about 24,000 fishermen die every year. As one commentator in Seaspiracy remarks: “We have heard a lot about Blood Diamonds. This is Blood Shrimps.”

Yet the crime on the high seas that concerns director/presenter Ali Tabrizi is ecological destruction. Cue the predictable, tear-inducing segment on the 150 million tons of plastic swirling around the bellies of whales. Far more horrifying, though, is the ecological holocaust caused by mainstream, commercial fishing methods. Usually, these involve “bottom trawling”, where boats pull gigantic nets across the ocean floor which scrape up fish — along with everything else in their path — wreaking havoc on ocean habitats. The United Nations suggests that it causes up to 95% of global oceanic damage.

Longline fishing, a technique often vaunted as preferable to bottom trawling, isn’t much of an improvement. Here, boats drag fishing lines bearing multitudinous hooks through the water. The hooks are indiscriminate; they catch and kill unintended species — from sea birds to whales — by the score. So whether you’re bottom-trawling or longlining; the methods are prodigiously wasteful: 40% of fish netted is so-called “by-catch”, unwanted fish which is dumped over the side of the trawler, usually dead. Meanwhile, longlines also snag on the ocean floor, and are never retrieved, killing marine fauna long after the boats have departed.

“Thank Poseidon”, you may say, “I only eat certified sustainable seafood approved by the Marine Stewardship Council.” But as the makers of Seaspiracy prove beyond reasonable doubt, the little blue “MSC” printed on supermarket packaging is hardly worth the label it is written on. The MSC receives income from giving its approval; and so few who apply get rejected. Ditto “Dolphin Safe Tuna”; one researcher discovered that 45 dolphins died for the sake of eight “friendly-fished” tuna.

What the labels don’t tell you is that over-fishing has caused wild fish-stocks to plummet. Seafood species have declined by 90% in the post-War period. In one of Europe’s most underreported scandals, 10,000 dolphins die every year in nets off the Atlantic coast of France. Then there are the seabirds which, like us, depend on natural fish-stock: their number has dived by 70% in just seventy years.

Neither does Seaspiracy let fish-farming off the hook. On industrial “aqua farms”, whether they are inland or cages in the ocean, fish spend their lives packed as tight as sardines in cans. Not infrequently, the water deteriorates into a toxic, anaerobic brew of antibiotics, faeces, and growth-enzymes which seeps into adjacent areas — a two-acre Scottish fish farm produces about the same amount of waste as a town of 10,000 people. Yet it’s Seaspiracy’s secret footage of salmon being eaten alive by lice that is most hard to forget.

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Still, it is a tough sell, getting viewers to feel for fish in the way that they weep over furry and feathery things. (I confess, though, that my inner schoolboy warmed to herring on discovering they communicate by farting.) Sea-creatures, as great literature has often had the acuity to recognise, are Other; hence Scylla and Charybdis, Moby Dick and Jaws.

They are monstrous things in the primordial waters we escaped from, which makes it hard to secure money for their conservation. Eco-lucre is based on the animal popularity contest; a team led by Stefano Mammola from the Italian National Research Council analysed the EU’s Life programme, which funds climate and environment action, between 1992 and 2018 to see how money was allocated. The study found that 23% of Europe’s vertebrates received funding compared with 0.06% of invertebrates. In total, vertebrates attracted €970m (£880m), six times more than the €150m for invertebrates. Risk of extinction does not influence how much money a species received. Giant clams just aren’t as sexy as grey wolves.

Doubtless Seaspiracy will still make a splash, though perhaps not on the scale of the same production team’s anti-factory farming Cowspiracy from 2014. For although Seaspiracy makes for striking television, one would need to be as mad as Captain Ahab to swallow all of its political solutions. There is the sensible suggestion of “No-Catch Zones” (a mere 1% of the globe’s oceanic expanse is presently protected), and fishing subsidies could certainly be made more transparent. But Seaspiracy, taking its lead from Cowspiracy, which reputedly turned more people vegetarian than any other “text” in history, also wants us to do the “only ethical thing”: stop eating fish.

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In shoving this message down our gullet, Seaspiracy comes over all fishy itself. Not all fish-farming is as tainted as Tabrizi would have us believe. Either he has never heard of organic fish farming, or has chosen not to highlight it. Be it ignorance or manipulation, it is unseemly methodology. Also, if the vegetarians promoting “plant-based alternatives” believe arable farming to be intrinsically environmentally good, they need to get out to the grain prairies of East Anglia more — and watch the chemically loaded, eroded soil wash into watercourses, and thence to the sea.

More to the point, it’s entirely impractical. People will never stop eating fish; Homo sapiens developed a taste for trout, a hankering for haddock as soon as he climbed down from the trees. To cater for demand, commercial fishing was begun as early as Graeco-Roman Antiquity: Oppian’s Halieutica, the oldest surviving treatise on sea fishing, dates to circa 180AD. And if the Romans did not invent the artificial fishpond, they perfected it. The earliest known Roman fishpond in England is at Eccles, Kent, and was built around about the time of Oppian.

During the Medieval Era, Western Europe was speckled all over with man-made fish-ponds. All of them organic, all of them brimming with wildlife; there are few better places for nature than a pond. And these fishponds were maintained precisely because they provided food. Sometimes the best conservation of nature comes from satisfying the stomach. It is perfectly possible to have your fishcake and eat it.

John Lewis-Stempel is the author of Still Water: The Deep Life of the Pond

From as far back as 2002, victims described being attacked in the back of his vehicle. Yet nothing was done until 2007, when he was arrested, questioned, and released without charge. His victim, a 19-year old, has described how the police laughed at her when she told them about her injuries. It was the same story for all those other women who had flagged down Worboys’ cab after a night out assuming they’d be safe in his black cab. Investigating officers generally presumed the women were drunk, incapable and unreliable. The victims were blamed and the cabbie allowed to drive on.

Shocking new light on this cascade of police failures is laid out in Predator: Catching The Black Cab Rapist, a Channel 5 documentary airing tonight. Among other grim revelations, is the recording of a police interview with Worboys following that complaint in 2007. Officers can be heard bantering with the cab driver rather than interrogating him. Laughing and joking with him, they appear to be helping him construct a defence to the woman’s allegations of drug-assisted rape. One even says: “I thought maybe she’s sort of come a bit undone at the front when you was helping her …”

In turn, the victim, during her questioning, was made to feel like she “deserved it”.

It was only the following year, after a pattern was finally noticed amid all these reports, that Worboys was properly interrogated and, at last, charged with several assaults. Then, in March 2009, Worboys was convicted of one count of rape, five sexual assaults, one attempted assault and 12 drugging charges. He had pleaded not guilty, and still shows no remorse for his crimes.

The civil case against the Metropolitan Police brought by two of Worboys victims found that there were “serious operational failures” during the investigation. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report into the investigation was a critical opportunity to bring about change in police culture. But all that was recommended in terms of sanctions were “words of warning” for some officers.

It’s an appalling example of poor policing. But you would have thought, wouldn’t you, that 12 years after Worboys was finally convicted, the force might have got their house in order? Sadly, I think that, if anything, things have got worse. The police have a consistently pitiful record when it comes to dealing with violence towards women, and their excessive reaction to the Sarah Everard protests the other weekend does little to dispel the feeling that perhaps they are part of the problem.

Between 2012 and 2018 across England and Wales, almost 1,500 complaints were filed against police officers, special constables and police community support officers (PCSOs) across 33 forces involving accusations of sexual misconduct, including sexual harassment, exploitation of crime victims and child abuse. These officers and special constables, remember, do swear an oath to “cause the peace to be kept and preserved and prevent all offences against people…”

Of these cases, 371 were upheld, resulting in the sacking or resignation of 197 individuals. One case involved a Devon and Cornwall officer, who was sacked following accusations that he attended a victim’s address, stripped off uninvited, and joined her in the shower.

Another is that of Peter Bunyan, a PSCO based in Penzance, who was convicted of three rapes and one count of sexual assault against two victims in 2016 and jailed for 16 years. Bunyan had previously spent time in prison after being convicted of having sex with domestic violence victims and a woman with mental health difficulties while on duty.

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In data published in the Observer, figures from the Royal College of Policing’s current “barred list” – officers who have been dismissed from a force and are banned from joining another – show that nearly a fifth of offences inlude abuse of position for sexual purposes, domestic violence or harassment against the public and colleagues. Of the 555 officers barred since the list was introduced in December 2017, more than 1,100 reasons for dismissal are listed of which more than 200 involve sexual, harassment or domestic abuse offences.

Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in 2019 show that police officers are seven times more likely than doctors or teachers to be dismissed for sexual misconduct. Now this is, admittedly, a small percentage of the service — but this is only the visible part. Police action lawyers will tell you that vulnerable victims rarely follow through on a complaint against a police officer, and rarer still that such complaints are held up by the courts.

I have interviewed several women over the years who have reported being asked out on dates, or just blatantly for sex, by the police they have called out to a domestic violence or rape complaint. I have also heard far too many stories from women in prostitution about police sexually assaulting them during an arrest, or asking for “sexual favours” in return for letting them go free. And I will never forget observing a rape trial and overhearing the police officers in the case joking outside the court about the “sexual positions” the victim must have enjoyed during the attack. Last week, one young officer shared an internet joke of a similar ilk with his colleagues, as the search for Sarah Everard’s body continued.

Not long after a serving police officer was charged with Sarah’s murder, Oliver Banfield, a probationary police officer based in the West Midlands was given a non-custodial sentence and ordered to pay just £500 compensation having been found guilty of a violent assault on a woman walking home following a night out.

Banfield was seen on CCTV shouting “slag” at Homer as he wrestled her to the ground using police training techniques. Homer, who suffers depression and panic attacks as a result of the attack says it was though Banfield was “fulfilling a violent cop movie fantasy”.

The attack took place in July 2020 but Banfield was allowed to continue to work as a police officer until he was sentenced. Police took eight weeks to follow up on the report about one of their own colleagues and to visit the scene of the crime. It was left to the victim to persevere with her request to have access to the CCTV footage which police had failed to do. As Homer commented after the sentencing, “It was like I had reported a missing cat.”

And, so, public confidence in the police when it comes to sexual and domestic abuse is at an all-time low. Women just don’t trust them. Earlier this month, the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) lodged a super-complaint to the Police Inspectorate highlighting systemic failures women are experiencing when reporting domestic abuse perpetrated by police officers. Officers, it is alleged, manipulate the system and act in bad faith.

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This tendency is underlined by Nogah Ofer from CWJ, who describes the prevalence of certain behaviours within the Service as springing from a “locker-room culture” in which violence against women is trivialised and loyalty towards fellow officers and concern about impact on their careers are paramount. The Centre has been contacted, for example, by almost 50 women who say they have been seriously betrayed by those tasked with protecting them when they reported domestic abuse and sexual offences committed by police officers and staff. These cases are currently being investigated by the same police force that employs the accused officer.

The rape conviction rate, meanwhile, is stuck at an all time low. It might as well — and I am beginning to sound like a stuck record now — be decriminalised. In an attempt to correct this, in 2018, Met Commissioner Cressida Dick announced that the police had decided to abandon its policy of automatically believing those who report sexual assault.

The “I believe you” policy had been introduced in 2011 in response to low conviction rates. It was a simple way to reassure victims that they would not be automatically accused of lying — something which had been exposed in the 1982 film A complaint of rape. This fly-on-the-wall documentary by Roger Graef film featured a woman with a history of psychiatric illness being bullied and cajoled by a bunch of male officers as she tried to report a rape. They dismissed her story as “the biggest bollocks” they had ever heard. The screening of the film triggered a change in British law and a more sensitive approach to rape cases.

However, three years ago, Dick dismantled that in favour of the “open mind” approach. It was in response to a series of high-profile failed cases, including the Carl Beech fraud. But Dick also said at the time: “If [the allegation] is a long time ago, or it’s very trivial, or I’m not likely to get a criminal justice outcome, I’m not going to spend a lot of resources on it.”

In other words, this pretty much gave police licence to disregard those cases in which a woman may have been previously sexually active with the accused, or had been drinking, or had dared to dress as she wished. Naturally, it had little effect on the conviction rate. It just shifted the blame back on to the victims.

But as a shadow report on rape compiled by a number of leading women’s organisations found last year, to address that extremely low rate, no new laws or policy are necessary, rather police officers need to up their game under the existing framework. It was a lack of training, persistent sexist attitudes from officers, and a failure to hold police accountable which led to those endless blunders in relation to Worboys and similar cases, not the law as it stands. And this still hasn’t been addressed.

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Right now, as this shocking documentary airs, it feels like things are getting worse for women. The CWJ is contacted by a constant stream of women who report drug-assisted rapes, which never progress to the “risk averse” CPS. Calls to Refuge during lockdown have been up by an appalling 60%. And now our streets don’t even feel particularly safe, as all those women last weekend were protesting. The police are seen to be very much part of the problem.

Which leaves women in a pretty desperate position. Worboys may be set to spend a while yet in jail but there are many other predatory men out there getting away with it. And unless there is a radical shift in that locker-room culture, and accountability and how women are dealth with, those men will continue to feel as invincible as the black cab rapist

We spent the night together in my hotel room; the day after we held hands in the gallery. He was raging and touching, and I lived with him for an autumn in Totnes. I left him on Boxing Day when his requests that I attend an orgy with him became too insistent and I found photographs of an almost nude woman on bedding I had bought for him on the dressing table. My friend named him Count Fuckula, and that was that.

None of this made it into the Ukip piece, but I am not Tabitha Lasley, the author of Sea State, an investigation into the oil industry which segues into an unhappy love affair. I am none of the brilliant women who would once have been novelists — fiction protects men from women, and women from themselves — but who are today writing subjective non-fiction. Lamorna Ash’s Deep, Salt, Clear, a story of working with Newlyn fishermen; Tamsin Calidas’s I am an Island, a story of living as a crofter in the Hebrides; Catrina Davies’s Homesick, a story of living in a shed near Lands’ End which is also a cold indictment, quite literally, of the housing crisis.

If I were, I might have written a piece in which I compared my discovery of Count Fuckula’s body to my discovery of Ukip; I might have compared his personal alienation — he was an alcoholic — to his quest for personal sovereignty. No, it would have been a book about an Electra complex — Electra in Ukip — but I was not skilled enough to write it and I didn’t want to know why I loved him. I might have written a self-hating piece on the love affair for a newspaper. They will take this sort of material from female journalists — and only from female journalists. It’s easy to sell your one note trauma. But these new books are not at all self-hating. There is too much voice in them.

Sea State is not a book about the men on the oil rigs, just as Deep, Salt, Clear is not really about fishermen, and Homesick is only superficially about a home. They are books about seeking. Sea State is Lasley’s state, and she succeeds: the story is hers, not theirs. It is theft really, audacious theft, the taking of men’s spaces as they have always taken ours. Lasley takes their bodies too. She leaves London her worthless lover (the first of two we meet) for Aberdeen “a Gulf state, a desert caliphate”.

She seeks working-class men with two lives: onshore and off. (Ash has a similar curiosity for men “always on the verge of falling”.) That is what obsesses Lasley because that is what she has. Towards the end of the book, she says that she is emotionally dependent on cocaine: “My mordant companion these twenty years.”

Her journalistic practices are dishonest and effective. She accosts workers in bars and clubs; she gives false names and false back stories; she is called a whore, repeatedly, about which she is sanguine and aggressive both; she walks with a man who says he is a murderer and offers to kill her lover for her. There is no need: she will do it, and with ink.

She sleeps with her first interviewee, a man of extraordinary emptiness called Caden, and they create a fantasy life as she researches his nothingness, intruded on by his furious wife and his furious emptiness. She describes her breast selfies, and her orgasms, but, in the end, it is all thwarted by Caden’s greed. He will keep a wife he doesn’t love rather than pay her alimony, and this is just one of Lasley’s superb and possibly unconscious metaphors: the oil industry is about greed and that is perfectly expressed by her description of Caden furiously ironing his expensive clothes, which, a wrecked family and an appearance in his lover’s memoir aside, is the only visible product of his double life.

When I read Sea State, I was disturbed by it, enough to ask myself why. Why was I obsessing about Lasley’s real book about the oil industry, the one without her in it? The one she would have written in the 1990s, when I became a journalist, if she had been sanctioned to do so? The one a man might write, with less observation — he would not have seen Caden ironing — but with more detail on the oil industry? (When writing about working class men, middle-class men often sound as if they are meeting another species. They sound stunned.)

Why was I angered by her strange combination of vulnerability and toughness? I suspect it was recognition — we have all been pleasing for access, and nude is pleasing — though she went further than I ever did, in print at least. Sea State is an honest account of how she got her story, when the fashion is to reach for a synthetic poise that is wholly invented. Few writers will say, as Lasley does: “I’d taken him for an adult because he made a lot of money, but he was like me.”

This genre is disturbing because of its newness, its tidal masochism and sometimes its cruelty — when a female writer has a voice, it can say anything. It is an incursion into masculine places by women who lose no femininity to get there. Their vulnerability — their smallness — is explicit, yet they are bold and they are not ashamed. It is all dangerous work. The Brontës published pseudonymously for a reason. Jane Eyre is barely fiction, and nowadays it wouldn’t be. It would be a book about the working conditions of governesses with discursions on tuberculosis, masturbation and psychosis.

Only Lasley writes her explicit sexual passions — Ash likes words, Calidas sheep, and Davies the sea — but the female voice is everywhere: women take space and form in the world. Ash gilds fish with poetry in an almost religious experience learning, “I will have to acknowledge that not only am I not a woman of the sea, but that I am not a woman of Cornwall either.” Davies makes herself a home on the edge of England, and she manages to keep it. Calidas, though she is intimidated by local men who abuse her, will not leave the Hebrides. Some wish she would. She was accused of colonialism, which I am pleased to call hysterical: she bought a small farm.

This is a hail of female voices who know they can write anything. When I began to write, you could not be yourself, unless men first sanctioned it. I was full of smiles. I like to think that Lasley does not smile at the men in Aberdeen. I like to think she does not have to.

Carney, of course, is a near-perfect specimen of homo financicus, a recent offshoot of common humanity that seems to sleep less, read more, earn more, do more than the rest of us. Among other things, Value(s) could be a field-guide to the subspecies: its PhD-holding author runs marathons, gets up before dawn to meditate and read the Classics. He analyses international finance with penetrative intensity. A father of four, he’s 56 years old but doesn’t even have the grace to look it. Some people think he looks like George Clooney. If he sometimes sounds a bit pleased with himself, we should remember that he has quite a lot to be pleased about.

But if Carney himself is relatively easy to describe, his book is much less so. Several famous names have had a go. Subtitled Building a Better World for All, it comes larded with glowing quotes from the likes of Bono (“a radical book that speaks out accessibly”) and Christine Lagarde (“Indispensable”). These endorsements are a pointer to the worst thing about the book: Carney’s namedropping. He frames the entire narrative as the result of a slightly over-written lunch with the Pope, and his cast of characters comes from the upper slopes of Davos. Not that Carney is wowed. Most super-famous people are disappointingly normal, he declares, though he admits to being impressed by Emmanuel Macron, the Grand Shiekh of the Al Azhar Mosque, Bono himself, and Greta Thunberg.

Unlike some of the names thus dropped, Thunberg’s walk-on part in this book makes sense. The author meditates long and hard on the greatest problem facing twenty-first century politics: climate change. He’s impressive on the technical and intellectual challenges involved in making huge changes now to avert a disaster that could still be several decades and many electoral cycles away. But can a matinee idol technocrat with a big brain and sharp suit take the people with him? Is Value(s) Carney’s first step into real politics?

He certainly likes to talk about “leadership”, dedicating page after page to the topic. But sadly, it turns that out what he means, most of the time, is “management”. Cue endless lists of the sort of bland wisdom familiar to anyone who’s ever set foot in a business school:

“Leaders are different in that they have to decide. In the end, to lead is to choose… When you take decisions as leader, it will obviously help greatly if they are the right ones… People will respect a leader who has integrity and who is benevolent, but they won’t always follow them if they are not deemed to be competent.”

Sometimes this stuff is sprinkled with some erudition and cod humility: “When I worked at the Bank of England, I would remind myself each morning of Marcus Aurelius’ phrase ‘arise to do the work of humankind’.”

Frankly, the classical references are easier to swallow than some of the jargon. Carney’s thoughts on the nature of the company, corporate purpose and how to encourage businesses to behave better — and make a profit by doing so — are genuinely impressive. If politicians engage with them, we may end up with a better, fairer and more sustainable capitalism. But Carney’s editors haven’t helped him welcome new readers to the subject. See, for instance: “IIRC is working with IASB, GRI and SASB to create a cohesive interconnected reporting system (though the IMP work).” To which even readers who like to think they’re au fait with corporate governance reform might say: WTF?

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Carney’s lapses into impenetrable jargon are understandable; he’s never really had to communicate clearly to the masses. Yes, central bankers talk in public, but generally as opaquely as possible. Among his global colleagues, Carney was a chatty charmer, but the bar was low. He talks a good game about always remembering the need to win and maintain public confidence — and even makes a stab at claiming deep legitimacy for independent central banks by invoking Magna Carta. But the truth is that, while those banks are given considerable autonomy by politicians to take decisions that have profound effects on the lives of voters, they are not directly accountable to those voters.

Carney is no rabble-rouser. His idea of the BoE getting down with the people is updating the portraits on bank notes. More telling is what he doesn’t mention. Nowhere, in almost 600 pages, does he find space to discuss quantitative easing — the “extraordinary” monetary policy that continued on his watch. Creating new money to buy bonds, and lower interest rates, had a profound social and political impact. It saved businesses and saved jobs; without it many people, especially younger and poorer ones, would have suffered significant hardship. But the side-effect was pumped-up asset prices. Effectively, central banks made people who own property much richer, and made it much harder for people who don’t own property to buy it. Voters are owed more of an explanation for this than Carney offers.

But when you have a hammer, problems look like nails. If you’ve worked as a carpenter, you tend to want to make things out of wood. And so Carney is keen to take the model of independent central banking into climate change policy, proposing “independent Carbon Councils” that would make quite profound decisions about the price of carbon emissions. He’s careful to maintain that, in the end, elected leaders must sign off big distributional decisions, but makes no bones about trying to find ways to keep those decisions away from voters: “Delegating responsibilities helps insulate decisions with significant long-term implications from short-term political pressures.” Never mind addressing such pressures, let’s just duck them — a novel approach to “leadership”.

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For all that, Carney’s book is still good — and the best bits are very good indeed. Unlike some global-minded liberal types, he recognises that the nation still matters. He sees patriotism as not just legitimate, but a way of actually helping countries work together on big problems. He understands that markets haven’t worked for everyone and won’t without sensible state action. He offers a lot of ideas about things like skills, education and employment that would make economies more productive and societies fairer. And his critique of “market societies” in which common values have been eroded, and individualism trumps social obligation, should be read and absorbed by every technocratic centrist wondering why those terrible populists do so well despite their terrible policies. “Building social capital requires a sense of purpose and common values among individuals, companies and countries,” Carney says.

That might sound like an uncontroversial statement of post-liberal orthodoxy — but remember that Carney himself is no post-liberal. He’s not just a Goldman Sachs-educated archduke of Davos: he’s a potential Liberal Party prime minister of Canada. And whereas the current holder of that title, Justin Trudeau, has largely embraced the identity politics that is rendering liberalism illiberal and unattractive, Carney’s book has no time for any of that — or for Trudeau himself. Other technocratic leaders get approving namechecks, but there’s not a single word about Canada’s current PM. Subtle, eh?

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By Dan Hitchens

Value(s) has enough ideas to fill a manifesto, but gives no overt sign that Carney is plotting a political career — an omission that suggests he wants to keep his options open. Could homo financicus make a sudden evolutionary jump to become a full-blooded politico? Less accomplished men have done so before him: Macron is an ex-banker who had a fraction of Carney’s experience when he took the Elysée; Trudeau, on the other hand, was a supply teacher. Barack Obama a law lecturer.

But those leaders are not the real comparators here, not least since they have all, in different ways, failed to live up to expectations. The liberal centre, the tribe of just-do-what-works technocrats, has lacked truly successful leaders since Bill and Tony were taken from us. Clinton and Blair were policy wonks and globalists who could still instinctively feel the mood and priorities of people who loved their communities and their countries. They have had no true heirs. Obama talked the talk, but in the end couldn’t hide his scorn for “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion”. David Cameron put on a decent act but lacked conviction or spine. Even his greatest fans wouldn’t claim Joe Biden will define an era in the way Clinton and Blair did.

Could Mark Carney take the good ideas from his impressive book and try to make them work in the messy world of politics?  If he did and it worked, he’d be the closest thing the real world has seen to the West Wing’s Jed Bartlet: a liberal intellectual technocrat with a devout Catholic’s social conscience — every sensible centrist’s political fantasy. But then, fantasies are fictional for a reason.

In 1997, just after the youngest millennials were born, Damien Hirst accidentally prophesied how that tension would affect their generation, in the title of his art book: “I WANT TO SPEND THE REST OF MY LIFE, EVERYWHERE, WITH EVERYONE, ONE TO ONE, ALWAYS, FOREVER, NOW.” The online world is destructively dual: it creates a delirious dream of boundlessness, while being an open prison; its subjects can see anything, while under total surveillance. These days, the kids who were toddlers when Hirst was pickling his first shark know this so implicitly that they seldom really think about it.  For them, what they screen off — and what they broadcast — has always been a function of being the first generation to undergo the process of identity formation within the feedback loop of a networked world.

And what that gets up-voted above all else, in that world, is emotional disclosure. It is the “stunning and brave” tale of trauma, spliced with a measure of pithy, pungent political agitprop — the essay that can generalise out from “me me me” to any kind of oppressed “we”. The inherent narcissism of the confessional genre is offset by those “we” aspects of the generalising think-piece, while the most shareable articles on social media have that same combination of relatability and a call to arms. In that context, writers like Jia Tolentino are in poll position to be the Voice.

Back in 2014, Tolentino was an editor at Jezebel, the blog site that pioneered a certain kind of personal-is-political feminism, now everywhere, which involves paying women $50 to share painful experiences in their past. Tolentino’s own work never misses the chance to score some minor culture wars point, always peeling back yet more of the soft viscera of her hurts in exchange for kudos.

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Like many women who grew up in the 90s, Tolentino feels defined by her very online-ness. At the start of her 2019 essay collection, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, she tracks the technological timeline of her life, from hymning the alien fritz of the 48k dial-up modem to raking over her pre-teen diary on her AngelFire website. For her, it was that early experience of online identity construction that represents that generational break-point. “The self is not a fixed, organic thing, but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance,” she says. But: “the internet adds a host of other, nightmarish metaphorical structures: the mirror, the echo, the panopticon.”

Life in the internet’s panopticon means you can never screen-off your personality — never engage in the perfectly normal behaviour of being different people in different social settings. It’s a process Tolentino sees as inherently crazymaking, because it means you’re never “off”, you never get to be in a rumpus room of consequence-free engagement. This over-construction, she concludes with the weary inevitability of an ex-Jezebel writer, is worse for women, who have always been socialised that way. She offers a millennial cliché as a solution: be more you. Lean into your saleable self. Tolentino is very good at doing this; she seems to have a native gift for swimming with the digital tides.

The same cannot be said of Roisin Kiberd, who, with a pedigree at VICE and a thing for techno-dystopian Mark Fischer, is another contender for the Voice. True, her new collection of essays, The Disconnect, opens with a remarkably similar catalogue of digital personhood. And the two are almost the same age; Kiberd references many of the same formative moments in the life of the net as Tolentino. But while Tolentino was expertly curating her brand, Kiberd began to come apart. In early 2016, she tells us, she had a breakdown, swallowed a month’s worth of pills and washed them down with cheap rum — taking care to set her Twitter to private, and write down all her online passwords.

A Dubliner, Kiberd had a PR job as the voice of an online cheese brand, then drifted into ill-paid, gig economy work writing about tech and for tech. Meantime, Dublin’s property market trebled in value, meaning that hers is a life of shunting between share-houses, with regular crestfallen returns to the parental nest. Kiberd was supposedly living the dream, a quintessential anywhere, free to jet off at a moment’s notice to live an Emily In Paris-style in a dreamy mittel European city. Yet in truth, all she does is work obsessively, storing up shifts on the treadmill today to make room for some undefined “real life” tomorrow. Anything that could be regarded as progress, the true stuff of life — a decent home, colleagues, regularity, hobbies — hovers just out of reach. Her world has become an infinite scroll, she’s a hare on a wire.

Somewhere, she knows this. But can she stop it? Can she look away? Well, ask yourself: can you?

If Tolentino is The Millennial Voice in 1D — a flatland of on-message self-disclosure — then Kiberd is its 2D upgrade: human, often lyrical, if still prone to cling to the orthodoxies of the consensus culture. But it takes the memoir-as-fiction to really nail the Voice in 3D; for true millennial thought, you need someone who thinks beyond the impact of tech in culture. Who thinks about culture as though it were just another kind of tech.

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Lauren Oyler was once a writer in VICE’s Brooklyn offices. I think I saw her there, in late 2015. Her tribe, Broadly — VICE’s women’s pages — were hived off in a single glass-panelled office, about eight of them around a single board room table. Peering in, the vibe did not seem good in their own personal panopticon. To say Oyler’s fantastic new novel Fake Accounts is thinly-veiled is an insult to the diaphanous. It’s literary cling-film, right down to the Peanut Butter M&M dispenser in that Brooklyn HQ. Oyler’s lead — like her, like Tolentino — also writes articles which are “designed to say X is bad for women”, dredged up by fishing the net for similar articles. Just like her heroine, prior to VICE, Oyler “moved to Berlin” in the golden age of the moving-to-Berlin era, around 2012. According to nothing more reliable than internet forum gossip, “she refused to learn any German and made a huge unnecessary fuss about Berghain”, the celebrated club that’s basically impossible to get into. (Oyler apparently claims her German is fine.)

Oyler’s leading woman is a moth drawn to this Mecca of hip globalised youth culture. Actual Germans with actual lives and cultures move around behind her on wires, Non-Player Characters in her personal video game. She speaks none of the language. She invests nothing. Instead, she spends a lot of time of Twitter, babysits for an American woman and goes on shapeless, meaningless internet dates, dishing up a string of fake personas for a string of nice enough men.

To say that Oyler has captured the Millennial Voice would almost be an understatement. She’s nailed that sense in which the surveillance is as much internal as external. Her narrator is perfectly self-aware, yet gets in tussles with herself about politics. Somewhere, there’s a catechism of things she merely thinks she believes, that she should believe — the same decision paralysis you see everywhere. When another character admits to an obsessive desire to get into baking, you get the sense she’s riven between the notion that baking is fantastically Instagrammable, and an ongoing ascetic quest to purge, to forego the net entirely and get back to real, manual work.

The Millennial’s is a binge-purge universe; a neurotically self-optimising one, always looking for the next tweak, the next FODMAP-free diet, or net-abstaining dopamine fast — which will be the one that will finally snap life itself into focus. Meanwhile, panning back, the truth of the matter that people with two Master’s degrees share shabby houses in cities where they don’t belong, well into their thirties, always on dates, always on Twitter, and thus perfectly, sublimely, free. It’s a culture of never truly gaining anything because you never truly commit to anything.

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Oyler “divides her time” between New York and Berlin now. Kiberd’s Instagram bio says she’s “Irish, mostly in Berlin”. The climax of the latter’s book comes, where else, at the Berghain (though she never actually names the club). There she is reunited with an apparent true love, in a town with “rents a third of Dublin”. At around the same moment in history, back in fiction, Oyler’s narrator was also trotting past the place, making mindless quips.

Berghain is famous for confiscating your phone on arrival. If Berlin is Mecca, then Berghain is the Black Stone of Kaaba, a big silent rock nothing can penetrate. Somewhere in there is a place where, for just one night, you cannot post anything to your socials. It is the Lost World Of Spontaneity. And while the word spontaneity has a reputation for, y’know, carefree stuff, in truth it requires deliberate choice. It requires putting something down, in order to become undivided. A lesson which none of our real or fake memoirists ever fully absorb.

Turns out the voice of the millennial isn’t so much that of the Anywhere as the exhausted Everywhere: a generation who simultaneously wish to have the kudos of the rat race, the hyper-socialisation of the big city, and yet also the simple parsimony, the mental clarity and basic stability, that comes from families and small towns; and the sacrifice inherent in choosing. You cannot live the rest of a life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always and forever — now can you?

Even before lockdown, the conflation of work and home was well-established. Companies call themselves “families”. Cubicles have been replaced by the supposedly more relaxed open-plan office. The suit, symbol of the 9-5 day, is on the way out. “Knowledge workers” curl up on their sofas.

Work has also supplanted the home in more fundamental ways. In the mid-18th century Samuel Johnson reckoned that the ultimate human ambition was “to be happy at home.” For many, it’s now the workplace that promises meaning and fulfilment. Even Amazon warehouse labourers look up to see signs reading “We love coming to work and miss it when we’re not here!”

Choose a job you feel passionate about — so a thousand gurus have advised us — and you’ll never work a day in your life. But as people are starting to notice, the language of “following your passion” is also a convenient way for employers to change the subject from, say, decent pay and conditions. Nobody is easier to exploit than someone working for love. If you want to build a prison without anyone noticing, make it look like a playground.

The homeliness of work, then, turns out to have a more sinister aspect. Home is a place of self-sacrifice; so it makes sense that gig platforms like Fiverr openly seek workers for whom “Sleep Deprivation Is Your Drug Of Choice.” At home, you expect to be known and seen; naturally, then, employers take ever more invasive steps to survey their employees, tracking each mouse-click or making workers’ health-insurance rates dependent on how much exercise their Fitbits record.

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The two faces of modern work — one cheerful, one ruthless — are the subject of a couple of new books, Jamie K McCallum’s Worked Over and Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back. They tell similar stories, of stressed and burnt-out workers ruing the broken promises of the “Follow your passion” economy. Wealth, of course, has flowed upwards: in the last 30 years, according to the policy analyst Matt Bruenig, the US’s top 1% has increased its net worth by $21 trillion, while the bottom half has lost $900 billion and, once you factor in debt, literally owns less than nothing.

And power has flowed in the same direction. Welfare programmes force the destitute to choose work over childcare; low-wage employees are subject to algorithms which deprive them of predictable schedules, with severe consequences for mental health and family life. Even the most “flexible” workers have to meet tough standards: to maintain good status on the handyman platform TaskRabbit, for instance, you have to say yes to 85% of requests.

McCallum’s book is lucid and tightly argued, but Jaffe’s is in some ways more intriguing: it shows how the madness of modern work has opened the mainstream to radical thinking. In Jaffe’s case the radicalism has a Marxist flavour. Work Won’t Love You Back, which has been applauded everywhere from Marie Claire to the Financial Times, makes an unfashionably dogmatic argument. Wage labour under capitalism just is exploitation, Jaffe tells us. Your boss may seem like a decent person, but in the end “financial concerns will come first for them.” Jaffe doesn’t “believe in bosses”; or, for that matter, in the family, which has “developed as a mechanism of controlling and directing labour … The only option, as theorist Jordy Rosenberg wrote, is to ride ‘the supernova of the family’s destruction’ through to something new.” Jaffe doesn’t believe in charitable works, either (“a relationship of power”). Only some kind of revolution, she believes, can restore us to our true selves.

Anyone baffled by the enduring appeal of Marxism should read Jaffe’s final chapter, with its plaintive note of spiritual yearning. “It is true,” Jaffe concedes, “that there is no outside to capitalism, but it is also true that there are moments in our lives where we can see, briefly, beyond it.” Our nameless desires, she writes, come closest to making sense on a strike or protest march. “Solidarity doesn’t mean you have to like every person you’re fighting alongside. But in those moments where you stand shoulder to shoulder, you do love one another.” Here the reader catches the last glimmerings of the revolutionary dream, that hope which throughout the 20th century animated so many courageous and intelligent people — as well as quite a lot of psychopaths and moral monsters — to give their lives to it.

Besides, it isn’t just radical socialists who are rethinking work from the ground up. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein recently toyed with the idea that “there’s no natural dignity in work.” Prophets of a robot takeover, like the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, argue that we should reshape the welfare state to serve a mostly wageless society. The post-work movement actively hopes that the machines can be given our jobs while we find something better to do; proponents of “fully automated luxury communism” agree, only adding that the robots should be collectively owned.

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These groups are right that too much time is currently spent on mindless wage-slavery instead of friendship, creativity and truth-seeking. But there are a couple of problems — even apart from the much-disputed question of whether a robot job apocalypse is really on the cards. The first is that, despite it all, many people (including the most eloquent critics of contemporary work culture) really do like or even love their jobs. Work can be demeaning, but it can sometimes be deeply fulfilling, whereas a utopia of round-the-clock poetry readings and community bake sales might at some point start to pall. The other problem with “post-work” is that it assumes a future which “we” as a society are all going to shape. But right now, there is hardly a functional “we” — there are workers and there are owners, and the owners have all the power.

Jamie McCallum’s book is especially acute on this point. He tells the story of Disneyland’s underground laundry service, where employees arrived one day “to find giant screens affixed around the workplace, with their names colour-coded like traffic lights blinking on and off.” If they failed to meet productivity targets, their names switched from green to amber and then red. Hidden away in an upstairs room, managers tweaked the system for maximum efficiency; anyone who understands power dynamics will not be surprised to learn that, before long, the injury rate rose, the break room and bathroom were deserted, morale plummeted and the workers began to turn on each other. Until, thanks to one determined leader, they banded together and came up with a pact to all work at a reasonable pace. It is the kind of collective action which unions once organised. But today, the worker often stands alone against a giant employer.

All of which gives extra significance to this month’s vote in Bessemer, Alabama, where Amazon warehouse workers could become the first in the United States to form a union. The almost unbelievable tactics used to thwart them — reprogramming traffic lights, bombarding employees with anti-union messages — show that Amazon fears the tide is turning. After years of telling its workers what to think (“We love coming to work and miss it when we’re not here!”), the company seems appalled at the possibility of those workers speaking with their own collective voice. Is it any wonder that capitalism is going out of favour, when an astronomically wealthy corporation which employs 1.3 million people worldwide can’t abide the thought of negotiating with them? You don’t have to be sentimental about “solidarity” to hope fervently that, this month in Alabama, the workers win.

A woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every four days in the UK. And the myth persists that these murders are spontaneous — just the result of two people having a fight and one of them ending up dead. But, as renowned criminologist Professor Jane Monckton-Smith makes clear in her new book, In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder: “They are the most predictable homicides, which is why we can and should be preventing them.”

To prove her point, Monckton-Smith has developed a method for detecting and intervening in these relationships. According to her eight-stage time-line, the escalation of risk can be tracked and halted before it reaches a deadly conclusion.

She formulated the model during a research project based on 400 intimate partner homicides. Drilling down into each of these cases, she realised they all played out in the same way — even the four incidences of women killing men. When published, her research was naturally greeted with a frenzy of enthusiasm and attention so she decided to develop it into a book.

In Control is a devastating read. It opens with as powerful and heart-breaking an account of the complexity and deadliness of domestic violence as I can remember reading. It is a story from the author’s early days in the police service, an account of her attending the scene of a “domestic”. Monckton-Smith arrives to help a young woman who had been hit on the head with a lump hammer. “Her boyfriend – her assailant – had fled the scene before any of us arrived. The woman was simply gazing at the floor, quiet and very still. There was blood trickling down the back of her neck and onto the carpet.” Despite her serious injuries, the woman refused to go to hospital.

It left me in tears, keen to know what had pushed Monckton-Smith to submerge herself in the horrifying details of these hundreds of homicides. “Anger,” she tells me.

After joining and leaving the police service, and fronting a heavy metal band for a decade, she then went back to school. “That’s when I started studying criminology,” she tells me. “And that’s when I started getting angry.”

Focusing on male violence while studying for her PhD, Monckton-Smith read the work of feminist criminologists such as Sue Lees, whose work exposed the misogyny within the criminal justice system. But it was meeting Frank Mullane, the CEO of Advocacy After Fatal Abuse, whose sister and nephew Julia and William Pemberton were killed by her former husband in 2003, that led Monckton-Smith to focus on domestic homicide.

“Frank took me to meet a family where the mother had been decapitated in front of her children,” she says. “Every single one of the stories I heard when we visited these families had a ring of ‘I’ve heard this before’. Things that hardly ever came up in court, such as his controlling behaviour, such as how she wasn’t allowed to have the lights on, or how he always had to know where she was.”

From there, she went on to develop her now widely-taught forensic model for the identification of domestic abuse. But she isn’t your conventional academic. She prefers her work to be read by those outside of the elite institutions rather than churn out papers for academic journals. But even though this work isn’t gathering dust on university library shelves, there are certain of her colleagues who are dismissive.

“Am I looked down on by some academics? Oh yes!”, she says, describing one conference at which she was presenting a paper on violence against women. “Some male academics were sneering at me, saying that my work was ‘voyeuristic’ and that there wasn’t a proper academic angle. So I thought, ‘Right, fuck you, I am going to give this the forensic attention that it deserves’. It made me realise how dismissive some people are of women being killed.”

Her book is neither academic nor voyeuristic. It is one of the most important books on abuse you will read, detailing each of the eight stages from first inkling to murder. It starts with the best advice that you can give a woman at the beginning of a relationship: “Don’t ignore what his ex said just because he says that she’s lying.”

These men are a type, says Monckton-Smith. It is not a crime of passion and they do not “just snap”. We can often predict how things are going to go by looking at his history. So any allegations of abuse in previous relationships, or any criminal records should set alarm bells ringing. This is stage one of the eight.

Stage two, she says is the abuser pushing for a commitment from his victim, such as a baby or moving in together. “Once they’ve got that commitment, it’s written in blood as far as they’re concerned,” says Monckton-Smith. “When they say, ‘You’re mine’, it can sound romantic. But what he is saying is, ‘I own you and you can never leave me’.”

By stage three, the abuser begins in earnest to create a situation where the woman would find it almost impossible to leave. At this point, coercive control at different levels is happening in practically every case. At stage four, he feels his control slipping. This happens almost always when the victim leaves or attempts to leave the relationship. This morphs into stage five, during which he will escalate the abuse in order to regain control.

“If she has left him, this is where the stalking comes in,” says Monckton-Smith. “There may be more threats of suicide, more acts of coercive control.” Or the perpetrator may decide to go back to stage one and love-bomb her in an attempt to remind her of how things were, or he could circle back to stage three and reassert his control.

“Stages three, four and five can be revisited over and over again for years,” she says. “Alternatively, he moves on to stage six, which is where the real danger of homicide begins.”

Stage six is when the perpetrator will decide how he is going to resolve things, having decided he may not regain control unless he kills her. If this is his decision, stage seven is the planning stage. “Some plan for months, years even, others for a few hours, but the important lesson to learn is that they do plan,” says Monckton-Smith.

The homicide is the eighth and final stage: “It is rare they fail. Forget what you hear about how he ‘just snapped’, that’s bullshit.”

Despite its harrowing subject matter, In Control is very readable and extremely accessible. She brings the eight stages to life using real case histories — interviews, police files and court documents — to highlight the methods and motives of the killers.

‘Vincent’ is one such murderer. “Vincent is ordinary,” writes Monckton-Smith. “He has never sought to be otherwise. His three-bedroom semi-detached house on a pleasant urban street … is well maintained, as is his ageing four-door estate car – precious emblems of the life he considered any man could expect. He claimed his entitlements and nothing more.”

Vincent stabbed his wife, Donna, 38 times because she had planned to leave him. He wasn’t usually a physically violent man, but he did control the movements and behaviour of Donna and their children. According to Monckton-Smith, who visited him in prison, Vincent saw himself as the victim. “He is not unlike so many of the other men I looked at.”

Monckton-Smith brings Donna, and all the other dead women in this book back to life with respectful scrutiny as she tells their stories with the help of 999 calls and the recollections of family members. She pores over medical records, text messages, social media and letters written by the victims that describe their abuse. She allows their cries for help to be finally heard.

Monckon-Smith says wants this book to save lives. “I don’t want people saying, ‘Oh, he was really jealous’ or ‘He was depressed, isn’t it awful?’ I want them to be saying, ‘Why wasn’t it recognised before? Why didn’t somebody say something? Why wasn’t this stopped?’”

After a year of lockdown, during which calls to helplines have risen significantly and household tensions have been unescapable, this book is more important than ever. If people hear these dead women’s stories, if people learn from them, then maybe others will be spared a similar fate. For until these domestic deaths are seen as the cold-blooded murders they are, the morgues will continue to fill with the bodies of women who could — and should — have been saved.

Obviously, you don’t think this is the only problem in the world, and you don’t think that all of humanity’s resources and ingenuity should be dedicated to finding ways of getting lynx and wolves released into north-west Scotland; we should still worry about carbon emissions and so on. But you think some of humanity’s resources and ingenuity should be devoted to it. Say you think that 0.01% of society’s time and effort should be spent thinking about lynx, instead of none at all.

But you’re only one person, representing one 70-millionth of the British population. Shifting society’s behaviour even by that small amount means convincing thousands of people to agree with you. You would need to dedicate all of your time, all of your effort, if you are to have any chance whatsoever of moving the dial even a little bit. 

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So you end up looking obsessive and weird – “why are you shouting about lynx all the time? Don’t you know there are other problems in the world?” – even if you’re completely right that the lynx-shortage is a bad thing. Scott Alexander calls this the “fallacy of reversed moderation”. The lynx-advocate might even be tempted to overstate the scale of the problem and the efficacy of the solution: “Deer overpopulation is causing children’s brains to shrink; only introducing lynx can restore normal-sized cortices to our nation’s young!”

This is, I think, part of what is going on in Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperilling the Future of the Human Race, by Shanna Swan and Stacey Colino.

In 2017, Swan, along with other scientists, published a meta-analysis, an aggregation of existing research. It said that since 1973, the average sperm count among men in Western countries had fallen by 59%, and by somewhat less in the developing world. It seems to have been a well-carried-out study, and it caused quite a stir.

The question, of course, is what caused (or is causing?) this decline. Swan and her co-authors suggested that it is, in large part, the modern chemical industry, and in particular a family of products called “endocrine-disrupting chemicals” (EDCs), which interfere with hormonal processes in the body, especially those involved with development and reproduction. One group of EDCs found in plastics, known as phthalates, are the particular enemy. They get into the water system, they’re in our takeaway containers, they’re in our cosmetics, and they’re damaging our precious bodily fluids. 

Count Down is essentially the book of that study. It expands on the problem, to talk about fertility in general, not just sperm counts; it talks about other causes, like smoking and obesity; and it offers individual advice and policy recommendations for how to ameliorate it. 

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All of which probably sounds pretty sensible. Swan thinks we have a growing fertility problem; she thinks she has identified the main cause; and she wants to help solve it.

But the book does not seem sensible. Because for Swan, everything causes fertility problems, not just phthalates. Sugar, beef, cycling, stress, watching TV, doing too much exercise, doing too little, eating the wrong diet; you can barely get out of bed in the morning without sabotaging your chance of having a baby. Undergoing stress and trauma will not only make you less fertile, they’ll affect your children’s fertility (should you remain capable of having them). You ought to “ban plastic from your microwave” and throw out your non-stick pans because they’re killing your sperm. I half expected her to say we ought to wear ray-shielded underpants.

And phthalates and other EDCs don’t just damage your chance of having a baby – they seem to be the cause of everything wrong in the world. Declining bird and fish populations. Abnormal development in alligators and sea snails. Reproductive failure in dolphins and grey seals. The apparent worldwide decline in insect populations is, for Swan, the fault of chemical pollution. She even suggests that the growth in intersex conditions and perhaps the rise of gender dysphoria, and even changes in gender identity, could be because of EDCs (and taking paracetamol in pregnancy!). She does say, in what feels a bit like an act of arse-covering, that it has led us to become more open-minded towards gender expression, which is a “silver lining”.

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What’s more, she hints, it’s causing the worldwide slowdown in human reproduction. The world’s “fertility rate” has dropped, she says; halved, in fact. And “the average twenty-something Danish woman today is less fertile than her grandmother was at thirty-five”.

And — and this is the big one — this could literally drive humans extinct. Our sperm could wither and die; we will become unable to have children. She refers several times to Children of Men and The Handmaid’s Tale, even saying that modern gestational surrogacy is a “consensual version of the [Handmaid] scenario”. (I feel like the non-consensual nature of the Handmaid scenario was fairly central to the story, whatever your opinions about surrogacy, but that’s by the bye.)

I can’t confirm all these different claims[1. Not least because there aren’t any footnotes, just a list of references for each chapter, which makes it bloody hard to check. Authors, please use footnotes, they don’t “break up the flow” or anything and it means pedants like me can have a look at your sources.], and perhaps many of them are entirely true; it is hardly as though chemical pollution hasn’t caused many environmental catastrophes in the past. Leaded petrol and asbestos are two obvious candidates that took decades to be fixed. And a few quick glances do suggest that there is something real here: EDCs seem to be implicated in the collapse of bald eagle populations, and in an apparent rise in intersex conditions, for instance.

But some parts seem on shakier ground. As it happens I’ve been speaking to entomologists recently for some other work. They thought that insect populations probably were declining (although the data was shaky), some much more than others; and they thought that pesticide pollution was probably a driver, and many pesticides are indeed EDCs. But they also mentioned climate change, eutrophication, light pollution, invasive species, habitat loss. Swan doesn’t outright say that EDCs are the main cause of insect loss (or of declining seabird populations), but she certainly implies it.

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There’s also the fact that, as she says, smoking in pregnancy seems to be a huge cause of infertility in male offspring, but expectant mothers smoke much less now than they did even 15 years ago and that is dropping all the time. You’d hope that would go a long way to offsetting environmental influences.

And her take on the human fertility issue just seems entirely backwards to me. The Danish woman being less fertile than her grandmother sounds dreadful, until you realise that fertility is literally measured by how many children you have. The Danish study found that 20-somethings in the 2000s have fewer children than 35-year-olds in the early 1900s. But that’s because Danish women, like women almost everywhere in the world and especially the developed West, are just having fewer children and having them later. The study had nothing to say about whether these women (or their partners) were less capable of having children.

In fact, the decline in total fertility rate – that is, the number of children born per woman — has indeed been going down worldwide; from more than five in 1950 to less than 2.5 last year. But usually I see that portrayed as a good thing. As Swan acknowledges, it correlates with, and is normally said to be partly driven by, female education: the more years of schooling women get in a country, the fewer children the average woman has. 

Fertility also correlates with child mortality: as the number of children dying in childhood goes down, so does the number of children born. There’s also the fact that women still tend to have more, rather than fewer, children than they would ideally like (although I should admit that the data all comes from poorer countries, which have more children and which are less affected by sperm-count decline). That doesn’t mean there isn’t a fertility problem, but it does suggest it’s hardly time to start making comparisons with Children of Men.

Swan says that this reduction in global birth rates will lead to a “demographic crisis”, and she’s probably right: having lots of old people and fewer young, working people will make it harder to support pension schemes, raise taxes, and so on. But unless you want to keep growing the population forever, you’re going to have to go through it at some point. More important, whether it’s good or bad, I don’t think you can reasonably blame it on phthalates or EDCs. You could easily convince me that there is a growing problem of infertility in the developed world, but I doubt it’s the main cause of declining family size, or that it’s mainly caused by EDCs, given the tendency to have children later.

Most important, though, it seems bizarre to suggest that this is going to lead to human extinction. This isn’t me over-interpreting Swan: she really drums it home. Scientists suggest, she says, that fertility decline “could threaten the survival of the human race”; she quotes a researcher saying it is “possible” it could lead to “extinction of the human species”. Her last chapter ends with the phrase “we and other species could end up marching toward the brink of extinction”.

And she says that humanity should be considered an “endangered species”, by the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s definition of the term: “Of five possible criteria for what makes a species endangered, only one needs to be met; the current state of affairs for humans meets at least three.” (Those three criteria are destruction of habitat, inadequate regulatory mechanisms, and man-made factors affecting our existence.)

But there are at least 7.7 billion of us. Our population has increased by more than 10% in the 10 years since I wrote this. You can argue about whether or not we’re damaging our habitat or inadequately regulating ourselves, but surely the key criterion for whether a species is endangered must be that there aren’t very many of them.

Sure, Swan might reply, but the main reason the population is still going up is because we’re living longer. If the world fertility rate drops below replacement, then the population will decline, and eventually we’ll run out of people.

But that is, still, obviously nonsense. We’ve all learned about R in the last year. Of a virus, it’s the average number of new infections that one infected person will cause. If R>1, exponential growth and epidemic; if R<1, disease dies away. But it can apply to anything that reproduces itself: yawns, computer viruses, internet memes. Or humans.

A fertility rate of 2 would be an R of 1 (two people creating two new people), if we ignore deaths in childhood for now. So if the world’s fertility rate dropped below 2, the population of the world will indeed decline, just as the virus does.

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But there are different strains of the virus, some of them more infectious — with a higher R — than others. They spread more easily. So the more infectious ones become more common in the population, and even if the “average” virus has an R below 1, it only takes one strain with an R above 1 to eventually become the dominant version and then cause a new wave of the epidemic.

Similarly, there are different fertility rates around the world. Even if R is below one, on average, worldwide, some countries will have higher rates of reproduction. Unless the phthalates are literally rendering us all infertile, which so far they don’t seem to be doing, then humans will continue to reproduce, and those human groups which have the most children will end up being the most common. The future is Amish!

(Plus, if we really do get a Children of Men situation, total global infertility, then efforts to create viable gametes from somatic cells will be increased pretty damn quick; they’re almost there now. We may go extinct some day, but it won’t be fertility loss that does it.)

This hyperventilating about human extinction, and rolling everything bad into a ball labelled “fertility and phthalates”, makes no sense if you think Swan (a respected epidemiologist) is trying to give a dispassionate assessment of fertility issues. But she’s not. This is a polemic. Swan thinks the world doesn’t pay enough attention to the problems of EDC-influenced fertility loss and environmental damage: so she’s upping the stakes as much as she can, making it as big a deal as she can, trying to shift the dial a little bit. The fallacy of reversed moderation declares that you can only do so by dedicating your whole being to the problem (and perhaps overstating it here and there) and looking like a crank.

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In a way, I hope she’s right, and that phthalates and other EDCs really are as big a problem as she says. If they are, then — just as we did with leaded petrol, asbestos and CFCs — it is possible that we could simply ban them, find some non-harmful replacement, and watch our alligator, dolphin and sperm populations spring back (although she does point out that the chemical industry, when some harmful chemical is banned, often replaces it with some not-banned but equally harmful equivalent). If all these problems are actually caused a huge, interwoven web of habitat loss, overfishing, air pollution, climate change, diet, and EDCs, then while getting rid of EDCs will help, we’ll still be staring at a severely depleted, damaged world with a lot of complicated problems to fix.

And in one important sense, her book is a success. I’m not going to follow all the advice in her book and replace my shower curtain or my pans — the convenience of non-stick pans seem to me to be worth it for a presumably small risk of reduced fertility (if it weren’t small, we’d have noticed it).

But I am going to turn the little dial in my head, the one labelled “Importance of endocrine-disrupting chemicals”. She has convinced me that they may be a real problem, and I hope someone more dispassionate and less polemical takes a long look at the risks (and benefits) to humanity of using them, and decides whether and where they are worth it. I’m still going to use Tupperware in the microwave, though. 

These resonated strongly with many readers, particularly — but not exclusively — young men. They were augmented by lectures, debates and YouTube videos; the book itself has sold over 5 million copies worldwide, and counting.

His follow-up, Beyond Order, seeks to go further — this time into the necessary balance between “the two fundamental principles of reality”, order and chaos, and their manifestations in authority and creativity, conservatism and change.

As we learn from the preface, it was written in the course of a highly turbulent period which included his daughter’s surgery, his wife’s diagnosis with a terrifying form of cancer and Peterson’s own traumatic withdrawal from benzodiazepine, which triggered severe insomnia, crippling anxiety and a form of incessant restlessness known as akathisia. Under such circumstances — in which both Peterson and his wife felt near to death — it might be considered a triumph to have produced a book at all. The opening rule is, in part, an explicit acknowledgement of how difficult it is to make something, as opposed to tearing it down: “Do not casually denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.”

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In the course of his rise to public prominence, Peterson has faced rather a lot of casual, and not-so-casual, denigration himself, along with unusually powerful levels of adoration from those who feel that they have been greatly helped by his books and lectures. The very nature of what Peterson represents — an unashamed didacticism, a strong emphasis on personal responsibility and a dogged resistance to progressive orthodoxies — has made him a kind of human lightning rod for the cultural conflicts of our age.

In Beyond Order, Peterson is reliably thought-provoking, often engrossing and occasionally a little ponderous in style. Indeed, with its careful explorations of myths, symbolism, fictional themes and clinical case studies, it is difficult to comprehend how his latest book reportedly had a number of junior employees at Penguin Random House Canada protesting, and even becoming tearful, at the decision to publish it. But then it is also hard to tell which version of Jordan Peterson, real or constructed, they were primarily reacting to: the author, the Toronto psychology professor, the YouTuber, the Tweeter, the combative debater, the indignant scourge of much left-wing dogma, or — more recently —the public player in a painful and complex human drama of illness and addiction?

Beyond Order, of course, is the creation of Peterson the author, whose words are weighed and qualified, and whose instructional paragraphs seek to strip his readers of their most damaging self-delusions while shoring them up with a measure of empathy. It “explores as its overarching theme how the dangers of too much security and control might be profitably avoided” and how to face fear and harness creativity in a way that is useful.

By way of illustration, Peterson includes a number of case studies from his clinical psychology. In these he comes across as a conscientious practitioner, who listens sympathetically to clients, cares about their recovery and searches for ingenious — if at times unusual — ways to help them.

Among his patients are a young, black, gay man who was psychologically devastated by a violent row with an ex-boyfriend, and a young, white woman emotionally paralysed by the workaday cruelties of the wider world, including the array of death laid out for consumption at the butcher’s shop. In both cases Peterson’s clients needed to come to terms with the troubling aspects of human nature — sexuality, violence and mortality — and wrestle them back into proportion (in the case of the hypersensitive young woman, his recovery plan included accompanying her to watch the embalming of a corpse).

Peterson has a sharp eye for the vagaries of human nature, and he can be a compelling storyteller, especially when narrating his own experiences and those he has observed from life. There is a fair amount of wisdom in Beyond Order, of the kind that used to be called common sense, but which might need restating in an era when views on what constitutes sense are no longer reliably held in common.

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A waiter tells Peterson, for example, how helpful his book and videos had been, as a result of which — in the author’s words — the waiter had “changed his attitude toward his comparatively lower status (but still useful and necessary) job”. Instead of despising his job, and himself, he had applied himself as fully as possible, and as a result been promoted three times in six months.

Peterson anatomises the considerable skills and interactions needed to be a successful waiter, from constant attentiveness to fostering good relations with chefs and tricky customers alike. For those who apply themselves to the difficulty of doing such jobs well, Peterson says: “The skills they acquire will be eminently portable.” Perhaps young people used to absorb this kind of nous instinctively when watching and learning from older mentors in practical settings: the farm, the workshop, the restaurant, the factory. No doubt many still do. But for those who may be freshly entering the world of work after an extended period in school and college, where the focus is placed more narrowly on intellectual achievements, it is worthwhile spelling it out.

Peterson is never shy of spelling things out — but then again, it seems that plenty of his readers welcome his didacticism, and if they don’t, why pick up a book with another 12 rules in it? In any case, he’s adept at blending the practical, the personal and the philosophical. Chapters such as “Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible” — a progression from his earlier instruction to clean up your room – move into an exploration of the role and transcendent power of art, his own past failure to enjoy the world through the eyes of his small children and an inherently comic run-in with a disapproving university administrator after he hatched a plan to beautify his office with Hammerite paint and wooden panelling.

Yet while the book repeatedly stresses the need for a balance between conservative and liberal forces in society — order and chaos again — its arguments become much hazier on political territory. Peterson’s own experience of the increasingly feverish displays of thought-policing in modern universities no doubt partly informs his impatience with the devotees of ideology. But some of the “-isms” which he criticises — such as socialism, feminism and environmentalism — began as a way of addressing genuine wrongs in the existing society, and often did so peacefully and successfully, which is no small achievement.

It was the practical, patriotic socialism of Clement Attlee, for example, which gave Britain its National Health Service. It was feminist campaigning that secured women votes, equal pay legislation, property rights, financial independence and a network of women’s refuges from domestic violence. Peterson, who makes a convincing case for marriage in general, also vividly acknowledges that failures occur even within broadly beneficial social institutions: “Sometimes, you have married someone who is a psychopathic brute, a congenital and incorrigible liar, a criminal, an alcoholic, a sadist (and maybe all five at once). Then you must escape.”

Yet how exactly might a woman have escaped from such a marriage, say, in the Republic of Ireland of the 1960s, except in the most abject of styles? Up until 1976, a husband could sell or mortgage the family home without the consent or knowledge of his wife. The “marriage bar”, which prevented any married woman from working in the public sector, was not revoked until 1973. And divorce itself was not legalised until 1996. It required a movement to exert sufficient social pressure to alter these things, and the movement required a name.

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Today, the feminist movement contains many different strands, some of them seeming to work in opposition. It can often appear now as if useful social action is being supplanted by stunts, relatively trivial shaming campaigns and ideological rows conducted in increasingly jargon-laden language. Energies may arguably be flowing into the wrong place: it is striking, for example, that while so much feminist academic discourse is generated in the US, it remains the only OECD country without a national statutory paid maternity leave. But in a world that still includes FGM, forced marriage, domestic violence, “revenge porn” and a growing normalisation in the West of violence against women during sex, there is surely still a place for a vigorous international movement which explicitly centres the concerns of women and girls.

In his writings and YouTube videos, Peterson speaks engagingly of strategies for self-transformation, with emphasis on bolstering one’s character and moral purpose before taking on the rest of the world: stand up straight, clean your room, do not lie, do not do what you hate. Some of Peterson’s critics find the simplicity and directness of such advice mockable, but I think there is sense in it, and its effect may be more profound than one might initially imagine.

One cannot expect a single book — or even two books — to contain the theory of everything. But since Beyond Order explicitly discusses the tension between the status quo and the necessity for change, one might reasonably ask: how exactly does Peterson think that the change part should be pursued?

Both the rage and the gratitude which flows towards Peterson from millennials and Generation Z, for example, is partly a result of the way in which certain social structures have hardened around them. It is not simply that they have been conditioned to consider their rights over their responsibilities, as he says, although that might well be true. In many cases their passage towards independent adulthood, even to the point of affording a home and supporting children, has been made much more difficult by forces beyond their control. A combination of high house prices and the rapid expansion of an insecure “gig” and freelancing economy has placed many young workers — including highly-educated, middle-class ones — in a financial situation of near-permanent precarity.

Peterson, rightly, warns against resentment, “that terrible hybrid emotional state, an admixture of anger and self-pity”. But even worse than resentment, surely, is misdirected resentment. Much of today’s ideological fury, which plays out on social media, strikes me as a form of generational revenge, whereby language has become the only battleground upon which angry young people can score a decisive victory. We have all now seen the drama unfurl a number of times: a professionally successful person might say something mildly questionable in Twitter, say, or state an opinion at odds with the fast-changing template of what is considered socially acceptable by a vociferous minority. The clamour for their instant ejection from public life begins. Corporations join in because policing the nuances of acceptable speech has become an easy way of signalling solidarity with “progressive” youth and attracting their disposable income. They also find it preferable to paying adequate tax or offering young employees a solid pay and benefits structure that might permit them a more economically secure life.

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To some extent, Peterson has turned this implicit modern bargain on its head. His books have proved highly profitable at the same time as he decries the burgeoning call-out culture of the Left. Much of Beyond Order delves deep into myth, embodying chaos in the form of the snake or the dragon. But it is hard to avoid the suspicion that when a younger generation looks at Peterson they find themselves wrestling, not with Grendel’s mother, but with a different archetype: Dad. Some of them, perhaps lacking paternal authority themselves, are clearly heartened by his insistence that they have agency in the world, and must therefore own it. Others are infuriated by his apparent repudiation of the arguments on societal structure that they consider vitally important.

Peterson does not seem a duplicitous person, but rather unusually sincere and emotional. That is, perhaps, what makes him both so testy and so effective when challenged in debate. He operates with a degree of personal courage under considerable stress, and has clearly been wounded, in the past, by the ways in which some critics have made blithely contemptuous suppositions about him. The Canadian writer Tabatha Southey, for example, once dubbed him “the stupid man’s smart person”, a phrase that reeked of intellectual entitlement. But who exactly are these “stupid men” to whom she referred? And if the “smart man’s smart person” hasn’t yet worked out a way to make themselves broadly intelligible to ordinary people, then whose failing is that?

Peterson has an army of loyal online followers, some of whom enjoy framing verbal debate like an MMA fight — “Jordan goes beast mode!” — and there are times when it feels as if Peterson himself (as in the interesting, broadly courteous debate with Helen Lewis) subsequently characterises the interaction as more malevolent than it appeared to many who watched it.

It is natural to like people who are explicitly on your side, especially when you often feel yourself assailed by waves of genuine hostility. Yet there can be more shared values with perceived opponents than this electronic reiteration of opposition allows for. The amplification of bad feeling by commentators on social media can result in Peterson and whoever has publicly engaged with him, particularly women, both feeling bruised by the encounter. And, given his intermittent tendency to depression, the growing visibility of his own, clearly beloved family on Twitter and YouTube — those unpredictable, exposing arenas whose effects we do not yet fully understand — worries me a little.

The alt-Right and its conspiracy theories have recently gained a concerning amount of ground, while much of the volatile energy of the “progressive” Left is now primarily directed not at self-evident bigots and racists, for example, but also at anyone who dares to argue for working in a different style towards a better, more harmonious society. That has stifled actual progress and sucked political energies into the never-ending competitive pieties of the culture wars. But it is also leaving a growing number of liberals feeling alienated from this particular version of left-wing politics. If Peterson is right to be wary of policies that demand enforced equality of outcome, there is surely much common ground to be found in reducing the existing disparities in equality of opportunity — or at least those that can be reduced.

Perhaps Peterson’s next book might engage with the looming question he has left broadly unanswered in this one, interesting though it is. Many institutions contain much that is of value, but we cannot always assume that the “hierarchy of competence” which he talks about is working, especially where the careful sifting of evidence shows that it is not. Governments are repeatedly lobbied by forces that do not always have the best interests of ordinary people at heart, and policy is often corrupted by short-term thinking and responses.

So when things do go awry, what can we agree needs fixing, and how might disparate groups of individuals best co-operate to effect valuable political change? In a world that has come to salivate over the constant drama of a battle, that is one discussion which might really subvert expectations.

Writing in the 1920s, DH Lawrence had foreseen it all. The son of a miner, he hated industrialism, which he believed had “frustrated that sense of community that would make us all unite in pride and dignity”. Politics had no solutions; it dealt in meaningless abstraction, rather than ordinary feeling. Talking with political activists, Lawrence observed, “is like trying to have a human conversation with the letter x in algebra”.

Exiled from Britain after the First World War, he set off an a “savage pilgrimage” before tuberculosis finally caught up with him. By 1930, he was dead. It was up to a new generation of writers, each in their own way inspired by Lawrence, to respond to his challenge to politics. They are the subject of Marc Stears’s new book Out of the Ordinary, which shows how the likes of George Orwell, JB Priestley, and Dylan Thomas rejected the abstract ideologies of their day. In using a language that was concrete and specific, Stears argues, they created a new vision for politics.

A political academic and former speechwriter for Ed Miliband, Stears believes that revisiting the output of these writers in the 1940s can provide a solution to our polarised present moment. The technocratic politics of the Blair and Cameron years have left Britain divided. Populism, both on the Left and Right, has failed to offer a convincing solution to years of economic inequality and political gridlock. For Stears, the answer is a politics of what he calls “the ordinary” and “everyday life”.

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In Stears’s account, Orwell, Priestley and Thomas rejected Lawrence’s “abstract idealisms”, refusing to fall, as Thomas puts it, “for the latest isms like pups for rubber bones”. For Orwell, vague and abstract language was the source of his era’s “political chaos”. It allowed politicians to manipulate the truth, and in its worst instances, to justify murder.

They eschewed the pessimism of the Right, too, and what they saw as grandiose ideas of Britishness. Priestley attacked what he called “Big Englanders”, Orwell hated “Rule Britannia” and flag-waving officer types, while Thomas loathed Elgar.

Instead, they aspired to a language that was tangible and rooted in people’s everyday lives and experiences. For Thomas, “the everyday” lay in memories of his childhood in Swansea: “the pubs and clubs, billiards rooms, promenades, and the suburban nights”. For Priestley, in “filling stations and factories”, “arterial and by-pass roads”, and “bungalows with tiny garages”, while Orwell associated ordinariness with “solid breakfasts, gloomy Sundays, smoky towns, winding roads, and green fields”.

When the Second World War broke out, Stears argues, these writers were forced to reconcile their sense of unease with conventional ideas of Britishness. In doing so, they turned their commitment to specificity into something of popular substance. Priestley’s Postscripts challenged Churchill for radio listeners; Orwell commissioned programmes for the BBC in India; Thomas wrote radio plays and film scripts.

After the War, however, the country failed to unite around this vision: Attlee built the welfare state from the top down, while successive governments — both Labour and Conservative — enfeebled local government. Politics become increasingly technocratic and distant from everyday concerns. All the things that once connected politics to everyday life, from trade union branches to local newspapers, began to disappear.

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This is a compelling account, but how applicable are the insights of these long-dead writers to contemporary politics? Today’s politics has arguably become more, not less, abstract. Indeed, we live in an increasingly abstract world, where things that were once solid — from telephone booths to paper money — have melted into an intangible digital world.

In his book, Stears recalls a conversation with a Labour pollster who, in the 2015 election campaign, told him that people valued spending time with loved ones more than any other issue. Nothing else came close. When Stears asked him why the party didn’t make this more of a focus, he was told this — the issue that matters most to people — isn’t what politics is about.

But if politics feels distant from people’s everyday preoccupations, it is because its language so often fails to connect. Both Left and Right talk of “equality”, “responsibility” and “aspiration”: vague, abstract words with no relevance to people’s lived experience. Even when politicians try to resolve these problems, their language fails to bring ordinary people onside. “Social mobility” and “levelling up” are phrases almost unheard outside the corridors of Westminster.

This linguistic emptiness means that politics is, as the philosopher Simone Weil wrote, increasingly “peopled exclusively by myths and monsters”. The slipperiness of abstract words means they can “represent for us an absolute reality”, while, at the same time, “mean anything whatsoever”. We reach for abstractions to explain systems of belief and ideologies: “fascism”, “sovereignty”, “patriotism”. But too often these words are manipulated to smear political opponents or shut down debate. When this happens, the common ground erodes and polarisation becomes inevitable.

The Conservative Party’s risible “war on woke” is a case in point. “Woke” is a meaningless expression often used by proponents as a commitment to vaguely progressive ideals. For its detractors, however, “woke” is nothing short of the 21^st century’s answer to Bolshevism. If we cannot even agree the meaning of a word, substantive argument becomes impossible. A “war on woke” is like trying to catch a phantom. And when only 4% of the public know what a culture war actually is, the chase is futile, too.

And if conventional political language loses its purchase on ordinary life, voters will look for unconventional politicians to fill the vacuum. When Donald Trump, for instance, pledged to “build a big, beautiful wall”, his language couldn’t have been more concrete. This was ordinary language at its most ordinary. Trump was electable because he refused to obey the conventions of politics and speak its jargon.

That isn’t to say that Trump-style populists are the solution to this crisis. Instead, if we are to develop a politics that can connect with voters’ lived experience, specificity is a place to start. Rather than gesturing vaguely to “community”, for example, we should talk about the institutions that facilitate one: affordable housing, for instance; access to fields or parks; pubs, shops, places of worship and schools.

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Politics will never be entirely free of abstractions, of course. For politicians, abstract language will always remain a useful tool to paper over the divisions that run through parties. Concrete language leads to firm promises, which are hard to keep. And disregarding all vague words would, as Orwell acknowledges, lead to a kind of “political quietism” where big ideas could not be debated at all. What’s more, phrases like “the ordinary” and “the everyday” are themselves abstractions, with different associations for different people.

But a concern for the everyday would, in Stears’s view, bring politics closer to people’s lived experiences. He believes it might help convince them that policy is not something irrelevant and aloof from their daily lives, but something that can be created by them, and in their own image.

In the meantime, what’s certain is that too often, politics feels like a poor substitute for the things that actually concern us: decent work, relationships, health, and a good place to live. If we could move politics closer to these concerns, we would go some way to solving many of the great challenges of our age.

“Unlike the progressive counterculture of the 1960s, which encouraged sexual openness, flamboyant individualism, and euphoric cultural mixing, today’s social justice crusades are built around joyless rites of self-interrogation, announced publicly but conducted inwardly.”

As much as anything else, many of today’s debates about identity and free speech deal with aesthetics. By presenting these activists as puritan zealots, the Quillette editors can invoke the contrasting glamour of the sixties counterculture. Today’s young activists are uncool.

In his new book, Free Speech and Why it Matters, the comedian Andrew Doyle also invokes past progressives that were more sympathetic to free speech so he can criticise the contemporary Left. Referring to civil rights, gay rights, and women’s rights campaigners, he writes: “without freedom of speech theirs was a lost cause”.

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Doyle also charges his defence of free speech with an optimistic tone. Freedom of speech is important because it allows us to defeat bad ideas: “We are far better placed to know and overcome evil if we are acquainted with its essence, and the best way to achieve this is to listen and to read”. The implication, here, is that progressives who have abandoned free speech not only shy away from difficult truths, but have also lost faith in our capacity for greater moral progress.

Nevertheless, both Doyle and the Quillette editors make a series of points that complicate this neat distinction between the optimistic progressive radicals of the past, who embodied the essence of free speech, and their dour incarnation in the present.

Puritanism is not simply about being pessimistic about the human condition, and unwilling to entertain new ideas. It is, as the American novelist Marilynne Robinson put in her essay, “Puritans and Prigs: An Anatomy of Zealotry”,  about the struggle for moral goodness. Struggle is the key word here. For Robinson, being good “is a great struggle and a mystery”. This means that “moral people seem to me especially eager to offer pardon in the hope of receiving pardon, to forgo judgement in the hope of escaping judgement”. So in trying to suppress your base instincts, trying “govern oneself”, you adopt a more tolerant attitude to the beliefs of others — this is the essence of free speech and the antithesis of cancel culture.

Doyle touches on this in his book. In one passage, he writes that we all understand the impulse towards censorship because we sometimes feel it. But in trying to enforce this instinct, we also “degrade ourselves by subordinating our reason to baser instincts”. This valorisation of reason over instinct, as Ralph Leonard and Maria Albano have written, recalls elements of Platonism and traditional Christianity: it is puritan in its assumption that human passions are so volatile and dangerous that they need to be contained by reason. Doyle puts the point more forcefully when he writes, “we find that in many cases the greatest threat to free expression comes from ourselves”. It is only through constraining our primal instinct toward censorship, then, that we can ensure freedom of speech.

The impulse towards censorship, then, is base. Repressing that instinct for censorship — our reason suppressing our base passions — is puritan. Consequently, puritanism fosters the environment for greater liberty. The relationship between constraint and freedom is also explored by the Quillette editors. They consider, for instance, the French Revolution and its often-cited legacy. “In its liberal form”, they write, “the revolution peaked with the constitution of 1791, which created a democratic constitutional monarchy”. The revolution degenerated, however, with the Terror — the orgy of denunciations and executions that gripped republican France: “As with communists, religious fundamentalists, Cold War McCarthyites, and autocratic populists, the architects of this terror argued that the Republican project was too urgent to be constrained by the need for due process, free speech, the right of assemblies, or other civil liberties”. They compare these people who are unconstrained by moral principles to modern-day progressives who see themselves as “vanguards against racism and fascism”.

But therein lies a tension. The criticism of contemporary progressives in this section is that they are unable to sufficiently constrain their base instinct for censorship; but the soixante-huitard radicals the Quillette editors admire were also characterised by their very lack of inhibition. Later on the editors state, quite correctly, that “crowdsourced dissent-suppression campaigns” show that freedom of speech depends as much “on a hospitable intellectual culture as on legal codes”. Which begs the question: what does this culture consist of? It does not depend on openness and radical optimism; rather, free speech depends on a puritan ethos.

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Doyle, for instance, points out that a genuinely hospitable intellectual climate would consist of a sceptical attitude to people in power being able to enforce hate speech codes without descending into tyranny. “You might trust our leaders to judge these matters sensibly, but it takes a certain myopia not to see governments of the future might want to abuse the precedent”. Doyle’s case against censorship, then, also partly depends on a pessimistic view of human nature. “The price we pay for a free society”, he argues, “is that bad people will say bad things. We tolerate this, not because we approve of the content of their speech, but because once we have compromised on the principle of free speech we clear the pathway for future tyranny”.

This talk of tradeoffs is reminiscent of what Thomas Sowell calls the constrained vision of life: there is no perfect or optimal way to organise society because our interests are always in a state of tension. To try to overcome this tension, as utopians of far Left and far Right have done, leads inevitably to a state of pitiless tyranny. The culture most conducive for free speech is thus one that maintains this tension — accepting that liberty and self-expression cannot be sustained without a degree of discipline on the part of those who participate in society. In other words, puritanism.

Doyle even invokes the fragility of civilisation against the demonic tendency toward censorship. “Civilisation”, Doyle writes, “is the barricade we erect to hold back our baser instincts. This cannot be sustained without free speech and, although I do not believe we are as yet experiencing a full-blown crisis, the first fissures in the barricade are certainly widening”. But he doesn’t go deep enough here; free speech itself cannot be sustained without tolerance.

Doyle’s elegantly written and moderate polemic is in stark contrast to his personae as Titania McGrath — his largely unfunny satirical embodiment of woke culture. In this book, Doyle is more like the eminently reasonable schoolteacher he once was, patiently instructing us on the virtues of free speech, and emphasising the importance of decency and good moral conduct. The problem is the class is no longer a room of well-behaved students; his audience now resides in the cynical digital landscape, where there is little incentive for the kind of puritan self-control necessary for the free exchange of ideas.

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Even John Stuart Mill, the archetypal liberal thinker, views intellectual tolerance more like a quid pro quo between conflicting interests than a vindication of abstract rights: “minorities, seeing that they had no chance of becoming majorities”, he writes, “were under the necessity of pleading to those whom they could not convert, for permission to differ. It is accordingly on this battlefield, almost solely, that the rights of the individual against society have been asserted on broad grounds of principle, and the claim of society to exercise authority over dissentients, openly controverted”.

In their earlier denigration of contemporary progressives as puritanical, the Quillette editors and Doyle have it backwards. The problem is these progressives are not puritanical enough. In her essay on puritanism, Robinson distinguishes between Puritanism and Priggishness. She describes Priggishness as “a consuming loyalty to ideals and beliefs which are in general so widely shared that the spectacle of zealous adherence to them is reassuring.” This is a more accurate description of many progressive activists.

A “prig with an original idea”, Robinson adds, “is a contradiction in terms, because he or she is a creature of consensus”. A prig is a person who has not thought deeply about an issue, but is absolutely convinced he has the correct opinion on it. Many of today’s contemporary progressives are pejoratively derided as moralisers, but the problem is many of them do not moralise enough — they don’t go through the individual grind and struggle a truly moral person often has to go through to get to their position.

This is not to say that puritanism necessarily leads to tolerance. Of course, many self-described puritans have been the very opposite of tolerant; there is a reason it’s a synonym for zealot. But some of the core principles associated with it are still valuable for us today, even if many of the people associated with it have behaved abominably. There’s also a risk that this maintenance of tension can lead to a sort of moral relativism, and make us unwilling to try to persuade those who we think are genuinely wrong. But puritanism doesn’t imply there are no right or wrong answers, but simply that humans will always be vulnerable to stumbling on the wrong answers. And a philosophical approach that recognises this is better placed to paint the kind of society conducive to the free exchange of ideas than one which naively assumes we can perfect humanity.

The controversy at the centre of Allen v. Farrow is a sort of zombie scandal, a story that keeps lurching back into the limelight, just when you thought it was good and dead. It stems from a now nearly 30-year-old accusation by Dylan Farrow, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, who claims that Allen sexually assaulted her at her mother’s Connecticut summer home in the year 1992. The incident was notable not just for its horrifying details and famous cast, but for its existence within a second, more conventionally sordid celebrity drama. The allegations against Allen came in the midst of a messy split from Farrow, after it was revealed that he’d been having an affair with her 21-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn.

While two separate investigations were launched into Allen’s possible misdeeds, it was the Soon-Yi debacle that dominated both the press coverage and public conversation when the story first hit. Even I, then a 10-year-old kid living in the boonies of rural upstate New York, remember seeing headlines about it in the Arts & Life section of the local newspaper. But by the time the case against Allen was dismissed, thanks in part to a report from the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital that determined no abuse had occurred, the public consensus was largely in his favour. Not that Allen didn’t have issues — the man had been in therapy since birth and once wrote himself into the role of a sperm, for Pete’s sake — but a paedophile? No, said the gossip hounds and film fanatics. Surely not.

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Of course, the thing about public consensus is that it’s changeable — and even malleable, if conditions are favourable and the proper pressure is applied. And while Allen continued making films, and telling stories, his accusers stood by theirs. The assault allegations first resurfaced more than 20 years later, after Allen was honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the 2014 Golden Globes. New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof published a letter from Dylan Farrow in his column at the paper, and questioned Hollywood’s continued support of Allen: “The standard to send someone to prison is guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but shouldn’t the standard to honour someone be that they are unimpeachably, well, honourable?”

In 2016, Ronan Farrow, Dylan’s brother, renewed the allegations in the pages of the Hollywood Reporter. A year later, Dylan spoke out again, this time in the LA Times. The cultural tides began to turn: actors who’d worked with Allen in the past publicly denounced him; his new film struggled to find an American distributor; and the publication of his memoir was cancelled after employees at Hachette staged a walkout. (The book was eventually released by another publisher.)

And now, three years after the peak of the #MeToo movement, comes a new entry — the “definitive” entry — in the form of Allen v. Farrow. And it’s perfectly attuned not just to a changed political landscape, but a moment of cultural obsession with documentary crime series that make the audience feel like part of the story.

The Farrow camp has asked why the same movement that took down Weinstein didn’t catch Allen under its wheels, a sentiment that’s repeated in the first episode of Allen v. Farrow: “He was able to just run amok while I was growing up,” Dylan Farrow says, her voice full of incredulous frustration. The running amok in question was not criminal or even deviant — Allen is the peculiar #MeToo figure for whom only a single, isolated incident of misconduct is alleged — but it was a life, a fruitful one, and wasn’t that just as bad? If this was a story of good versus evil, Allen’s outcome was the worst sort of twist: here was a villain who not only escaped punishment but thrived in his freedom, so untouchable that not even a movement explicitly founded on the dispensation of justice for long-ago crimes could topple him. As fairytale endings go, this one positively sucked.

But in the era of Serial and Making a Murderer, this apparently glaring miscarriage of justice is the stuff prestige TV is made of — and you, the audience, are part of it. Not just watching but participating, nudging the universe another degree in its incremental path toward justice. Sometimes, the thrill is in correcting the mistakes of overzealous prosecutors, a righteous quest to free the protagonist who was found guilty, yes, but nevertheless seems innocent. But sometimes, and this is even more exciting, you get to catch the bad guy. The audience plays cop, judge, jury, and executioner. The police couldn’t punish the perpetrator, and now it’s up to us; if we all work together, we can make him pay.

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Allen v. Farrow is best understood as an attempt to draw us into a narrative that is gripping, outrageous, scandalous, horrifying, and most of all, definitive. This TV series is meant to be the final draft of Woody Allen’s biography: you’ve heard this story before, sure, but this time it’s the official version. The one you remember him by. The one that ensures that when the 85-year-old dies, his obituary headlines describe him not as Woody Allen, Oscar-Winning Director, but as Woody Allen, Alleged Child Molester. (Allen has described it as a “hatchet job”.)

It should come as no surprise that Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick are the team behind the scenes on Allen v. Farrow. These filmmakers often present the “definitive” take on issues like this, which is a nice way of saying that they flatten away the complexity and nuance of a story until what you have is a tale so one-sided, so simple, that it goes down like a communion wafer. Take it on faith. Swallow it whole. Though they bill their work as documentary, the team prides itself on not giving a microphone to whomever it plans to paint as a villain; in a screenshot of a 2013 email that has been circulating online, an associate of Ziering and Dick assures a source that she and her collaborators “do not operate the same way as journalists,” promising “no insensitive questions or need to get the perpetrator’s side.”

This full-throated commitment to incuriosity is a hallmark of Dick and Ziering’s work, which also includes the 2015 film The Hunting Ground, an examination of sexual assault on college campuses that has been broadly criticised for using discredited data and playing fast and loose with the truth. When Ziering was asked by the Boston Globe what people could do to combat the scourge of campus sex crimes, she replied, “You can believe the survivors.”

You can believe — and Ziering is here to help you do it. Her films are something beyond truth: they create the narrative that becomes the official story, drowning every doubt or alternative theory in blazing certainty. The Allen v. Farrow series promises to tell you everything you need to know about the allegations against Woody Allen, yet the information provided over four hour-long episodes points exclusively to his guilt.

What’s in the blurred-out text of the New Haven report from which only a handful of incendiary, out-of-context words have been highlighted? Why are Dylan Farrow’s allegations treated with the utmost respect, while Moses Farrow’s claims of abuse by Mia are dismissed, with a scoff, as fabrication? What was happening in the moments before and after Mia trained a camera on Dylan and asked her to describe where her father touched her? What aren’t we seeing, hearing, being given the chance to consider? Don’t ask. It’s not part of the story.

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The documentary is haunted by the spectre of recovered memory — only instead of the victim, it’s the viewing public being asked to confront the truth they’ve been hiding from all these years, to edit their understanding. It’s a tactic that has been effective, even important, for addressing past wrongs within the framework of #MeToo: to think again about that encounter that left you feeling grimy, to revisit, reframe, and ask yourself if maybe it wasn’t your fault after all. For individual women, retelling the story in a different way can be a powerful means of illuminating the grey areas between consent and coercion, or violation versus regret.

But as a means of shaping the public understanding of decades-old allegations, it feels more like propaganda pushed on us by powerful people with tons of cultural clout. Ziering and Kirby’s history of deceptive filmmaking is one thing, but even Ronan Farrow, who appears frequently in Allen v. Farrow as his sister’s staunch defender, has often blurred the line between journalism and activism in his quest to unmask MeToo’s biggest villains. Writing about the work that became Ronan Farrow’s book about Weinstein, Catch and Kill, Ben Smith at the New York Times noted, “[Farrow] delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic.”

In other words, it’s not that Ronan Farrow makes things up. It’s just that he doesn’t like to interrupt the narrative with pesky doubts, quibbles, or caveats. Like this documentary, his work favours a good story over a messy truth.

At the end of the day, Allen v. Farrow is about establishing a narrative more than it’s about changing anyone’s mind. The information it contains is the same information we’ve always had, just repackaged as brave and groundbreaking for the Serial era, in which documentaries are supposed to make a difference — and in a lost year in which the only “safe” activity is sitting at home and watching TV. In this year of no socialising, no sporting events, and very little new content as Hollywood struggles to produce amid pandemic restrictions, here is a chance to feel something. To do something. To be on the right side of history, and be a hero of sorts, instead of just watching them in reruns.

But this is a rerun, too. It’s a story we’ve all heard before, a reboot of a horror show that never should’ve been made into a tabloid spectacle the first time. And no matter how much we might like to think so, tweeting our outraged intent never to watch another Woody Allen film again will not make the world a safer, kinder place for victims of abuse, most of whom will never see their stories told once, let alone over and over. That there’s nobility, even justice, in staying in on Sunday night to watch a premium cable documentary series about a 30-year-old celebrity breakup might be the biggest lie of all.

But we don’t want to think about that. Never mind all the kids who were abused yesterday, who will be abused tomorrow. Tell us the one about the bad little man in the attic again. Maybe this time, it’ll have a happy ending.

Under Preston’s fair pen Maxwell is a clever, vulgar, frightened polyglot. In his heyday he was perceived as cartoonish — so inhuman that a guest at one of his parties at Headington Hall went through his cupboards looking for insights into his character. She told Preston she wouldn’t normally do this but it was Maxwell so who cares? (She found rows of salad cream.) His story is irresistible because it is barely believable. One reviewer called it “entertaining”.

Is it though? It is true Maxwell’s life was novelistic. He was a man of infinite possibility because he did not know who he was, and he could not bear to ask. He was a plutocrat who lived in a rented house. He was a sexual exploiter cuckolded by an employee. He was a father who appeared to hate his children. He styled himself, preposterously, as an English country squire and endured typical British snobbery for his trouble. (The Observer compared to him a Petticoat Lane market trader. The Sun called him a peasant.) He invented modern British scientific publishing but had fake book spines in his study. He was the first British passenger to fly one million miles, but he could not go home.

I do not find this story irresistible, or even very strange, but then I am a Jew. To me, Maxwell’s story is a fairly ordinary tale of Holocaust trauma, if not to Preston (but who wants to believe their subject is a type?). It is the story of a man who hated himself so much for survival he could not, for 40 years, admit to his Jewishness, or to his childhood name. It is possible he even forgot he was once called Ludvik Hoch. One of Maxwell’s sisters, Sylvia, was saved by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who rescued her from a Budapest station as she was about to be sent to Auschwitz. He gave her, along with other Jewish children, Swedish citizenship, and she later came to England. Towards the end of Maxwell’s life Sylvia asked him why he called himself Jan Hoch. Maxwell replied it was his name. No, said Sylvia, he was named Ludvik. According to Preston’s account Maxwell looked “astonished” and asked: “Was I?”

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He was born in what is now Ukraine, in 1923. “I remember how cold I was,” he said, “how hungry I was and how much I loved my mother.” His mother was adoring and his father abusive: Stalin’s family dynamic, precisely, one designed to cultivate suspicion in a child. He said he was once so hungry he ate a dog but that may not be true. He was not a reliable narrator. He was ever shifting. Perhaps that was why he became so fat. I wonder if he subconsciously sought to anchor himself to something, to anything, to this earth.

He was 16 when he left his family. He ended up fighting for the British against the Nazis. By the time the war was over his parents and all by two of his siblings were dead, some in Auschwitz, others en route. He had had nine brothers and sisters — he was the eldest son — and, with his non-Jewish wife Betty, he would have nine sons and daughters, as if to recover the lost family. Betty says he sank to his knees by a pool when they visited Auschwitz, pulled out some sodden splintered bones, and wept.

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As Preston calmly relates, Maxwell’s criminality went far beyond the Man Who Saved the Mirror robbing its pension fund and treating his employees like serfs. (He particularly enjoyed tormenting the well-connected because they knew their place in the world.) That is the least of it. He was a killer. As a British soldier, he shot German civilians — he shot a mayor in the head in the town square — and German soldiers trying to surrender. (He could not understand why other British soldiers objected.) He robbed their corpses. His wife Betty, in her anguished memoir, said that even in the ecstatic early days of their marriage his own lips “depicted death and carnage”. He carried it with him to England, to the House of Commons — he was a much-mocked and talkative Labour MP — and to a publishing empire.

He gathered a robe of success around him, but it did not fit him. He learnt to stop changing his name after his bank manager told him he would close the account if he did not stop. (He had four different names before the age of 23.) He found it impossible to be intimate and walked around his parties with a PA system, so his voice would boom from nowhere. He had no friends, only employees. His most treasured possession was his passport, which was normal for Jews of his generation: the right passport could save your life. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, he asked his family to choose the music. Who doesn’t have music? A man who either cannot hear it or feels he does not deserve it.

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He returned to Judaism and Betty thought that this, and his growing belief that he betrayed his family by marrying a non-Jew, destroyed their marriage. She said everything changed when they visited Slatinské Doly, the town of his birth, to a hero’s welcome, though the inhabitants could, or would, not save his family. He didn’t divorce her, but he verbally abused her, ignored her and lived in a ludicrous London penthouse alone. In reply, Betty became a skilled historian of the Holocaust. It was an attempt to understand him. It didn’t work. He would say: “I know what loneliness is like.”

He deserved to be lonely, but when I read the exhausting lies, I wonder if Maxwell was a thief because he believed he had nothing. In the most revealing passage Preston writes: “He took the logo of Mirror Group Newspapers — a roaring lion — from the Hollywood studio MGM; the names of the headquarters, Maxwell House, from a brand of instant coffee; and the name of his parent company, MCC, from the Marylebone Cricket”. Once, he pretended to have been in a military hospital with Ronald Reagan, a memory he stole from the Reagan film The Hasty Heart. Another time, preposterously, he pretended to be Scottish. All this is material to those who found him ridiculous, but it is, again, a normal reaction, if to be yourself meant death.

He was not, then, a mysterious person, but another rational product of Nazism. Even so, the mystery endures. Myths fly around his death. Did he commit suicide as his financial crimes came close to exposure? (Did he lock his bedroom door behind him, so the absence would not be discovered?) Was he murdered by the Israelis, who sent a Mossad assassin to a yacht in the ocean, only to give him a state funeral days later? (Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories bookend his life. They give it structure.) Did he fake his own death; does a fake Robert Maxwell lie in a Jerusalem grave? It doesn’t matter. You can argue that Maxwell was dead in every meaningful sense by 1945. That is not the story of every Holocaust survivor, but it is his. The rest, through scornful laughter or not, is detritus.

But masculinity takes its toll on men. Most glaringly, there’s the suicide rate. In his new book You Are Not the Man You Are Supposed to Be: Into the Chaos of Modern Masculinity, author Martin Robinson describes this as “an orange flare in the night sky, illuminating a heaving ocean of self-harm, addiction, eating disorders, violence and anti-social behaviour”. In England and Wales, three quarters of those who died by suicide in 2019 were male — a trend which has been consistent since the mid-1990s. That’s a horrifying 4,303 men, in just one year.

And there’s more. Robinson lists the stats: “95% of prisoners are male, 86% of homeless people, 73% of deaths from drug misuse.” Some of these figures are not quite as clear cut as suggested, thanks to a data gap that consistently under-measures women (female homelessness, for example, is often hidden in official figures). But nevertheless it’s true that some men pay a hell of a price for masculinity.

Yet the informal man code requires that men accept this suffering without complaint. Robert Webb put the predicament vividly in his own memoir-slash-dissection-of-manhood, How Not to Be a Boy: “if you want a vision of masculinity,” he wrote, “imagine Dr Frankenstein being constantly bum-raped by his own monster while shouting, ‘I’m fine, everyone! I’m absolutely fine!’”

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Robinson is neither imprisoned, nor homeless, nor addicted (although he does make a point of mentioning just how many of his encounters over the course of reporting this book took place drunk, wasted or straight-up pissed; the use of booze as a solvent for male reticence is one trope of masculinity that isn’t getting reassessed here). He lives with his partner and their two children, and until 2016, he was a magazine journalist; in 2018, he launched the website The Book of Man, with a self-defined brief to “open up the possibilities by questioning masculinity”. You Are Not the Man You Are Supposed To Be is the book-form version of that mission.

Whose benefit is all this questioning for, though? Robinson notes that the audience at one of his many “events encouraging men to talk” is “as ever” made up of almost completely women. Most reviewers of Webb’s book were female, and here I am, female also, writing about Robinson’s. Women, it seems, feel compelled to understand men — to do the emotional picking-up. And while there is certainly a male market for introspection, the success of Jordan Peterson shows that there’s an even bigger one for hearing that maleness has been cruelly traduced.

Peterson tells men that their problems lie, not with masculinity itself, but with a society that fails to value masculinity properly. For Robinson, masculinity is the problem. He sets up the ideal of manhood in his chapter headings — “in control”, “one of the lads”, “hard”, “ripped”, “straight”, “the breadwinner” — and then tries to understand why aspiring to this role hasn’t made him happy. His explorations take him to men’s groups, to a cage fight and to a drag queen who paints him up in full femme mode (Robinson is disappointed to discover that this does not unleash an inner reservoir of campy wit).

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Robinson is interested in how gender stereotypes make men unhappy. He is less curious about what they do to women. We’re halfway through the book before he mentions the problem of male violence against women, and three quarters before the wage gap comes up. A discussion of domestic abuse focuses on men and boys as unrecognised sufferers, but elides the fact that, while female perpetrators do exist, most perpetrators are men whatever the sex of their victims.

One of feminism’s perpetual battles is the insistence that to address violence, we must “name the agent”. That means rejecting passive constructions like “woman killed”, which suggest some inevitable and impersonal force at play, and instead use formulations such as “man kills woman”, identifying both the human source of the violence and the fact that committing it is a voluntary act. When Robinson baulks at naming the agent, it’s hard to resist the suspicion that his interest is less in solving the problems masculinity causes, and more in repositioning men as an afflicted class deserving of sympathy.

It’s right to sympathise with men, as it’s right to sympathise with anyone, but doing so is not a radical reframing of gender politics. It is usual for male subjectivity to take centre stage (the philosopher Kate Manne calls this phenomenon “himpathy”). The flow of feeling from women to men is one of the mass transfers of resources ensured by men’s social dominance, and if Robinson had read much feminism, he would perhaps have come across that concept.

In fact, he seems hardly to have engaged with feminism at all — there are cursory mentions of de Beauvoir and Butler, but that’s as far as it goes. And this is very strange, because masculinity and femininity exist in relation to each other. When feminists address the state of women, they write about men because it would be impossible not to. Yet women barely figure in Robinson’s book, which suggests he is less willing to leave the strictures of masculinity than might be hoped.

When it comes to the vexed issue of gender identity which has lately ripped feminism in two, he has a splendid obliviousness to the detail that I can only envy. At one excruciating point he announces that “the trans community should be worshipped as the ultimate humans, for showing the rest of us how it’s done”. This is embarrassing for everyone, including trans people, who surely do not want the burden of sainthood.

The most curious thing about gender is that while its outward forms can be flexible, its function rarely is. There have been many versions of being a man, ranging across history and geography; but however masculinities differ, they share the property of dominance over femininity, and that dominance ensures the flow of goods (power, property, reproductive labour, sex, compassion) from women to men.

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If men want to stop the Frankenstein of masculinity from committing its daily violations, they need to start by admitting that this monster was made for a reason. In 1980, philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards put the matter with perfect clarity in her book The Sceptical Feminist:

“What, for instance, must be happening if an employer passes over a competent woman in favour of a less competent man? It means that the job will be less well done, and therefore (to put it schematically) that he will be losing money by appointing the man. Why should he do that? He is actually willing to pay for something or other, and it is hard to see what it could possibly be other than the simple cause of male supremacy.”

Some men are paying a hell of a price for masculinity. That price is the cost of dominance. (Of course, the class system and racism help to ensure those prices aren’t borne evenly.) Robinson says towards the end that men must “cede power for parity with others”, and deserves credit for that; he’d deserve more credit if he outlined exactly how that might happen.

Advocates for women’s rights have always known that attaining justice for their sex meant giving up the illusory securities of feminine subordination. Men who want to break the constraints of masculinity similarly have to embrace the losses, as well as the gains. Books like Robinson’s will be half-hearted so long as they are only seeking a version of masculinity with the sharp edges worn off. Men can have their new version of manhood: it starts, not with a glorious expression of pent-up emotion, but with cleaning their own bathrooms.