I will be 84 next month — even though I have smoked since I was sixteen. I started with five Woodbines and now I smoke Davidoff magnums which I have to get from Germany.

I recently told my doctor I smoke twenty a day, then about ten in the evenings — and I try and keep it down to five during the night. I also told him that I have had three doctors in the last fifty years. Each of them recommended I give up. But each of them has now died; the last one only a year older than me. My new doctor laughed and said nothing. He has a good sense of humour.

My father was a very keen anti-smoker, but he died at 75 because he ate too many chocolate biscuits. He was a diabetic who would walk up the street to buy a packet of chocolate biscuits and then eat them all in the park. This caused him to go into comas, which he did once too often and died of a heart attack in the hospital. He knew that going into a coma damages your heart, but he was a lot more worried about the smokers.

I knew this was completely irrational, but I also knew that he wasn’t alone. One of the reasons I moved to Normandy was because there are many people in England like him who are now trying to ban smoking. All of them are humourless bossy boots.

They are now trying it in Oxfordshire, which wants to become England’s first “smoke-free” county. I have no plans to go there. I was once invited by the Oxford Union to a debate on smoking, but I had to decline because of my deafness — although I did also point out that there’s not a hotel in Oxford where you can smoke.

It is the relentlessness of these people that has demonised smoking in England and America. Why are they listened to? It wouldn’t happen in France, Germany, Italy or Spain.

Suggested reading

Stop hating on vaping

By Tom Chivers

The Guardian published a report last week about how there were now 1.1 billion smokers in the world — but it also mentioned that 8 million had “died” from smoking, and how terrible that was. I had to remind them that 8 million was 0.73% of 1.1 billion, so what about the 99.27 % that hadn’t?

It’s all madness to me and something should be said. I have always thought the world to be mad and it has been madder at other points in my lifetime. I was, after all, born in 1937. I would normally be willing to take on the anti-smokers, but at the moment I’m living a very quiet life in Normandy, working away because I’ve something to do. I have a purpose in life.

Not many people in England will defend smoking. They are intimidated by the medical profession and “social pressure”. Well, I’m lucky I can’t hear the “social pressure”, let alone what the doctors have to say. Their obsession with health is unhealthy. Longevity shouldn’t be an aim in life; that to me seems to be life-denying.

Suggested reading

It's not our job to protect the NHS

By Timandra Harkness

I know the World Health Organisation is also part of this madness. They might relentlessly go on about it, but why are they listened to? They are completely irrational. They won’t give up, just like my father.

In my profession, Picasso smoked and died at 91, Matisse smoked and died at 84 and Monet chain-smoked and died at 86. I don’t smoke much when I’m painting, but I light a cigarette every fifteen minutes when I stop to check what I have done. Monet smoked while he painted, but kept them in his mouth all the time. I can’t do that. I take a drag then hold it in my hand.

Renoir also smoked: if you go on YouTube and type in “Renoir smoking and painting”, you will see an old man painting with difficulty because of his arthritic hands. And then he lights a cigarette. I can tell he enjoys it enormously, and all these bossy boots would deny him that pleasure.

I know there will always be bossy people. Anne Applebaum says that 30% of people in every country have an “authoritarian disposition” — but doesn’t she just mean “bossy”? Smoking for me is a deep pleasure and 1.1 billion people in the world seem to agree. It can never be stopped; smokers would just start growing their own tobacco. But we need more people to defend it, otherwise the bossy boots will win in England.

I’m 100% sure that I am going to die of a smoking-related illness or a non-smoking related illness. But I couldn’t imagine not smoking, and when people tell me to stop I always point this out. I’ve done it for 68 years, so are you telling me I’m doing something wrong? Fuck off.

Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.

This piece was originally published in June.

The existence of our future kings is the chance product of the tumult accompanying the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It is a dramatic illustration of the Butterfly Effect, whereby random events on one corner of the European continent totally reshaped timelines on the other: indeed, we could declare the prime mover in the events that placed the Duke of Edinburgh as our Queen’s consort to be an aggrieved Greek monkey.

On 2 October, 1920, Prince Philip’s uncle, King Alexander of Greece, was taking the air in the grounds of the royal palace of Tatoi, outside Athens. His German Shepherd dog, Fritz, attacked a Barbary Macaque belonging to a member of his staff. As the King rushed to extract the screaming monkey from Fritz’s jaws, the macaque’s furious mate sunk its teeth into the king’s leg. Alexander contracted sepsis, and died just over three weeks later, throwing Greece into a succession crisis, and totally reordering the subsequent history of the Near East. As Churchill later wrote, “it is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite”.

King Alexander’s septic leg, like the rest of the Greek royal family, possessed not a drop of Hellenic blood — something Prince Philip reportedly made clear to a Greek visitor to Buckingham Palace who dared to claim ethnic kinship with his host. Back when the small Balkan nation finally won its independence from the Ottoman Empire, in 1831, the European Great Powers had decided on the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty to rule the poor and volatile Greeks. When the Wittelsbach King Otto was forced from his throne by the revolution of 1862, the Great Powers reconvened, and chose the 17-year old Prince William of Denmark, Prince Philip’s grandfather, as Greece’s new king. As he would later instruct his children, “You must never forget that you are foreigners in this country, but you must make them [the Greeks] forget it.” 

Retaining his markedly un-Hellenic surname of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderberg-Glücksberg (to this day, the Hellenic Republic refers to his deposed descendent ex-King Constantine II as Citizen Glücksberg), Prince William adopted the regal name of George I, King of the Hellenes. 

This styling was significant: where the luckless King Otto merely styled himself King of Greece, George’s title expressed a desire to expand his little kingdom’s reach to encompass the still unliberated Greeks of the Ottoman Empire, who outnumbered the population of Greece itself. 

In this, his reign was markedly successful: first, Greece was granted the Ionian Islands, including Prince Philip’s birthplace of Corfu, as a coronation gift by Britain. Then, following the unsuccessful 1897 war against Turkey, Greece was nevertheless awarded the rich farmlands of Thessaly and Central Greece by the Great Powers. Most dramatically, under the inspired generalship of King George’s eldest son, Constantine, Greece doubled its territory by conquest in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, winning control of the wild and ethnically-mixed Balkan provinces of Epirus, Macedonia and Western Thrace (my own great-grandfather, a Corfiot army officer, met and married my great-grandmother, a peasant girl from Epirus, while taking part in Constantine’s successful campaign). 

The Greek monarchy won unprecedented acclaim from its people following that succession of victories against the vastly superior Ottoman armies. It came as a great shock, then, when King George was gunned down during a stroll through the newly-liberated port city of Thessaloniki by a Greek, Alexandros Schinas, variously described as either a socialist or a lunatic (his subsequent fatal flight from a 30-ft window during detention unfortunately leaves his true motivation a matter of debate).

When George’s eldest son, Prince Philip’s uncle, assumed the throne as King Constantine I in 1913, it was as the victorious commander of the First Balkan War as well as Greece’s first Greek-born king. Immensely popular, Constantine won further accolades for his generalship of the Greek armies in the Second Balkan War against Bulgaria, which broke out a few short months after his accession. Annointed Conqueror of the Bulgarians, awarded the rank of Field Marshal by his premier, the liberal Cretan statesman Eleftherios Venizelos, Constantine had reached the summit of his career. 

The outbreak of World War I a year later would quite literally split Greece in two, and set in train the events that would lead Greece to catastrophe and the infant Prince Philip on his path to Britishness.

Educated in Germany, and married to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s sister Sophie of Prussia, King Constantine had no desire to lead a Greece exhausted by two years of war into a greater European conflict, regardless of Britain’s offer of Cyprus as an inducement. Venizelos, however, saw the war as an opportunity for further Greek expansion into the Balkans and Asia Minor; he intrigued with the Allies to effect Greece’s entrance into the conflict. When the premier allowed British and French forces to land in Thessaloniki to establish the Macedonian front against Entente forces, it enraged Constantine, and escalated the National Schism between liberal and monarchist elements in Greek politics to previously unimaginable heights. 

Suggested reading

Philip, Prince of Nowhere

By Ed West

In 1916, Venizelist officers in Thessaloniki mounted a coup to commit their forces to the Allied cause; in Athens, a Franco-British landing to force the King to enter the war on the Allied side was defeated by Greek royalist volunteers. French public opinion would never forgive Constantine for the death of French marines in this brief engagement. As Churchill would later remark, Constantine became “a bugbear second only to the Kaiser himself in the eyes of the British and French people”, a fact that would have tragic repercussions for Greece.

In June 1917, following an Allied naval blockade of Greece and the seizure of the Greek Navy, the French landed troops in Thessaly and forced Constantine to abdicate the throne in favour of his son Alexander. Greece entered the war on the Allied side, fighting doggedly against German, Bulgarian and Austrian forces on the Macedonian front, and winning the country the approval of the Allies once again. 

Through Venizelos’s expert diplomacy, Greece was awarded a share of the Ottoman Empire in the peace conferences that followed the war’s conclusion. Greek troops entered Eastern Thrace, raising the Greek flag over the historic city of Adrianople, even as Greek forces landed in the ancient port city of Smyrna, in Asia Minor, home to a Greek ethnic majority. The Greek battleship Averoff sailed through the Bosphorus to Constantinople, the lost Byzantine capital now bedecked with Greek flags under Allied occupation: it seemed that the Greek Megali Idea, of the uniting of the Greek people in a rich and powerful nation of “two continents and five seas,” had finally come true. 

Then that random monkey bite changed everything.

In a plebiscite on who would replace the luckless King Alexander, the Greek people overwhelmingly chose his exiled father Constantine, hero of the Balkan Wars, to the horror of both Venizelos and the Allies. Constantine returned home, exiling Venizelos in turn, and took over command of the Asia Minor campaign. The Turkish nationalist forces under Ataturk, fighting the Italians in Southwest Turkey, the French in the south and east and the Greeks in the west, had withdrawn into the country’s deep interior, settling on the ramshackle village of Ankara as their revolutionary capital. 

Winning battle after battle against the Turks without ever landing a decisive blow, Constantine’s forces pressed on into the country’s waterless interior in the pursuit of total victory. The king was unimpressed with the new lands he had won, and the squalid villages his men passed through. “It is extraordinary how little civilized the Turks are,” he wrote home, “it is high time they disappeared once more and went back into the interior of Asia whence they came.” Had he won his war, an independent Kurdistan as well as an Anatolian Armenian state would likely have accompanied the Greek victory, and modern Turkey would not exist.

Among King Constantine’s generals was his younger brother Prince Andrew, Prince Philip’s father, a career cavalry officer who had been appointed command of Greece’s II Army Corps. Andrew was the “most Greek” of the Glucksberg dynasty: as a child, he made a conscious choice to speak only Greek where his relatives conversed with each other in German and English. A sickly infant, he had grown up in the ramshackle Athens palace built for King Otto (today Greece’s parliament), even contracting typhoid from its single squalid bathroom. 

As he marched his forces across Anatolia’s Great Salt Desert, omens of impending doom flit across his mind. He had no great affection for the Asia Minor Greeks of republican sympathies for whom he was fighting, once writing that “the people here are generally disgusting. A swollen Venizelism prevails… It would really be worth handing over Smyrna to Kemal [Ataturk] so as to kick all these worthless characters who behave like this after we have poured out such terrible blood here… My God, when shall I get away from this hell here?” Andrew’s death in battle outside Bursa had already been erroneously announced in the world press. 

Back in Corfu, at his home of Mon Repos, a Regency villa built for the island’s former British governor which could have been lifted straight from Bath or Cheltenham, his Anglo-German wife Princess Alice of Battenberg gave birth on the kitchen table to a son, Philippos. 

But here in the depths of Anatolia, the Greek high command, split between officers of royalist and Venizelist sympathies, was internally divided. The Army’s supply lines were dangerously over-extended, and its baggage train was harried by Turkish cavalry along the long route to Ankara. “There are still some villages where dangerous fanaticism still reigns, and then the Turks go out by night and massacre, in the most atrocious manner, our men or the lorry drivers who happen to be isolated,” Constantine had written home. “They mutilate them or even skin them, which enrages our soldiers to such an extent as to give rise to disagreeable reprisals. The war is developing into wild fighting, and that is the reason why we have so few prisoners — they are all massacred on the spot.” Some Greek sources note that Prince Andrew was given the epithet of “hut burner” by his men for his treatment of the Turkish villages along his path.

At the winding Sakarya river, some 35 miles outside Ankara, the Greek and Turkish forces readied themselves for the decisive battle of the war. The Greek inability to decisively defeat Ataturk’s forces, along with Constantine’s return to the throne, had caused the British and French attachment to Greece’s cause to wane dangerously. For Greece to retain Lloyd-George’s support against what Churchill described as the “pro-Turk bias” of the British Conservative Party, Foriegn Office and military establishment, Constantine would need a decisive victory at the Sakarya. Unfortunately for the Greek people and its royal family, he did not win one.

After three weeks of bitter fighting along a 60-mile front, in a battle which could at any point have gone either way, the Greek general Anastasios Papoulas disengaged his forces and began the retreat westward. The bodies of thousands of men on both sides littered the field of battle. Ataturk had won a famous victory, regarded now as the moment which led to the birth of the modern Turkish state. Years later, the Turkish General and future president Ismet Inönü remarked of Sakarya that Papoulas was too nervy to be an effective commander: “Papoulas avoided disaster. But he never won a battle,” he would later write. 

Papoulas saw things differently. He lay the blame for the defeat directly on Prince Andrew, who had refused a direct order to commit his II Army Corps to the fray at one of the battle’s decisive moments.

By the same author

Get ready for Fortress Europe

By Aris Roussinos

Prince Andrew requested to be relieved of his command position, and was refused, though his chief of staff was sacked. Papoulas was replaced with the mentally unstable general Georgios Hatzianestis, who was too preoccupied with the delusion that his legs were made of glass to command effectively. Back in Smyrna, Andrew would write presciently of the darkening situation that “something must be done quickly to remove us from the nightmare of Asia Minor… we must stop bluffing and face the situation as it really is. Because finally which is better? – to fall into the sea or escape before we are ducked?”

Permitted three months leave, Andrew finally returned to his wife in Corfu and held his newborn son Philippos for the first time. After nearly a year of stalemate in the trenches west of Ankara, during which time Greece’s Western allies abandoned their support of the Greek cause and began treating with Ataturk, the Turks launched an offensive that would see the Greek forces fly in headlong retreat towards the Aegean. Greeks call the result, simply, “the Catastrophe.” When the victorious Turkish forces reached Smyrna, the city and its predominantly Greek inhabitants were put to fire and sword, leading to the flight of 1.6 million Christian refugees to Greece and all but ending a 3,000-year Greek presence in Asia Minor. 

In Athens, a military coup unseated King Constantine, restoring Venizelos to negotiate the Treaty of Lausanne which established the modern borders of Greece and Turkey. As Constantine abdicated, the revolutionary government arrested six of the royalist generals and politicians blamed for the defeat, and sent troops to Corfu to arrest Prince Andrew and bring him to Athens for trial. He was accused of disobeying a direct order to attack, and abandoning his position in the face of the enemy “with disastrous results not only to the corps under his command but to the entire army”. 

After a brief trial, the unlucky six were sentenced to death by firing squad, positioned at the edge of a hastily dug pit and shot without blindfolds. A 2010 court case would later overturn their convictions for treason. Prince Andrew’s trial began two days later. The revolutionary general Theodoros Pangalos, Andrew’s contemporary at the Hellenic Military Academy and briefly the country’s future dictator, visited him in detention. “How many children have you?” he asked, nodding when Andrew answered. “Poor things,” he replied, “what a pity they will soon be orphans!”

Further reading

Britain's divisions go way, way back

By Ed West

As the historian Michael Llewellyn-Smith noted in his excellent book on Greece’s Asia Minor campaign Ionian Vision, “whether or not Andrew had been guilty of insubordination, it was an absurd charge to bring fifteen months after the event, given that he had not been relieved of his command at the time.” On 3 December, Andrew took the stand. A staff officer, Colonel Kalogeras, stated that Andrew had refused to attack despite direct orders. Colonel Sariyannis and General Papoulas both attested that if Andrew had carried out Papoulas’ orders, the Greeks would have won the day at Sakarya. Andrew was unanimously found guilty of disobedience and abandoning his post and sentenced to be stripped of his rank and banished permanently from Greece. 

Andrew expected to be executed in his cell at any moment. However, in the background, the Greek revolutionary General Nikaloaos Plastiras, a future three-time Prime Minister of Greece, had been negotiating with the British government, which had broken off formal diplomatic relations with Greece since the execution of the Six. They agreed that Andrew would be permitted to leave Greece on a British warship.

And so, a few months after his birth, Prince Philippos of Greece left Mon Repos, Corfu and Greece on the British destroyer HMS Calypso, along with his mother and father and into a life of exile. Philippos was, famously, carried onto the warship in an orange crate instead of a cot. His father Prince Andrew settled into a life of exile in France, writing a book Towards Disaster, translated by Philip’s mother Princess Alice, which aimed to justify his actions at Sakarya as necessary to avoid a pointless loss of life in a losing battle. When the monarchy was restored in Greece, Andrew refused a commission for Philip in the Hellenic Navy, saying “‘Never the Greek Navy! In the Greek Navy after a bit they would throw him out – that’s what they did to me, not once, as you know, or twice, but three times!’” 

Instead, Philip served gallantly in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, and was awarded the Greek War Cross for his actions at Cape Matapan. While his son Prince Charles became a benefactor of the Greek monastic republic of Mount Athos and frequent visitor to Corfu, and who is widely considered to be a Phillhellene with a strong mystical attachment to the Greek Orthodox faith of his grandparents, Prince Philip described himself as “a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction”. For despite his nickname as “Phil the Greek”, he felt no great affection for the country and the uneasy crown it offered its foreign rulers. As he once said of the land of his birth and the mercurial people it contains, “I certainly never felt nostalgic about Greece. A grandfather assassinated and a father condemned to death does not endear me to the perpetrators.”

This piece was originally published in April.

I use that quote from Pascal (Pensées, 229) because I am not setting out to assert positive truths nor to defend opinions. I see a situation which — as Pascal writes in his next sentence — “offers nothing but cause for doubt and anxiety”.

In asking me to give an opinion on the now celebrated “Letter of the Generals,” UnHerd‘s Will Lloyd rightly notes: “What seems most extraordinary about the furore that followed is that so few people questioned the premise of the letter — that France is on the point of collapse.”

This is indeed surprising. Why France? Why France rather than any other European country when the others seem to be in a more or less similar situation and sometimes worse off?

I might as well admit from the beginning that I have no solution to this mystery (even though I know France well and I am a Frenchman). I will try to avoid straying into confused notions of the “psychology of nations” kind; but it will be difficult.

From the point of view of Islamist terrorism, it is true that, for a time, France was especially targeted by Isis, the latter believing (not without reason) that France had attacked them by intervening in Syria and Iraq. But those days are behind us, and if one considers the last decades, we see that Great Britain, Spain, Belgium and, to a lesser extent, Germany have also suffered murderous terrorist attacks. What would be difficult, in fact, is to find a country in the world that has been spared Islamist violence.

Are crime and violence, whether or not linked to drugs, really wreaking more havoc in France than in other European countries? I have no idea, but it would surprise me a little; if this were the case, French journalists would not have failed to emphasise it.

More from this author

How France lost her dignity

By Michel Houellebecq

There is in France a vague and widespread ambiance of self-flagellation — something that hangs in the air like a gas. Anyone visiting France and watching television cannot help being struck by the obsession of its presenters, journalists, economists, sociologists and assorted specialists: they spend the greater part of their time on air comparing France to other European countries, invariably, with the goal of belittling France.

In general, it is sufficient to point to Germany; but sometimes Germany does not have such a good record so they refer to Scandinavia, the Netherlands and, more rarely, Britain. Whatever the subject may be, it is of course always possible to discover a country that is superior to us; but such an extreme delight in masochism is surprising.

This is just a detail. By far a more important subject, since it is not only a symptom of decline but decline itself — decline in its very essence — is of course demography. Recently, politicians and commentators were disturbed to learn that the “synthetic index of fertility” (that is, the number of children per woman) has fallen in France to 1.8.[1. The United States and Russia are both at 1.8; China is at 1.7.]

Such a figure would be a dream come true for the countries of Southern Europe: for Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, where the rate is 1.3.[2. These figures from 2019 come from an informational bulletin, Population et sociétés, published by the Institut National d’Études Démographiques; their data come in turn from a report published by the UN’s population division. This bulletin also engages in projections of countries’ populations by 2050. They are probably banking on a certain percentage of immigration, which would explain the differences with what follows from fertility rates. As such, the population of the United States increases significantly (that of France as well, though much less), whereas that of Russia and China decrease slowly; in 2050, the most populated country in the world should be, by a wide margin, India.] It is worse still in Asia, in parts of the world that are as technologically advanced as they are far away but generally admired. The rate in Singapore and Taiwan is 1.2.

South Korea is only 1.1. This country risks losing a tenth of its population by 2050; if that continues it will only have one chance of survival: to annex North Korea, which is at 1.9. I’m joking, but only just.

Suggested reading

The death of the French intellectual

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

With a rate of 1.4, the Japanese are almost muddling through, which is surprising, since the most amusing news on declining birth-rates typically comes from Japan. These news items are so crazy that I hesitate to repeat them (but the improbable is sometimes true):

• Old men are apparently so numerous in Japan that they can no longer be housed, so they have to find a way of breaking the law to find lodgings in prison.
• The Japanese government is reported to have to broadcast pornographic videos in primetime on public television, in order to stimulate the sexual appetites of Japanese couples. After all, screwing does end up producing a few children.

In France, it is clear that we have not quite sunk to his level, at least not entirely. The truth is that French obsession with the idea of decline is far from new. Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserts somewhere (or is it Voltaire? I’m too lazy to check; these authors are tedious to read. Anyway, it is one of the two), that sooner or later — “the thing is certain”: we will be enslaved by the Chinese.

France sometimes reminds me of one of those hypochondriac old men who never stops complaining about their health; the kind who are constantly saying that this time they really do have one foot in the grave. People usually respond sarcastically: “You watch, he’ll end up burying all of us.”

Suggested reading

Macron, the failed Machiavelli

By John Lichfield

The United States of America seems, on the other hand, to have erected optimism into a principle of existence. One can doubt the soundness of this attitude. When Joe Biden claims that “America is once again ready to lead the world” (here again, I am too lazy to find the exact quotation; Biden is even more tedious than Voltaire), I immediately interpret this as:

• America will not be long in embarking on a new war;
• As always, she will wind up conducting herself like a piece of shit;
• She will waste a lot of money, while reinforcing up the near-universal loathing of which she is the target; this will allow China to strengthen its position.

No, we are not really dealing with a “French suicide” — to evoke the title of Eric Zemmour’s book — but a Western suicide or rather a suicide of modernity, since Asian countries are not spared. What is specifically, authentically French is the awareness of this suicide. But if we consent to set aside for a moment the particular case of France (and really it would be wise to do so), the conclusion becomes crystal clear: the inevitable consequence of what we call progress (at all levels, economic, political, scientific, technological) is self-destruction.

By refusing all forms of immigration, Asian countries have opted for a simple suicide, without complications or disturbances. The countries of Southern Europe are in the same situation, although one wonders if they have consciously chosen it. Migrants do land in Italy, in Spain and in Greece — but they only pass through, without helping to sort out the demographic balance, although the women of these countries are often highly desirable. No, the migrants are drawn irresistibly to the biggest and fattest cheeses, the countries of Northern Europe.

Suggested reading

Why we love to hate the French

By Ed West

I should mention in passing the Leftist/progressivist/humanist opinion: we are not dealing with a suicide but with a regeneration. Ethnic composition is, admittedly, being modified, but in the essentials everything else remains unchanged: our republic (or rather in Europe, mostly our monarchy) our culture, our values, our “Rule of Law,” all that stuff. I sometimes hear this opinion being defended (though more and more rarely).

The 45% of French people who believe, on the other hand, in impending civil war help to show (and it is almost sweet) that France remains a nation of braggarts.

It takes two to wage war. Are the French going to take up arms to defend their religion? They haven’t had any religion for quite some time; and in any case, their former religion is the sort where you offer your throat to the butcher’s blade.

Would it then be a war to defend their culture, their way of life, their system of values? What exactly are we talking about? And supposing it does exist, is it worth fighting for? Does our “civilisation” really still have something to be proud of?

Europe seems to me to be at a crossroads. Reading Pascal helps me a lot: but, like him, I see “nothing but cause for doubt and anxiety”.

Translated by Dr Louis Betty. 

© Michel Houellebecq c/o Agence Intertalent info@intertalent.fr

This piece was originally published in June. 

Perhaps the least interesting thing about this talented young couple is that they are unvaccinated against Covid-19. When I meet them at their house in a wooded suburb outside Vienna, I am almost embarrassed to ask about it. But they carefully explain how, for reasons of mistrust, caution and, as they see it, integrity, they have decided not to take the Covid vaccine — and how this fact is suddenly defining their whole lives.

Since Monday, unvaccinated Austrians are not allowed to leave their homes except to go to work, to buy essential supplies, or to take exercise: it’s the world’s first “lockdown for the unvaccinated”. It was introduced in response to rapidly rising cases and a lack of excess capacity in Austrian hospitals. “It is not a recommendation, but an order,” announced the Interior Minister Karl Nehammer at a press conference. “Every citizen should know that they will be checked by the police.”

It is, essentially, a ratcheting up of the regime of vaccine passports that exists already in many countries across Europe, whereby unvaccinated people are already excluded from restaurants, museums and theatres. But to place a minority of the population under partial house arrest does seem to cross a new line.

The Brazilian-born Mia has already had Covid and, in the Austrian “2G” system, proof of recovery affords you the same status as if you had been vaccinated — albeit for a period of six months. So, for now at least, she is allowed out and about. Chris is stuck at home. He describes it as a “brainfuck”. Attempting to remain philosophical about it, he explains how he tries to tune out the relentless fear coming out of the TV and keep control of his own mental state. “I don’t want to be dependent on these kind of things to be happy.” But the sense of alienation and unease is palpable. What will the future look like? He is supposed to be performing in Paris before Christmas; who knows if he will get there.

Back in the old town, alongside the fancy boutiques of the Kärntner Straße, it’s a very different world. Affluent shoppers are out and about in the crisp November air, and they are more than happy to share their views with us.

“I think it comes much too late,” says one woman. “They’re crazy. All the trouble we have is due to those people that believe in, I don’t know, that the earth is flat… If the majority of society depends on idiots, then they can’t be helped and it’s the end of society!”

Her view is typical — there is very little sympathy here, and a good deal of frustration. Only a few voices take the opposing view, and they tend to be passers-through more than the wealthy locals; the doormen and deliverymen we try to talk to just shake their heads. One man simply describes the latest lockdown as “bullshit”.

What is striking is that very few think the policy will actually work. Covid levels per capita have shot up in recent weeks, and Austria now has one of the highest case rates in Europe. The rationale behind the lockdown is that it will increase the level of vaccination (low for a Western European country at 65%); but even supporters of the move predict that it will be followed up by more universal measures soon enough. The Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg openly explains that the policy is a heavy-handed “nudge”: “My aim is very clear: to get the unvaccinated to get vaccinated, not to lock up the unvaccinated,” he told ORF radio station.

On a practical level, though, the logic of the new rules does not withstand much scrutiny: unvaccinated workers are permitted to travel to and from work, and they work disproportionately within the hospitality sector. This means that they are currently allowed into restaurants and bars to serve, but not to consume. In any case, if there were only vaccinated people in a venue, that wouldn’t necessarily make it Covid-free. Many places require daily testing for non-vaccinated staff, yet not for the vaccinated, leading to the odd situation where the unvaccinated are “safer” than the patrons.

It feels like a bit of a stand-off. The vaccine issue has become a show of strength, a test of principles. As Ivan Krastev, a political scientist at Vienna’s Institute for Human Sciences, tells me: “When some of the anti-vaccine people said, ‘we are ready to defend our freedoms’, the basic message of the Government was, ‘Okay, let’s see what price you are ready to pay for them.’ The idea of this measure is to make people uncomfortable.”

One peculiar feature of this dramatic new measure is the silence of the liberals. Why are the bien-pensant Viennese, usually so concerned with the rights of minorities, so relaxed about a measure that in other contexts would seem outrageously draconian?

Somersaults of logic have been performed to assert that the policy is more liberal than the alternatives. For one thing, they say, it stops short of an actual vaccine mandate, which just about keeps alive the notion of personal choice; for the majority, it offers the hope of avoiding another lockdown, so seems to them to be a lesser intervention. And, unlike in neighbouring Italy, the unvaccinated can still work, with tests being provided at public expense. In Austria, across the West, there is no one left to assert the rights, or even try to understand the motivations of this despised minority, the anti-vaxxers. They are the new deplorables.

To interrogate this seeming contradiction, I visit Professor Manfred Nowak, one of Europe’s pre-eminent human rights lawyers, at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He has dedicated his whole life to the upholding of human rights and the defence of oppressed minorities against arbitrary detention and mistreatment. Former Special Rapporteur to the UN on Torture, current Secretary-General of the European Campus of Human Rights, activist against Guantanamo Bay, UN Independent Expert on Children Deprived of Liberty — the list continues. I expect him to be a little concerned about the potential direction of travel in his home country of Austria.

He wasn’t. He thinks the policy doesn’t go far enough. “From a human rights perspective, you always have to balance the obligation to protect the right to life, the right to health, with interfering with other rights such as personal liberty,” he tells me.

He wants to make vaccination mandatory, with refusal equivalent to a traffic offence, resulting in a fine rather than a criminal record. He is also worried about how this partial lockdown might affect an already divided society — but he is unconcerned about the human rights or civil liberties implications. Do you not even have a twinge of anxiety about the shift in democratic norms, or whether such discriminatory policy might be applied in different settings, I ask? “No, not really,” he says, with admirable candour.

The final component in this lockdown mix is, of course, politics. In most European countries there are no mainstream political parties that could be described as “anti-vaccine”, but Austria has the populist, right-wing Freedom Party, which was part of the coalition government until 2019; it has made vaccination choice a central issue. The FPÖ organises regular rallies in cities around Austria, and its new leader Herbert Kickl is gaining popularity by condemning Covid policies as “corona fascism”.

Having thus turned vaccine hesitancy into a “right-wing” political campaign, Kickl has managed to put a face to the dissenting minority — and it’s not one that many people like. As a result, instead of thinking of the unvaccinated as a vulnerable, if misguided, group and one worthy of protection and respect, they have become viewed as an extreme political enemy who must be defeated.

It would be hard to think of anyone less threatening or extreme than Mia and Chris. Alternative, certainly; anti-establishment, yes. But good people who in any healthy, confident culture would be cherished and celebrated. Allowing them, and millions like them, to drift into a caste of untouchables, separated from the mainstream, all for the sake of a marginal gain against a virus that is rapidly becoming endemic, may prove to be a grave miscalculation with effects that will be felt for years to come.

This piece was originally published in November.

At one stage he even says: “When speaking to a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil, don’t call them a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil! Many contemptible idiots find that language insulting.” But he continues to do it, and frequently segues into lengthy digressions about how stupid and harmful the idiots’ beliefs are. Presumably you would not feel that the author had really taken his own advice on board

This is very much how I feel about How to Talk to A Science Denier, by the Harvard philosopher Lee McIntyre.

McIntyre wants to help us change people’s minds. Specifically, to help us change the minds of these strange, incomprehensible people called “science deniers”. He addresses five main groups of “deniers”: flat earthers; climate deniers; anti-vaxxers; GMO sceptics; and Covid deniers.

This is, on the face of it, an important project. It’s a truism that the world is polarised, and our sense of shared reality is under attack. If there is some way of learning how to talk across difference, and to persuade without attacking, that might go a long way to bridging our various divides, not just the five he discusses.

More from this author

What we're not being told about ME

By Tom Chivers

The framing is that McIntyre goes and meets representatives of these groups and tries to persuade them out of their wrong beliefs. He goes armed with social-psychology research about how best to persuade people. His big trick (which I think is a good, if limited, one) is asking: what evidence would it take to make you change your mind?

But the whole book is premised on one idea: McIntyre is right, and the people he is “talking to” are wrong. 

And it’s true that all five groups are wrong, or at least their central claims are. The earth is in fact an oblate spheroid; the climate is warming, due to human influence, and will likely have severe negative impacts; vaccines work; GMOs are safe; and Covid is real.

The trouble is that by using these groups, McIntyre is playing on easy mode. When your example of a “science denier” is a literal flat-earther, it’s easy to say “look over there at the crazy deniers”.

Even with climate change scepticism, sure, there are people who literally don’t believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are warming the planet. But those people are relatively rare. People who believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are warming the planet, but that the emissions are going to be hard to stop because of economic growth in the developing world and it would make more sense to concentrate on adaptation rather than mitigation, are much more common. Are they “deniers”? Certainly they’re often called deniers. But McIntyre himself acknowledges that China is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and that the IPCC says the sweeping global changes required to cut emissions sufficiently to avoid a 1.5°C warming are unprecedented.

McIntyre constantly wants to make a clean distinction between “science deniers” and non-deniers. So, for instance, he says that there are five “common reasoning errors made by all science deniers” [my emphasis]. They are: cherrypicking, a belief in conspiracy theories, a reliance on fake experts, illogical reasoning and an insistence that science must be perfect. If you don’t make all five of those errors, you’re not an official McIntyre-accredited science denier.

Hang on, though. A “belief in conspiracy theories”? McIntyre spends a lot of time talking about the tobacco firms who manufactured doubt in the smoking/lung cancer link, and the oil firms who did the same with the fossil fuel/climate change link. He says that the spread of Covid denialism through the US government was driven by Republican desire to keep the economy open and win the election. Aren’t these conspiracy theories?

More from this author

Who would kill children to save the planet?

By Tom Chivers

Ah, but for McIntyre these aren’t conspiracy theories, they’re conspiracies. The distinction is “between actual conspiracies (for which there should be some evidence) and conspiracy theories (which customarily have no credible evidence).”

So, since some anti-vaxx conspiracy theories like the polio vaccine giving children polio, or the CIA using fake vaccination stations to take people’s DNA, are true, does that mean anti-vaxxers don’t believe in “conspiracy theories” but “conspiracies”?

Obviously not. But the point is that there’s not some clear line between “real conspiracies” and “conspiracy theories”. When Alex Jones says that chemicals in the water are turning frogs gay, he’s referring to real claims that endocrine disruptors are affecting sexual development in lots of animals. It’s not easy to draw a line between real and fake, evidence-based and not evidence-based.

I think the basic problem is that McIntyre is a Popperian. That is, in hugely oversimplified terms, he believes that no amount of evidence can confirm a theory: but evidence can falsify it. “If we find only evidence that fits our theory, then it might be true,” he writes. “But if we find any evidence that disconfirms our theory, it must be ruled out.” 

I, on the other hand, am a Bayesian. I have some prior belief and I assign some level of probability to it: “climate change is real and dangerous”: 90%; “the world is flat”, 0.1%. And then each new piece of evidence shifts my belief a little: if next year NASA say “we got new photos in, looks like Earth is sitting on the back of a turtle”, then I’ll upgrade my belief in a flat earth to, I dunno, 1.5% (but also upgrade my belief in there being mad people at NASA to 95%).

So I don’t need to draw a bright line between “denial” and “reality”. I can say: “I think it’s likely that tobacco firms conspired over lung cancer, but I think it’s pretty unlikely that NASA faked the moon landings.” And I can update my beliefs as new evidence comes in. I don’t have to “rule anything out”, I can simply downgrade how likely it is.

McIntyre, though, is stuck with two categories: things that might be true; and things which have been “disconfirmed”. If you believe things that have been disconfirmed, then you must be a “denier”. And so he needs to find ways of explaining why these “deniers” are so different from the rest of us. 

He has various ideas about “inflated self-confidence, narcissism, or low self-esteem”. But if you reject the idea that there are two groups of people, “deniers” and “non-deniers”, then you can avoid the need to explain it at all, beyond saying “some people are better than others at working out what’s true”. 

But we’re not just here for his epistemology: we’re here for a masterclass in how to persuade people out of false beliefs. Over the course of the book he meets various people — the flat earthers; two coal miners; a couple of hippyish friends of his — and tries to talk to them about their beliefs, using the methods he has learnt. His solution is to listen, to be respectful, to meet people face to face, and to do so over several meetings. Does his approach work?

In short: no. Hilariously, both of the coal miners he meets cheerfully accept the reality of climate change, but say that the economic value is worth the potential damage to the climate. His first hippyish friend is entirely pro-vax and only slightly GMO-sceptical; the other one is anti-GMO but on anti-corporate grounds rather than safety ones. 

Suggested reading

Never trust a scientist

By Stuart Ritchie

So he falls at the first hurdle: he not only doesn’t convince anyone, he doesn’t meet anyone who unambiguously disagrees with him, except the flat earthers. (He also struggles to be respectful, at least in the book itself. There’s an astonishing line on p77 in which he says “When speaking to them, we should remember that it is an insult to use the word ‘anti-vaxxer.’” There are 109 uses of the term “anti-vaxx” in the book. Occasionally he remembers and says how important it is that we listen and pay attention, then he immediately reverts to calling, say, Covid scepticism “ridiculous conspiracy theories and partisan nonsense”.)

But there’s a bigger problem. McIntyre’s big question, as mentioned, is asking: What evidence would it take to change your mind? But at no point does McIntyre ever ask himself what it would take to change his mind. 

For instance: when he was talking to the Pennsylvania coal miners, he accepted that they were just trying to feed their families. I assume he’d also acknowledge that Chinese coal mining is allowing that country to get richer and improve its citizens’ way of life. But I don’t think I’m misrepresenting him when I say that he thinks coal mining is a disaster.

When he talks to a friend of his about GMOs, though, that friend says that even though GMOs can save lives now (in the form of golden rice), they’ll cause disaster in the future. McIntyre says, OK, so the kids who can’t get the golden rice now, they’re just going to die? And his friend says yes. McIntyre says that’s easy for him to say, “because he had money and wouldn’t be one of the ones who suffered”.

The exact same question, though, can be asked about coal mining. Sure, McIntyre can say stop using coal, and it’ll help prevent future disasters. But it will also presumably mean some number of tens or hundreds of millions of Chinese people losing electric lights and functioning hospitals, and a smaller number of Pennsylvanians losing their jobs. McIntyre himself would be fine, except for somewhat higher electricity bills. 

Is the tradeoff worth it? McIntyre clearly thinks so (and I think I do too): but what would change his mind? I can tell you: I would update my beliefs significantly if you showed me a utilitarian calculation showing that more people would be harmed by ending coal mining than by continuing it. But McIntyre never asks himself the question. He is stuck on transmit, never on receive.

What’s sad is that he sometimes comes close. He recognises that beliefs are part of people’s identity, and that that makes it hard to change them – but again, applies the lesson only to the weird, wrong, other people, not to himself and people like him. The near-total lack of introspection renders the whole grand project largely meaningless. I am right, you are wrong, the only thing we need to discuss is how to make you realise how wrong you are. The idea of working together to establish a shared reality is hamstrung by his certainty that the reality that needs to be shared is his one.

It’s mainly a book designed to tell readers that people they already think are dumb are, in fact, dumb. It is, really, How to Talk to A Contemptible Idiot Who Is Kind of Evil.

This piece was originally published in August. 

Critical race theory is now widely accepted by the liberal-Left media and much of academia. It’s not just the bad laws of the Jim Crow south. And it’s not just a few racist people here and there. Racism is not some bad apples; it is as American as apple pie.

For Martin Luther King and, later, Barack Obama, American racism was the consequence of a liberal and egalitarian country failing to live up to its principles; for supporters of critical race theory, by contrast, these principles were predicated on the subjugation of black people. The American Dream is rotten to the core.

In critical race theory, then, the key historical moment is not the abolition of slavery — or the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which brought an end to segregation in public places — but the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that “separate but equal” public schooling was unconstitutional. It violated the fourteenth amendment — which, after former slaves were granted citizenship, had assured all citizens “equal protection of the laws”. If black Americans have separate schooling, they can’t realise that equality: so concluded the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

Suggested reading

Is Critical Race Theory racist?

By Helen Pluckrose

This seems like a tremendous achievement. Indeed, in many standard textbooks on the history of the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board is seen as the first big crack in the edifice of Old Jim Crow. But the founding father of critical race theory was sceptical about its positive impact. In an article published in the Harvard Law Review in 1980, Bell argued that the decision was based on:

“value to whites, not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation.”

In other words, the decision was motivated not by principled idealism but cynical self-interest. Domestic legislation in the fifties was shadowed by the Cold War — and in the battle against communism, America wanted to be seen as a moral exemplar.

But Bell’s critique of Brown v. Board runs deeper than this. Bell considered himself a realist, and viewed those who celebrated Supreme Court victories with bemusement. A few laws don’t change 250 years of slavery followed by 100 years of segregation and terror. “My position”, he wrote in his 1992 Faces at the Bottom of the Well, “is that the legal rules regarding racial discrimination have become not only reified (that is, ascribing material existence and power to what are really just ideas) … but deified”. This is because “the worship of equality rules as having absolute power benefits whites by preserving a benevolent but fictional self-image, and such worship benefits blacks by preserving hope”.

Hope was the very emotion, however, that animated the politics of King and Obama. (The latter’s second book was entitled: The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.) But Bell is having none of this.

Suggested reading

Barack Obama was a false hope

By Justin Webb

“I think,” he writes, “we’ve arrived at a place in history where the harms of such worship outweigh its benefit”. Those who persist in clinging on to the vision of the nation as a bastion of enlightened values are, according to him, at best naive.

This display of world-weariness, in contrast to doe-eyed idealism, is one shared by the most esteemed black American intellectual in the second term of Obama’s presidency: Ta-Nehisi Coates. No one writes much about Coates anymore. Perhaps because he left Twitter. The last memorable thing he did was base a villain in a comic book on Jordan Peterson. But six years ago, after the publication of his book Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, he was anointed by Toni Morrison as James Baldwin’s successor — the nation’s intellectual and moral conscience on matters of race.

Coates isn’t a theoretician like Bell; he is a polemicist. In his writing, the realist attitude central to Bell’s critical race theory is expressed with piquant force. Racism is a constitutive part of America’s identity, Coates argues, and anyone who deviates from this fact is deluded, naive or malevolent. “There is nothing”, Coates writes about racists, “uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy”.

Coates is known for his essays in The Atlantic, which are stylish, personal, historical and very long. The overall mood is one of disenchantment. The American Dream is not for black people. Between the World and Me is written as a letter to his son, and it contains no consoling words for the future: “I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals”. The view that the moral arc of history bends towards justice is an illusion. “America”, Coates writes, “understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men”. He is an atheist.

More from this author

The black saint against white guilt

By Tomiwa Owolade

Bell was not; he was a Christian. And his detached pessimism was tempered by an aggressive moralism. In his book, Ethical Ambition, which mixes memoir and self-help, he emphasised that:

“humanity at its essence is both an ongoing readiness to recognize wrongs and try to make things better, and the desire to help those in need of assistance without expecting reward or public recognition”.

So there is a point in being human, and that point is to do good. The virtues that are most important to Bell are “passion, courage, faith, relationships, inspiration and humility”. He often reads less like a radical subversive than a hokey Grandpa, slipping you moral maxims rather than sweets. Which raises the question: how can someone with such piety end up conceiving an ideology characterised by doleful pessimism?

Bell is in truth an unlikely candidate for the godfather of critical race theory, an ideology sceptical about the positive impact of anti-racist legislation. When he was younger, he worked for the NAACP, the establishment anti-racism group that believed American society could be transformed through the legal system. He worked, in particular, as a civil rights lawyer in the fifties Deep South. But eventually the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights division asked him to stop being a member of the NAACP: they thought he couldn’t be objective. He quit his position in the department, but continued to work for the anti-racist organisation.

Suggested reading

What liberals get wrong about race

By Eric Kaufmann

One plausible way to reconcile these two sides of Bell — the moralist and the pessimist — is to emphasise his Christianity. He believed in the permanence of racism just like any Christian believes in the inevitability of sin — nevertheless, the inevitability of sin does not mean we shouldn’t try to be better.

But perhaps a better way to account for this tension — a way that explains the similarities between Bell and non-Christians like Coates — is to view his conception of critical race theory as a case of thwarted idealism in the American Dream. America did not become a post-racial utopia after the civil rights revolution; therefore racism is a permanent feature of American society. Just like every passionate atheist is in some sense an inverted believer, people like Bell who are so antagonistic to American idealism belie their underlying attachment to it. This is true of critical race theory in general.

Although he is not a Christian, Coates is as profoundly American as Bell. His criticism of the nation is animated by his acceptance of American exceptionalism. “One cannot”, he writes, “at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error”. His proposal is this: “to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard”. In other words, he takes at face value the ideals of the American Dream (the very same American Dream that, he argues, is not for black people).

Meanwhile, the opponents of critical race theory see its ideas as hostile to — or at least inconsistent with — America (Fox News has mentioned it over 1,900 times in four months). In an exact inversion of critical race theory’s contention that racism is present in every aspect of American life, many on the Right — in this case, Christopher Rufo — now complain that critical race theory has “pervaded every aspect of the federal government” and poses “an existential threat to the United States”. Rufo and his ilk aren’t opposed to, say, teaching the history of slavery and segregation in American schools; what they oppose is schoolchildren acknowledging their whiteness. Rufo calls it state-sanctioned racism.

The irony is that critical race theory is not, as it sees itself, a realist’s ideology. And it is not, as its main opponents view it, fundamentally un-American. Like many on the conservative American Right, it espouses an idealised view of the nation’s self-professed values: if they truly believed these values were fundamentally corrupt, then what would be the point, as Bell and Coates do, of holding America to them? The truly realist position is one like Coleman Hughes’s: he has shown, with evidence and dispassionate argumentation, that black Americans have made material progress in recent decades.

Although Rufo may deny this of himself, many on the conservative Right do cling on to a form of American idealism that is insensitive to the existence of racism. But critical race theorists cling on to their own idealism by concluding that, because America is not yet a post-racial society, racism is an inexorable feature of the country. The vision of the shining city on a hill becomes the sole means by which to judge the nation — while the material realities of black people fade into the distance.

This piece was originally published in August.

Decline is in the air, mingling with the smoke of burning forests in Greece and the shocking footage coming out of Afghanistan. Much of what Spengler wrote about the West’s dissolution — which he predicted would make itself fully known in the 21st century — has proven prescient, and he hadn’t even heard of climate change or the Taliban. You would have to have a strong will — the kind which old Oswald admired — to deny, as nations angrily fragment, the gulf stream stutters, the supply chains choke up, that he might have been onto something.

But what is “the West”? It depends which tribe you ask. For a liberal, the West is the “Enlightenment” and everything that followed — democracy, human rights, individualism, and that dynamic duo, “science and reason”. For a conservative, it might signal a set of cultural values: traditional attitudes to family life and national identity, and probably broad support for free-market capitalism. And for the kind of post-modern leftist who currently dominates the culture, the West — assuming they concede it even exists — is largely a front for colonialism, empire, racism and all the other horrors we hear about daily through the official channels.

All of these things could be true at the same time, but each is also a fairly recent development. The West is a lot older than liberalism, leftism, conservatism or empire. It is at the same time a simpler, more ancient and immensely more complex concoction than any of these could offer. It is the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a particular religious story.

“There has never been any unitary organisation of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church,” explained the medieval historian Christopher Dawson in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after World War Two. “Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.”

“The West”, in other words, was born from the telling of one sacred story — a garden, an apple, a fall, a redemption — which shaped every aspect of life: the organisation of the working week; the cycle of annual feast and rest days; the payment of taxes; the moral duties of individuals; the attitude to neighbours and strangers; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most of all, the wide picture of the universe — its structure and meaning, and our place within it.

Suggested reading

The end of secularism is nigh

By Tom Holland

The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. If you live in the West now, you are living among its ruins. Many of them are still beautiful — intact cathedrals, Bach concertos — but they are ruins nonetheless. And when an old culture built around a sacred order dies, there will be lasting upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics to the level of the soul. The shape of everything — family, work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to the body to kin to duty — all of it will be up for grabs. Welcome to 2021.

Forty years ago this year, the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argued in his classic work After Virtue that the notion of virtue itself would eventually become inconceivable once the source it sprung from was removed. If human life is regarded as having no higher meaning, he said, it will ultimately be impossible to agree on what “virtue” means, or why it should mean anything.

Macintyre’s favoured teacher at the time was Aristotle, not Jesus, but his critique of the Enlightenment and prediction of its ultimate failure was based on a clearsighted understanding of the mythic vision of medieval Christendom — and of the partial, empty and over-rational humanism with which Enlightenment philosophers attempted to replace it. Macintyre believed that this failure was already clearly evident, but that society did not see it, because the monuments to the old sacred order were still standing, like Roman statues after the legions had departed.

To illustrate his thesis, Macintyre used the example of the taboo. This word was first recorded by Europeans in the journals of Captain Cook, in which he recorded his visits to Polynesia. Macintyre explains:

“The English seamen had been astonished at what they took to be the lax sexual habits of the Polynesians and were even more astonished to discover the sharp contrast with the rigorous prohibition placed on such conduct as men and women eating together. When they enquired why men and women were prohibited from eating together, they were told that the practice was taboo. But when they enquired further what taboo meant, they could get little further information.”

Further research suggested that the Polynesian islanders themselves were not really sure why these prohibitions existed either; indeed, when taboos were abolished entirely in parts of Polynesia a few decades later, there were few immediately obvious consequences. So, were such prohibitions meaningless all along?

Suggested reading

The West's cultural revolution is over

By Ed West

Not quite. Macintyre reminds us that, at first, taboos “are embedded in a context which confers intelligibility upon them”. But if they are deprived of that context, “they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions,” especially “when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten”. Once a society reaches the stage where the reason for its taboos has been forgotten, one shove is all it takes to start a domino effect that will knock them all down. Macintyre believed that this stage had already been reached in the West.

When such an order is broken, what replaces it? When the taboos were abolished in Polynesia, reported Macintyre, an unexpected “moral vacuum” was created, which came to be filled by “the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries”. In this case, a certain colour of Christianity had stepped into the breach created by the death of a previously sacred story. The end of the taboos had not brought about some abstract “freedom”; rather, it had stripped the culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but now that the formal architecture was gone too, there was an empty space waiting to be filled — and nature abhors a vacuum.

It seems to me that we are now at this point in much of the West. Since at least the 1960s, our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years many of the remaining monuments have been — often literally — torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. No hostile army swept into Europe and forcibly converted us to a rival faith. Instead we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all.

In After Virtue, Macintyre explains what happened next. The Enlightenment project of the 18th century was an attempt to build a “morality” (a word that had not existed in this sense before that time) loosed from theology. It was the project of constructing a wholly new human being After God, in which a new, personal moral sense — no longer eternal in nature, or accountable to any higher force — would form the basis of the culture and the individual.

Suggested reading

Why the West isn't racist

By Ralph Leonard

Did it work? In a word: no. Post-Enlightenment “morality”, said Macintyre, was no substitute for a higher purpose or meta-human sense of meaning. If the correct path for society or the individual was based on nothing more than an individual’s personal judgement, then who or what was to be the final arbiter?

Ultimately, without that higher purpose to bind it, society would fall — as it has — into “emotivism”, relativism and ultimately disintegration. If every culture is cored around a sacred order — whether Christian, Islamic or Hindu, the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin — then the collapse of that order will lead inevitably to the collapse of the culture it supported. There is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force we take our instruction from. The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions — “the people” or “liberty” or “democracy” or “progress.”

I’m all for democracy (the real thing, please, not the corporate simulacra that currently squats in its place), but the dethroning of the sovereign — Christ — who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order did not lead to universal equality and justice. It led — via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler — to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

The vacuum created by the collapse of our old taboos was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism. It has now infiltrated every aspect of our lives in the way that the Christian story once did, so much so that we barely even notice as it colonises everything — from the way we eat to the values we teach our children. Cut loose in a post-modern present — with no centre, no truth and no direction — we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the self and to the power of money; broken worshippers before the monstrous idol of Progress. “In the ethics of the West,” wrote Spengler, “everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant.”

After Virtue ends with its author declaring that the task we face today is similar to that set for those living through the collapse of Rome: not to “shore up the imperium” but to start building anew. Macintyre famously concluded that the West was waiting for “a new — and doubtless very different — St Benedict.” That was forty years ago, and we are still waiting, but it’s not a bad way to see the challenge we face. Despite the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, the post-Christian West is not at all short on ideas, arguments, insults, ideologies, stratagems, conflicts or world-saving machines. But it is very short on saints; and how we need their love, wisdom, discipline and stillness amidst the chaos of the times. Maybe we had better start looking at how to embody a little of these qualities ourselves.

This piece was originally published in August.

Two things. As these are not philosophies but tricks, they are less likely to affront; one can always say of a trick (and what are techniques but elaborated tricks?), “I just learned this last week…”

First: when the baby gets you up in the middle of the night, do not look at the clock. Anyone who’s had children will nod in understanding — you’re up anyway, why pay twice?

The second trick is The Designated Criminal.

My notion of hell is the cross-country road trip with the whole damn family. Here everything, of course, is always going wrong. Some kid is complaining, spouses are feuding about directions, and all is misery. Now this traveler and now that offends against reason and good order and everyone ends up blaming Father, who, as the sole voice of reason, will now turn belligerent. Hot, tired, weary, angry, thirsty and lost, the car rolls on.

How to get from Coast to Coast? Appeals for calm (from Mother), obedience (that’s right), fellow-feeling, and so on will not avail. But a technique (trick) may. It is The Designated Criminal.

On setting out the family must establish a rotation. Each car member, then, on his appointed day, will be The Designated Criminal. On his lucky day, everything that goes wrong in the car is his fault. The affronted family are happily then leagued against the diabolical offender in their midst.

It works like a charm.

But The Designated Criminal may also be practised as oppression. For there are families and other organisms which employ the technique not as a means of maintaining esprit-de-corps, but of exercising control. Here the criminal is designated once and for all time, and will live and die in his chains.

Suggested reading

The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

In the co-dependant family one child or parent is always in the wrong. We have all seen it and some have been taxed with participating in the loathsome farce: that Dad is a fool, Mom is a dunderhead, Little Bob is a lazy good-for-nothing, Little Suzy is a pre-pubescent whore and if she doesn’t wear more modest clothes she will end on the street, and so on.

And we know of the continual indictment of The Jews, the Witch Trials of Salem and McCarthy, the chattel slavery of Black Americans, and the continuation of that vile racism as the indictment of Whites.

The mechanism of the Designated Criminal can be used both for social equilibrium, in the car, or, politically, for disruption of the body politic. The first case, The Orderly Rotation of Blame, is the essential engine of democracy. The Game’s Rules (The Constitution) are designed to ensure the periodic exchange of power. The Ins and the Outs, and their adherents and dupes, may not understand the transfer of power as a game; but they are involved in one as much as the folks in the station wagon.

The motorists enjoy a process which elevates family unity over individual discomfort; the voters, the self-importance of saving the world from mindless fools. But it’s the same game.

If played according to the rules the rotation of power promotes the health and longevity of the organism. The Ins are allowed to tax the limits of legitimate incumbency, the Outs to misuse the permitted latitudes of opposition. And then, as in a football game, offense and defence shift.

But what if the game is not played according to Hoyle?

What if a player or contingent takes advantage of the rules themselves to achieve a goal other than balance? What if put-upon Dad, for example, says, “I know which Young Traveller is today’s Designated Criminal, but Samantha has just done something so egregious that I am going to suspend the rules and humiliate her”.

Readers will feel the affront of the interjection. As will not only young Samantha, but the whole family. For they had agreed to suspend their individual feelings in favour of group unity. And Dad has just proclaimed that they were fools to do so — that they had made a bargain which, it seems, the car’s driver reserved the right to abrogate, and, thus, that anyone may be the next-accused.

Now, the once-happy car, all occupants free to enjoy not only the trip but the game, are forced into co-dependence. The game is over, and the Ref (of whose existence the car was previously unaware) has ruled that actual indictment of the other is now the order of the day and those not supporting the new rule will suffer. The enjoyment of Free Speech has been superseded by the necessity of obedience to power. The car has just experienced Terror.

Suggested reading

We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

The occupants, now, do not know what the new rules are, but only that they, having been changed once, may continue to be changed at will, by those possessing or bidding for power. Now, rather than the joy of improvisation (of the communal comedy), the rule of silence, obedience and denunciation is in force.

This is the state of the sick, co-dependant family. Here it is not that some things may be false, but that all things must be false. For if the subordinate members do not know what is and what is not permitted, they must devote themselves, in preference to any productive activity, to protection from power.

Far worse than the frowns of the car which does not know The Designated Criminal we now have the false smiles and the sad head shakings of the sick family, which is to say, of the Left.

When we know that it’s our turn on the electoral ducking stool tomorrow, we, when in power, may moderate our behaviour. In a crumbling Democracy, the power-mad, like Dad taking the reins, have come to the Dictator’s realisation. That is, “Wait a second. All I have to do is rig it so I can hold my seat indefinitely”. This, of course, is the aperçu of most every politician from dogcatcher to President, down through time. (George III said of Washington that if he chose to relinquish the Presidency he would be the greatest man who ever lived.)

***

One cannot credit the Politicians of the Left with even the delusion that they are Doing Good. And, if they do, then what? They did not take an oath to do good, but to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

Must they come to bend and break the rules in favour of 1) their good ideas, 2) the necessity of staying in office, 3) theft? Of course. That’s why we have elections. To roll the dice. The co-dependant, terrified society comes to think that, having achieved the perfection of leadership, it’s a grand idea to call it quits, abolish the electoral college, mail ballots to everyone on earth, require no voter identification, import new voters, and so on.

Just as the inspired politicians see that perpetual hegemony might be had by mere suspension of their Oath; their dupes, the electorate, learn to suspend their reason, and substitute hatred of the indicted for their new-found fear of power — a fear so powerful it must be relegated to the unconscious.

Just like the children in the car.

When Dad trashes the rules he changes the whole point of the exercise. The building of family happiness and unity (which, we assume, was, after all, the whole purpose of the trip) becomes an indoctrination; and, the child sees, safety must now be his primary concern. He may keep silent, or join in the condemnation of Little Trevor, but should he object, “what about the Game?” he is, most certainly, now the new Criminal.

Our electorate is split into the affronted Right and the supine Left. Those who wish to preserve our Constitutional Republic, its rules, and the culture from which they spring, are indicted by those in momentary power (both political and asserted) ad-lib.

Suggested reading

Will magic defeat America's elites?

By John Michael Greer

There is no merit in supporting various contemporary blasphemies (“Birthing Parent”, and so on). Unless they are untrue. The merit comes from the affiant’s vocal sacrifice of his reason, and, so, of his self-respect, in support of The Cause.

This is the contemporary terror. Not that we’re faced with the enormities, the crimes, delusions, and lies of a Politician (when were we not?), but that we are now frightened of whomever was screaming last.

From “New Business Item 39” posted on the National Education Association’s website on July 5, 2021: “The N.E.A. will provide an already-created, in-depth study that criticises empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeniety, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarcy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of oppression at the intersections of society.”

This is the country’s largest Teachers Union. What do these words mean? That the teachers will be put in charge of criticising. Whom? Whomever the N.E.A. designates.

And how might one, however convinced, ensure that he will not transgress the rules? There are no rules, for the categories are infinitely expansible. (Larry Elder, an African American running for Governor of California, and a lifelong champion of America and of his race, was called “the Black Face of White Supremacy,” L.A. Times, August 20, 2021.) And what in the world are “the intersections of society”?

In Woody Allen’s film Sleeper (1973) he is transported to the future. There he learns that the world he knew came to grief in 1989. He asks how and is told: “A man called Albert Shanker got his hands on a nuclear warhead.” Albert Shanker was the head of the United Foundation of Teachers, and then the American Federation of Teachers.

This may be the rock on which the Left comes to grief: the insistence on infecting one’s children with hatred. Young parents four generations away from The New Deal are insisting that they will not abandon their children to the blasphemies of the N.E.A. and its servitors, the Democratic Party. They are finding that there is a mechanism created to protect them from a despotic government, and that it is The Constitution and the organisations derived therefrom.

It is not incumbent on us Jews to prove we do not drink the blood of Christian Children, nor of white American citizens to apologise, nor of citizens to assert their loyalty to various confederations of thugs, and shriek heresies and treason or risk blacklisting as “of insufficient zeal”.

What does it mean to be “cancelled”?

It seems to mean that some group asserting power has mobilised its forces in social media and that their indictments have, in turn, been echoed and endorsed by multitudes. But we all know, or should know, that the controllers of the algorithms are constantly aware of and manipulate our prejudices through their presentation of that called information.

Fear of the heretic is spread through social media, but who knows, and how could one know, that the numbers and the tweets are real? One cannot. They are pixels on a screen which stampede the fearful into actual action against the indicted.

Suggested reading

How Satanism conquered America

By Mary Harrington

Would the controllers of the blogosphere stoop to such subterfuge as cooking the numbers? They limit access to their outlets ad lib, banning any person or idea they do not endorse. Why would they not also warp the number or content of the blogs to suit or, indeed, confect them? (I worked, for a year, as a Contributing Editor (utility man) at a very prominent national publication. One of my duties was Letters to the Editor. This involved not only answering but writing them. I assume the practice was universal and that it continues in the new media.)

I live in a liberal neighbourhood outside of Los Angeles. The residents here are miserable. Traditionally it was Not Done to acknowledge each other’s presence on the streets. A “good morning” uttered to a fellow dogwalker was considered as if one had exposed oneself. (This latter, in fact, now accepted as a permitted practice of the Homeless.)

Since Covid, the masked or the unmasked cross the street to avoid each other, glaring.  Signs on the homes proclaim that Love Is Love, but the residents hate and fear each other. Nancy Mitford wrote of the Liberals, “they are all so unhappy, and all of their plans fail so miserably.”

I was elected a non-person by the Left many years ago. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s costly and sad to see the happy fields in which I played all those decades — Broadway, book publishing, TV and film — fold up and Hail Caesar, but there it is.

The question for the young is: what kind of country do you want for your children? The question for the aged (myself) is: “what did you do in the War, Daddy?”

I’ve been involved for near 50 years in dealing with folks in the mass. It was not a social experiment for me, but a game: The Theatre. I learned very young that the correct study of the dramatist was neither his own feelings, nor those of the actors, but the attention of the audience. I understood that it was not my job to teach them anything, nor to induce a feeling in them, but to perform a sort of magic trick — to understand their behaviour in order to control their concentration. Why? In order to give them a treat. Just like a magician.

I sat with them night by night and year by year, and it was a joy to feel their conjoined attention, and to learn from it and its absence how to improve the play. As Billy Wilder said, “individually, they’re idiots, but together they’re a genius”.

The horror of the last year’s slide into despotism has showed me the reverse of the medal.

Suggested reading

Britain needs a cigarette

By David Hockney

Watching the good play, the audience suspends its reason in order to be entertained — at Hamlet, as much and identically with watching a woman be sawed in half. The audience enjoys the trick while knowing, and because they know she is not going to be harmed. Just as they know Hamlet’s Dad is not coming back from the dead.

But just as the techniques of stage magic are identical with those of the confidence game, the understanding of the dramatist — that the mass can be suggested, and, so controlled —is the same as that of the Dictator. Here fear replaces happy anticipation; and, as we see, outrage at the indicted masks an unavowable fear.

The children in the car must immediately come to support the new regime or risk abandonment. The protection it offers is illusory (as who knows who will be next), but the illusion, to them, is preferable to knowledge of their powerlessness.

In the mass the alternative to submission is blacklisting, poverty, censure, et cetera. Finally, this is the same alternative offered to the children. They may court protection from fear only by remaining submissive. Just like the Electorate.

© David Mamet 2021

This piece was originally published in November.

Through my mask I try to explain that he has been getting better, and that we wouldn’t have a place for him on the high dependency unit (HDU) unless we thought he had a good chance of survival. He tells me that I don’t understand what it’s like, desperately struggling to breathe, which is true. This goes on for around 10 minutes. Eventually, I have to take his request seriously. Perhaps it isn’t illogical for him to want to die peacefully.

In order for me to allow him to make this decision, I have to be sure that he understands the risks, so I ask him to explain to me what he expects will happen if he takes off his mask and doesn’t put it back on. He says he doesn’t know. I tell him that he has to understand that he will die and that he needs to say those words to me if that is what he really wants. Eventually we compromise; he will put his mask on for another hour, then phone his wife and tell me his decision. This man is 61.

I am allocated B Bay, in which there are five patients. My patients are mostly men, ranging from their early 30s to their 60s. This is younger than normal on HDU because — as I explained to the man — we only have beds for people with a fighting chance. I read their charts to update myself on what happened overnight.

Who dropped their oxygen saturations? Who needed their CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) settings increasing? This comes via a tight mask that goes over your face to help you breathe by forcing air into the lungs at high pressures, keeping the airways open. I am told that it feels like you are suffocating.

Who crashed overnight and is now on the ICU (intensive care unit)? Who has died?

I then put on my PPE (FFP3 mask, hairnet, long-sleeved gown, gloves, visor) and enter the bay to examine the patients. I feel lucky to have this level of protection — my colleagues outside of the HDU only have surgical masks, which offer little protection against an airborne virus.

The patients don’t ask many questions, mostly because they need to spend all of their energy breathing. I try to work out if one of my patients isn’t answering my questions because she is delirious, because she doesn’t speak English, or because she is depressed. I work out that it is probably the latter; her notes say that her husband died just before New Year, from Covid. I try to remember every patient as an individual, since I can’t bring the notes into the bay to write as I go, but each crackly chest I listen to blurs into one. I summarise what I have found, for the consultant’s round later in the morning.

Suggested reading

Did anyone predict coronavirus?

By Tom Chivers

By this point, the blood test results should be back. I had been wondering why one of my patients was deteriorating — requiring more oxygen and at higher pressure — and his blood results provide me with a likely answer: a blood clot on the lungs. He is too unwell to enter a CT scanner, which would confirm this theory, so I treat him as if he has one, with higher doses of blood thinners. I corner the ICU doctor, who happens to be reviewing another patient on the ward at the same time, asking him to have a glance at my patient. He agrees that he will likely need an intensive care bed at some stage, but at the moment they simply don’t have one. I worry that my patient is going to end up with an emergency intubation, much more dangerous than a controlled one in ICU.

I now have to update relatives over the phone, since they are unable to visit. I always put this part off; I almost never have good news to deliver. Hearing people cry on the other end of the phone, knowing that I am them bringing news of the worst day of their lives, is heartbreaking. There is nothing positive that can be made from the words “your father is currently on the maximum support we can offer, and we are not sure if he is going to survive today”. I feel like a bad doctor because — to put it bluntly — I’m causing suffering rather than alleviating it. Why can’t I make them feel better?

We try to have our patients prone (lying on their fronts) since this opens up their lungs at the back and improves their oxygen levels. The patients hate proning, since the masks dig into their faces, their backs hurt and their arms go numb, and we do not have massage table-style beds with holes for their faces.

One of my patients has not managed to be prone at all. I speak to his wife, who tells me that he is very claustrophobic, and that might be why he has been resistant. She tells me that she has been pleading with him on the phone to try it, but hasn’t been able to persuade him. I ask her if there’s anything that has helped him in the past with his claustrophobia and she says sometimes watching a film on the iPad. But I don’t have the courage to tell her that he is nowhere near well enough to watch a film. She suggests a fan, so I arrange for a fan to be set up for the patient, and he manages to prone all day. I feel like a good doctor.

Suggested reading

Did 'Eat Out to Help Out' cause a second wave?

By Aveek Bhattacharva

We have several patients who are not “fit” for ICU in the current climate. Before Covid, they most likely would have been given a chance, but not now. When we think that these patients have suffered enough, and are unlikely to ever recover, we start talking about making them comfortable. It’s partly that we need the beds for patients with a better chance, and partly that we feel it is cruel to keep these people suffering when their chances of survival are slim. It’s difficult to work out which of those is your true motivation.

The most distressing part of their struggle is the air hunger. You can spot these patients easily, as they grasp the masks to their faces with both hands and gasp visibly for air.

Once we decide to palliate someone, we give them morphine to reduce their respiratory drive, and ease this feeling. We give them benzodiazepines to lower their anxiety, antiemetics to stop them from feeling nauseous, and other medications to prevent them from needing to cough. We then take off their masks.

It is important that these medications are given before their masks are removed, otherwise they will die terrified and gasping. This decision is made for about two or three patients each day on my ward, out of 20 or so. However, this process does not always run smoothly. Sometimes these medications are prescribed but not given in a timely fashion, or at insufficient doses. With so many patients, we cannot keep an eye on them all; to watch whether what we are doing is working.

Suggested reading

When will the Covid-19 vaccine arrive?

By Saloni Dattani

Once a patient is deemed to be dying, they are allowed one family member to see them for 15 minutes. The patient won’t be able to see their loved one’s face, since they will be wearing full PPE. Because the family member only has one shot at visiting, we need to accurately guess the patient’s time of death so that we can call them to come in. Sometimes we get this wrong, and the family never gets to see them. But all of the patients who die do so alone. There is nobody to hold their hand. Nobody to comfort them. Nobody to tell them they love them.

Towards the end of the day, two of my patients are deteriorating and destined for the ICU. Another doctor had an ICU candidate in her bay. They are all between 60 and 64 years old, none of them with significant comorbidities; all were working full time until coronavirus struck. They all now require 80% oxygen at high pressures, breathing at around 50 breaths per minute and tiring. There is only one ICU bed. I leave before the decision is made as to which of them will get the bed. I am sure that whoever doesn’t get it is likely to deteriorate overnight.

I pay for an Uber home, because at 9.30pm I can’t face walking in the January dark to the train station and spending over an hour getting back. I arrive home at around 10.15. In less than 10 hours, I will repeat the same day again.

This piece was originally published in January. 

I recently told my doctor I smoke twenty a day, then about ten in the evenings — and I try and keep it down to five during the night. I also told him that I have had three doctors in the last fifty years. Each of them recommended I give up. But each of them has now died; the last one only a year older than me. My new doctor laughed and said nothing. He has a good sense of humour.

My father was a very keen anti-smoker, but he died at 75 because he ate too many chocolate biscuits. He was a diabetic who would walk up the street to buy a packet of chocolate biscuits and then eat them all in the park. This caused him to go into comas, which he did once too often and died of a heart attack in the hospital. He knew that going into a coma damages your heart, but he was a lot more worried about the smokers.

I knew this was completely irrational, but I also knew that he wasn’t alone. One of the reasons I moved to Normandy was because there are many people in England like him who are now trying to ban smoking. All of them are humourless bossy boots.

They are now trying it in Oxfordshire, which wants to become England’s first “smoke-free” county. I have no plans to go there. I was once invited by the Oxford Union to a debate on smoking, but I had to decline because of my deafness — although I did also point out that there’s not a hotel in Oxford where you can smoke.

It is the relentlessness of these people that has demonised smoking in England and America. Why are they listened to? It wouldn’t happen in France, Germany, Italy or Spain.

Suggested reading

Stop hating on vaping

By Tom Chivers

The Guardian published a report last week about how there were now 1.1 billion smokers in the world — but it also mentioned that 8 million had “died” from smoking, and how terrible that was. I had to remind them that 8 million was 0.73% of 1.1 billion, so what about the 99.27 % that hadn’t?

It’s all madness to me and something should be said. I have always thought the world to be mad and it has been madder at other points in my lifetime. I was, after all, born in 1937. I would normally be willing to take on the anti-smokers, but at the moment I’m living a very quiet life in Normandy, working away because I’ve something to do. I have a purpose in life.

Not many people in England will defend smoking. They are intimidated by the medical profession and “social pressure”. Well, I’m lucky I can’t hear the “social pressure”, let alone what the doctors have to say. Their obsession with health is unhealthy. Longevity shouldn’t be an aim in life; that to me seems to be life-denying.

Suggested reading

It's not our job to protect the NHS

By Timandra Harkness

I know the World Health Organisation is also part of this madness. They might relentlessly go on about it, but why are they listened to? They are completely irrational. They won’t give up, just like my father.

In my profession, Picasso smoked and died at 91, Matisse smoked and died at 84 and Monet chain-smoked and died at 86. I don’t smoke much when I’m painting, but I light a cigarette every fifteen minutes when I stop to check what I have done. Monet smoked while he painted, but kept them in his mouth all the time. I can’t do that. I take a drag then hold it in my hand.

Renoir also smoked: if you go on YouTube and type in “Renoir smoking and painting”, you will see an old man painting with difficulty because of his arthritic hands. And then he lights a cigarette. I can tell he enjoys it enormously, and all these bossy boots would deny him that pleasure.

I know there will always be bossy people. Anne Applebaum says that 30% of people in every country have an “authoritarian disposition” — but doesn’t she just mean “bossy”? Smoking for me is a deep pleasure and 1.1 billion people in the world seem to agree. It can never be stopped; smokers would just start growing their own tobacco. But we need more people to defend it, otherwise the bossy boots will win in England.

I’m 100% sure that I am going to die of a smoking-related illness or a non-smoking related illness. But I couldn’t imagine not smoking, and when people tell me to stop I always point this out. I’ve done it for 68 years, so are you telling me I’m doing something wrong? Fuck off.

Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.

This piece was originally published in June.

After I had run out of excuses, the day arrived and, predictably, after a few minutes of the usual small talk, my friend launched into a tirade about the Iraq War, which several of my colleagues strongly supported.

“You don’t belong there, Ayaan,” she said.

I remember trying to steer the conversation on to actual policies. I had voted for supporting the American coalition in Iraq when I was a Member of Parliament in The Netherlands — and I started to explain why.

But she wasn’t interested in a rational discussion. She interrupted me mid-sentence, launching into a monologue about John Bolton, the former Ambassador to the United Nations and a fellow at AEI (and subsequently National Security Advisor to President Trump). Bolton, my friend insisted, was a loathsome, hateful, racist, neo-conservative warmonger. The list went on and on until eventually she said that he looked like a walrus with a moustache. You could tell by his physiognomy, she explained, that he was a psychopath.

“But what about the policies?” I responded, trying to redirect the conversation away from personalities. The more she spoke, the more I recognised her broad disposition as something I had experienced earlier in my life. Her attitude was almost entirely tribal. Two things, in particular, stood out: an almost blind hatred of a particular group (Republicans); and secondly, the use of deeply personal attacks on individual researchers to justify that hatred.

More from this author

Sweden's migrant rape crisis

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Today, ten years later, this attitude seems to be the prevailing norm. Numerous studies support the hypothesis that American life — not just politics, but life in general — has become deeply polarised. The deeply divided society we now live in increasingly reminds me of clan or tribal behaviour in Africa.

In Somalia, where I was born, my mother was blindly loyal to our clan. So much so that, apparently, she claimed she could detect the malicious intentions of an individual from a different clan just by the structure of his forehead. She would, for example, often warn my father that someone was trying to take advantage of him, purely by the way he frowned.

In Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, anthropologist Philip Carl Salzman recounts meeting tribesmen in Baluchistan. What, they had asked Salzman, would he do if he faced a real danger in his home country? Well, Salzman replied, he would call the police. The tribesmen roared with laughter, then looked at him pityingly: “Oh no, no, no, they said: only your ‘lineage mates’ will help you.”

In tribal communities, neutral institutions of civil society that Westerners take for granted — such as the police, impartial courts, and the rule of law — simply do not, and cannot, exist. In such societies, everything is tribalised, and the task of building civic institutions is laden with difficulties.

In Somalia, I was taught to be suspicious of anyone from a different clan, to always think harm was coming my way and to be guarded against anyone that was “other.” I come from the Darod clan, and was taught to constantly listen to accents, examine face shapes and overanalyse all non-verbal cues, searching for any indications of a different tribe. I can still identify a Somali (and usually their clan) from across a room.

We were captives of an echo chamber, hearing constantly of the evils of the neighbouring Hawiye clan. We were taught from a young age that the Hawiye were coming to rape, rob, and destroy us. In response, we amassed weapons, hoarded food and exhorted young men (as young as 12) to join the military. The looming threat of the Hawiye was so great that my mother eventually sent my sister and me abroad.

Suggested reading

The dangerous pull of political tribalism

By James Mumford

In the end, because of such protracted tribal tensions, Somalia collapsed into civil war. Every attempt at mediation proved incapable of handling the deep-seated mistrust and hatred that accumulated by each clan over the years; tribal elders, reluctant to compromise, could not de-escalate the situation. With such high levels of distrust, the conflict spiralled into bloodshed.

While such violence is yet to seize America, all the tribalist ingredients are present. There is a blind commitment to one party or the other; emotions are running high; there is a lack of trust in civic institutions. If such tribalism isn’t overcome, it’s only a matter of time before the situation escalates.

Some of this has its absurd side: for instance, the strange ways that public-health measures such as mask-wearing and vaccination have become politicised, to the point that I know of fully vaccinated people in California who say they will continue to wear masks for fear of being mistaken for Republicans. Bizarre? Of course. But it is also symptomatic of a dangerous trend towards tribalism.

We are, I fear, close to the precipice of serious destabilisation. Many American cities are either militarised (Washington, DC), near a social boiling point (Minneapolis), or have capitulated to anarchist protests and pressures (Portland, Seattle).

These tribal quirks run deep on both sides of the aisle. Many Republicans continue to dispute the legitimacy of the result of the last presidential election; while on the Left, the woke are eroding the Democratic Party from the inside, as identity politics displace universalist aspirations. Some citizens are viewed as part of oppressive groups, some as part of oppressed groups. A person’s individual actions can generally do little to change the immutable characteristics of the tribe to which they belong.

Suggested reading

How anarchists captured Portland

By Bret Weinstein

Just as I noticed with my friend over lunch, there is frequently a visceral hostility towards anyone who leans even slightly toward the Right. Today, especially in academia, those who don’t conform with the “progressive” narrative, no matter how ethical they might be as individuals, are vilified as racists, white supremacists, homophobes or transphobes. Individuals can be attacked, cancelled, disinvited or even fired for the tiniest of verbal transgressions.

This kind of intolerance has for some time been apparent in high schools, too. Another friend of mine has a daughter who attends a private school outside of San Francisco. Last year, when it was revealed that she had expressed mild support for President Trump, she was pushed down the stairs by a fellow pupil.

It was a horrifying and, one hopes, rare incident. And yet there is something very striking about tribalism: it is a basic human trait, like skin colour or gender. However, despite being the natural state of being for many humans, it is not a positive or helpful trait, particularly in modern times. Tribalism developed as an imperfect social survival mechanism in the early stages of human civilisation. But in modern times, it can lead to social disintegration and severe violence between groups.

The beautiful story of America, the reason so many people around the world still yearn to come here, is to a large extent founded on our rejection of tribalism and our establishment of civic, neutral institutions, based on the fundamental principle of equality before the law. These institutions are imperfect, of course, but they are far superior to the tribalism that rules other parts of the world. Our overcoming of such a natural urge is an accomplishment.

As “woke” politics strengthens its grasp on our institutions — extending beyond the educational system into the media and now many corporations — that accomplishment is being eroded. The presumption of innocence, the commitment to blind justice and the whole notion of due process are all falling victim to spurious notions of “equity” and “anti-racism” — both of which carry within them an implicit intention to discriminate on racial lines.

If we continue to slip down this path, the thirst for tribalism will be unquenchable. That’s why moderate liberals need to stand up to the destructive forces that are taking over the Democratic party, just as moderate conservatives need to resist the tribal impulse that often grows in reaction to the other side’s excesses.

In Somalia, we failed to do this. In America it is imperative that we succeed.

This piece was originally published in May.

Bri Luna is a magical influencer, whose posts appeal to the increasing number of people — especially young women — who self-identify as witches, and who account for the 6.8 million Instagram posts with the hashtag #witchesofinstagram. It’s clear that many of those posting use it simply to attract attention to their hot Goth selfies; to interior design ideas with not-much-of-a-twist — “Last Minute Beltane Ideas … place a bouquet of fresh flowers in your home. Light a red (passion) and a white candle (purity) [sic]. Decorate your home with ribbons and flowers…”; or to promises of a miracle — “Any Finger That will like this will never lack of money” (though they may lack of grammar).

On TikTok, witches are even more popular: witchtokboy, who offers spells and curses, has had 8.2 million likes and offers bookings. But it’s not just a digital phenomenon — Taylor Swift’s latest album, Evermore, has seen witches welcome her to their tribe. In the last few years, witchcraft manuals, such as Ariel Gore’s 2019 Hexing the Patriarchy: 26 Potions, Spells and Magical Elixirs to Embolden the Resistance, have been published in number and sold well. Gore writes that “magic has always been a weapon of the disenfranchised” and promises to teach her readers how to make “salt scrubs to wash away patriarchal bullshit” and “mix potions to run abusive liars out of town.”

Elsewhere, self-identifying witches have become political, like the protestors in Boston in August 2017 who dressed as witches and carried signs saying, “Witches against White Supremacy”, “Hex White Supremacy”, “Good Night Alt-Right”, and — note the acronym — “We Interrupt Those Choosing Hate”. Some of this has been taken very seriously: when, in February 2017, Michael Hughes posted online “A Spell to Bind Trump and All Those Who Abet Him” and urged other witches to join him in casting it, Christian Trump supporters put out urgent calls for prayer and fasting to counter the spell.

Having studied the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, I find this resurgence both fascinating and a little disturbing. Historically, people turned to magic when things felt uncertain or inexplicable. They were more likely to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft in times when money was tight or disease was rife. And while men could be and were accused of witchcraft, in most places in Europe women made up the vast majority of those who were prosecuted and executed as witches, because women were perceived to be innately weaker and more sinful than men, and so more easily tempted by the Devil.

In a culture fixated on fecundity, older women were especially vulnerable to accusation, because the witch was seen as infertile, an anti-mother. Above all, it was the idea of magical, diabolical power being used by the socially powerless that made witches especially scary. In today’s world, when money is tight, disease is rife and many people feel politically impotent, the resurgence of witchcraft among young women is both a mark of powerlessness and an attempt to reclaim power.

Professor Ronald Hutton suggests that the word “witch” was once used as a kind of smear campaign for all types of folk magicians. Many names that were originally insults — Protestant, suffragette, sans-culotte, queer — have been reclaimed, and that seems to be happening again as, for many modern sorceresses, “witch” has become a synonym of “feminist”. Much of the identification comes from seeing the history of the witch-hunts as a story of female oppression. Modern-day witch Gabriela Herstik told Sabat Magazine that “Witchcraft is feminism, it’s inherently political. It’s always been about the outside, about the woman who doesn’t do what the church or patriarchy wants.”

She is echoed by April Graham, whose sweep is even broader: “A Witch is somebody who stands against patriarchy and everything that is currently wrong with our society and any society throughout the ages.” By that definition, we could all be witches — which may, indeed, be the point; Luna says, “Every woman is a Witch.”

Witchcraft, then, has been repackaged as a kind of female empowerment. Erica Feldman, the proprietor of HausWitch shop in Salem, Massachusetts, says that for her the initials WITCH stand for “Woman In Total Control of Herself”. Deborah Blake, author of Modern Witchcraft: Goddess Empowerment for the Kick-Ass Woman (2020) gives away her stance in the title, but adds that “Many women are feeling frustrated, frightened, triggered, and down-right furious with the current social and political environment, but also feel powerless to create positive change … Witchcraft can give them both a sense of personal empowerment and a number of goddesses through whom they can channel those feelings in healthy and productive ways.”

More from this author

Anne Boleyn: whore, witch or Cinderella?

By Suzannah Lipscomb

Though not always. There is a burgeoning genre of books on how to hex your ex, including Deborah Gray and Athena Starwoman’s How to Turn Your Ex-Boyfriend into a Toad and Other Spells. You can feel the fun they had composing these: ingredients needed for “The Forget Me Not Spell” are “a square of white cloth, a sprig of mint, a photograph of you and your lover together, a pair of your lover’s underpants, a pair of your sexy underpants, a piece of scarlet ribbon”. The Toad Spell needs to be done at midnight on a Full Moon and involves making a cloth bag, filling it with dirt and a picture of your ex, and drawing a toad on it. If you can’t draw, you can probably find someone on Tiktok to cast a spell for you. This is the commodification of witchcraft.

Some of the modern elision between witchcraft and feminism, however, has a less capitalist edge. The notion of using the figure of the witch to fight patriarchy has roots in the 1960s American women’s liberation group W.I.T.C.H. — Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell — who protested societal inequalities by dressing up as witches, “hexing” Wall Street, and gluing shut the doors to the New York Stock Exchange — but they were using the term with their tongues conspicuously in their cheeks: they didn’t consider themselves to be “real” witches.

Instead they adopted the name because they believed accused witches of the past were “the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression — particularly the oppression of women down the ages” (WITCH manifesto, 1969). The group was revived in 2015-16 and its modern iteration takes its witchiness much more seriously. Its founding members, who all identify as witches, staged a ritual performance to focus attention on the lack of affordable housing in Chicago. One of them, Jessica Caponigro, objects to being called a “witch” in inverted commas, and resents threats from Wiccans who don’t think her witchy enough. She considers witchcraft to have always been “an act of social protest.”

In this reading, witches were always activists, rebels and non-conformers, who were punished for the resistance they mounted to the patriarchy. In the women’s marches of January 2017, protesters wore T-shirts, pin badges and placards bearing the line (from Tish Thawer’s 2015 novel The Witches of BlackBrook): “We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn” (even though, in England and New England, witches were hanged). Witchcraft has become a signifier of both systematic violence against women and of women’s attempts to resist that violence. This creates a binary of “we” — the assumed descendants of the oppressed — and “you” — the assumed oppressor.

This involves holding two dissonant ideas in tension: witches are women who exploit their power, and magic is something used by those who have no power. It is worth noting that neither aligns with the historic reality of the European witch-hunts in which large numbers of powerless, innocent people were prosecuted, tortured and executed — by which I mean that most of the witches accused in the 16th and 17th centuries protested that they were not guilty because they had not used magic. To believe witchcraft is making a comeback, you have to believe it was around in the first place. But today’s witches do, and they believe in both using and celebrating their supernatural powers. But here’s the rub: do they claim to actually practise magic?

Much hinges on our definition of the word. Witches in the past were thought to practice maleficium or evil magic that caused harm to people, animals or property, but Professor Hutton suggests we need a broader definition of magic that includes “any formalised practices by human beings designed to achieve particular ends by the control, manipulation, and direction of supernatural power or of spiritual power concealed within the natural world.” Witchcraft today seems to be about accessing supernatural power without faith in a deity. It promises to tap into unseen sources of power as a way to tackle life’s problems. Luna claims that witchcraft offers “resources for collective healing in our fraught political and social climate.”

But what does this magic look like? There is normally mention of the sort of things you might expect: Juliet Diaz, whose 2018 book Witchery: Embrace the Witch Within was an Amazon bestseller, describes a “Magick” that includes herbs, working with lunar cycles and the solar year, and setting up a sacred space. Others mention shrines, crystals, tarot cards, astrology, reiki, and auras. But there’s much that emulates Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret – that the universe will yield up its bounty in response to repeated affirmations. I’ve seen a spell defined as “a prayer to the universe”.

More from this author

How to survive a Little Ice Age

By Suzannah Lipscomb

Diaz offers a “manifesting spell”, for example, for which you need a bay leaf, some matches, a pen (she recommends menstrual blood as ink), a burn-safe bowl or cauldron, and some plant seeds (perhaps sage, eucalyptus or mint). Then: in a place of stillness, repeat aloud your desire as an affirmation (“I am blessed, money flows into my life easily and effortlessly”), and write the affirmation on the bay leaf before burning it in the bowl and planting the ashes with the seeds. Elsewhere magic is presented in the language of self-care – aromatherapy and meditation feature frequently. Magic is aligned with accessing what Luna calls “the deepest parts of ourselves”, Diaz’ “witch within”.

“Natural magic” — what Hutton referred to as the direction of “spiritual power concealed in the natural world” — also seems to play a major part. Here witchcraft manuals overlap with another genre of books that have boomed in sales as the young feel more politically powerless: books about getting back in touch with the world around you and reconnecting with nature.

Dr Alice Tarbuck’s A Spell in the Wild: A Year (and Six Centuries) of Magic (2020) — a beautifully-written meditation for the urban witch — seems to speak of magic where other words might do. Her “healing ritual for winter pains” is an affirmation of the healing power of food. Her euphemism for masturbation — “solitary sex magic is a way of observing the energy of witches’ Sabbats” — made me laugh out loud. But there is much that is metaphorically enchanting about the way she comprehends magic to be about connecting with the earth and attuning oneself to nature.

“Witchcraft is,” she writes, “I believe, the practice of entering into relation with the world, of exerting your will in it and among it, and learning how to work with it in ways that are fruitful for yourself and the world.” The warm, lyrical, and tender tone of her writing wins her many five-star reviews, but you don’t need to be a witch to wonder with her at “the curious magic of the world, the way it shimmers and changes if you walk through it … with your eyes open”. So why do she and others think that you do?

I think the rise in people identifying as witches might come from a combination of factors: not only does witchcraft promise you the mystical power to change your life, but in the same breath calling oneself a witch claims a victim status — as part of a historically downtrodden minority — and offers a reassuring place in the world: membership of a community with a shared language, set of rituals, and an identity. It provides the comforting framework of religion for the non-religious and a fellowship of believers for the unbeliever, and it does so in a very capacious way, as befits an age of identity politics. “Witch” and “witchcraft” have become such all-inclusive, amorphous categories that they can mean anything and everything — and sometimes even nothing.

Suggested reading

Why they burn witches in Scotland

By Diane Purkiss

This mantra is repeated again and again: Diaz states that “A Witch can’t be defined, because a Witch is an embodiment of his or her own unique Magick.” Caponigro argues that “There is no right way to be a witch. If you say you are a witch, and feel you are a witch, you are a witch. End of story.” That there is no definition, no criteria, appears to be a major part of the appeal. Being a witch is conceived, as Luna puts is, as “the freedom to be your most authentic self. To embrace ALL aspects of whoever that may be, and fiercely.” Diaz is even more startingly postmodern: a witch is “an embodiment of her truth in all its power”. Being a witch is whatever you want it to be, as long as it is self-actualising. Focusing on the self is legitimated by the language of healing nature and scaring the patriarchy.

In the European witch-hunts, witchcraft was invoked in times of poverty or pandemic, when people felt disenfranchised, and when things seemed inexplicable, and it chiefly concerned women. For similar reasons it is being invoked today (humans, universally, it seems do not cope well with the brutal unfairness of the concept of chance). But those characteristics in early modern Europe caused people to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft, not to name themselves as witches.

In the witch-hunts, nearly everyone who confessed themself to be a witch did so only out of fear and pain, like Gertrauta Conrad who, in Germany in 1595, changed her robust denial into a confession of witchcraft only after being left to hang for five hours with her arms tied behind her back and lifted above her head, her shoulders dislocating as they bore the weight of her body and of the weights attached to her feet. Today — at least in the West — people freely self-identify as witches. And in contrast to the witches of old, today’s witches practise magic. Or, at least, they say they do.

This piece was originally published in May.

Those who use the foodshare live at the top of the hill in the Penbeagle estate. It is run by the St Ives Community Orchard inside the St Ives Rugby Club, which donated their premises for free. They collect waste food from local supermarkets and give it away, so it doesn’t go into landfill. Unlike foodbanks, of which there are many in Cornwall, you do not need a referral from an agency, which will take your testimony and, if you are judged worthy, issue a chit. You just show up.

There are trestle tables covered with produce: a pile of potatoes and carrots (the only glut here, how British); a few onions; oranges, bananas, apples, and lemons; yesterday’s wilting pastries from the Co-op; four ham and cheese quiches; eight packets of miniature sausage rolls; one pack of noodles; four packets of mashed potatoes; three tins of vegetables; four rice puddings; five packets of crisps; one small box of salad.

Anyone who thinks this is mere bounty, something to be unconditionally celebrated, doesn’t understand food poverty, by which I mean poverty. This food is given with love and concern, and often collected by those who use it themselves. But it is remnants. There is no fresh meat except one packet of sliced beef; no fresh bread; one box of eggs and no butter, fish, green vegetables or milk. What is here is only what others do not want and cannot sell; at the end anything that is left is fed to pigs

I watch a man with two small children walk about, considering what to take; often people think they are not the most in need, and take too little. I see a girl, perhaps 11, with an empty carrier bag and an expression so defeated I am shocked to see it in a child and, later, I do cry, which shames me further. Tears are cheap, and I don’t cry after subsequent visits: immunity is easily caught here.

Suggested reading

Stop making poverty the butt of jokes

By Gavandra Hodge

The children are keen to help. Why wouldn’t they when their parents walk so heavily with their fear, as if carrying a great physical burden? But their chirping is stilled. Here there is no joy in the having; that is a fantasy for people who do not use these places. There is too much pain in the needing. Initially this foodshare was used by people who simply didn’t want to waste food. Increasingly it is used by people who could not survive without it.

No one smiles except the volunteers who grin brightly, for denial. It is quiet, speechless almost, like a deathbed. Just a murmur of thanks and a wave as they go out into the rain. Then a woman with three boys snaps at them as they say what they would like and ask her, too — what she would like? I recognise what I see: not an unloving mother, far from it, but a woman who can take no more. She chides them noisily, and her voice rises further to panic; but then she gathers herself, looks at them, touches them, praises them. She returns from her terror to herself. She smiles a small, tight smile and walks away with her bags, the children trotting with her.

If you are poor, landscape is only a taunt; a physical impediment even, for the hills around the harbour are steep. Those who live in Penbeagle would have lived on the harbour once, and seen seals and maybe dolphins from their windows, but the hunger of outsiders to own a second home, rather than stay in a hotel or caravan park has pushed them up the hill into a council estate that manages, with its pale uniformity, to deny its own Cornishness. “We all live up here now,” says Jo Chatterley, a volunteer, as I drive her to the orchard with what is now the pig food. “Some people don’t even go into the town in summer. They don’t feel welcome”.

The natives of St Ives can no longer afford the picturesque. They are no longer considered worthy of it. A local estate agent called St Ives, recently named the happiest place in Britain (in a survey conducted by another estate agent) — not a town, but a business. Where does that leave people? The old trades of fishing and mining are fetishised beyond the duchy in books and novels, but one is declining, and the other is gone. It is another way of mythologising Cornwall. To mythologise something is another way of not seeing it; and you can’t eat myths.

The orchard is picturesque, though, because only pigs live in orchards; that is, it doesn’t contain any holiday accommodation. The ground is lively and sodden; the apple trees are gnarled and expressive. There are bees; a fire-pit; a vegetable garden. This orchard exists for itself, which is rare in a town which is also a business, and to counter that other epidemic that thrives amid lack: depression. People come here for their mental health; subsistence farming is considered healing, and it is, but not by itself.

Cornwall pays a price for its insane beauty. The average house price is now £254,382; in St Ives it is £100,000 more. Living costs are as high as London, and sometimes higher (the price of a return bus ticket from Pendeen to Penzance is more than £5 and if you don’t have a car you are forced to pay it or risk your life on a bike across the moor that gathers fog, and many do). Parking in summer is £5 a day or more. Restaurants and clothing cost what they always do. But wages are two-thirds of the national average in St Ives, often for a combination of zero hours and split shifts, which mean, respectively, that you cannot take another job to supplement your income, or that you are paid for a part-time job but do a full-time job with a long lunch break.

Suggested reading

Let food bank clients eat cake

By Matthew Sweet

Before pandemic, Cornish employment was higher than the national average, and the Cornish worked longer hours than the average in “jobs”, I am told, “because there are almost no careers”. In 2019, this felt like a duchy that existed for people who do not live here; then pandemic came, and employment fell. Universal Credit claimants swelled by 135% and it is not enough to live on. Food is the obvious thing to cut back on. You won’t call a bailiff on yourself.

Usually, Jo says, in St Ives you have a seven-month holiday season in which to earn enough to keep yourself through winter. This year it was three months. “You have a lot of people living pretty much on the breadline and there’s a lot of people who aren’t usually over it anyway. People went from doing all right to absolutely nothing pretty much overnight. We are helping people who aren’t used to asking for help”. She knows a self-employed builder with four children and no work this year; when his wife developed breast cancer their income fell to nothing. She knows one family of seven adults existing on one wage.

Ten miles away, in Treneere, Penzance, Liz Sullivan runs Whole Again Communities (WAC). She sits in her office, her leg on the desk (she has hurt her ankle) and tells me how WAC exists to teach people how to cook healthy food – soups, hot pots, pasta sauces – from scratch on a budget. They distribute food, offer cooking classes – in pandemic these were online – and teach gardening, giving out compost and seeds. “We are a real community of making things and managing,” she says. “They don’t go around groaning and begging. They get used to managing. They are incredibly resilient. People are trying so unbelievabley hard and it’s still incredibly difficult. People live hand to mouth. Rent in Cornwall is so incredibly dear. Everything is more expensive down here”.

Owning is unaffordable and there is almost nothing to rent, due to the profusion of holiday cottages. A Rightmove search for Penzance brings up 11 properties, and only one is under £500 a month.

Liz explains what people will do to avoid the foodbank. One single mother (her partner is dead) took a full-time job as a carer, walked to work despite her ill-health (she had no car) and left her son with his grandmother, who is shielding: “She had to forgo seeing her son [during pandemic]. That is a typical story”. This girl wanted to be a baker – she is a gifted one – but she has no premises; caring is one of the few jobs you can get. It is the same for a girl who wants to be a beautician, she says: no premises, although many of the shops in Penzance are empty.  She tells me about a chef who left his job to care for his wife, who has complex health conditions, and their three children; they now need donations of food.

“Covid-19 is just one issue,” she says. “It’s not just all of sudden that food poverty has become an issue. It’s just the way it is, and some people cope better than others”. It has been worse since 2010, she says, when the coalition government came to power. “There is, she says, “the exhaustion of living a certain way. Some people, I believe,” she pauses, “people are where they feel they deserve to be”. That is perhaps the saddest part. She shows me a letter of thanks she received, from a woman with ill-health (two of her three children also have complex health conditions): “if we didn’t have the boxes [from you], we would have gone hungry. Tom is digging up the garden and planting the carrot and courgette seeds”.

Suggested reading

Maybe Scrooge was right

By Giles

I meet Lynne Dyer at the Growing Links community garden nearby. She runs a community store cupboard, teaches gardening to children and adults and also runs the street food project, which provides hot meals to vulnerable residents each night. Lynne knows people who are making a loaf of bread last a full week. She knows families evicted from their rental accommodation in summer for the tourist season, who have to camp in fields. She knows a sick man denied his benefits because he could walk 15 yards left destitute for a year and a half. She knows a woman who lost her job under the first lockdown unable to manage on Universal Credit. “She was feeding her children and not feeding herself. These sound like stories from Victorian times, don’t they? One thing about the Victorians – they had the poor house, didn’t they?”

And that is it: in west Cornwall people are feeding their neighbours, and kindly though it is, it cannot be a substitute for a functioning state. It is flickers of light inside a catastrophe.

In St Ives yesterday, as she set out the Christmas Eve collection, Jo was anxious to tell me that she knows of only one family that has abused the foodshare scheme. I didn’t want to include that – incidentally, the proportions are identical to the benefit fraud numbers, which are negligible — but I feel I must, because the narrative that such places are run by the politically motivated for the idle and wicked is so widespread. I understand why. It is essential to believe that, because it is absolution for the rest of us: it allows us to avoid responsibility for a child with an empty carrier bag and an adult’s eyes.

This piece was nominated for the National Press Awards in 2021.

I’m no genius, but I do know something about the social dynamics in that scene, because I kind of lived it.

All my friends got labouring jobs at the ages of fifteen or sixteen. To us, students were the middle-class kids who didn’t work, then left to go to “uni.” They never really came back, or if they did, they returned just to boss us around. Our home, for them, was something shitty to escape from. In their world, everyone babbled endlessly as if everything they had to say was fascinating. In our world, if you spoke self-importantly, people told you to shut the fuck up. They thought nothing of us; we thought nothing of them.

My experience of secondary education wasn’t good. I sat for five years in a crumbling comprehensive with thirty other bored working-class kids. There were fights in the corridors, bullying, shoplifting down the town at break times. We threw things at teachers, dragged our feet and our bags between lessons, and resisted every well-meant attempt to change us. Often disillusioned and half-broken teachers did their best to hold it all together. I hated it. I left as soon as I could with nothing to show for it.

My education might have ended there, but a decade later, I was talked into going back to school by my girlfriend. I got my A Levels by taking night classes at an adult education centre. A teacher there suggested I apply for university. I decided to give it a go. I didn’t tell my friends.

I was building a dry-stone-wall by a roadside, mulling over which through-stone fitted best, when the postman stopped to hand me a letter. He was a lad I’d been to school with. I opened it while I was chatting to him, and he seemed baffled when I told him the letter said I’d got into Oxford University. “But you’re thick like me,” he said.

After he’d driven away with a friendly wave, I thought, “How will I tell everyone?” Was I about to become one of the people I’d grown up hating? In fact, my people were proud of me and cheered me off to war against the posh people (they’d seen Good Will Hunting too).

I went for two main reasons, and neither of them were very nice. I went because our farm was struggling and had become very claustrophobic and small, way too small for me and my dad, and because I needed a new hustle: everyone I knew who had money seemed to have gone to university. But I loved books, too, and liked the idea that you could study just one subject, and skip the rest, which was handy as I was useless at most of the subjects. But it was terrifying. I didn’t want to leave the place and the people I was from, or give up being who I was. I wanted to come back afterwards, but had no plan for how that might work.

Suggested article

Confessions of a student Marxist

By Tobias Phibbs

Going to an elite university exposed me to the people that made me most nervous: the well-spoken, (supposedly) clever people. My first instinct was to flee from this strange new world with its archaic traditions, funny language and weird social habits. But I was too proud to go home defeated, so I decided to fight instead. It didn’t take long for me to realise that the posh kids were all leather shoes, woollen jackets, small-talk and bullshit. I soon shrugged off the idea that there were some mystical clever people somewhere that were better than me: I’d now met them, come up against them one on one, and they were often bang average. I could hold my own on anything substantive. I’d grown up among straight-talking tough people who loved to argue in smoky pubs, so Oxford tutorials felt strangely familiar.

If I’d been confined to a plastic chair, and told to sit in silence and listen for an hour to someone who wasn’t very interesting talk about a subject I hadn’t chosen to be interested in, I suspect I’d have messed about and misbehaved, just as I did as a teenager. But Oxford wasn’t like that. The teaching was personalised, flexible and interactive. That kind of system keeps people like me in the room, fired up and engaged. Kids like me, who don’t flourish in school, can benefit from such attention, and focus, and belief. A good society would strive to give it to them.

More from this author

How to save British farming (and the countryside)

By James Rebanks

But posh kids still dominate these institutions. I learned, when I was there, that their trick was not any kind of genuine superiority but pure conditioning. Their schools and families had taught them that university was as much a social rite of passage as an opportunity to learn. They aimed high, in terms of grades — and to be fair, often worked very hard to pull it off. I was from people with lots of excuses for not doing things out of the ordinary; posh kids strode into their extraordinary future with their heads held high. No one I knew had that kind of polish and swagger, but I soon realised you could fake it. I looked at them and thought: if you fuckers can do remarkable things, then why can’t I?

It was liberating to find that I was clever enough, if I worked hard. And I knew how to work hard — for hours, days, weeks and years. OK, my people didn’t achieve highly in education or the professional white-collar world, but we were proud farmers with a culture of striving. I simply switched that mentality and applied it to education — something I hadn’t realised was possible at school. I knew the posh kids couldn’t outwork me. And the fact that I’d failed a lot was a strength, faced with their easy but brittle confidence. I knew how to get back up off the floor. People from more disadvantaged backgrounds than mine often lack this self-belief. But what if they were surrounded by people and institutions expecting and helping them to excel, as the posh kids were?

So much of this is about self-fulfilling prophecies. For years university worked because we believed it worked. It turned out “clever” people for “clever” jobs with good salaries, and sent the rest down the mine, to the factory or the farm. No one asked whether these students were really the most intelligent people. The system just confirmed the advantages of birth and background. My odd, and entirely untypical, journey exposed me to the extremes of the British education system. It has left me with complicated feelings about what universities can and can’t do.

A lot of people treat you different when they think you are an Oxford graduate than when they think you are a farm labourer. They talk to you differently. They talk to you more. They invite you to their house and try to make friends with you. They talk about books. Some of this is perhaps based on not unreasonable assumptions. Some of it is just lazy snobbery. I knew people that would talk down to me or my friends because they thought we weren’t very bright or worth very much. With those people I’d shamelessly mention having been to Oxford to knock them back a bit. It was like sprinkling fairy dust. They’d shrink back as if I’d said the password — or worse, start fawning, when five minutes earlier they’d thought I was northern, common, and knew nowt. Snobs and the powerful fetishise ‘academic’ credentials. I didn’t even pick my degree up, but it didn’t matter. Once you are in the club the detail isn’t important. You just have to look at our leading politicians. Boris Johnson would be stacking shelves in Aldi or working down the chippie if he’d been born in Hartlepool.

Suggested reading

Why universities had to be challenged

By David Goodhart

My story is sometimes seen as a rags-to-riches tale. But I wasn’t exceptional; I was lucky. The point of this story is that a society that is blind to the potential of so many of its young people, is a wasteful, unfair and ineffective society.  I look at bookshop shelves and wonder where half the stories are. Where’s the book by the girl that works in the laundrette, the man who serves you in McDonalds, the Romanian woman who cleans your hotel room, by the lads that work on the railways or the building site? We don’t care about these people enough because they don’t get heard, and they don’t get heard because we build a success machine that they don’t want to be part of, or can’t access, or use, or afford. Instead of a fair system, the machine churns out entitled mediocrities, born to be heard, born to rule.

And though universities are trying hard to become more “accessible”, there is only so much they can do. Perhaps it’s too late by the time the kids are eighteen. And if working class kids don’t apply, what can an admissions system do?

Around this time eighteen ago, I was sitting down to take my final exams. I did well. I could probably have stayed and become an academic, but I was drawn home to my own landscape and work — to the place and people that made me. Oxford didn’t make me, as a person, or a writer, but I’ve returned there over the years. The people that once taught me seem sad. They say it has gotten worse: the posh kids arrive, use it, then leave to work in the City.

And perhaps all the debt this training requires means that the kids are right to be mercenary about it all. Work hard, get the grades, move to London, do the job, get promoted, earn more, pay it back. Love of subject, creativity, taking risks and experimenting: these things feel marginal. I can see why people are sceptical about universities, and angry at the elite ones. They are often now little more than training camps for the stormtroopers of capitalism. I may have been lucky to go when I did.

This piece was first published on May 31, 2021

Another time, the matter under investigation might be the “angle of repose” of a pile of sand, as in an hour-glass. Does it depend on the particle size? On their shape? Do these factors determine the rate at which an hour-glass empties?

My favorite was the question of what technique will empty a jug of water fastest. Should you simply turn it upside down and let the air rush in (as it must, to replace the water) in that halting, glug-glug-glug fashion, or hold it at a gentler angle so the pour is unbroken? Answer: turn the jug upside down and swirl it vigorously to set up a whirlpool effect. This creates a hollow space at the centre of the flow, where air is free to enter. The jug will empty very quickly.

My father became famous for these “kitchen physics” experiments after he included assignments based on them in a textbook he wrote, published in 1968 and beloved by generations of physics students: Waves (Berkeley Physics Course, Vol. 3). My sister and I, aged two and five, are thanked in the acknowledgments for having surrendered our Slinkies to the cause.

He pursued such investigations, not simply as a pedagogical exercise, but to satisfy his own curiosity. And he made time for this even while working at the frontier of particle physics, in the lab of Louis Alvarez at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. This was fairly early on in the transition of the practice of science into “big science”.

Alvarez won the Nobel Prize in 1968 for his invention and use of the bubble chamber, an instrument for detecting particle decays. It was a device that would comfortably fit on a table top. Today you can build one yourself, if you like. But over the next few decades particle accelerators became enormous installations (CERN, SLAC) requiring the kind of real estate only governments and major institutions, indeed consortiums of institutions, can secure. Scientific papers came to have, not a handful of authors, but hundreds. Scientists became scientist-bureaucrats: savvy institutional players adept at getting government grants, managing sprawling workforces, and building research empires.

Inevitably, such an environment selected for certain human types, the kind who would find such a life appealing. A healthy dose of careerism and political talent was required. Such qualities are orthogonal, let us say, to the underlying truth-motive of science.

You can well imagine the appeal of getting back to basics for someone who was drawn to a scientific career when the prospect had a more intimate scale to it. Kitchen physics is about the pure intellectual refreshment of wondering about something that you observe in the world with your own unaided powers, and then investigating it. This is the basic image we have of what science is, immortalised in the anecdote of Galileo going up into the leaning tower of Pisa and dropping various objects to see how fast they fall.

Science as authority

In 1633, Galileo was brought before the Inquisition for his demonstration that the earth is not fixed but revolves around the sun. This was a problem, obviously, because the ecclesiastical authorities believed their legitimacy rested on a claim to have an adequate grasp of reality, as indeed it did. Galileo had no interest in being a martyr, and recanted to save his skin. But in the lore of Enlightenment, he is said to have muttered under his breath, “but it does move!”

This anecdote has a prominent place in the story we tell about what it means to be modern. On one side, science with its devotion to truth. On the other side, authority, whether ecclesiastical or political. In this tale, “science” stands for a freedom of the mind that is inherently at odds with the idea of authority.

The pandemic has brought into relief a dissonance between our idealised image of science, on the one hand, and the work “science” is called upon to do in our society, on the other. I think the dissonance can be traced to this mismatch between science as an activity of the solitary mind, and the institutional reality of it. Big science is fundamentally social in its practice, and with this comes certain entailments.

Suggested reading

Science journals have been corrupted by China

By Ian Birrell

As a practical matter, “politicised science” is the only kind there is (or rather, the only kind you are likely to hear about). But it is precisely the apolitical image of science, as disinterested arbiter of reality, that makes it such a powerful instrument of politics. This contradiction is now out in the open. The “anti-science” tendencies of populism are in significant measure a response to the gap that has opened up between the practice of science and the ideal that underwrites its authority. As a way of generating knowledge, it is the pride of science to be falsifiable (unlike religion).

Yet what sort of authority would it be that insists its own grasp of reality is merely provisional? Presumably, the whole point of authority is to explain reality and provide certainty in an uncertain world, for the sake of social coordination, even at the price of simplification. To serve the role assigned it, science must become something more like religion.

The chorus of complaints about a declining “faith in science” states the problem almost too frankly. The most reprobate among us are climate sceptics, unless those be the Covid deniers, who are charged with not obeying the science. If all this has a medieval sound, it ought to give us pause.

We live in a mixed regime, an unstable hybrid of democratic and technocratic forms of authority. Science and popular opinion must be made to speak with one voice as far as possible, or there is conflict. According to the official story, we try to harmonise scientific knowledge and opinion through education. But in reality, science is hard, and there is a lot of it. We have to take it mostly on faith. That goes for most journalists and professors, as well as plumbers. The work of reconciling science and public opinion is carried out, not through education, but through a kind of distributed demagogy, or Scientism. We are learning that this is not a stable solution to the perennial problem of authority that every society must solve.

The phrase “follow the science” has a false ring to it. That is because science doesn’t lead anywhere. It can illuminate various courses of action, by quantifying the risks and specifying the tradeoffs. But it can’t make the necessary choices for us. By pretending otherwise, decision-makers can avoid taking responsibility for the choices they make on our behalf.

Increasingly, science is pressed into duty as authority. It is invoked to legitimise the transfer of sovereignty from democratic to technocratic bodies, and as a device for insulating such moves from the realm of political contest.

Over the past year, a fearful public has acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life. A pattern of “government by emergency” has become prominent, in which resistance to such incursions are characterised as “anti-science”.

But the question of political legitimacy hanging over rule by experts is not likely to go away. If anything, it will be more fiercely fought in coming years as leaders of governing bodies invoke a climate emergency that is said to require a wholesale transformation of society. We need to know how we arrived here.

In The Revolt of the Public, former intelligence analyst Martin Gurri traces the roots of a “politics of negation” that has engulfed Western societies, tied to a wholesale collapse of authority across all domains ­— politics, journalism, finance, religion, science. He blames it on the internet. Authority has always been located in hierarchical structures of expertise, guarded by accreditation and long apprenticeship, whose members develop a “reflexive loathing of the amateur trespasser”.

For authority to be really authoritative, it must claim an epistemic monopoly of some kind, whether of priestly or scientific knowledge. In the 20th century, especially after the spectacular successes of the Manhattan Project and the Apollo moon landing, there developed a spiral wherein the public came to expect miracles of technical expertise (flying cars and moon colonies were thought to be imminent). Reciprocally, stoking expectations of social utility is normalised in the processes of grant-seeking and institutional competition that are now inseparable from scientific practice.

The system was sustainable, if uneasily so, as long as inevitable failures could be kept offstage. This required robust gatekeeping, such that the assessment of institutional performance was an intra-elite affair (the blue-ribbon commission; peer review), allowing for the development of “informal pacts of mutual protection”, as Gurri puts it. The internet, and the social media which disseminate instances of failure with relish, have made such gatekeeping impossible. That is the core of the very parsimonious and illuminating argument by which Gurri accounts for the revolt of the public.

In recent years, a replication crisis in science has swept aside a disturbing number of the findings once thought robust in many fields. This has included findings that lie at the foundation of whole research programs and scientific empires, now crumbled. The reasons for these failures are fascinating, and provide a glimpse into the human element of scientific practice.

Suggested reading

Why we stopped trusting 'experts'

By Oliver Traldi

Henry H. Bauer, chemistry professor and former dean of arts and sciences at Virginia Tech, published a paper in 2004 in which he undertook to describe how science is actually conducted in the 21st century: it is, he says, fundamentally corporate (in the sense of being collective). “It remains to be appreciated that 21st-century science is a different kind of thing than the ‘modern science’ of the 17th through 20th centuries….”

Now, science is primarily organised around “knowledge monopolies” that exclude dissident views. They do so not as a matter of piecemeal failures of open-mindedness by individuals jealous of their turf, but systemically.

The all-important process of peer review depends on disinterestedness, as well as competence. “Since about the middle of the 20th century, however, the costs of research and the need for teams of cooperating specialists have made it increasingly difficult to find reviewers who are both directly knowledgeable and also disinterested; truly informed people are effectively either colleagues or competitors.”

Bauer writes that “journeymen peer-reviewers tend to stifle rather than encourage creativity and genuine innovation. Centralized funding and centralized decision-making make science more bureaucratic and less an activity of independent, self-motivated truth-seekers.” In universities, “the measure of scientific achievement becomes the amount of ‘research support’ brought in, not the production of useful knowledge”. (University administrations skim a standard 50% off the top of any grant to cover the “indirect costs” of supporting the research.)

Given the resources required to conduct big science, it needs to serve some institutional master, whether that be commercial or governmental. In the last 12 months we have seen the pharmaceutical industry and its underlying capacity for scientific accomplishment at its best. The development of mRNA vaccines represents a breakthrough of real consequence. This has occurred in commercial laboratories that were temporarily relieved of the need to impress financial markets or stoke consumer demand by large infusions of government support. This ought to give pause to the political reflex to demonise pharmaceutical companies that is prevalent on both the Left and the Right.

But it cannot be assumed that “the bottom line” exerts a disciplining function on scientific research that automatically aligns it with the truth motive. Notoriously, pharmaceutical companies have, on a significant scale, paid physicians to praise, recommend and prescribe their products, and recruited researchers to put their names to articles ghost-written by the firms which are then placed in scientific and professional journals. Worse, the clinical trials whose results are relied upon by federal agencies in deciding whether to approve drugs as safe and effective are generally conducted or commissioned by the pharmaceutical companies themselves.

The bigness of big science — both the corporate form of the activity, and its need for large resources generated otherwise than by science itself — places science squarely in the world of extra-scientific concerns, then. Including those concerns taken up by political lobbies. If the concern has a high profile, any dissent from the official consensus may be hazardous to an investigator’s career.

Public opinion polls generally indicate that what “everybody knows” about some scientific matter, and its bearing on public interests, will be identical to the well-institutionalized view. This is unsurprising, given the role the media plays in creating consensus. Journalists, rarely competent to assess scientific statements critically, cooperate in propagating the pronouncements of self-protecting “research cartels” as science.

Bauer’s concept of a research cartel came into public awareness in an episode that occurred five years after his article appeared. In 2009, someone hacked the emails of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain and released them, prompting the “climategate” scandal in which the scientists who sat atop the climate bureaucracy were revealed to be stonewalling against requests for their data from outsiders. This was at a time when many fields, in response to their own replication crises, were adopting data sharing as a norm in their research communities, as well as other practices such as reporting null findings and the pre-registration of hypotheses in shared forums.

The climate research cartel staked its authority on the peer review process of journals deemed legitimate, which meddling challengers had not undergone. But, as Gurri notes in his treatment of climategate, “since the group largely controlled peer review for their field, and a consuming subject of the emails was how to keep dissenting voices out of the journals and the media, the claim rested on a circular logic”.

One can be fully convinced of the reality and dire consequences of climate change while also permitting oneself some curiosity about the political pressures that bear on the science, I hope. Try to imagine the larger setting when the IPPC convenes. Powerful organisations are staffed up, with resolutions prepared, communications strategies in place, corporate “global partners” secured, interagency task forces standing by and diplomatic channels open, waiting to receive the good word from an empaneled group of scientists working in committee.

This is not a setting conducive to reservations, qualifications, or second thoughts. The function of the body is to produce a product: political legitimacy.

The third leg: moralism

The climategate scandal delivered a blow to the IPPC, and therefore to the networked centres of power for which it serves as science-settler. This perhaps led to a heightened receptivity in those centres for the arrival of a figure such as Greta Thunberg who escalates the moral urgency of the cause (“How dare you!), giving it an impressive human face that can galvanise mass energy. She is notable both for being knowledgeable and for being a child, even younger and more fragile-looking than her age, and therefore an ideal victim-sage.

There appears to be a pattern, not limited to climate science-politics, in which the mass energy galvanised by celebrities (who always speak with certainty) strengthens the hand of activists to organise campaigns in which any research institution that fails to discipline a dissident investigator is said to be serving as a channel of “disinformation”. The institution is placed under a kind of moral receivership, to be lifted when the heads of the institution denounce the offending investigator and distance themselves from his or her findings. They then seek to repair the damage by affirming the ends of the activists in terms that out-do the affirmations of rival institutions.

As this iterates across different areas of establishment thinking, especially those that touch on ideological taboos, it follows a logic of escalation that restricts the types of inquiry that are acceptable for research supported by institutions, and shifts them in the direction dictated by political lobbies.

Needless to say, all this takes place far from the field of scientific argument, but the drama is presented as one of restoring scientific integrity. In the internet era of relatively open information flows, a cartel of expertise can be maintained only if it is part of a larger body of organised opinion and interests that, together, are able to run a sort of moral-epistemic protection racket. Reciprocally, political lobbies depend on scientific bodies that are willing to play their part.

This could be viewed as part of a larger shift within institutions from a culture of persuasion to one in which coercive moral decrees emanate from somewhere above, hard to locate precisely, but conveyed in the ethical style of HR. Weakened by the uncontrolled dissemination of information and attendant fracturing of authority, the institutions that ratify particular pictures of what is going on in the world must not merely assert a monopoly of knowledge, but place a moratorium on the asking of questions and noticing of patterns.

Research cartels mobilise the denunciatory energies of political activists to run interference and, reciprocally, the priorities of activist NGOs and foundations meter the flow of funding and political support to research bodies, in a circle of mutual support.

One of the most striking features of the present, for anyone alert to politics, is that we are increasingly governed through the device of panics that give every appearance of being contrived to generate acquiescence in a public that has grown skeptical of institutions built on claims of expertise. And this is happening across many domains. Policy challenges from outsiders presented through fact and argument, offering some picture of what is going on in the world that is rival to the prevailing one, are not answered in kind, but are met rather with denunciation. In this way, epistemic threats to institutional authority are resolved into moral conflicts between good people and bad people.

Further reading

How race politics liberated the elites

By Matthew Crawford

The ramped-up moral content of pronouncements that are ostensibly expert-technical needs to be explained. I suggested there are two rival sources of political legitimacy, science and popular opinion, that are imperfectly reconciled through a kind of distributed demagogy, which we may call scientism. This demagogy is distributed in the sense that interlocked centers of power rely on it to mutually prop one another up.

But as this arrangement has begun to totter, with popular opinion coming untethered from expert authority and newly assertive against it, a third leg has been added to the structure in an effort to stabilise it: the moral splendor of the Victim. To stand with the Victim, as every major institution now appears to do, is to arrest criticism. Such is the hope, at any rate.

In the unforgettable Summer of 2020, the moral energy of anti-racism was harnessed to the scientific authority of public health, and vice versa. Thus “white supremacy” was a public health emergency — one urgent enough to dictate the suspension of social distancing mandates for the sake of protests. So how did the description of America as white supremacist get converted into a scientific-sounding claim?

Michael Lind has argued that covid laid bare a class war, not between labor and capital, but between two groups that could both be called “elites”: on one side, small business owners who opposed lockdowns and, on the other, professionals who enjoyed greater job security, were able to work from home, and typically took a maximalist position on hygiene politics. We can add that, being in the “knowledge economy,” professionals naturally show more deference to experts, since the basic currency of the knowledge economy is epistemic prestige.

This divide got mapped onto the pre-existing schism that had organised itself around President Trump, with the population sorted into good people and bad people. For professionals, not just the status of one’s soul, but one’s standing and viability in the institutional economy, depended on getting conspicuously on the right side of that divide. According to the Manichaean binary established in 2016, the fundamental question mark over one’s head is that of the strength and sincerity of one’s anti-racism. For white people who worked in technical bodies connected to public health, the confluence of the George Floyd protests and the pandemic seemed to have presented an opportunity to convert their moral precarity on the issue of race into its opposite: moral authority.

Over 1,200 health experts, speaking as health experts, signed an open letter encouraging mass protests as necessary to address the “pervasive lethal force of white supremacy”. This pervasive force is something they are specially qualified to detect by their scientific knowledge. Editorials in journals such as The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, Scientific American and even Nature now speak the language of Critical Race Theory, invoking the invisible miasma of “whiteness” as explanatory device, controlling variable and justification for whatever pandemic policy prescription it seems good to align themselves with.

Suggested reading

How Critical Race Theory captured the Church

By Giles Udy

The science is remarkably clear. It has also been bent to expansive purposes. In February 2021, the medical journal The Lancet convened a Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era to deplore the president’s politicisation of science – while urging “science-led proposals” that would address public health through reparations for descendants of slaves and other victims of historical oppression, the enhancement of affirmative action, and the adoption of the Green New Deal, among other measures. One can certainly make a case for such policies sincerely, freely, and with due consideration. Many people have. But perhaps it is also the case that the moral sorting and resulting insecurity among technocratic professionals has made them quick to defer to activists and sign on to grander visions of a transformed society.

The spectacular success of “public health” in generating fearful acquiescence in the population during the pandemic has created a rush to take every technocratic-progressive project that would have poor chances if pursued democratically, and cast it as a response to some existential threat. In the first week of the Biden administration, the Senate majority leader urged the president to declare a “climate emergency” and assume powers that would authorise him to sidestep Congress and rule by executive fiat. Ominously, we are being prepared for “climate lockdowns”.

The wisdom of the East

Western nations have long had contingency plans for dealing with pandemics, in which quarantine measures were delimited by liberal principles – respecting individual autonomy and avoiding coercion as much as possible. Thus, it was the already-infected and the especially vulnerable who should be isolated, as opposed to locking healthy people in their homes. China, on the other hand, is an authoritarian regime that solves collective problems through rigorous control of its population and pervasive surveillance. Accordingly, when the COVID pandemic began in earnest, China locked down all activities in Wuhan and other affected areas. In the West, it was simply assumed that such a course of action was not an available option.

As UK epidemiologist Neil Ferguson said to the Times last December: “It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with [lockdowns] in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.” He added that “These days, lockdown feels inevitable.”

Thus, what had seemed impossible due to the bedrock principles of Western society now feels not merely possible but inevitable. And this complete inversion happened over the course of a few months.

Acceptance of such a bargain would seem to depend entirely on the gravity of the threat. There is surely some point of hazard beyond which liberal principles become an unaffordable luxury. Covid is indeed a very serious illness, with an infection fatality rate about ten times higher than that of the flu: roughly one percent of all those who are infected die. Also, however, unlike the flu this mortality rate is so skewed by age and other risk factors, varying by more than a thousand-fold from the very young to the very old, that the aggregate figure of one percent can be misleading. As of November 2020, the average age of those killed by Covid in Britain was 82.4 years old.

In July of 2020, 29 % of British citizens believed that “6-10 percent or higher” of the population had already been killed by Covid. About 50% of those polled had a more realistic estimate of 1%. The actual figure was about one tenth of one percent. So the public’s perception of the risk of dying of Covid was inflated by one to two orders of magnitude. This is highly significant.

Public opinion matters in the West far more than in China. Only if people are sufficiently scared will they give up basic liberties for the sake of security – this is the basic formula of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Stoking fear has long been an essential element of the business model of mass media, and this appears to be on a trajectory of integration with state functions in the West, in a tightening symbiosis. While the Chinese government resorts to external coercion, in the West coercion must come from inside; from a mental state in the individual. The state is nominally in the hands of people elected to serve as representatives of the people, so it cannot be an object of fear. Something else must be the source of fear, so the state may play the role of saving us. But playing this role requires that state power be directed by experts.

Early in 2020, public opinion accepted the necessity of a short-term suspension of basic liberties on the supposition that, once the emergency had passed, we could go back to being not-China. But this is to assume a robustness of liberal political culture that may not be warranted. Lord Sumption, a jurist and retired member of the UK’s Supreme Court, makes a case for regarding lockdowns in the West as the crossing of a line that is not likely to get uncrossed. In an interview with Freddie Sayers at UnHerd, he points out that, by law, the government has broad powers to act under emergency. “There are many things governments can do, which it is generally accepted they should not do. And one of them, until last March, was to lock up healthy people in their homes.”

Suggested reading

Lord Sumption: civil disobedience has begun

By Jonathan Sumption

He makes the Burkean observation that our status as a free society rests, not on laws, but on convention, a “collective instinct” about what we ought to do, rooted in habits of thinking and feeling that develop slowly over decades and centuries. These are fragile. It is far easier to destroy a convention than to establish one. This suggests going back to being not-China may be quite difficult.

As Lord Sumption says, “When you depend for your basic freedoms on convention, rather than law, once the convention is broken, the spell is broken. Once you get to a position where it is unthinkable to lock people up, nationally, except when somebody thinks it’s a good idea, then frankly there is no longer any barrier at all. We have crossed that threshold. And governments do not forget these things. I think this is a model that will come to be accepted, if we are not very careful, as a way of dealing with all manner of collective problems.” In the US as in the UK, the government has immense powers. “The only thing that protects us from the despotic use of that power is a convention that we have decided to discard.”

Clearly, an admiration for Chinese-style governance has been blossoming in what we call centrist opinion, in large part as a response to the populist upsets of the Trump and Brexit era. It is also clear that “Science” (as opposed to actual science) is playing an important role in this. Like other forms of demagogy, scientism presents stylised facts and a curated picture of reality. In doing so, it may generate fears strong enough to render democratic principles moot.

The pandemic is now in retreat and the vaccines are available to all who want them in most parts of the United States. But many people refuse to give up their masks, as though they had joined some new religious order. The wide deployment of fear as an instrument of state propaganda has had a disorienting effect, such that our perception of risk has come detached from reality.

We accept all manner of risks in the course of life, without thinking about it. To pick one out and make it an object of intense focus is to adopt a distorted outlook that has real costs, paid somewhere beyond the rim of one’s tunnel vision. To see our away out of this — to place risks in their proper context — requires an affirmation of life, refocusing on all those worthwhile activities that elevate existence beyond the merely vegetative.

Losing face

Perhaps the pandemic has merely accelerated, and given official warrant to, our long slide toward atomisation. By the nakedness of our faces we encounter one another as individuals, and in doing so we experience fleeting moments of grace and trust. To hide our faces behind masks is to withdraw this invitation. This has to be politically significant.

Perhaps it is through such microscopic moments that we become aware of ourselves as a people, bound up in a shared fate. That’s what solidarity is. Solidarity, in turn, is the best bulwark against despotism, as Hannah Arendt noted in On The Origins of Totalitarianism. Withdrawal from such encounter now has the stamp of good citizenship, i.e., good hygiene. But what sort of regime are we to be citizens of?

“Following the science” to minimise certain risks while ignoring others absolves us of exercising our own judgment, anchored in some sense of what makes life worthwhile. It also relieves us of the existential challenge of throwing ourselves into an uncertain world with hope and confidence. A society incapable of affirming life and accepting death will be populated by the walking dead, adherents of a cult of the demi-life who clamour for ever more guidance from experts.

It has been said, a people gets the government it deserves.

This article was first published in May.