But it means I do understand the power of J.K. Rowling’s childhood-shaping novels. And so I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn about the shrine on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire. Here, a tumble of painted rocks remembers Dobby the house elf, a squeaky-voiced magical creature from the Harry Potter series who was stabbed in a good-versus-evil battle before teleporting (stay with me) to the sand dunes to die. Fans found the spot after the theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 in 2010; in the intervening years, mounds of pebbles and odd socks (long story) have been stacked along the shore around a simple wooden cross. 

We know that adult Harry Potter fans can be, well, fanatical. They tote tattoos or necklaces bearing the sign of the Deathly Hallows, hold Hogwarts-themed weddings, name their dogs Sirius Black. They are cringe but they are harmless. Unless you’re in the energy sector, that is. Simon Ludlam, director of a £430 million cabling project, knows exactly the damage they can do. He was recently inundated with “hundreds” of calls from Potterheads over a project he was leading, the Greenlink interconnector, which would thread underneath the dunes of Freshwater West — right through Dobby’s grave — all the way to County Wexford. Ludlam, who looks to be a normal and well-adjusted man in his sixties, very reasonably asked “who?” before being informed that the house elf’s resting place was a “very, very serious matter”. In the end, the fans won: a 504-megawatt interconnector between Britain and Ireland had been made to negotiate with the imagined remains of a house elf. 

It has become depressingly fashionable to distance oneself from the supposedly heinous views of Harry Potter’s creator. Rowling’s advocacy for women and children in the gender debate, at great personal cost to herself, has awakened all the fury and poisonous misogyny of those living in their own fantasy worlds. Hundreds of scribblers and social-media screamers have been keen, over the years, to highlight the “irony” of the offense emanating from one of the figures in British life most celebrated for promoting warm and fuzzy values. How can this woman going to bat for single-sex spaces on X be the same dreamweaver of our childhoods — the creator of a world in which the oppressed triumphed? The implication is of a national treasure turned witch — a fallen angel. And, for many, it’s personal: some of the biggest evangelists for the cult of gender were once the biggest fans of Harry Potter.

The pipeline here should be self-evident. Many of the most vocal apostles for “trans resistance” are part of an arrested cohort: their generation festers in fandoms, hoards Funko Pops, indulges in parasocial relationships with celebrities and fictional characters. They assimilate the moral frameworks of imagined worlds and bluntly apply them to complex grown-up politics. Gender evangelism being a distinctly dweeby movement is not incidental: it directly relates to the baked-in credulousness, magical thinking and outsiderdom which has come to define their generation. 

Nor is it incidental that these themes are the very foundations of the Harry Potter novels. The series’ inciting incident is the sacrifice of Lily Potter, Harry’s mother, to shield him with the simple “old magic” of love. For Rowling, noble is the acceptance of death in the face of persecution — Harry’s parents, many of his peers and ultimately the boy himself model this. The novels’ “wizarding wars” mirror our own, particularly the Second World War: the creed of Voldemort’s gang (the Death Eaters) is a cognate for white supremacy — a murderous preference for pure magical blood over the “mudblood” dilution of non-wizard muggles. Toleration, parity and sympathy for the weak: these are tenets not just of the Potterverse but of the Christian world, too. And just as the beneficiaries of Christianity in the modern, skeptical West have turned on the Church in the Tom Holland model of secularism, so too did Rowling raise a generation of readers to turn on her for criticizing the ultimate monopoly-holder of modern-day oppression: the transgender movement. The force — the creed, the author — which shaped our values also handed us the tools to dismantle them. Harry Potter’s Christian skeleton (intentional or otherwise) put the novel’s author on a familiar track: it seems inevitable now that she’d be ridiculed by those who were raised in the cozy, tolerant atmosphere which both Christianity and Rowling, in their own ways, ushered into being. 

The Potter novels also place enormous emphasis on the mendacity of institutions and the untrustworthiness of official language: the Ministry of Magic, the magical government, is a den of mealy-mouthed apparatchiks and becomes, after Voldemort’s return, a sort of butterbeer-swigging Vichy. Journalists like Rita Skeeter are incorrigible tabloidy liars; authority figures like headteacher Dolores Umbridge are corrupt sadists in league with forces of evil. Even public speech is boobytrapped in Rowling’s world: nobody dares name Voldemort, and speaking obvious truths — for example, about the fact of his resurrection — is met with utter contempt and castigation (a state of affairs Rowling has now come to experience herself). 

Of course, the laudable moral messaging of the Harry Potter novels does not map directly on to real-world political disputes. These books are about heroes and villains: the good, the redeemed and the bad. In real life things are much more messy: rights conflict, language cannot dissolve material trade-offs, and sincerity does not equate to truth. And so, Rowling’s fantasy-steeped children came of age with both an unusually vivid appetite for moral sorting and a drilled-in obsession with oppression and empathy. Frustrated by the complexity of our strange political world, they turned on their maker; transcending upwards into ever purer believers, they labeled their founder a heretic.

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So the debacle surrounding Dobby’s grave isn’t a silly-season news quirk. The moving of a real half-a-billion-pound infrastructure project around a fictional character encapsulates the entire story of Rowling’s place in public life. Hundreds of furious adult fans gave Dobby the house elf a real-world moral constituency and appointed themselves guardians of his final resting place. When that was threatened, they leapt up to do battle with an evil bureaucratic body which, like the ministry in Rowling’s novels, are maleficent killjoys picking on the plucky little guy. They were acting, in other words, like characters from Harry Potter — the tenacious schoolchildren fighting against the odds, the motley Good Ones plotting against dark forces in the tumbledown Weasley cottage. 

I understand why grown adults came out swinging on Dobby’s behalf; I also understand why other former Potter readers cling to an absurdly trenchant moral framework and deranged obsession with victimhood. What was meant to be a refuge — a fictional world with its impossible narrative logic — has hardened into reality for a generation of perennial superfans prepared to elbow children out the way to spend grown-up pocket money on chocolate frogs at theme parks. For the fact is that these are simply cracking stories, vivid worlds with plotlines that inspire a sense of justice even in small children. Because these plotlines were so wonderfully woven, a small number of vocal adults will do whatever they can to cleave to the Potterian schema — whether it’s calling up energy execs or turning on their founding mother for being a little too of reality. In the end, the lure of this fiction was too strong for a readership who cannot seem to put childish things away.

“Always, after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.” When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote those words, he didn’t have the theories of his contemporary Carl Jung in mind, but the Swiss psychologist’s insights are relevant here. If your every effort to get rid of an enemy simply makes him stronger, it’s a safe bet that he isn’t merely an annoying intrusion from outside your comfortable world, but rather the inevitable consequence of your own attitudes and actions. What Jung called “the Shadow”, the sum total of everything about yourself you refuse to acknowledge, can be a political reality as well as a psychological one. Thus it’s essential to recognize, along with the hard political and economic realities that have lent strength to Trump’s movement, the inner dimension of myth that gives him his extraordinary grip on the collective imagination of our time.

It says something for the acumen of Trump’s opponents that they almost grasp this. The efforts to equate Trump to Hitler aren’t simply shrill propaganda, meant to tar him by association with the most famous name in the political demonology of our age, though of course that has always been part of it. As Jung pointed out in his prescient 1936 essay “Wotan”, much of Hitler’s power over the collective mind of Europe came boiling up out of the realms of myth and archetype. Rationalists in Hitler’s day were consistently confounded by the way he brushed aside obstacles and followed his trajectory to the bitter end. That the trajectory itself could have been anticipated by a glance at the relevant myths simply adds piquance to the result.

Of course, to speak about myth nowadays is to court thoughtless dismissal. According to one of the popular canards of our time, myths were all well and good for the crude, primitive minds of people before the modern age, but we have outgrown them. We don’t have myths, so the theory goes: we have facts. This is a very comfortable belief to those who can make themselves cling to it. Its only downside is that it’s flatly contradicted by the most basic realities of our collective life.

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By John Michael Greer

Human rationality is a thin and recently added veneer, perched unsteadily over the top of a tangled mass of drives, instincts, and inborn reactions that we share with other social primates. With fewer exceptions than we like to think about, our behavior is governed by the same motives that guide baboons and bonobos; the great difference is that these relatives of ours don’t hide behind layers of self-justifying verbiage. Yet the capacity for conceptual thought that distinguishes our species isn’t just there to generate rationalizations. It also provides one of the handful of useful tools we have for seeing beneath the surface.

The ancient Greek word muthos originally meant “narration” or “story”. Later on it came to mean the stories that matter. This doesn’t require such stories to be factual in the evening-news sense. As the philosopher Sallust wrote, myths are things that never happened but always are. They communicate truths rather than facts. Grasp the underlying myth, as Jung did in making sense of the Hitler phenomenon, and you can get a much clearer sense of where things are headed than you would from the collective chatter of your time.

Nowadays, though, there’s a significant obstacle in the way of such insights — the presence and popularity of pseudomyths. A pseudomyth is a fashionable narrative manufactured by the popular culture of a given era, rather than rising from the deep places of the mind as genuine myths do. One great difference between pseudomyths and the real article is that pseudomyths don’t wear well; a few generations, maybe a century at most, and they land in history’s rubbish tip. Another great difference, which goes far to explain the first one, is that predictions based on pseudomyths are inevitably wrong.

I could parade any number of pseudomyths to address the point that needs making here. Let’s cut to the chase, though, and talk about the pseudomyth that frames too many discussions of Donald Trump. It’s especially easy to do this, because the pseudomyth in question has been given one of its classic forms in the pages of J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter novels.

Consider the basic framing story of the Potterverse. There are certain people, you see, who are special. They have marvelous talents the rest of us don’t have, and so they get to live in a wonderful, magical world from which the rest of us are excluded. Most of them come from families that already belong to that world, but a few are recruited into it from outside. The core of the recruitment process is an educational system from which, again, everyone else is shut out.

There are people who don’t support this state of affairs, to be sure. Some are outside it and some within. The outsiders who dislike and distrust it are crass Philistine thugs like the Dursleys. It’s the dissidents from inside the system who come in for the real vilification, though. In the eyes of the pseudomyth, they’re evil — knowingly, deliberately evil. They call themselves Death Eaters; for all practical purposes, they might as well don t-shirts saying “GENUINE CERTIFIED BAD PERSON”. The very thought that any one of them might have a reasonable motive or an honest disagreement with the system as it exists is excluded utterly by the pseudomyth.

All this is to say that the Harry Potter stories echo, with remarkable precision, the self-aggrandizing ideology of what we may as well call the laptop class, the overeducated and overprivileged caste that monopolizes the levers of managerial power across today’s Western. Members of that caste see themselves as special in the full Potteresque sense, set apart from mere Muggles by their talents and training. Anyone from outside their ranks who dares to question their superiority can count on being treated like a Dursley — if you want to hear genuine hate speech these days, one of the best ways to do it is to get a group of laptop-class inmates talking about working class culture — but their real hatred is directed toward those who challenge their authority from within the system. I trust I don’t have to point out who they identify as Death Eaters — or as Lord Voldemort.

Central to narratives of this type is a habit I call moral masturbation. This far-from-solitary vice involves the repetitive stroking of sensitive moral clichés to produce sensations of shuddering delight at one’s own goodness and virtue. It’s a very common habit these days; Hollywood has done very little else for a decade. It has plenty of expressions in today’s official culture, but the one that matters most for our present purposes is the insistence that one side in any collective controversy can only be motivated by pure deliberate evil, and so every decent person must inevitably fall into the ranks of the other side.

In the real world, that’s never true. No matter how obviously hateful a regime appears to its enemies, it will contrive to convince a good share of its populace that it really is the morally superior option. If it fails in that task, it won’t last a week. In genuine myths, by exactly the same token, the strident moral dualism that fills so many modern pseudomyths is notably absent. The gods who contend with giants or titans or asuras to keep the cosmos from crumbling back into chaos are, by and large, no more moral than the powers against which they do battle. In the legends that reflect mythic thinking down onto the human plane, this is even more obviously true: Achilles defeats Hector, and Arjuna defeats Karna, but neither the Iliad nor the Mahabharata vilifies the champion of the losing side as evil incarnate.

This matters for several reasons, but one in particular matters just now, for a reason already hinted at. Pseudomyths lead to bad predictions and thus to failed strategies. The pseudomyth we’ve been discussing is an excellent example here. In all its endless, dreary iterations, once one side has been identified as the “Bad People”, their defeat follows with mechanical inevitability. No matter how overwhelming the power of the Bad People, no matter how absurdly small the chance that they will be defeated by whatever inadequate force the Good People can muster against them, the Good People are guaranteed total victory. The fantasies that empower moral masturbation, like those associated with the other kind, all move with mechanical predictability toward their inevitable climax.

Both these types of fantasy do very poorly when taken as descriptions of the real world. That, in turn, goes far towards explaining the flailing of Trump’s opponents during the last six months or so. They convinced themselves that events had to copy their preferred pseudomyth, and that Trump and his minions would surely be defeated once and for all. It apparently never occurred to them that the electorate would have its own view on the matter, or that Trump and his circle might have used their four-year exile to figure out how best to target the other side’s weaknesses and win one victory after another.

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Donald Trump is not Lord Voldemort, and the pseudomyth his opponents deployed so repetitively and uselessly against him thus deserves a rest, if not a decent burial. The question that needs to be addressed, once pseudomyths are set aside, is what sort of mythic figure he actually is, and thus what we can expect as his myth unfolds.

It must be said here that Donald Trump the man is in no way mythic. He’s an ordinary American oligarch with lowbrow tastes and an unusually robust ego. Like similar figures throughout history, he realized that it was possible to snatch power out of the hands of a senile kleptocracy by championing the concerns of those whose voices had been excluded from the collective conversation for too long. Oswald Spengler, who wrote extensively on this process a century ago, referred to it as Caesarism after one of its most famous practitioners, and the implied comparison is worth noting. Caius Julius Caesar was an ordinary Roman oligarch before he took power and made his family name a potent force in the realm of myth.

The man is not the myth. There’s a world of difference between the hardbitten Romano-British warlord who fought against Saxon invaders, and the noble King Arthur whom we created from folk memories of his career. In the same way, the mythic pattern that swept up a banal American real-estate magnate and reality TV star, and turned him into the vehicle for sweeping political and cultural transformations, has nothing to do with his personality. It comes out of the deep places of the collective psyche of our time.

The United States is still a very young culture, and many of its underlying myths still await the poets and storytellers who will give them lasting form. One pattern, though, stands out clearly in the narrative structure of our national history. Three times already, a decaying and dysfunctional governing class has been swept aside in an era of traumatic convulsions, and in each case a single figure rose through the turbulence to become the figurehead of change. None of these men were especially remarkable human beings, but you won’t learn that from their contemporary or posthumous reputations: all three were vilified in extreme terms during their lives and exalted to a secular sainthood after their deaths. I’m talking, of course, about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

No doubt mentioning those hallowed names will cause outrage among readers. That simply emphasizes the point I’m trying to make. These three men were not pulled out of their historic contexts and raised to mythic status in the collective imagination by any unique virtue of their own. They happened to be at the right place and the right time to spearhead one of the major transformations of American history. After they were safely dead, their heirs scrubbed their reputations clean of any suspicion of mere humanity, and turned them into plaster saints. You have to go back to contemporary media to find out just how many Americans saw Washington as an ambitious scoundrel, mocked Lincoln as an ignorant bumpkin — newspaper cartoonists loved to portray him as a baboon — and savaged Roosevelt as a traitor to his nation and his class.

The thought that some similar process of posthumous sanitizing will shape Donald Trump’s legacy will doubtless upset a great many people. Nonetheless, it’s far and away the most likely outcome of the current turmoil. The laptop class — less colorfully, the professional-managerial caste that took power with Roosevelt’s New Deal — has gone the way of its predecessors, sinking into the usual morass of greed and dysfunction, and it’s being shoved aside by a rising entrepreneurial class that has no respect for credentials and no time for moral masturbation. That transformation is well under way, and Trump happens to be its political figurehead.

Trump’s posthumous canonization, probably including a gold-plated Trump Memorial in Washington DC and another face on the side of Mount Rushmore, is fairly likely at this point. As an old man holding down one of the world’s most stressful jobs, he’s also likely to die in office. This will offer cold consolation to his enemies, who will have to endure the rise of a posthumous cult freed from the often awkward realities of the man’s personality and actions. But it’s a worthwhile reminder that we don’t choose our myths. They choose us, and whether we appreciate the results or not is no concern of theirs.

Jamie is closer to Rickman than any of his other parts: not only was Rickman also a Labour activist who played the cello, but he was similarly needling and obsessive. And I wonder if Madly, Deeply is supposed to perform the same spell for a different woman: the resurrection of a loved one. This book is not a finished piece of art. Its publication feels personal: it is a fragment of a man, a fragment of the cult of the actor, and vanity by proxy. Obliviously, this book investigates that cult of the actor.

People will say that they like the diaries because they like Rickman the actor, and they want more of him: but you don’t get that from the diaries. He was clearly likeable, and generous: he mocked himself in Galaxy Quest, playing a Shakespearian actor slumming it in a Star Trek rip-off for money, and he felt that tension between artistic and commercial imperatives. (An entry written during a Harry Potter film says bleakly: “More Great Hall. More turkey. More Hogwarts song”.) But the diaries aren’t good. Rickman is a subtle actor, but he is not a writer, and I think he knows it. He agonises over the entries. He hints that he lied to them, fretting that he cannot remember the “coded details and the sharp thoughts hidden between the safer lines”. A good diarist will betray his friends and, above all, himself, as consciously and willingly as an actor will put “the chicken” on his head for the part. But Rickman is more oblique: his confessions are accidental.

You yearn for him to tell more — to inhabit himself consciously. But the most he manages is to call women he dislikes “Ms”, beadily; suggest that famous actresses are controlling, and write “[He] has a wonderfully pitched reading. I wish he would find different mouth-shapes,” about Simon Russell Beale. He is fragile. He struggles. He watches Yes To The Dress.

Rickman knows that fame is self-hating: the phenomenon of wanting to engage with fantasy people not real ones, that is, not engaging at all. I suspect his battles with the media are a proxy for his battles with himself: art versus commerce. He notes the terrible questions journalists ask on press junkets: “Alan, what are the smells of Barcelona?”

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He notes the offensive diary items. He suspects a female masseur is taking sexual pleasure from touching him in a professional capacity. Did she confuse him with Hans Gruber, or the Vicomte de Valmont? Many actors excel at playing who they are not — it’s the ecstasy of transgression. He is nothing like a villain, or a satyrmaniac: he was in a relationship with the same woman for almost 50 years.

I think a large part of Rickman was repelled by his fame — he mocks actors who care who is playing what and for how much — but it addled him anyway. Fame corrupted and exposed him, and we know that because in the diaries he accidentally exposes himself. He and his partner are distraught to discover that there are no Leftists at the luxury hotel in the West Indies they visit over Christmas: why would there be? He frets that the (presumably First Class) airport lounge he finds himself in has no space for “Eccentrics and Weirdos” like himself. So why not step outside?

His serious politics — and I am willing to believe they are serious in intent — are made absurd by the publication of these diaries. If you place serious things next to trivial ones — and the lifestyle of a famous actor can only be trivial — they become trivial too.

This is Rickman at an anti-austerity march in 2011. It reads like parody. “Straight to EAT for coffee and a sandwich before wandering down to Trafalgar Square and long wait for the Equity banner. At Park Lane the sight of the Dorchester proved too much.” “Ms [Mia] Farrow talked long and expertly about Darfur,” he writes in another entry. “Salma Hayek talks of her time in India as a volunteer for Mother Teresa — this utterly beautiful woman talking of wiping up shit and worms and keeping the flies off a dying woman’s face.”

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It often reads like parody, Adrian Mole grown up: “On the way home, a visit — forced — to Dean Street Tesco. What a dump this chain is. A sort of shopping equivalent of our shoddy government.” Or: “St James’s Christmas Mass. The sermon evoked Stalin as a reason for the need for God. Mostly I was looking at the congregation and wondering why we don’t have a local Waitrose.” Or: “Tonight the tree frogs were silent. What do they know?”

He should have written a book about acting. He is, of course, a superb critic: “Emma [Thompson] needs to work with someone who will ask her to dig rather than skim”; “Ms [Georgina] Cates [in An Awfully Big Adventure] suffers from only functioning from her sense of the story. She listens to nothing, responds to nothing. She’s a butterfly inside her own glass case, watching herself bat around.” “Every line,” in a Henry Goodman performance of Shylock, “is a thought contained in a body which has a life.”

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But mostly it is Rickman in an unfinished play: what would he think? It is a fair metaphor for our treatment of the acting class: deification is objectification, and destruction; the end of Perfume, in which the desired man is torn apart. It is fragments from a nervous man who hated gossip, and now will be read for it: “Bumped into P. Mandelson & Reinaldo [his partner] in Westbourne Grove. He was eating a choc-ice and trying to rent a video. Tea with Mussolini.”

So it is a tragedy, then: with the publication of this book, perhaps commerce won. A question from the Sweeney Todd press junket is cruel, but it displays his predicament neatly: Alan, if you were a pie which flavour would you be?

The sender, who claimed to have phished a copy of the manuscript from a Scholastic employee, and whose idiosyncratic writing style suggests that English was not his first language, went on to enumerate several other (equally inaccurate) plot points from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In doing so, he hoped to curtail the influence of Harry Potter over “the youngs of our earth”, whom he feared would be seduced into neo-paganism: “So we make this spoiler to make reading of the upcoming book useless and boring.”

At the time, guys like Gabriel were widely derided as villains, malicious hatemongers on a shameful quest to ruin everyone else’s good time. But on Wednesday, within hours of the release of a new crime novel by J.K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, a user named “opiumteaworld” posted the following on Twitter: “[redacted] is the identity of [redacted] and the name of the killer in #TheInkBlackHeart. Retweet as a form of #NonViolentProtest of J.K.Rowling’s relentless enabling of abusive transphobes and the British media ignoring the desecration and destruction of the Manchester trans memorial.”

In the 15 years since Harry Potter made his final stand against Voldemort, the angst directed at Rowling has evolved from nebulous fears of neo-paganism into a far more sustained and focused rage over her perceived transphobia. But when it comes to the shape the anger takes, very little has changed. Rowling’s haters can’t stop her from writing, and they can’t stop people from reading her writing — but by god, they’ll do what they can to make sure those people don’t enjoy it.

This quest by former Rowling fans to ruin her new book is richly metatextual under the circumstances. The Ink Black Heart finds detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott investigating the fatal stabbing of a content creator, a case that centres on the extremely online activities of a toxic fandom that sprang up around an animated cartoon.

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Based on the premise alone, it’s no surprise that the novel has been described by Rowling’s critics as “a riposte to those who fantasise about killing her”. And yet the idea of The Ink Black Heart as just the latest entry into a reactionary pissing contest between Rowling and her critics doesn’t quite ring true. It’s not just the length of the book (who wants to write a “riposte” in the form of a 1,000-page novel when Twitter is right there?); it’s that The Ink Black Heart is such an incisive, even prescient, view into how the fan community surrounding a beloved cultural property turns toxic, turns on its creator, and ultimately tears itself to shreds.

Indeed, for all the claims that Rowling is writing in response to her trolls, it’s those same former fans who seem most intent on insisting that life imitates art. For instance, as soon as The Ink Black Heart was released this week, a fake screenshot was immediately circulated on Twitter purporting to prove that Rowling uses another anonymous account to tweet homophobic content — a near-identical smear to those that dogged Rowling’s fictional murdered cartoonist, Edie Ledwell. If I were to collage a series of posts invented by Rowling for her book alongside real responses to its publication from the anti-Rowling contingent, you would not be able to tell them apart.

Ever since social media began allowing fans to both gather en masse and, on those same platforms, to enjoy an unprecedented level of access to content creators, the balance of power between the people who make art and those who consume it has been volatile. That tension is the basis of the “toxic fandom” dynamic whose trajectory was traced by fantasy author Sam Sykes in a viral tweet from 2017: “1. I love this. 2. I own this. 3. I control this. 4. I can’t control this. 5. I hate this. 6. I must destroy this.”

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Directed at the work itself, this dynamic begets all sorts of atrocious fan behaviour. But when the focus of the anger shifts from the work to its creator, the ugliness multiplies — and intensifies. This is especially true for someone like Rowling, whose books defined not just the childhood of fans but their adolescence and emergence into adulthood. More than entertainment, the Harry Potter series taught them how to live — and more than just an author, Rowling represented something akin to a moral authority; if not a parent, then a cool, understanding aunt.

For this reason — and also in light of the extremely online plot premise and early buzz about The Ink Black Heart’s self-referential aspects — I had also wondered if Rowling had finally given in to the temptation to stick it to her critics in her work. As an author of thrillers myself, I know it’s a fine line to walk. (I also know that uncharitable readers will invariably assume that the characters in a book are a stand-in for the author whether they are or not.) It was an issue that Rowling addressed directly last weekend, saying: “I should make it really clear after some of the things that have happened in the last year — this is not depicting [that]”, before adding that the first draft of the book was finished well before “certain things” occurred.

Needless to say, Rowling’s critics refuse to believe this. But I do, and not just because the length of time it takes to plot, write, edit, and traditionally publish a book makes anything else extremely unlikely. (There’s a reason it took more than 18 months for the first round of hastily-written pandemic-themed novels to start hitting bookshelves.) It’s that if The Ink Black Heart were truly what it’s been accused of — a thinly-veiled persecution fantasy about Rowling’s victimisation at the hands of her former fans — it wouldn’t be a good story. It wouldn’t treat its characters, including the badly-behaved, narcissistic, vengeful, and murderous ones, with so much interest, or so much compassion. It wouldn’t be a pleasure to read even after some goober on the internet took it upon himself to spoil the killer’s identity.

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But — and this is no doubt infinitely frustrating to Rowling’s haters — it is, and does, all of these things. And while Rowling writes about the internecine warfare among the extremely online with the insight and authenticity of someone who has seen that world first-hand, she does not indulge the urge, so prevalent in these communities, to conclude that all this disagreeable behaviour is motivated by rank bigotry, bad character, or a moral compass skewed irretrievably toward evil. She has, ultimately, a novelist’s eye for the complications and contradictions that lie under the surface of human behaviour. Even the bad guys in this world have good reasons, or at least sympathetic ones, why they do the things they do.

Of course, those railing online against The Ink Black Heart have no idea about that; it’s not only acceptable but something of a badge of honour in cases like this to denounce a book, or decry other people’s enjoyment of it, without ever actually reading it. And there is an irony here: despite her own experiences — or perhaps because of them: crime novelists will literally write a 1,000-page murder mystery instead of going to therapy — Rowling has evidently spent more time trying to understand what motivates someone to devote so much of their life to hating someone on the internet than those same people have ever spent examining their own destructive impulses.

The critics rail away about her narcissism, her ignorance, her refusal to listen. But this book makes it clear that they’re badly mistaken: she has always been listening. Not with the empty-headed deference of the obsequious ally, but in the way that all good storytellers do, as a fly on the wall of the discourse, a keen observer of human affairs. And it is this — not her fame, not her money, but her ability to imagine an internet troll in all his sharp-edged human complexity — that ultimately makes Rowling uncancellable. She doesn’t just know her enemies; she knows them better than they know themselves.

It was late August 2019 when a message popped up in my Twitter inbox from J.K. Rowling. I had noticed that she had begun to follow me on Twitter a few months earlier, along with a number of feminists, and I was delighted to hear from her.

“I’ve just seen that you’re in contact with Magdelen Berns,” she wrote. Berns was a young lesbian who, after being silenced at her university, made YouTube videos tackling the absurdity of transgender ideology. She was popular, hilarious and informative. I say was; Berns, in her 30s, was dying of a brain tumour. I planned to visit her at a hospice in Edinburgh and had put a call out on Twitter to any women who wished to send her a message.

I knew that she would be delighted to hear from Rowling. A few weeks beforehand, during an excitable telephone conversation, she had already told me that “JK is following me!” Berns was thrilled to have her work recognised by one of the most famous and successful women on the planet, and I was thrilled to carry her message.

I kept in touch with Berns after my return from Edinburgh, until she died in September. Rowling and I also stayed in contact, bonded by our feminism and our “simply not having it” attitude. Then, three months later, Maya Forstater lost her job for stating that sex is real. Rowling was furious, and her tweet to that effect has become the stuff of legend. #IStandWithMaya, she said, and all hell broke loose.

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How cancel culture hurts the Left

By Kat Rosenfield

On one side, British women were galvanised into action. On the other, the fact that this wealthy, powerful, successful and uncancellable woman was not only expressing her opinion, but doing so in public, inspired a tsunami of abuse. For the crime of having perfectly reasonable views on women’s sex-based rights, Rowling was harassed on social media and beyond. There were death threats, rape threats, doxxings, and wild accusations. Each time, they became more and more extreme, and even, in some places, normalised and justified.

During this period, many other feminists came in for the same treatment, but no one with a profile that came near to matching Rowling’s. Under fire from extreme trans rights activists, a core group of us formed a bond. It was, however, not formed in defiance of them, but around the beating heart of our movement; for women, for girls, for our rights and our protections, and against misogyny and male violence, whatever form that eternal chimera is currently taking.

Here’s the rub. The kind of threats and abuse sent to Rowling, to me and to others are designed to make us feel isolated, afraid, alone. Patriarchy is all about dividing women and ensuring we don’t share our experiences. Why? Because when women talk, we realise our experiences are quite similar when it comes to male violence and abuse. We realise that all the gaslighting, all the lies told to us, have a common thread. We realise that the guilt, blame and shame of what happened should not belong to us, but to the perpetrators.

And when we bond like that over our common experiences, in what some of us still call “sisterhood”, we are powerful beyond measure. We support each other, emotionally and practically. We organise, agitate, fight. The haters try to stop us. But what they don’t realise is that being under fire is a recipe for solidarity.

No woman is safe from this kind of attention. Martina Navratilova has a long history of being a very public ally to everybody in the LGBTQ rainbow, and yet was still subjected to foul abuse from radical trans rights activists. What was her sin? She questioned whether biological males should compete against women in sports. But the more they came after us, the closer and more supportive our coven became until one day, another DM dropped into my inbox, again from Rowling, this time to a dozen or so of us. It was an invitation. To lunch.

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How philosophy sacrificed the truth

By Kathleen Stock

Like many journalists, I love a good lunch. It’s not like the old days where it would be a three-bottle job, beginning at 12:30 after you’d filed your copy, and ending with the restaurant chucking you out at 5pm. But there is something extremely decadent about getting a bit lashed of an afternoon, with a convivial group consuming fine wine and food. And that is exactly what happened last Sunday.

The problem? We were all women, and to make matters worse, feminists. The icing on the cake was that Rowling was the host, and her guests all known for standing up against extreme transgender ideology and for women’s sex-based rights. That was bad enough, but the fact that we got up to hijinks, and had the temerity to laugh, and drink wine, and eat pasta, and have a bloody brilliant time, and do it on camera, was simply too much for some people. Can you imagine? The cheek of it.

I’d had enough experience of these things to know, beforehand, that there would be some sort of reaction, but I was genuinely surprised by the scale of it. Several national newspapers, radio programmes and talkshows covered it as some fascinating event rather than just ladies who luncheon. I was not surprised, however, by the sheer warmth of many feminists, and even a few men, who lit up social media with their good wishes for us. Nor was I surprised by the fact that there was a backlash from the blue-fringed brigade; the anger and pure spite was palpable, and once word got out that we witches had got together and had some fun, the pile on began.

First, were the handmaidens. One woman, a well-known author with pronouns in her biography, suggested that we were “patting ourselves on the back for solving feminism because of the mutual dislike of trans people”. Then another woman, a comedian, again with the pronouns, kicked off big time, saying that she had had a “mad, angry cry about the photos of J.K. Rowling at the TERF gathering. It’s disgusting how members of our own community can be so hateful”. And of course, Twitter in all its glory was soon awash with the hashtag #MadAngryCry.

Then the boys joined in. Craig Murray, who describes himself as a historian and human rights activist, seemed to think that our event was disrespectful to a man accused of the rape and sexual assault of two women. “While [Suzanne] Moore was knocking back expensive wine in a shit venue with fellow “victim” J. K. Rowling, Assange was entering his fourth year locked in a tiny cell amongst convicted terrorists.” One wonders whether it is only feminists who should refrain from eating until Assange is free?

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The corruption of the feminist library

By Julie Bindel

Hen parties, make-up salons, hair dressers, maternity wards are all permissible places for women to hang out, but actual feminists meeting? Those women that refuse to back down when the patriarchal boot is on the collective neck? No chance.

Some of the intensity of this backlash is no doubt driven by jealousy — not just of us having lunch with the stupendous Rowling, but of how much we made each other laugh. Contrary to prejudicial stereotypes about feminists, there is no shortage of funny women in our midst. As can be seen in the countless photos taken at the lunch, we teased each other in the most irreverent way, such as deciding that Rowling was only 66% straight. I mean, come on: very few heterosexual feminists prioritise the bullying and debasement of lesbians by trans activists and other misogynists as she does.

When the photos were tweeted, to great merriment, I suddenly found myself accused of being some type of sexual predator, out to convert our Queen. In response, Rowling wrote: “Appalled to learn that @bindelj sexually harassed me by (checks notes) making me laugh while lunching. I’ve naturally consulted lawyers, but they say my case is likely to fail at trial due to a legal loophole known as ‘this is bullshit’. Devastated. Please send more fake concern.”

And yet for all that we laughed, it isn’t easy being on the receiving end of so much vitriol and hatred, no matter how much support, or wealth, or sisterhood you have. People seem to think that privileged women such as Rowling have no feelings, no ability to feel pain, and no concern for their safety. But this is sociopathic behaviour, sadistic even — laced with a desire to put women on the receiving end in a position where we cannot win.

Well, on that Sunday afternoon, with that group of women, and the friendship and solidarity in sisterhood in the air, we won. Trust me: we had the hangovers to prove it.

This field of inquiry doesn’t just include behavioural science books such as Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and Ian Leslie’s Conflicted. James Graham’s new play Best of Enemies, currently running at the Young Vic, and Jon Ronson’s recent Radio 4 series about culture wars, Things Fell Apart, are in the same business. Both men are known for their empathy and even-handedness: Ronson has written thoughtful bestsellers about extremists and online shaming, while Graham’s work for stage and screen gravitates towards periods of disruption and division. Taken together, their latest projects shed light on the crucial distinction between debate and dialogue.

Best of Enemies is based on a 2015 documentary about a series of landmark televised debates. In the summer of 1968, the struggling ABC network decided to build its slim coverage of the national party conventions around 10 debates between William F Buckley Jr, the editor of The National Review and host of Firing Line, and Gore Vidal, the novelist and playwright. Born just a few weeks apart in 1925, both men were sons of dynastic privilege who had run for office and attained considerable celebrity, both on screen and in print, by being as combative as they were erudite. But as Buckley later remarked: “There is an implicit conflict of interest between that which is highly viewable and that which is highly illuminating.”

Casting Buckley and Vidal was a vote for viewability. For one thing, they represented not Republicans and Democrats but the most radical expressions of conservatism and progressivism: what we would now call culture warriors. Neither, for example, cared for the eventual Democratic nominee, the cheerful moderate Hubert Humphrey. Electoral strategy and policy platforms interested them less than a battle for the soul of America.

For another, they displayed mutual disgust. Each man considered the other not just dangerous but obscene. Even before the vicious exchange of slurs that made their penultimate meeting notorious, the debates were a gruesome display of smirks and sneers, sly digs and barbed crosstalk. The host, Howard K. Smith, often seemed taken aback by the heat of their animosity. Vidal dubbed Buckley “the leading warmonger of the United States”; Buckley branded Vidal “an agent for the end of democratic government”.

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By Tom Chivers

The debates shot ABC from the bottom of the ratings heap to the top. In 1968, the spectacle of two very clever, eloquent men tearing chunks out of each other was a delicious novelty. Even today, in the play, many of the biggest laughs come from verbatim re-enactments of their showdowns, which Graham structures like the bouts in a boxing movie.

In hindsight, the two men’s ideas and rhetoric seem impressively hifalutin but viewers tuned in for the sizzle not the steak, and that became their legacy. To this day, broadcasters like to frame debates as a spicy clash between two irreconcilable points of view. I’m not the only journalist to have lost a radio booking by admitting that they don’t entirely disagree with the other guest; the disappointment in the booker’s voice is palpable.

On YouTube, meanwhile, the likes of Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson are billed as rhetorical gladiators who DESTROY and CRUSH their opponents. Vidal had it right in the final 1968 debate: “I think these great debates are absolutely nonsense. The way they’re set up, there’s almost no interchange of ideas, very little even of personality. There’s also the terrible thing about this medium that hardly anyone listens.”

Some would say that the Vidal/Buckley clash was a crass corruption of the noble art of debate; but perhaps they merely tore the mask off. The value of adversarial debate is vastly overstated by politicians and journalists who belonged to the tiny of minority of students who participated in them at university (and are rarely sound advertisements for their educational benefit) because it is ultimately a sport rather than an exchange of ideas — and a bloodsport at that.

“Competitive debating takes argument’s essential features and reimagines them as a game,” wrote Sally Rooney about her time as a star college debater. “For the purposes of this game, the emotional or relational aspects of argument are superfluous, and at the end there are winners. Everyone tacitly understands that it’s not a real argument.”

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Why satire gave up on politics

By Dorian Lynskey

The American novelist Ben Lerner came to similar conclusions about his own prowess as a competitive debater in high school: “The speeches required decisiveness: clear rather than complex answers won rounds, and you learned to stud a speech with sources the way a politician reaches for statistics — to provide the affect of authority more than to illuminate an issue or settle a point of fact.” Although this experience appears to have done neither novelist any harm in the long run, Lerner did not like what the game did to him: “I became a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the smallest provocation; I dominated; I made other debaters cry.”

Debates have a place in election campaigns because the goal of both is to win and to leave your opponent, as Vidal said of Buckley, a “bleeding corpse”. More often, though, the challenge of politics is to resolve painful disagreements through dialogue and compromise. There is no perfect quip or killer statistic, flourished like a duellist’s blade, that will deliver an enduring piece of legislation. Law-making is not good television because it requires listening. Even the politicians who are most adept at Prime Minister’s Questions resent the time it consumes because its theatrical aggression has so little to do with the rest of their job.

There are better ways to talk about the issues that divide us. In Things Fell Apart, Jon Ronson tells eight stories about formative moments in the culture war which still influence how we argue today. The most popular episode is also the most uplifting. ‘A Miracle’ revisits the 1985 conversation between the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker and a gay priest with Aids named Steve Pieters. As Peters, still alive today, relates, Bakker’s unexpected compassion built a bridge between evangelical Christians and gay men at a time of rampant homophobia and demonisation of those with Aids: “People in that audience got to see a real live human being.” Their conversation is the polar opposite of Buckley vs Vidal because Bakker really listened. (Fittingly, she is the subject of a stage musical that James Graham is currently writing with Elton John and Jake Shears.)

‘A Miracle’ chimes with ‘Many Different Lives’, which describes how a transwoman called Nancy Burkholder managed to foster a respectful (albeit short-lived) dialogue in the Nineties between the women’s festival Michfest and her fringe gathering Camp Trans. Burkholder’s guidelines for fruitful debate are so self-evidently helpful yet so rarely followed that they are worth quoting in full: “Listen carefully and remain calm and patient. Do not call anyone names or belittle their point of view or imply that they are irrational. An atmosphere of love and joy will attract people to us. Anger and hostility will turn them away. We are all on this planet trying to figure out a lot of complex stuff together.” In these episodes you can hear Ronson, a culture war pacifist, exhilarated by the possibility of breaking a deadlock.

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Oliver Stone's seductive conspiracies

By Dorian Lynskey

Like any war, a culture war is a failure of diplomacy. Unlike most wars, it can never be won, whatever the noisiest and most passionate combatants would like to believe. Polls consistently show that most people don’t want to participate in culture wars, if indeed they even know what they are. They want compromise and settlement, without which a democratic society cannot function.

Binary extremism may reap viewers, clicks, followers and donations but it is also brutalising and corrupting. The more we have of debate as a game rather than debate as dialogue, the worse things get. As the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg lamented in a recent piece about January 6: “The addiction to good-versus-evil narratives pitting the honourable and decent ‘us’ against the villainous and sinister ‘them’ is as strong as ever — and there is little appetite for the kind of argument and persuasion that sustains democracy.”

Towards the end of Best of Enemies, Graham imagines the kind of honest, vulnerable conversation that Buckley and Vidal might have had when the cameras weren’t rolling: “no performing, just talking,” as another character says. It’s an instinctive bridge-builder’s fantasy of good-faith disagreement, where the goal is understanding rather than victory. Ronson’s series closes with a more explicit plea: “I think people are just exhausted by how things have fallen apart and what they’re longing for instead is connection.”

Buckley died in 2008 and Vidal in 2012. Neither sought a significant online presence. Yet it is on the internet where their 1968 desire to fight and win at any cost, to generate heat and damn the light, has become overwhelming. In the 2015 documentary, former ABC executive Richard Wald sadly observes: “Argument is sugar and the rest of us are flies.” What he doesn’t say is that the sugar is poisoned.

Beyond these penny dreadfuls, the broader notion of “cult” oozes ever-outwards, both as marketing ploy and as symptom of a fragmenting society. Increasingly, we have come to see vague social trends through the lens of belonging; to view followership as a good in itself. You could perhaps trace this to 2001, with the “cult of Apple”: the snaking tech product launch queue has become its own trope. Around this time, queues sprung up, too, at Kings Cross’ platform 9¾, where adult Potterheads can still be observed, rotating round their personal Kaaba. Nowadays anything from jelly shoes to shower heads can be “cult”.

Yet nowhere has the cult of “cult” established itself as well as in fitness. SoulCycle, the LA spinning brand, is perhaps the most obvious example: it is regularly described as “a cult” for its theatrical class leaders (each with their own devoted following), its joyous sloganeering and its “community focus”. SoulCycle’s marketers reject the cult tag, but only in the most ah shucks way.

Ever since we were throwing virgins into volcanos, we’ve understood that pain is gain, morally speaking. From Jane “No pain, no gain” Fonda on, the modern fitness business has been keen to exploit that psychic flaw. Bikram Choudhury, the now-disgraced leader of the Bikram Yoga movement, would put those who came on his Las Vegas teaching courses through three or four-hour sessions in 40 degree heat, walking up and down muttering cheeky-chappie aphorisms as he toured the room. Around him, yoga pros would be fainting or puking. This wasn’t exercise. This was self-flagellation. Like the devoted Catholic Filipinos who nail themselves to crosses every Easter, it was a chance to become one with your lord and saviour via an apex of anguish.

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The emptiness of the millennial world

By Gavin Haynes

Of course, moving in tandem can be powerful. No wonder Falun Gong (which The Chinese Communist Party has decided is definitely a cult) founded itself upon its nationwide morning Tai Chi-like exercise sessions. Military psychologists have long known that marching is principally about compounding a disparate group of individuals into a hive mind. In China, the CCP quickly became unnerved by the sight of hundreds of Falun Gong devotees, in parks and on street corners, acting as one.

Yet Falun Gong are an interesting case, in that they do have a single charismatic leader, and he does believe in UFOs. Yet their workout theology does not appear to be harmful, nor overly inward-looking. So, where does the cultish stuff we’re sold tip over into something more sinister?

As Amanda Montell explains in her new book Cultish: The Language Of Fanaticism, it’s a tricky question to answer. The experts don’t even use the term “cult” anymore — it’s both too broad and too narrow. The best definitions involve the lack of a break clause: if it’s hard to get out of, if people are trying to break down the bonds between you and your prior support network, if the language cleaves strongly into “us” and “them”, then it is probably a cult.

Montell tries to piece together how organisations build their own internal lexicon — and how that in turn builds its own metaphysics. The most instructive examples are also the most extreme. History has largely forgotten Heaven’s Gate, perhaps because it seemed almost a parody of a cult. UFOs. Shaved heads. Flowing robes. A mass suicide with an air of wipe-clean.

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By Tanya Gold

One sunny morning in 1997, Heaven’s Gate’s 38 members took a combination of vodka and barbiturates, then tied plastic bags around their heads, then died, in their flowing robes, wearing their Nike Decade sneakers (which Nike discontinued just after this publicity nightmare). A day earlier, they had all recorded their exit interviews. The tapes still exist — in fact they’re available on YouTube. These personal testimonials do not record a fear of death: quite the opposite.

For many years, the language of their guru, Marshall Applewhite, had gradually pushed Heaven’s Gate members through the looking glass. They knew themselves as “the away team”, meaning they were on the far side of the galaxy to their origins. According to lore they’d developed, Earth was being recycled, or as they put it, “spaded under”. In this context, death was “nothing to fear”, but in fact a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.

Unlike Jonestown or David Koresh’s Waco compound, this was not a group about to come undone. Inside Heaven’s Gate, life could easily have gone on in peace. But the jargon said otherwise. Gradually, their linguistic map had been rewritten; finally, they were conceptually committed to suicide. One by one, they’d accepted each tiny grammar modification, until the concept of “exiting your vehicle” seemed perfectly logical. This was the closest thing the linguistic postmodernists ever got to a field experiment, and it turned out they were right all along: language structures thought.

What happened at Heaven’s Gate, Montell wants to say, is just a bigger version of what is happening to us every day, as we navigate between linguistic vortexes of belonging. CrossFit, for instance, comes with its own lingo that connotes insiders: there’s “WoD”, the workout of the day, always named after a literal “fallen policeman or soldier”. Here, the gym is called a “box”. “C2Bs” are “chest to bars.” “DOMS” is “delayed onset muscle soreness”. Her conclusion is that there is no strict border between cult and not, but that recognising cultish language is a great first step to stopping ourselves from falling for those who would have us under their thumbs.

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The deluded cult of social justice

By John Gray

Here, her admirably big thesis bites off more than it can chew. In June of last year, CrossFit’s CEO, Greg Glassman, was sacked for questioning whether the murder of George Floyd constituted a “public health emergency of racism” of a scale worth breaking lockdown for. Montell decides this means he “outed himself as a shameless racist”. “By glorifying the police in its Hero WoDs,” she writes, “CrossFit had been telling on itself all along”. It is not noted whether Montell thinks white people washing the feet of black people is cult-ish, nor whether the definition would apply to building a 700lb statue of a former armed robber in central Newark. It seems even the experts can suffer from us-and-them thinking and in-group argot.

Beyond simply recognising cultish language, it might be a better conclusion to overtly recognise some of the submerged values that underlie our cultish obsessions. There’s an old meme of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, where the pyramid has been reformatted to have at its base: “Belonging”. Above it is a smaller level labelled “Status”. Then a tiny triangle atop of “Everything Else”. The reprise of the cult reminds us of quite how much truth there may be in jest.

Belonging eludes many of us these days, something with implications for the less-than-fully-formed in particular. Youth culture is increasingly monochrome. The internet has blobbed everyone together: Spotify, for example, has meant that people are ever-more omnivorous in their musical taste. The great style tribes of the past have faded away: there are no more mods, ravers, emos or the like, perhaps because the capitalist cultural machine is now so instant that it breaks new things down and eats their bones before they’ve had a chance to really get going. Perhaps that is why young people have found themselves at home in identity politics.

The paradox is that the same commodified lens that is trying to sell us everything as a cult is doing so by drowning us in choice. Just as with music, we now have infinite social groups we could be a part of. But what is the thing that is going to force you to be a part of it?

At its heart, a cult is a degraded kind of love affair, passion turned toxic. And more and more, what we’re looking for is to be whisked off our feet. It’s the sense of something that is not only bigger than us, but that pushes the locus of control out of our hands. And as our present hands-face-space era has illustrated, many quietly yearn to be told what to do.

So reads the introduction to the famous Edwardian children’s book Our Island Story, a work that exemplified a certain idea of Britain. It was a country that was unique, blessed by God with a destiny, the narrative drawing on mythical ideas that went back to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s famously implausible 12^th century history of the island. Britain — or, more specifically, England — was different.

Just as the 17^th century Puritans saw England as the new Israel – indeed some took it further to suggest we were the Israelites — so the Victorians had come to think of the country as unique, a new Athens in glorious isolation. Britain was part of Europe, but not of it, and instead destined to rule the oceans and its great dominions overseas.

British exceptionalism was a seductively ego-affirming idea, but then if you belong to a smallish country that ends up ruling a quarter of the world, you’d probably start to conclude you were special, too. Today, the empire is no more but the British are still exceptional — although perhaps not in quite the same way.

Five years ago this week the country’s thought-leaders were given the shock of their lives when the electorate voted against all advice and apparent common sense to leave a trading bloc on which their economy was dependent. The decision seemed to lack any reason, an act of wilful self-harm, “shitting the bed” as one comedian called it.

Unable to explain this idiocy, journalists and academics came to the conclusion that it could be explained by British, or more particularly, English exceptionalism — a deluded belief that the country was somehow special.

It was a common theme that the English – the most Eurosceptic of the home nations – considered themselves somehow exceptional, unique, which became the subject of numerous articles, academic papers and treatise.

One scholar traced this British exceptionalism back to the Napoleonic Wars, when the country’s elite constructed an idea of an island story. Another even even linked Brexit to Our Island Story, suggesting that “Support for this seemingly innocuous children’s bedtime story should therefore be understood as an important ideational element in a predominantly English Eurosceptic disengagement from the EU and a re-engagement with the Anglosphere amongst Conservatives”.

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Fascism isn't coming

By Ed West

A columnist warned how this dangerous ideology, with its “tawdry jingoism, the faux-patriotism, the cynical use of the flag to exploit the people’s belief in ‘British exceptionalism’”, could even be to blame for the country’s disastrous handling of Covid.

Yet in Europe at least the British are exceptional in a completely different way, not in feeling themselves special or above the rest. England – not Britain – is unique in being so uncomfortable with itself, so filled with self-disdain.

In no other country are symbols of nationhood so likely to provoke such disgust or mockery, to be considered either distasteful, vulgar or actually hateful. In no other country would a front-bench politician slyly mock a voter for flying the flag. To a certain section of society every defeat for England is cheered, every victory lamented. This was the problem at the heart of the debate five years ago, the real British exceptionalism.

In this we are strangely unique, since neither the German nor French Left feel discomfort with national symbolism in the same way as the British. French intellectuals are down on their country — they’re down on everything — and Germans are ashamed of their past. Artists everywhere tend to be more self-critical than the population at large. But among European countries only in England is there such revulsion and cringe at the symbolism of the nation, and the people who celebrate it.

This autoAnglophobia was epitomised by the actress Emma Thompson, who during the run-up to the referendum described her homeland as “a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe, I mean really, a cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island”.

Thompson, who more recently flew from Los Angeles to London to attend a climate change rally, could not have better personified her caste; raised from old theatre stock in Hampstead, attending one of Camden’s elite state schools and then Cambridge, she described herself as “European”, but for a certain type of Briton that means less an identification with the inheritance of Rome and Greece than membership of a community of belief. It means being internationalist, open-minded, progressive, university-educated… just not British.

The English are exceptional in their “oikophobia”, as Roger Scruton defined the “need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ours”.  Scruton argued that it is “a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes” but which is common among intellectuals and artists of all sorts. The English are the worst at it.

None of this is new; the British intelligentsia has hated the country for at least two centuries, to the extent of supporting opponents far more sinister than the EU.

Yet while such disdain was once confined to small literary circles, today its association with education and high status has allowed it to mimetically spread through the institutions. Today even august bodies like the National Trust are dominated by people who find patriotism just a bit distasteful, and would be horrified to promote it. In what other countries would the publishing industry have a whole genre of books devoted to denigrating the country’s history, showing that actually we’re the worst at everything; that every victory wasn’t really ours; that our heroes were monsters.

It is also a strangely parochial belief, this idea that Britain is somehow uniquely bad, as if everywhere doesn’t have similar problems, often worse. But then British internationalism is one of the most parochial belief systems in the world; we laud the NHS as the finest moral legacy of mankind, while in the rest of Europe it’s a laughing stock. Our commentariat bemoan that our country is going down the dark path of nationalism because our PM once made an off-colour joke, while across the Channel politicians compete to appear the most hostile to Islam. Indeed, Britain is unusually liberal for European standards, and of most social issues has become noticeably more liberal since 2016.

For all that it was about Europe, and the world, the referendum debate was really about two competing visions of what it meant to be British; even the Remainer identity, with its EU flags and affected xenophilia, was a particularly British tribal allegiance, dominated by Thames Valley Liberal Democrats who are nice people and like Radio 3 and the Proms.

For a certain type of progressive, British patriotism or nationalism is nothing to celebrate, and always contains something dark within, the neanderthal and skinhead just waiting to emerge. A recent article by a former Labour MP warned that “although we British have long been prone to outbreaks of nationalism, until recently obsessive flag waving was by and large confined to small far-right parties, Northern Irish Unionists and a bunch of Hooray Henrys and Henriettas at the Last Night of the Proms. But the Brexit referendum and its aftermath has ushered in a new era. Something fundamental has changed. With the coming of Brexit the nationalist genie is out of the bottle and will not easily be put back.”

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What if Leave and Remain switched sides?

By Ed West

Next year France may well elect Marine Le Pen as president; in Rome the Brothers of Italy party is surging ahead, while everyone’s favourite liberal paradise, Denmark, has an immigration and asylum system that would have British Tories, let alone liberals, in fits.

When ministers suggest government buildings might fly the British flag, rather than the Pride colours or trans flag or whatever the liturgy dictates this week, there are howls of outrage from people who seem uninterested that this is normal everywhere else in Europe. It’s seen as some unprovoked “culture war”, as if the Left hasn’t been engaged in a forever culture war for decades. Wanting to fly the flag is not exceptional; thinking the British are above flag-waving is the exceptionalism.

So what is different about England? Much of it has to do with the country’s main class fault-line, between a socially liberal haute bourgeoisie and a conservative petty bourgeoisie (apologies for my French, fellow patriotic Britishers).

Explaining why he found Radio 4 so irritating, the novelist Tim Lott once explained that the liberal middle class “is the voice of the upper echelons of the BBC” and they are in conflict with Middle Englanders, “essentially people with nice homes and decent incomes and a commitment to abiding by the law and even a sense of patriotism. The LMC see them as retrograde and primitive – those damn Daily Mail readers.”

Auto-Anglophobia is defined by a disgust of a certain idea of England. When Thompson made her comments it was leapt upon immediately by the Daily Mail, which asked “Why DO so many leftie and luvvies loathe this country”, which is a legitimate question, although it might also be said that it’s not exactly the country they hate but YOU, the Middle Englanders.

No recent book better summarises this fault than the Harry Potter series, where each of the villains represent different archetypes of the Liberal Middle Class’s enemies, from the small-minded suburban NIMBY Uncle Vernon to the future Bullingdon boy Malfoy.

The AutoAnglophobic intellectual isn’t against nationalism per se; they fawn over the Celtic variety, that earthy, authentic love of country, and when did Celtic nationalism ever kill anyone? Some proclaim how they long to be Scottish, just as once they might have claimed Irish or, if they were clutching at straws, Cornish ancestry. Some even dream of a separate Scottish nation, a British version of Vermont, progressive and egalitarian.

Similarly, “flag-shagger” as an insult almost invariably comes from people with flags in their Twitter bio – Palestine flags, EU flags, gay flags, trans flags, any flags just as long as they’re high status rather than low — the Union Jack and, worse still, the prole’s apron that is the St George’s Cross. You might see the latter in a middle-class areas during the later stages of a football tournament, but otherwise Rod Liddle was right to say that in north London you’re more likely to see the Palestinian colours being flown.

The conservative response to this disdain is often disingenuously defensive of the nation and its people, when indeed there is lots to dislike about England. The bone-headed officiousness of many in authority, which has come out to the fore in lockdown. The yobbishness, which is far more noticeable than in other European countries. The fact that you have signs in theme parks telling men to keep their tops on. We aren’t the world’s biggest drunks, but we’re probably the most unpleasant. Although much improved, England football fans can be horrible in the flesh; thuggish, racist and intimidating.

Visiting Holland always brings out my inner Remainer, because the people just seem like a better version of the English; the Germans are more cultured and take serious things like opera seriously; Italy is dysfunctional but Italians are intrinsically more civilised than us, and the Scandinavians run things in such a fairer way. And the French; well, I’m sure they have their good qualities, too. (Joke! I love the French.)

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Likewise, much of the urban liberal critique of the British establishment is entirely justified. Our class system is not unique, but no one else really has such a divide between the private and state school sectors, for instance, nor such domination by one school in producing a lot of quite mediocre national leaders. The absence of revolution or war has been a blessing, but it has allowed us to avoid reform where it is needed.

And England is exceptional in some ways. The biggest event in our history took place ten thousand years ago when Doggerland was flooded. It is hard to invade an island, and so the country remained unaffected by the rule of Napoleon, or Hitler, leaving different legal and measuring systems, and a different psychology.

That silver sea has made us a happy breed of men, but it has also made us a complacent breed – the perfect conditions for oikophobia. In countries which have been trampled over by armies down the years an artist who disdained the ground where his ancestors had been starved or raped would be tiresome; in an island which had not endured foreign occupation or tyranny for centuries it’s indulged.

It’s an ancient tradition, going back at least to the late 18^th century. The French Revolution was cheered by many in Britain, but many of those continued cheering even after it had descended into bloodshed, and war with Britain. Many of Britain’s intelligentsia praised Napoleon as “the Great Man of the People of France, the Liberator of Europe”, in the words of one radical MP. Charles Fox praised the French dictator, Britain’s arch-enemy, as “the most stupendous monument of human wisdom”. The great polemicist William Godwin – husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley – wrote that Bonaparte was “infinitely more dear to the people of France” than ever, even after it became clear he was a tyrant. William Wordsworth, once enthusiastic about revolution, had after France invaded Switzerland in 1798 lamented of his home country “Oh grief that Earth’s best hopes rest all with thee!”

Among the most enthusiastically self-hating were the Unitarians, who felt that Britain was uniquely immoral. One Unitarian minister, Ebenezer Aldred, said that Britain was the real Beast of Revelation, “guilty of imperialism, slave trading and sodomy”, in Robert Tomb’s words.

The intelligentsia’s disdain for the country that had nurtured them became more pronounced in the 20^th century as Britain’s prestige declined, much of it influenced by a class disgust of the newspaper-reading “clerks”. It began at Cambridge University, where around the time of the First World War Lytton Strachey’s brilliantly timed Eminent Victorians marked the start of a cultural shift, after which the intelligentsia would always hate Britain.

The Bloomsbury set were the most notorious, among them Virginia Woolf and EM Forster, who combined following an egalitarian creed with snobbery for the ordinary British. A Room With a View, his novel about English tourists in Italy, is filled with contempt for the Brit abroad, who sophisticated English travellers have for centuries looked down on.

In fact back during the days of Grand Tour, the Whig Earl of Chesterfield told his son “You are not sent abroad to converse with your own countrymen… among them, in general, you will get little knowledge, no language, and I am sure, no manners… Their pleasure of the table end in beastly drunkenness, low riot, broken windows, and very often (as they well deserve) broken bones”.

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The mindset became starker in the 1930s; in the famous 1933 Oxford Union debate, the country’s future leaders voted that “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country” by 275 votes against 153.

Orwell accused the country’s intelligentsia in the 1930s of “chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British”. Unsurprisingly, when he wrote Nineteen-Eighty-Four, he saw that if there was hope against the new ideology, it would lie with the proles.

Intellectuals like Virginia Woolf didn’t understand why the workers continued to love their country, despite everything. Even during the darkest days of the War they refused to give up hope: on 17 June, 1940, Home Intelligence found a mood of “gloomy apprehension” to be most common in “the middle classes and women”. Working-class men, despite what the experts believed, thought we would win, and that even if we didn’t — we should fight anyway.

Since then, disdain for the country has spread from a small circle at Cambridge to the entire upper echelons of society; it has become a mark of status. It was noticeable after Brexit that many of those claiming to speak for “the 3 million” EU citizens here (who turned out to be 5 million) argued their case by insulting Britain, saying that a lazy country needed them.

This might seem ungrateful, but it was really a sign of integration, doing what the Brits do. (Just as high-status Asian-Americans talk about white supremacy because that’s what high-status Americans do.)

In fact, this has long been a mark of fitting in. Before The Satanic Verses affair, Salman Rushdie had ingratiated himself with the British cultural elite by comparing the country to Nazi Germany for Channel 4; more recently, foreign-born British journalists and cultural figures attack Britain for being racist; what looks like ingratitude is just newcomers imitating a society’s high-status beliefs. Two hundred years ago they might have joined the Church of England; now they join the Church of Hating England.

Bohemians are good for society; it needs them. But when bohemian mores spread too widely it can start to turn into universal cynicism and distrust, and eventually populism.

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The disdain that many people feel for Britain certainly didn’t help Remain’s cause. In the weeks leading up to the vote, a bunch of bankers would come up with important but rather boring forecasts of just how skint we would be if we left; then some idiot would tweet that they’d lose their nanny if we left, unaware of how much that was the point, to punish an urban elite who enjoyed the full privileges of globalisation without the social contract that comes with being part of a national community. Perhaps the abiding image of the campaign was Bob Geldof, do-gooder par excellence — and a genuinely decent man by all accounts, who has done actual good — sticking two fingers up at British fishermen during a rather bad tempered, but comical, day of protests.

After the referendum, another social media trend was for people to post pictures of themselves on skiing holidays, looking sad because they were saying goodbye to Europe. Some posed with themselves eating continental food, because now they sadly never to eat a croissant again. This was done without any self-awareness, and the abiding message was “look how much I despise you all”.

The problem for Remain, and for progressives generally, is that everything is now so out in the open. Back in 2004 Thomas Frank wrote in What’s The Matter with Kansas? his polemic on working-class conservatism, that Right-wing media had created a fantasy where “all-powerful liberals who run the country… are contemptuous of the tastes and beliefs of the people who inhabit it.”

Yet since then, social media has proved the conservative fantasy to be obviously true, and it’s possible that nations, like families, need the little white lies to keep things going; if we all knew what the people around us really thought about us, things would fall apart very soon. And in Britain it became obvious that large numbers of the cultural elite really do hate the country.

It is that disdain for Englishness that partly explains Brexit. People will often put up with being ruled by people who cheat them, or lie to them, or who mismanage the country — as recent polls illustrate. But they won’t put up with being ruled by those who openly despise them.

As a writer, I am haunted by the tremendous impact that stories — particularly myths and folk tales — had on me as a child. That’s partly why I became fascinated with Jordan Peterson, long before he came to public attention and when he was still lecturing in small, shabby classrooms to handfuls of students.

I discovered his “Maps of Meaning” lectures five years ago. I dipped into them and was hooked, watching hours of his talks one after the other. They thrilled me; not only was Peterson charismatic, witty and erudite, but he was addressing an issue that has obsessed me since a very young age: why do people believe what they believe, and how is this connected to narration and storytelling?

That may sound like a curiously innocent query, but the truth is that it has very dangerous implications. Each of us, after all, needs our beliefs emotionally. We often fiercely defend them, to the death in some cases. But if these convictions are merely part of a story — fundamentally flawed or incomplete — what value can we place on them? This, to me, explains a lot of the hostility to Peterson; he touches on nerves we find too uncomfortable to lay bare. He reminds us that our psychological houses are built on sand — that our most cherished beliefs are just stories, not absolute truths.

As Peterson’s fame started to grow, I had a chance to interview him on zoom and met him in person on several occasions. Our conversations were electrifying. I had never come across an interviewee so attentive, at both listening and speaking. Over almost four hours, he talked about his personal vulnerability (he cried more than once as we spoke ), about the inevitable political element of his work, but also religion — in particular Christ’s story and the motif of death and rebirth. He mentioned, for example, that one meaning of INRI — the Latin inscription on Christ’s cross — was “through fire all nature is renewed”, before explaining about the constant renewal of life through suffering and death.

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He talked about how some of these mythological motifs appear in popular culture. Star Wars, for instance, has a lot in common with many of the other mass cultural phenomena of the last 50 years, including Harry Potter, ET and Sleeping Beauty — in particular, the prominence they give to death and rebirth.

But specific content aside, Peterson emphasises how the ideas that we seek to understand cannot actually be communicated in words; they have to be communicated in narratives, in stories. This is as true of the Bible as it is of The Little Mermaid, and is a truth known by every producer of every Marvel and DC movie. It is what lies underneath the action that produces the audience response — or lack of it.

The meaning of action is most clearly revealed in fairy tales and children’s stories. So Peterson focuses a lot of his attention on youth and adolescent popular culture. He briefly references these narrative mechanisms in Lesson Two of his new book, Beyond Order, but sadly not in sufficient depth to render them anything more than superficially intelligible. One has to watch the lectures for that.

Peterson’s central point is this: we do not know what we know. Just as the Old Testament carries ideas too complex to be expressed in words — his Biblical lectures explain how those mysterious verses actually tell the story of the emergence of individual conscience out of herd morality — fairy stories and great literary works translate into images and narratives that cannot simply be “told”, in the sense of “explaining”. They have to be shown. Hence the famous writing trope “show don’t tell”. And what better way to do that than in stories?

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For example, in symbolic terms, Harry Potter is in almost every respect identical to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: the ingénue, an orphan who lives a meaningless life, in suburbia or Tatooine, who has a lost father who is a great magician, and who must face great danger and die and be reborn, rejuvenating the spirit of the dead father. Both narratives, of course, also have a lot in common with the story of Christ.

These are not just stories, but metaphors for what is happening in our individual psychologies: “determining to move forward and upward despite the horrors of life,” as Peterson puts it.

Crucially, you needn’t be aware of this psychological shift for it to happen. Indeed for Peterson, an artist may not even understand their own work: “if you can say what you’re doing, you’re not producing art,” he says. Did Shakespeare really understand the import of Hamlet or was he just channelling a larger force?

Either way, Peterson’s most important lesson still remains: that it is the job of the storyteller to provide a portal to a deeper-felt reality, rather than to relate — as is depressingly common today — an ideological or moral position. True art, poetry even, is trying to create something out of the partially lit darkness. Anything else is just posturing, propaganda or wish fulfilment.

One of the most brilliant of many brilliant things about J. K. Rowling’s books was the way in which they grew up alongside their readers. In the first novel, Harry turned 11, and he grew older with each one; an 11-year-old reader of that first book would have crested young adulthood at the same time Harry did. The stories grew darker, more complex, more challenging. The adventures spilled out from the classroom into the wider adult world. The dangers were greater, the reverses and losses more permanent and more grave.

But then, of course, they stopped and their readers carried on into the trackless wastes of maturity without him. That will have been a loss.

It’s worth taking this opportunity to say what artful books they are, and how thoroughly imagined was their world: Rowling seeded future developments and plot strands so early in the first book; she dropped her trail of breadcrumbs. She knew where she was going, and she went there at just the right pace, and (admirably) she stopped when she got there, her story told. The writing may not have been showy, but it did its work. She picked out evocative details — Ollivander’s moonlike eyes, say, or the light through the high windows striping the stone corridors of Hogwarts. She employed the whole sensorium to make her world immediate. And there was a warm gleam of humour on every page.

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When they first came out, some early reviewers — including this one — groused a little that Rowling was a magpie. The novels seemed to be a collage of influences: this from T. H. White or Tolkien, that from Roald Dahl, this from The Worst Witch; that from any number of old-fashioned boarding-school stories; this – blimey — from Kafka. But of course, looking back, to indict her for a lack of originality was to miss the point. Rowling knew just what she was doing. She was in the business of building a myth. And all myths steal and repurpose previous stories: they draw their power from them. The Torah was a straight remix of Babylonian creation myths and all the better for it.

And if a myth does its job, it offers — however fantastical — a way of thinking about the world. Like many children’s books, the Harry Potter books set out to affirm a set of moral principles for the generation that grew up with them; and given the almost 100% saturation of the market it’s fair to assume they will have had an influence. These principles are, we can say, pretty uncontroversial. They affirm the value of courage, honesty, loyalty and the importance of friendship. They say that bullying is to be deplored, kindness valued; that might doesn’t make right and that love is stronger than hate.

They go in to bat, too, for some easy liberal values. Slavery is a bad thing. Eugenics and racial profiling are no-nos. Torture and random sadistic murder are definitely frowned on. Hey kids, these books say full-throatedly: don’t be a Nazi, ‘mkay?

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In so doing, and in the very reasonable line of being children’s books, and bloody good ones — and exciting stories at that — they present the world as an all-or-nothing heroic struggle between unmitigated good and unfathomable evil. You have lovely, wise, kind and selfless Dumbledore in one corner and you have that utter rotten egg Voldemort in the other. Pick a team.

Institutions are to be trusted only inasmuch as they are run by goodies (the Ministry of Magic is eminently corruptible but Dumbledore’s Hogwarts is not, at least while the old man remains in charge), and rules are to be broken ad lib as long as it’s the goodies doing it. Normative authority is creepy old Filch, skulking the corridors with Mrs Norris in search of fun to spoil and miscreants to snitch on. The mainstream media is the prurient and unctuous scratching of Rita Skeeter. Suburban normies — incarnated in the Dursleys of Privet Drive — are the pits.

In their fine texture, the books are subtler than that — Snape’s story arc, for instance, has a level of real moral complexity; and the psychology of the protagonists’ day-to-day friendships is not simplistic — but the basic shape of the main story is goodies vs baddies to the death. And that is, as I say, quite proper. They’re children’s books.

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Revolutions eat their children. Critics of the series have since argued that there are subtextual or framing issues: that they’re kind of heteronormative (Dumbledore was, Rowling told us later, gay — but there’s scant evidence for it in the text); or that they’re kind of white (Rowling welcomed the casting of a black Hermione in the stage show, and Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote interestingly about how a black Hermione would have enriched the story in Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, but, again, the text tends not to support the idea).

You may agree with these criticisms or you may scoff at them — but it’s striking that an audience primed to take a binary goodies vs baddies worldview has turned with some decisiveness on the author of that worldview when it decided (most dramatically over her gender-critical comments on Twitter) that she’s on the other team.

Our cultural and political moment now looks very much like one with a sorting-hat view of the world: the hat peers deep into your soul, and after no more than a minute – though usually instantly – it assigns you an identity. If you’re Slytherin, that’s that.

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That is to say: evil is held to reside ineradicably in the person so sorted. The extent to which this has become general is shown on the reaction to the now notorious Harper’s letter — signed, among many others, by J. K. Rowling — which offered some pretty unexceptionable bromides on free speech. The debate centred not on the arguments made in the letter but on the people who signed their names to it. The question not was it the right argument, but were they the right people? Was the Dark Mark upon them? One signatory who had freely endorsed the contents of the letter, presumably having at least skim-read them, immediately withdrew their support and apologised on the express grounds that they never would have signed had they known who else was signing. Wrong team. Expelliarmus.

These are, as I’ve said before, children’s books. Harry Potter, somewhere in the multiverse, grew up. So must his audience.

Back then, fantasy was a nerd hobby. Today, though, both fantasy and the moral policing of fantasy seems increasingly mainstream. Fantasy novels can be pulled for wrongthink and even wildly successful fantasy authors such as JK Rowling get dogpiled. Not even actors representing fantasy characters are safe: witness the treatment meted out to Mandalorian actress Gina Carano after being judged by the court of social media to be guilty of heresy.

To those uninterested in fantasy “fandoms”, these may seem absurd dramas. After all, when we’re talking about imaginary worlds populated by imaginary people, who cares about the private opinions of those who create the stories, or represent them on TV?

This dismissive attitude is a mistake. The truth is that a culture’s ideals are always delivered via stories, and in most cultures telling and re-telling these has been taken very seriously indeed. It’s only in our modern world that tales of gods and monsters, rather than taking centre stage in our shared cultural life, have been shoved off into a box called “fantasy fiction” and treated as a mezzobrow hobby for the incorrigibly childish.

It should be clear by now that I have a personal stake here: I’m a full-bore fantasy fiction nerd. Whether it’s solemn sword-and-sorcery, the comic adventures of Terry Pratchett, or the weird worlds of China Miéville or Josiah Banks, if it’s even half-decently written and concerns fantastic kingdoms and impossible adventures I’m there. But I’m also, to a modest extent, interested in literary history. And it’s striking how fantasy fiction popped into existence as a Western genre more or less at the exact point where epic poetry in the classical style stopped being taken seriously.

Rewind a few hundred years, and everyone writing in English sprinkled references to the Greek and Roman gods into their stories and poems, while the Homeric myths occupied a place in the Western imagination almost as central as the Bible. It’s difficult to imagine today but figures such as Athena, goddess of war and wisdom, Circe the sorceress and snake-headed Medusa were common cultural reference points for the educated class.

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And it wasn’t just the mythic memes of antiquity that larded our literature — it was the forms as well. The hero’s quest, as set out in The Iliad and The Odyssey, and later in Virgil’s Aeneid, formed a template for heroic narrative that continued almost unchanged into the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Countless authors borrowed, imitated, translated and ironically reworked the epic mode, from Spenser’s hallucinatory Faerie Queene (1590) to Milton’s barnstorming retelling of the Christian story, Paradise Lost (1667), to arguably the last effort at epic poetry, Byron’s Don Juan (1819). But it couldn’t last. In Don Juan, Byron captured something sad but unmistakably true: the classical epics were losing their aura, leaving behind only a sense of lost grandeur. As Byron’s hero laments, while trapped on a Greek island (with only a nubile pirate princess for company):

THE isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.

Byron’s 16,000 lines of satire, sex and mourning for the vanished glories of classical antiquity put paid to epic as a usable form for anyone with a desire to be taken seriously as a writer. Or was it science? Imagine a looming form that by candlelight seems a shadowy, terrible monster — then turns out, with the lights switched on, to be just a coat-stand. With scientists explaining away ever more of the world’s mysteries by the light of reason, maybe the old gods just started to look a bit silly.

So a few short decades later, the epic style migrated into the first fantasy novels: George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858), and the children’s adventure The Princess and the Goblin (1871). Even as epic poetry died off, modern fantasy fiction was born.

The high point for our rational world — Peak Reason, if you will — was probably the end of the Cold War, when it seemed all the grand battles between good and evil had been won. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it was in the 1980s that the fantasy market went supernova.

Remembering my adolescence in the 1990s, the everyday world seemed flat, dull and stripped of all enchantment. But fantasy blossomed: after my baptism-by-Belgariad, I fell feet-first into the then freshly-published greats of modern fantasy, by now-classic authors such as Robin Hobb, Tad Williams and of course JK Rowling. Epic imagination scaled new heights, even as geopolitics sought perpetual peace under the “liberal international order”, the Communist threat evaporated, and the scope for heroic achievement in the “real” world seemed as vanished as Byron’s vision of classical Greece.

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Those who went on dreaming of earth-shattering battles or heroes plucked from obscurity to save the universe have spent the Age of Reason with their heads down. Tolkien’s classic of 20th-century fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, is one of the best-selling books of all time; but one 1955 letter to WH Auden, Tolkien ruefully describes being “scourged with such terms as ‘pubescent’ and ‘infantilism'”. And everyone loves dragging millennials about the Harry Potter thing.

But while science has plenty to say about the “what” and “how” of our world, it has far less to offer on “why”. We may laugh at the tweeness of being a Harry Potter obsessive in your thirties, or someone with a mortgage and two kids cosplaying at a Star Wars convention. But we’re not so different from our fireside-storytelling ancestors, in craving stories that help us get at the dark, strange questions — or the big ones about power, empire, good and evil.

And while mythology seemed temporarily defeated by the End of History, today successive crises of finance, terrorism and pandemic have shown our world to be far more dangerous and unpredictable than we once imagined. So even as history has come roaring back, we shouldn’t be surprised to see gods and monsters doing the same. They might take the form of Baby Yoda memes or emetic Gryffindor avatars, but they’re playing the same role as the Greek and Roman pantheon centuries ago: providing a common narrative language for debates about the big questions.

From this perspective it’s easier to see how quarrels over whether or not an actress thinks you should wear a mask, or what JK Rowling thinks about transgender women, aren’t ludicrous culture war sideshows at all. Rather, they’re border skirmishes over the content of our moral operating system. The woke grasp this fact instinctively, which is why they reserve a special fury for policing heresy in our emerging new mythologies.

But the new would-be guardians of our epic mythologies are likely to find in time that their subject has a habit of escaping their control. The long history of stories that survive and replicate tells us it’s not the morally correct ones that make the cut, but the ones that ring true. No one today reads that classic of 17^th-century woke literature, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, unless they absolutely have to. Meanwhile, it’s a testament to the continued power of the old pantheons, that having disappeared from highbrow literature, they’ve since reappeared in (among other things) PlayStation games and the Marvel universe.

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And the power of such gods lies partly in their refusal to be domesticated: they’re two-faced, ambivalent, bloody, capricious and awe-inspiring. They’re not at all inclusive. They carry a payload of intuitions about — for example — the persistence of power, violence and hierarchy, the often-untidy dynamics between the sexes, and the obnoxiousness of heroic personalities, that don’t sit comfortably with the sanitised modern imagination. Stories are too unruly to be easily contained by moral correctness.

It was the pursuit of Reason that chased the old gods into the shadows of children’s literature. But today, our faith in Reason is well on its way to collapsing. David Goodhart wrote recently about how, as media control has decentralised in the internet age, what looked like a consensus on “objective” discourse has been upended by a tidal wave of emotionally inflected personal testimony. Even the New York Times, which has for decades styled itself as the objective ‘paper of record’, has been convulsed by civil war over whether it should instead embrace more polemical, politicised stances.

As the lights go out and we see the world by firelight again, expect to discover the old gods striding, full-sized, across our imaginations again. We may find their return a mixed blessing.

One of the most brilliant of many brilliant things about J. K. Rowling’s books was the way in which they grew up alongside their readers. In the first novel, Harry turned 11, and he grew older with each one; an 11-year-old reader of that first book would have crested young adulthood at the same time Harry did. The stories grew darker, more complex, more challenging. The adventures spilled out from the classroom into the wider adult world. The dangers were greater, the reverses and losses more permanent and more grave.

But then, of course, they stopped and their readers carried on into the trackless wastes of maturity without him. That will have been a loss.

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It’s worth taking this opportunity to say what artful books they are, and how thoroughly imagined was their world: Rowling seeded future developments and plot strands so early in the first book; she dropped her trail of breadcrumbs. She knew where she was going, and she went there at just the right pace, and (admirably) she stopped when she got there, her story told. The writing may not have been showy, but it did its work. She picked out evocative details — Ollivander’s moonlike eyes, say, or the light through the high windows striping the stone corridors of Hogwarts. She employed the whole sensorium to make her world immediate. And there was a warm gleam of humour on every page.

When they first came out, some early reviewers — including this one — groused a little that Rowling was a magpie. The novels seemed to be a collage of influences: this from T. H. White or Tolkien, that from Roald Dahl, this from The Worst Witch; that from any number of old-fashioned boarding-school stories; this – blimey — from Kafka. But of course, looking back, to indict her for a lack of originality was to miss the point. Rowling knew just what she was doing. She was in the business of building a myth. And all myths steal and repurpose previous stories: they draw their power from them. The Torah was a straight remix of Babylonian creation myths and all the better for it.

And if a myth does its job, it offers — however fantastical — a way of thinking about the world. Like many children’s books, the Harry Potter books set out to affirm a set of moral principles for the generation that grew up with them; and given the almost 100% saturation of the market it’s fair to assume they will have had an influence. These principles are, we can say, pretty uncontroversial. They affirm the value of courage, honesty, loyalty and the importance of friendship. They say that bullying is to be deplored, kindness valued; that might doesn’t make right and that love is stronger than hate.

They go in to bat, too, for some easy liberal values. Slavery is a bad thing. Eugenics and racial profiling are no-nos. Torture and random sadistic murder are definitely frowned on. Hey kids, these books say full-throatedly: don’t be a Nazi, ‘mkay?

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In so doing, and in the very reasonable line of being children’s books, and bloody good ones — and exciting stories at that — they present the world as an all-or-nothing heroic struggle between unmitigated good and unfathomable evil. You have lovely, wise, kind and selfless Dumbledore in one corner and you have that utter rotten egg Voldemort in the other. Pick a team.

Institutions are to be trusted only inasmuch as they are run by goodies (the Ministry of Magic is eminently corruptible but Dumbledore’s Hogwarts is not, at least while the old man remains in charge), and rules are to be broken ad lib as long as it’s the goodies doing it. Normative authority is creepy old Filch, skulking the corridors with Mrs Norris in search of fun to spoil and miscreants to snitch on. The mainstream media is the prurient and unctuous scratching of Rita Skeeter. Suburban normies — incarnated in the Dursleys of Privet Drive — are the pits.

In their fine texture, the books are subtler than that — Snape’s story arc, for instance, has a level of real moral complexity; and the psychology of the protagonists’ day-to-day friendships is not simplistic — but the basic shape of the main story is goodies vs baddies to the death. And that is, as I say, quite proper. They’re children’s books.

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Revolutions eat their children. Critics of the series have since argued that there are subtextual or framing issues: that they’re kind of heteronormative (Dumbledore was, Rowling told us later, gay — but there’s scant evidence for it in the text); or that they’re kind of white (Rowling welcomed the casting of a black Hermione in the stage show, and Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote interestingly about how a black Hermione would have enriched the story in Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, but, again, the text tends not to support the idea).

You may agree with these criticisms or you may scoff at them — but it’s striking that an audience primed to take a binary goodies vs baddies worldview has turned with some decisiveness on the author of that worldview when it decided (most dramatically over her gender-critical comments on Twitter) that she’s on the other team.

Our cultural and political moment now looks very much like one with a sorting-hat view of the world: the hat peers deep into your soul, and after no more than a minute – though usually instantly – it assigns you an identity. If you’re Slytherin, that’s that.

That is to say: evil is held to reside ineradicably in the person so sorted. The extent to which this has become general is shown on the reaction to the now notorious Harper’s letter — signed, among many others, by J. K. Rowling — which offered some pretty unexceptionable bromides on free speech. The debate centred not on the arguments made in the letter but on the people who signed their names to it. The question not was it the right argument, but were they the right people? Was the Dark Mark upon them? One signatory who had freely endorsed the contents of the letter, presumably having at least skim-read them, immediately withdrew their support and apologised on the express grounds that they never would have signed had they known who else was signing. Wrong team. Expelliarmus.

These are, as I’ve said before, children’s books. Harry Potter, somewhere in the multiverse, grew up. So must his audience.

We are now at the stage where people are expected to denounce friends or, in the case of J.K. Rowling, the woman who made their careers and to whom they owe everything. The author needs no introduction, but perhaps a lucky few among you have managed to miss our howling culture wars. If so, a summary: where Rowling was once universally lauded for her writing, today an element of the online public purports to believe that the Harry Potter author is an evil bigot.

This is because on that issue of minimal importance but maximal rage – the Trans debate – Rowling has taken the same view that the majority of the British public holds. Which is that while trans people should be afforded the same rights and dignity as everybody else, they do not have the right to redefine biological reality. Specifically, in the case of Rowling and many others, they do not have the right to redefine what a woman is.

Last week the author took exception to the use of the phrase “people who menstruate” in a news report — the headline writer clearly trying to get around having to use the increasingly triggering word “woman”. As Rowling wittily put it:

‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?

Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate https://t.co/cVpZxG7gaA

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 6, 2020

This brought the ire of trans Twitter down upon her. That whole army of people who used to be men who tell women to shut up, and the people who think they are helping trans people by pretending that biological sex doesn’t exist and that the clownfish is a suggestive comparison for the biological make-up of human beings.

So after a few days of abuse, Rowling published a long article on her website explaining her position, a deeply personal, moving and reflective piece from the heart. So of course people who hadn’t read it continued in their campaign to make the creator of the Potterverse into a persona non grata in what used to be called polite society.

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All of this is an average week in the cesspool of Twitter. But the most interesting aspect of the rage against Rowling is not the anonymous trolls and freakishly unemployable individuals who spend their days abusing famous writers on social media: it is the fact that all week the Rowling story has been whipped along by the pronouncements of people who to a greater or lesser degree owe their careers to J.K. Rowling.

The first to break was Daniel Radcliffe. Of course, Daniel Radcliffe owes everything to Rowling. He isn’t an especially accomplished actor, even after all these years of practice. He isn’t noticeably good-looking either, or in any other way naturally fitted for the screen. His superstar career has come about because, at the age of 10, the director of the first Harry Potter film spotted him and thought he was perfect for the role.

So you would have thought that a certain amount of solidarity or even simple gratitude might be in order. But no. On Monday, Radcliffe issued a statement through a Trans charity called The Trevor Project denouncing the woman who made his career. “While Jo is unquestionably responsible for the course my life has taken,” he stated: “as someone who has been honored to work with and continues to contribute to The Trevor Project for the last decade, and just as a human being, I feel compelled to say something at this moment.”

“As a human being.” Unlike Rowling, obviously.

Radcliffe went on to spout the usual dogma, declaring that “Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases etc etc…” Just to further make clear where he stood, he even had the audacity to address some of Rowling’s readers. “To all the people who now feel that their experience of the books has been tarnished or diminished, I am deeply sorry for the pain these comments have caused you.”

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As Radcliffe must have expected, this led to worldwide headlines, all coincidentally portraying him in the best possible light. “Daniel Radcliffe speaks out” and “Daniel Radcliffe calls out JK Rowling’s anti-trans comments” were two typical headlines. All of these cast both actor and author in a very specific light — Rowling had done something terrible, while Radcliffe was boldly, heroically and one might also add bravely, calling her out.

Next up was Eddie Redmayne, who played some less-memorable character in the interminable Fantastical Beasts movies, also based on Rowling’s work. Perhaps Redmayne felt especially compelled to speak up because he had previously pretended to be a trans person onscreen in The Danish Girl. A movie from just five years ago that would undoubtedly now lead to questions about why a cis male should presume to approximate the feelings of a trans person by playing one on screen. Anyhow, Redmayne, too, felt condemned to criticise Rowling, and in a statement issued to Variety magazine he said:

“Respect for transgender people remains a cultural imperative, and over the years I have been trying to constantly educate myself. This is an ongoing process. As someone who has worked with both J.K. Rowling and members of the trans community, I wanted to make it absolutely clear where I stand. I disagree with Jo’s comments. Trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary identities are valid.”

Like Radcliffe, Redmayne was rewarded with headlines describing him as ‘speaking out’ and the like. So brave. Once again the media portrayed him as being on the right side against an unspeakable position taken by his elder.

Finally, out came Emma Watson, who like Radcliffe owes her career to Rowling. Since becoming known as Hermione in the Harry Potter movies, Watson has often used her platform to advocate for all the correct causes of the hour. And so perhaps it was inevitable that she should condemn Rowling for her views — but the framing of Rowling was instructive.

“Trans people are who they say they are,” she wrote, making no mention of Rowling’s own revealed traumas: “and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned or told they aren’t what they say they are.”

By now it was not just that Watson, Remayne and Radcliffe had ‘called out’ and ‘spoken up’ about Rowling’s views. They had spoken up — as reporter after reporter put it – against Rowling’s ‘controversial’ views. It is a very interesting thing this modern use of the word ‘controversial’, often and indeed usually put in front of a person who holds views which are in absolutely no way controversial.

In fact what polling there is on trans issues suggests that while it is ‘controversial’ to believe that a person who was born a man is exactly the same as a woman, it is not remotely controversial to believe (as Rowling does) that while they are deserving of exactly the same rights and respect as everyone else, trans women are not the exact same thing as biological women. So the commonly held view is the ‘controversial’ one, while the ideas of a small number of campaigners are held up as the only acceptable and non-controversial opinion to hold.

Because of some of the personal revelations made by Rowling in the last week, not least about her own experience as a domestic abuse survivor, there has been a tiny amount of pushback against the three actors who have benefited so much from the work of J.K. Rowling. But the most important lesson has been entirely missed.

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None of the three needed to say anything. None of them needed to release a statement. None of them needed to string the story along for another couple of days by denouncing the author in succession. All will doubtless claim that they felt that they needed to in some way, and this claim will most often be backed up — in private — by a plea that they were coming under enormous pressure of some kind.

It is possible that they were. That some of the unbelievably demented activists who operate in this area made the actors feel that their silence was complicity, to use one of the Stalinist phrases which has embedded itself in our culture. But here is the thing — they didn’t need to say anything. They could have remained beautifully silent, as Redmayne has in the past admirably suggested that actors should on political topics. But they didn’t.

As individuals, we all have friends who have opinions great or small with which we are in disagreement. Yet a civilised person does not feel the urge to publicly call out, shame or in any other way have it out with somebody who is a friend or who has been good to you. At the least you will shrug. At the most you might pick up the phone and speak to the person. But the modern instinct is not to do this; the modern instinct is to go nuclear and denounce them in public. It is one of the most unhealthy habits in an age which needs less of them.

I suppose we should be grateful that, at the time of writing, at least the Weasleys haven’t kicked off.

The stories were propaganda, in the most benevolent sense — designed to promote a system of values that should be imparted onto children. The Jesuit saying, “give me a child until seven and I will give you the man”, reflects the importance of shaping values at an early age.

I haven’t been so diligent in bringing my own children to church, and I’m pretty sure they couldn’t tell their St Catherine of Alexandria from their St Catherine of Sienna, but that’s not to say they aren’t being indoctrinated in the values of the ruling class’s faith.

When my daughters were around six and seven, they started French classes at a children’s library in our borough; I had been to our local library countless times but had mainly confined myself to the infant section, and older children’s books were something of a revelation. The entire front desk area was made up of hagiographies of Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela.

And hagiography is the most accurate term: these books were just like the ones I used to read in church. Here Blessed Nelson forgave his jailors, here St Barack healed America of its racial sins – and these are just a couple of examples.

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It was a bit of a surprise, learning just how much the tone of kids’ books had changed and how much progressive politics is now ever-present. Which is fine, if you’re a believer; but if you’re a conservative, you’re faced with raising your children in a culture which is filled with messages you disagree with — sometimes misleading, sometimes anecdotally true but not representative, often just anti-wisdom, giving children the worst possible advice in life. And it’s becoming worse: since about 2016, children’s books have grown way more explicitly political.

The children’s literature section at Tate Modern

Last month, a friend went to Tate Modern and took a picture of the young children’s section. Among the books on display are biographies of Greta Thunberg, something called Queer Heroes, another work called The Rainbow Flag, books about refugees, the bestselling Good Night Book for Rebel Girls — and its countless imitators. Whether you support it or not, this is propaganda; the aim is to raise a generation of progressives just as those Lives of the Saints were designed to bring forth young Christians.

And it works. Conservative ideas are very much in retreat, the subject of a brilliant new book I recently read (which, admittedly, I also wrote).

From a very young age, children are read books and shown films that teach them the core progressive messages: that we are all basically good and only behave badly because of circumstances; that borders and barriers are bad, stereotypes are wrong and girls ought to adopt traditional male gender roles if they want to be respected.

Stereotype inaccuracy is a popular idea — and a false one; in so many kids’ stories the unusual stranger or alien or wild animal who turns up in the neighbourhood will defy the small-minded pessimist who expects the worst. When it comes to gender politics, no self-respecting children’s book in the 21^st century has girls aspiring towards being a princess and living happily ever after; to the post-ironic upper-middle-class parents who are the publishers’ main audience, that would just be lame.

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There’s nothing wrong with all this, of course — and as a parent, it’s a relief when daughters move on from the pinky-princess-fairy stage of cartoons and onto the more thoughtful stuff that questions gender stereotypes. That questioning is a natural part of growing up and books open their minds to potentially endless possibilities — before they reach maturity and realise that gender identity matches biological sex in the vast majority of cases. Unfortunately, our culture has become stuck in this adolescent stage of late.

My in-laws kept dozens of books from the 1970s and early ’80s, which we read to our kids along with more recent ones. The general difference in tone was noticeable, progressive themes being almost totally absent in the older books. My Naughty Little Sister is naughty simply because she’s a bloody nuisance, and it’s not really celebrated either as some non-conforming, high-status trait; she’s not a ‘rebel girl’, she’s just annoying.

Of course, the Talmud of progressive children’s literature is the Harry Potter series, preaching of a boy born to freedom-fighter parents who has the bad luck to be brought up in a stultifying, conservative Surrey suburb by his dully conventional uncle and aunt.After the geeky, open-minded protagonist is allowed to go to wizard school, what follows is a battle between two worldviews: that of the snake-like Slytherin house, which favours the pure-blooded and aristocratic, and the inclusive Gryffindor house, kind-hearted and welcoming to people of all backgrounds.

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The values in children’s books have changed over the past few decades because society has undergone a revolution in values. But as with previous revolutions, in France and Russia — and with the earlier Protestant Reformation, too — the process has sped up with its own momentum. The revolutions of 1789 and February 1917 are followed by more extreme jolts; Luther is followed by Calvin and Munster.

So after decades of accelerating social change, during the 2010s there was a marked and radical shift, especially among the English-speaking upper-middle-class, christened “the Great Awokening”. The term is a play on the Great Awakening, the 18^th century religious revival in the United States — and the name is apt, since the movement has an obviously religious feel, sacralising victim groups and inspiring extreme hostility towards non-believers, heretics and apostates. Indeed poor old J.K. Rowling has herself been partly eaten by the revolution, after revealing herself to be a gender-critical feminist.

And so, with this great movement, there has been a proliferation of books for young children that aim to install progressive politics — and promote those most sacred of issues, women’s empowerment and racial equality, and to a lesser extent gay and trans rights.

There are now children’s books in the States with such names as A Is for Activists, D Is for Dreamers and W Is for Welcome: A Celebration of America’s Diversity, as well as large numbers pushing the gender-is-a-social-construct narrative, such as One of a Kind, Like Me/Unico Como Yo, about a boy who wants to dress up as a princess.

Britain is embroiled in the revolution, too. I remember two Christmas’s ago, almost every girl between 8 and 13 in my part of north London received a copy of that bestselling Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls from some well-meaning relative (my elder daughter received two). The publishing industry has since cashed in on telling stories of heroic (often overlooked) females.

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Parents can feel good that they are raising their offspring to be firm believers, Woke Babies who will “raise their fists in the air… cry out for justice” and “grow up to change the world.” The book A is for Activist promises it is “written and illustrated for the next generation of progressives: families who want their kids to grow up in a space that is unapologetic about activism, environmental justice, civil rights, LGBTQ rights and everything else that activists believe in and fight for.”

There has also been a proliferation of political biographies for young children, including picture books about not only Obama or Mandela but Latino judge Sonia Sotomayor and even Elizabeth Warren. Likewise, over here there’s a book about Remainer pin-up Lady Hale, called Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court.

It’s not that I oppose children reading about Lady Hale or Elizabeth Warren; it’s more that I couldn’t even comprehend why anyone would wish for their children to do so. Unless they were true believers of a progressive new religion of kick-ass women, boys-who-want-to-be-girls and visionaries who heal people of their racism sickness.

I’m not, and seeing children’s books being turned into a sort of religion, I feel like a ten-year-old again, wishing I could be reading The X-Men rather than sat in church.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History is published by Constable

You can find these images in even newly published material. Yet landline telephones with rotary dials were last sighted when I was learning my A B C, most planes haven’t had propellers on their noses for decades, and the last passenger steam train to run in these isles delivered its valedictory “choo-choo” in the summer of 1968. Let’s not even get into what farms look like in children’s fiction versus what they look like in the modern world.

Yet we say to our kids: this is what a train looks like, this is what a phone looks like, this is what a plane looks like. And, being kids, they go: cool, okay. And soon, perhaps, they start drawing these things themselves — with their cute Victorian-era fountain pens, obviously.

Meanwhile, fairy tales and nursery rhymes plunge children into a medieval Albion or a heavily-forested Mitteleuropean never-was. Here are worlds where spinning wheels are a thing; water comes from wells; princes are expected to marry princesses; woodcutters, rat-catchers and huntsman are honourable lower-middle-class occupations; and bears and wolves — rather than, say, off-road motorbikes — are the main thing to be nervous about meeting in the woods.

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The oddity of this is, I think, too seldom remarked on. We register the anachronism and pass over it, as adults, in the same way that we almost unthinkingly shift literary genres. But I bet it confuses the hell out of a five-year-old, at least to begin with.

And yet it also, perhaps, gives them a little head-start in understanding that reality is a moving target; that stories flow out of previous stories and follow a logic that’s at least as much to do with the logic of genre as it is to do with the so-called real world; that, as the poet Elizabeth Bishop put it, “our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown”. In other words, that ease and adeptness with which we adults shift literary genres: we learn it in childhood.

Reading is a form of travel, it’s sometimes said. More specifically, it’s time-travel; and especially in the reading children do. I’m not just talking about books about actual time travel — though my childhood was enriched enormously by Terrance Dicks’s Dr Who novelisations, by A Wrinkle In Time, by time-bending science fiction from Ray Bradbury, Nicholas Fisk and Stephen King and by the timeslip adventures of my beloved X-Men.

I’m talking, more, about this way in which children are bombarded by anachronism. On the one hand, we encourage them to read the classics. I remember being impressed when my daughter was reading something like The Borrowers (lots of bodkins and thimbles and coal fires, IIRC) or Anne of Green Gables or something by Beatrix Potter, and breezed past a mention of someone “putting the door to”. I mean, blimey: I don’t think anyone has put a door to in the last 100 years. WTF’s a parlourmaid? WTF’s a parlour?

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On the other hand, even modern children’s stories tend to be retro. Like I said, reading is a form of time-travel. Let us not forget that all children’s books are written by adults who draw on their own childhood memories — necessarily at least a decade or two out of date. And they draw on literary conventions and genres which go back further than that. Harry Potter — steeped in the long traditions both of fantasy and of boarding school literature – gives us a Hogwarts that more resembles an early modern than a modern boarding school, all grand halls and suits of armour, arcane rituals and old-fashioned clothes. His Dark Materials is pure steampunk. Even Burglar Bill and Mog are deeply retro.

And the Beano! My eight-year-old son is devoted to this weekly comic, which was first published in 1938. They have done much to modernise, but there’s only so much you can do. Teacher has lost his mortar-board and cane (still present when I read the Beano in the 1980s), but the Bash Street Kids are still basically 1930s schoolchildren, with their collars and ties and Danny’s trademark peaked cap. Minnie the Minx still wears a tam o’shanter, for heaven’s sake. Fish and chips still appear, iconographically, in newspaper, teachers use blackboards, and catapults and conkers are as likely to feature as Nintendo Switches.

I haven’t yet chanced on one that contains a traditional uniformed park warden with sharp elbows, a stick with a spike on it and a fanatical obsession with keeping off the grass — but they loomed large in the Beano! of my childhood even though they had long since vanished from the outside world.

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Change, when it has come, has tended to be forced on the comics by the realisation that some of its laughs are #problematic. My son, who has been Googling the history of the comic, wondered why Dennis wasn’t constantly pitted — as he used to be — against Walter the Softy. “To avoid charges of homophobic bullying,” I did not say.

Readers are no longer expected to laugh at Walter’s mincing ways; and as for Plug, Fatty and Smiffy, whose entire raison d’etre was originally to be pilloried for being ugly, overweight and dim — let us say that their identities are treated a little more sensitively these days. It’s a standing miracle that the Native American caricature “Little Plum” has not been entirely erased from history — though he no longer says “um” instead of “the”.

All of this is, I think most of us would agree, progress. But it’s surface tinkering. It doesn’t much alter the very profound ways in which, even if you change Little Plum’s vocal tics or give Gnasher a Kong instead of a bone, you’re essentially introducing children to imaginative worlds which are in many ways deeply out of date.

Is that a bad thing? Quite the opposite. It just shows how much more varicoloured and strange — how much more plural — are the worlds that children are learning to navigate even as they learn to read. It embeds not just the memories of adult writers but the folk memories of the tribe in the stories that we learn. And in turn, as our children grow up with their own image-hoards full of angry parkies, steam-engines and single-prop planes, and as some of them become writers, they will pass those folk memories on to the next generation.

Earlier this month it was reported that Beijing was growing increasingly concerned with British-based private schools monopolising the most talented Chinese pupils.

Britain’s public schools now run 47 campuses across China, educating almost 10,000 pupils, with the total number of institutions doubling in just two years, and pupil increasing by 10% in just one.

Wellington – at £41,580-a-year – operates schools in Tianjin, Shanghai and Hangzhou, while the even more expensive Dulwich College has two campuses in Shanghai, plus two more in Beijing and Suzhou.

In total there are almost 25,000 non-British students at overseas British schools, and it has become such an industry that the prestigious teacher-recruiting company Gabbitas has shifted its core business to tutoring pupils for independent school entrance, with offices in Russia, Japan and South Korea, as well as three in China. Large numbers of Chinese pupils are also educated in Britain, enough that boarding schools limit the number of Chinese children in each house.

Britain’s schools are an export market worth £1billion a year, hardly surprising when the private system has continued to maintain its place as the best in the world, even during the 1970s and 80s when the state system was at its worst. And yet Chinese parents often talk of their admiration not just for the education system but Britain and its culture.

Britain’s education industry is a key part of what’s referred to as “soft power”, national strength derived from cultural influence, but it is also a beneficiary of it, taking advantage of a particular idea of Britain and Britishness that attracts people from around the world.

The origin of this soft power runs deep. The ethos of the British public school owes much to Thomas Arnold, the early 19th century reformer who introduced the prefect system and made public schools far more civilised. But Arnold, a devout Christian whose son Matthew went on to write Dover Beach, also did much to create the English gentleman (before Arnold, public schools were violent in a way that now seems comically absurd, with regular riots in which troops had to be called in, and regular firearms-related antics).

The English gentleman was an ideal but it had tangible, real-world effects, contributing in part to the huge change in British behaviour between 1850-1950, when a very violent and boorish country became famously gentle; as Orwell observed, “in no country inhabited by white men is easier to shove people off the pavement”.

Such was the power of the this idea that the rising middle class around the world aped British mores, most noticeably in the adoption of the suit as the global dress – because that was how a gentleman dressed. It helped create an idea of Englishness, an attractive brand that the country’s institutions continue to benefit from.

But soft power is much older even than the Victorians. Long before disputes over burgundy and blue, UK passports weren’t even in English but in French, the language of high culture and diplomacy. This was not just a reflection of historic French military domination, but the leading position of Paris University in the Middle Ages. During the 12th and 13th centuries, when the likes of Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great graced the Sorbonne, one-third of students there were English, who were even then stereotyped as drunks.

Although the Norman Conquest had a huge impact on our language, the great bulk of French loan words in English arrived much later, in the 13th and 14th centuries, a result of French cultural domination. (Whether the spread of their culture was of any benefit to your average French person is a matter of debate.)

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Today British soft power is likewise strengthened by our university system, which educates as many world leaders as the United States, but this probably has less influence than the country’s cultural capital, and in particular its stories.

For most outsiders, our island story has little to do with the things a nation tells about itself – usually victories in battle – but the narratives we tell; when people think of Britain they immerse themselves in Lord of the Rings, Wind in the Willows, the Narnia tales, James Bond or Paddington.

Places tangibly benefit from the stories attached to them; Edinburgh’s rich literary history aides its ability to draw in not just tourists but the talented people who allow it to compete globally. Dublin will live off the cultural royalties of James Joyce long after the family have stopped getting the cheques from Dubliners. Birmingham even benefits from Peaky Blinders tourism. Some stories grow so powerful that they come to define a country; Walter Scott’s novels didn’t just help Scottish tourism but helped to create the very idea of Scotland. Were it to leave the UK and go it alone, the country would still very much depend on the romantic legacy Scott left it.

Soft power matters more today because global elites are far more mobile, and freer to choose between a number of potential homes; countries are in competition to attract this small pool of talent, who all speak the same global language and could easily settle in any of 20 or 30 global cities. London has an advantage in that wealthy foreigners have a certain idea of England.

Again this is nothing new; the Arthurian tales, which became popular in the 12th century among the French-speaking aristocracy of northern France and England, had such an impact on the imagination that aristocrats like Roger Mortimer and Henry III’s brother Richard ended up spending vast amounts on building castles in the Celtic lands of Wales and Cornwall to indulge their own Arthurian fantasies, stories converting into currency for the local economy.

Stories are central to the human psyche, and for Britain there is one like no other when it comes to drawing people to these shores. When a writer from Times Higher Education visited Durham University and asked Chinese students why they had chosen the city, the young people all gave the same response, one that will be wearily predictable to parents across the land: “Harry Potter”.

Durham featured in the film series and its architecture and location, accessed by King’s Cross, gives it some of that cash-convertible Potter magic. Realising this potential, and with universities as competitive as cities in trying to attract global talent, the college has even taken to sorting its students into Hogwarts houses.

Harry Potter, it’s fair to say, is more than just a book; its fans – my daughters among them – treat it more akin to a religion, and it seriously influences their worldview and even politics.

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And the world J.K. Rowling created speaks hugely about the modern British brand. It is a curious mixture of progressive political values – Gryffindor v Slytherin is a thinly disguised conflict between liberals and reactionaries – and very traditional aesthetic styles, in particular its Gothic-Romanesque hybrid boarding school (not to mention the conservative idea of a boy chosen not for any great meritocratic abilities but who his parents were). Rowling’s vision is very much of the current year, but it certainly owes something to Arnold, that deeply ingrained idea of gentleness.

In this world tolerance is a key virtue, as much as “love” is for Pauline Christianity, reflecting its centrality to modern-day British culture. Indeed, when Tony Blair’s government started talking about “British values” in the 2000s as something to be taught to an increasingly fractured society, “tolerance” was presented as something inescapably British, as if other nations define themselves by their intolerance.

This modern idea of Britishness is very much seen in films like Paddington 2 or the revamped Mary Poppins, which curiously combine modern social mores – “it’s okay to be different” – with very traditional architecture and visual aesthetics. The Notting Hill of Paddington, with evenly-distributed ethnic groups and social classes living side by side in a friendly urban environment, is obviously a charming fantasy, and one that particularly appeals to 21st century Britain’s Bobo ruling class.

Yet Britishness now transcends geography, so much so that it can be replicated in Changzhou or Chengdu. This is something new, as for most people historically a country is defined by place, patriotism being a love of a particular spot, reflecting the Greek etymolgy of patri, “father land”. This is why the inherently conservative country music so readily fixes on a particular town or space, as do pretty much all folk traditions.

For those of a more progressive worldview, however, a nation is also an ideal, the land being merely the body beyond which there is a “soul” of a nation. This is certainly true of Britishness, which has developed into something far more than a physical country, let alone an ethnic group. Britishness has become a sort of idea – and a very profitable one at that.

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Why the North East of England is different

By Dan Jackson

Today British values are intimately tied up with liberalism, the country being one of the most proselytising about gay rights, literally flying the flag from its embassies. Just as British national identity is in decline at home, facing both Scottish and English nationalism and – more damaging still – a university-educated middle class who regard national feeling as déclassé (something they’ve made quite clear since June 2016), so it has gained new life as sort of global ideology, inseparable from progressive values of tolerance. Britain has lost the Raj and all the flags have come down, but it has gained a spiritual empire.

History once again provides a template. After Rome fell it was still able to project its cultural values, worldview and language across most of Europe through the Roman spiritual empire, or as it’s better known, the Catholic Church. Christianity was relatively new to Rome by the fall of the western empire, and to a third century Roman it would have been as incomprehensible as the “British values” of gay marriage and trans rights would have been to our great-grandparents; yet the liberal doctrine of tolerance has become as intertwined with Britishness as Catholicism came to be with Rome.

We certainly benefit from the stories that have come to be associated with these islands, just as the Eternal City has done through the ages. While Game of Thrones is worth £200m a year to Northern Ireland, Harry Potter’s value to the UK economy is incalculable, but Rowling has arguably put more cash into the British treasury than anyone in history.

Perhaps it’s something we should be more aggressively profiting from; we could redesign Luton or Stansted Airport to look like Hogwarts and divert the trains so that visitors came into King’s Cross platform 9 or 10. Birmingham could certainly take more advantage of its Tolkien connections, not to mention the obvious trick of renaming its airport after Shakespeare.

Would that be to make England an amusement park? Perhaps. In Julian Barnes’s novel England, England an entrepreneur turns the Isle of Wight into a sort of miniature fantasy England, complete with recreations of the Battle of Britain and a scale model of Buckingham Palace; he even persuades the king to move there, but then the British royal family is, after all, ersatz anyway.

In the story the replica proves so successful that the Isle of Wight becomes a thriving independent state, while the rest of the country – Old England – turns into a depopulated hell. As one of the characters explains, people prefer the fake to the original these days; but then perhaps they always have. As T.S Eliot observed, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”.

Well, thanks to my seven year old daughter, I’ve just reread all one million words of the Harry Potter novels, and I can tell you that Lord Voldemort is not defeated by facts, reason or elite education. He’s defeated by love. Call this saccharine, by all means. Call it derivative. But don’t call it neoliberalism.

I count seven occasions when love – or an allied emotion like compassion, or loyalty – is instrumental in saving Harry and undermining the noseless supervillain. And zero occasions on which facts or reason are the deciding factor – and don’t contradict me by mentioning the puzzles the children solve to reach the Philosopher’s Stone, because those were put there by the teachers. When it comes to defeating evil, it’s emotion that matters.

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As for celebrating the power of elite education, well, I accept that the books are mostly set at a school, and a selective one at that. But two of our three heroes are bad at their lessons and get pretty shocking grades. Harry, who saves the world, is a dreadful student. He cheats at Potions. He is hopeless at Occlumency. He flunks Divination.

And all three of them – even super-brain Hermione – literally drop out of school a year before graduation to save the world. Even the musical Grease pushes the establishment view that your life will be a disaster if you leave school early. Harry Potter says dropouts can save the world.

And of course, it is wandlore – the impenetrably complex interactions between wands, and their relationships with their masters – that finally defeats Voldemort. This is put forward as an area of magical study in which the word “guess” is as good as it gets: a magic so deep it is beyond the reach of study or education, no matter how elite.

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RJ goes deeper, though. He argues that the very concept of magic is a neoliberal fantasy of meritocracy: an elite have access to a special power, which gives them the right to rule.

Now I have never met JK Rowling but I’m guessing she’s at least dimly aware of this, given that the central conflict of her stories is the question of whether magical power confers the right to rule. The bad guys think it does. The good guys say it doesn’t. And just in case you don’t get the message that elites shouldn’t oppress others, there’s endless detail about how wrong it is for wizards to subjugate other magical creatures, from giants to goblins.

The most important thing to recognise is that the politics of these books is laid on with a trowel. They’re children’s books, so it’s no surprise, but the morality lessons come thick and fast, and they’re barely more subtle than an Aesop’s fable. It ought to be impossible to read Harry Potter novels and say they portray “facts” and “elite education” as the answer to all problems.

And yet it isn’t impossible. RJ, and all those who widely shared and loudly cheered his article, prove it can be done, not just once but by thousands of people. And that’s because partisanship rots the brain.

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Seeing the funny side of censorship

By Andrew Watts

The hard Left has decided that it hates JK Rowling because she doesn’t support Jeremy Corbyn. Not supporting Jeremy Corbyn is essentially the same thing as being a neoliberal. And, therefore, the works of JK Rowling must be neoliberal propaganda.

This skewing of the mind to be biased against an author you hate is not conscious. The neuroscientific work of Drew Westen showed that politically aligned people use their emotions, not their reason, to respond to politics. When presented with contradictory statements by their own ‘side’, the partisans explained them away, with fMRI scans showing activity only in the emotional parts of the brain. As Westen says “partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want.”

And this matters. It matters when one side can’t even read a work of fiction by its opponent without disconnecting the basic functions of logic in their mind. No wonder everyone believes the BBC is biased against them, when the moment a political opponent is up on screen, their rational brain switches off. No wonder we can’t resolve the problem of Brexit, when both sides assume everything said by the other is malicious and wrong.

More from this author

Why should a life without faith be without meaning?

By Polly Mackenzie

Our instincts make mistakes all the time. We shouldn’t be ashamed to use facts and reason to question the judgement of our eyes or our guts. Use your eyes and the world looks flat. Use reason and you’ll accept that it is not.

I’ve even used facts and reason here to prove that Harry Potter isn’t a celebration of facts and reason. And I’m unashamed to say that my argument is better than RJ’s because I could write a 19-page version of this article with footnotes to spare, where he’d be stumped to go beyond ‘because I said so’.

I don’t care how much you like Harry Potter. I don’t care how much you like JK Rowling. I care only that you recognise they are not the same thing. Our inability to look beyond the messenger and consider the value of the message is destroying our political system. How can you achieve anything but deadlock when you won’t even listen to your opponent’s ideas with an open mind?

Perhaps you’re one of the good guys. You try to get out of your bubble and read ideas by people with whom you disagree. Well next time, do yourself a favour. Stick a picture and a byline of your favourite writer at the top. Maybe then you’ll be able to trick your brain into giving an opponent’s idea a fair chance.