Few would argue that Britain’s social fabric is in a better condition today than it was in 2011. There have been further large-scale outbreaks of violence, like Belfast and Southport, but the spread of petty criminality is arguably as damaging. Consider, for instance, a recent analysis by Forecourt Eye, a security company, of the effects of the spike in fuel costs caused by the Iran war. The report claims that, in the five months since the conflict began, £200,000 worth of petrol and diesel has been stolen from British pumps every day. That figure is almost 50% higher than before the crisis started. No less striking is the variety of the people engaging in this theft. Forecourt owners say that, besides the hardened chancers and the black-marketers filling up jerry cans for resale, the thieves now include all manner of ordinary people, some claiming they can’t afford to pay. “It could be anyone,” a petrol station owner in Birmingham tells The Guardian. “They come right in front of you, because they have no fear.”

Three weeks into Andy Burnham’s premiership, it’s tempting to think that Britain is again settling into a strange kind of equilibrium. The country’s long-term problems continue to fester, but now that we have a prime minister with at least a basic degree of political skill, it already feels like the forces of inertia are reasserting themselves. Labour’s populist challengers appear increasingly unconvincing, and are duly subsiding in the polls. People have almost stopped noticing the boats. Some things will get a little better, others a little worse. There will be occasional hotspots of violent unrest, but no great conflagration. Burnham will keep releasing videos about pub snacks and football. And the country will move slowly, imperceptibly, down the path of managed decline, like a building which has partly collapsed but somehow remains habitable.

This impression is surely complacent. Like the recent epidemics of shoplifting and mobile phone theft, not to mention fly-tipping and fare-dodging on public transport, the sudden spike in fuel larceny raises the specter of an increasingly low-trust society, where a failure to observe basic norms undermines goodwill and turns everyday life into a kind of gauntlet. It also implicates trust in the state, which people are liable to blame for the unaffordability of basic goods as well as the failure to enforce its laws. Even if such trends do not culminate in a 2011-style blowout, they can turn into more gradual cascades. Why follow rules if others don’t? Why act considerately towards strangers if your generosity is rarely repaid?

But petrol-pump raids illustrate another, equally important, reason that a fragile society is unlikely to remain stable. We live in a volatile world, and exogenous shocks such as the Iran war will continue to pile economic strains on these vulnerable bonds linking individuals, society and state.

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Indeed, fuel theft could be seen as part of a much broader pattern of resource-related criminality — spurred by global disorder. In recent years, gangs have turned their attention to, of all things, the production of fake olive oil, meeting a demand created by crop failures and, ultimately, climate change. In 2024, Italian authorities intercepted almost $1 million worth of oil debased with substances such as chlorophyll, which was already being used in dozens of Roman restaurants. As the price of copper has been driven up by technological shifts, meanwhile, stripping, stealing and scavenging has surged around the world. In the UK last year, more than 100 incidents of copper theft from the railway network led to 130,000 minutes of train delays. Similarly, historic spikes in the gold price, a consequence of investors seeking a safe-haven from financial turmoil, have prompted outbreaks of illegal mining everywhere from Ghana to the Amazon.

These developments might lead one to conclude that the law is a weak barrier to the power of economic incentives. Yet history makes a mockery of the idea that criminal behavior can be straightforwardly tied to material factors. During the first half of the 20th century, the average British person was much worse off than today, yet Britain itself was remarkably law-abiding. The prison population of England and Wales hovered around 10,000 throughout the Thirties and Forties, compared with over 85,000 today. The overall crime rate may have nearly doubled during the hardships of the Seventies, but it had also doubled during the economic boom of the Sixties. On the other hand, anyone arguing that the decline of traditional morality was responsible for these negative trends may struggle to explain why most forms of crime have been falling again since the turn of the 21st century.

A study of 1,620 of those arrested during the London riots suggested that a combination of material and social factors were at work. The rioters’ neighborhoods were correlated with resentment towards police, poverty, and ethnic diversity (the authors posit that diverse areas are “less cohesive, and so adults are less able to prevent youth from rioting”). The rise of fuel theft alongside this year’s price hikes, or for that matter the shoplifting boom in the years since Covid, suggests that a similar cocktail of causes are involved in the recent rise of petty criminality. A useful concept here is that of “social crime”: an illegal act which people don’t in practice regard as criminal, or which is seen as a justified form of protest. As the historian and criminologist Clive Emsley noted, such crimes have a long history in Britain, and many involved illegally taking or supplying goods.

In 19th-century Manchester, before the arrival of domestic plumbing, people commonly helped themselves from outdoor taps without paying the requisite fees to the water company. Smuggling, too, could enjoy widespread consent when it circumvented unpopular taxes, such as the duty on tea in the 18th century. In Norfolk, one man sentenced for shooting livestock in 1839 delivered a memorable courtroom diatribe against the establishment of the day, complaining that “to such a state had they brought the poor of this country… that it was impossible for a poor man to live by honest means, and all this was to support big-gutted relieving officers”. (Some on the Right will be pleased to hear that this man was deported — that is, to a penal colony in Australia.)

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The morality of social crime is complex: it depends on the circumstances of the act and the nature of the law being broken. The point is that our sense of what is acceptable often diverges from the letter of the law. It seems that, to some degree, various forms of theft are now becoming social crimes: those committing them do not really think they are doing anything wrong, or have perceived that those around them won’t judge them very harshly for it. This is where the issues of trust and economic pressure meet, for it is the stories that people tell themselves about the unfairness of society which allows them to minimize their actions, and the sense of being hard up which makes those stories more compelling. A classic example is the casual shoplifter who, seeing prices rise, feels that stealing is justified given that the money is just lining the pockets of greedy capitalists anyway. Another is the self-employed person who works off the books because they feel they are taxed too much, and, in any case, the corporations don’t pay their fair share.

Rioting is another phenomenon which has often been assigned to the “social crime” category. Many reports of the 2011 riots emphasize the participants’ shared grievances, such as the account of one rioter in Hackney who said they were “angry about the phone-hacking scandal; angry about the MPs’ expenses scandal; angry about the bank bailouts; angry about police corruption and the abuse of stop-and-search powers”. One policeman recalled many looters citing the Duggan shooting, leading him to wonder why they’d rob an electrical store because the police shot a man.

That’s shadowed by more recent examples. In April, The New York Times hosted a discussion titled “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?”, in which the commentators Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker declared themselves, in Piker’s words, “pro stealing from big corporations”. In case anyone doubted her good intentions, Tolentino added that when she stole from Whole Foods (the term “microlooting” was mooted), she was buying groceries for a mutual-aid group.

One doesn’t need to subscribe to Kant’s categorical imperative to see how such reasoning can go awry. Anti-social behavior justified by the unfairness of the system does little to harm the fat cats. But it does create a depressing atmosphere of cynicism and anomie which undermines the basis of mutual decency in the public realm. In Britain, the Government itself has been guilty of encouraging that cynicism, opportunistically attacking supermarkets and petrol stations for the prices they charge (even though tax makes up a far greater share of fuel costs than forecourt profits do). This is obviously good politics, at least in the short term. At a time when hard-pressed consumers are making the political weather, who wants to stand up for big business? In any case, the populist Right has inconsistencies here too. Reform UK has long made the pacification of “Lawless Britain” one of its central campaign themes, yet the party’s own financial controversies are hardly likely to make the little folk want to play by the rules.

In the end, the problem of petty criminality cannot be fully addressed either by the “broken windows” policing model favored by conservatives — coming down hard on minor infringements that corrode trust — or the liberal alternative of showering love on gangsters and funding youth centers. It is true that paltry legal penalties and nonexistent policing have encouraged the rampant theft of everything from bikes and phones to diesel. But to argue that a harsher state will suffice as a solution is to invite a future where pervasive facial recognition technology merely conceals the evaporation of authority and trust. Conversely, a compassionate approach which treats crime as an expression of victimhood is unlikely to dampen the tendency to think that some law-breaking is morally justified, or indeed politically virtuous.

Economic stress, material scarcity, a loss of cohesion and social trust: these are all part of the problem, and an effective response must account for them. What we are less comfortable acknowledging is that there is also a moral problem here, which requires a moral solution. Perhaps it can begin with a particular idea of pride. We ought to be more willing to find self-worth in a determination that, even if the world around us appears unfair, corrupt or selfish, we will not sink to its level. The source of this pride is not one’s own purity, but commitment to a public realm that depends on trust.

Of course, none of us, least of all me, will ever be flawless in this regard, so there is no use being sanctimonious about it. Yet morality, like social crime, is also a matter of shared attitudes and expectations, and it’s difficult to see how a new civic ethos could be cultivated in the tumultuous Britain of 2026. Robert Tombs writes of the Victorians’ successful campaigns against anti-social behavior that “politicians, churches, charities, trade unions, schools, the police and ordinary people in their neighborhoods co-operated”. These institutions hold even less sway now than they did at the time of the London riots, and social media is hardly famed for its wholesome role models.

In political terms, the pertinent question is how all of this might play out if global events, in combination with our less-than-resilient infrastructure, deliver more shortages and price-increases over the years ahead. There are reasons to think that Britain would handle outright rationing with greater steadfastness than many other countries: consider the acquiescence with authoritarian measures during the pandemic, the popularity of price caps, the ongoing support for egalitarian and welfarist principles. You can already imagine the daily updates from a sober but sensitive Prime Minister Burnham.

Yet the rise of casual crimes like fuel theft makes one wonder if Britain still has the reserves of solidarity that its leaders claim. The more burdensome the sacrifice that people are asked to make, the more widespread free-riding will shred trust in society and the state. Let’s hope we never have to find out how fragile Britain’s equilibrium really is.

Niblett’s big idea is to herald in what she calls a “summer of sex”, instructing the general public in the art of having satisfying, mutually respectful erotic experiences. Perhaps assuming that the Right needs more help with this than the Left, she appears to be spinning her campaign towards Reform and Restore voters in particular: “it’s about taking control of our patriotism, about taking control of our Britishness, and not feeling ashamed”. Accordingly, she has named the project “Yes Sex Please, we are British”, which ironically sounds like something only a foreigner could have made up. In fact, though, it’s a riff on a Seventies sex farce featuring Ronnie Corbett — probably a little niche, even for Rupert Lowe fans.

The details of Niblett’s project sound unlikely to get the national pulse racing. Or as Aristotle percipiently noted in a different context, one swallow does not a summer make. She plans to team up with a fellow sex positivist — the equally improbably named Cindy Gallop — to replace the pornographic stereotypes in people’s heads with images of “real people” having sexual contact. In other words: don’t picture the slick thrustings of Pornhub, think Matt Hancock smooching in an office. Gallop is the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP), a website where, according to its own hype, you can “watch real world sex videos in all their loving, hot, and messy humanness”. Niblett apparently enjoys visiting the site herself — “It’s a turn on, it helps you masturbate, helps you cum”, she elaborates to the reporter, somewhat unnecessarily — and says she is looking to facilitate engagement between its founder and government ministers.

Gallop, meanwhile, is a 66-year-old entrepreneur who recently told the Telegraph she is proud of the fact that she “regularly and recreationally” sleeps with younger men. It was apparently in the course of these amatory adventures that she had a Eureka moment, in the traditional sense. She started to notice that the young men with whom she was sleeping had various misconceptions about sex, based on hardcore porn consumption. And lo, the idea for MLNP was born.

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In a spirit of inquiry, I signed up for the free version. I can’t say I enjoyed the experience much, though perhaps it was because the clips I was watching were only three seconds long — you have to pay to watch full videos, and I didn’t. Generally, the site looks like an updated Readers’ Wives section. If you like brutally natural lighting, concentrated facial expressions, low-energy writhing on well-worn Ikea furniture, and occasional grunts interspersed with the sounds of the Heathrow flightpath, this might well be the place for you.

Participants write their own blurbs to lure viewers in, and several seem to involve references to childcare: “This is just a short video we made while finding some time in the morning while the children were still asleep”; “We’re again using the time our toddler is napping to get as much of each other as possible”. Another theme is the outdoors: “Witness as Tausha’s body responds to Trevor’s touches. Hear her moans echo through the forest, listen to the birds respond to her primal tones”. I did as instructed and think I might have heard a startled woodpecker, though it was quite hard to tell.

Of course — as Niblett’s fellow MPs have been quick to point out — this is all a right Carry On, and a distraction from current political priorities: wars, looming food shortages, systemic state failures resulting in the murder of children. As Kemi Badenoch pithily put it in the Commons, “it gives a whole new meaning to fiddling while Rome burns”. Stung by the criticism, Niblett has apparently now changed her PR strategy, suggesting yesterday that the campaign is for the benefit of “old people” who “want to have sex”. Presumably Badenoch’s Spads are brainstorming double entendres about the triple lock as I write.

But what is also frustrating is that Niblett and Gallop identify a real problem, though the solution they propose is hilariously empty. It is obvious that porn use, among other modern malaises, is infecting sexual behavior to the detriment of both women and men, but the solution cannot be yet more porn — for this is indeed what MLNP provides, despite the disclaimer in its title. True, there are no webcams or teary-eyed women retching, an undoubted plus; but the mere absence of something awful scarcely counts as a valuable education.

Part of the problem is that images of people enjoying one another say nothing very complicated. Not being made of words, images tend to be simple like that. Gallop grandiosely claims that each of the videos on her site “is an object lesson in consent, communication, good sexual values, good sexual behavior”. But that’s like saying that a photo of Kew Gardens is an object lesson in how to grow roses. In fact, though, what we are supposedly seeing demonstrated onscreen at MLNP — respect, mutuality, loving concern for the other, or whatever — is the end result of a process that is still a complete mystery to many.

Since the sex you have with others is a product of the wider relationship you have with them, a sex education worth its name would require making substantive moral judgments about good and bad relationships — and not just in the bedroom or on the picnic rug. Yet beyond the usual platitudes about consent and better communication, this is something both Niblett and Gallop are very unwilling to do; and it’s a reluctance shared with nearly everyone in the so-called “sex education” space. Niblett insists in her interview that she is not “saying that anybody else’s preferences are wrong”. And in a 2009 Ted talk, Gallop states: “this is absolutely not about judgment… this is not about good and bad”. She even professes herself a regular watcher of hardcore porn. Her big revelation is that for every possible sexual proclivity, there will be some that like it, and some that don’t; and if you don’t like something, it is OK to say so.

But secondary schools, women’s magazines, and soap operas have been harping on this basic point since at least the Eighties. Announcing it yet again is not going to change a thing. In fact, the average person who assents to a hated sexual practice knows perfectly well that a firm “no” is always available; but they don’t want to use it, and not necessarily because they are feeling open-minded. A rival explanation is that they can’t think of any persuasive consideration against the practice in question; and, in this regard, mainstream culture has done nothing to help. On the contrary, it has made nearly every kind of sexual behavior immune to serious critique, as long as accompanied by the transformational fairy dust of adult consent.

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Saying that something is only bad if you don’t like it, but fine if you do, is a particularly unconvincing argument. It doesn’t even work well for wine tastings, let alone human relationships. It makes your likes or dislikes of certain things seem like they must be built on sand, and scarcely worth defending. Feelings of disgust become “preferences” rather than helpful reactions of ethical discernment. You lose the capacity to articulate what in other circumstances would be a perfectly natural thing to say: “No, I’m not bloody well doing that, because it expresses nothing but contempt for me; and you are a creep for even trying”.

A real sex education must be, partly, a moral education, and moral education involves judgment by definition; yet modern moralists have a kink for being non-judgmental, as their preferred phrasing goes. Accordingly, they treat sexual activity as utterly unlike any other sphere of human behavior: as bizarrely insulated from everyday attitudes like hatred and resentment, even when the actions undertaken are obviously hateful and resentful. In no other context could you slap someone hard in the face, choke them, pull them around on a lead, or intentionally cause them to retch, yet still claim later without embarrassment that you “respected” them hugely throughout.

Since only radical feminists and religious types seem willing to contest this absurd narrative, vacuous platitudes from the likes of Niblett and Gallop about “better communication”, “freeing people from shame” and, of course, “increasing consent” will likely continue unabated, circling vaguely around the real ethical dilemmas of sexual interaction but never actually engaging. In a 2019 interview, Gallop talked of plans to start a business called ConSensual: not, as you may have first feared, a sex education site aimed at Conservative Party members, but rather a “safe social sexting app, which both enables you to sext completely securely and improves your sexual communication in your relationship (I have this all planned out in the pipeline, I just need investors)”. Imagine a Cindy-avatar in kinky boots, cheerfully reminding you that if someone calls you a filthy, disgusting whore, that’s perfectly fine, as long as you happen to like it; but absolutely not if you don’t! Personally, though, I think I’ll just stick to WhatsApp, plus my usual practice of avoiding sexting people who clearly loathe me. And that’s a bit of sex education the world can have for free.

One common denominator in all of these events was the impulse to explain or “contextualize” them in ways that minimize their horror. After 9/11, for instance, I heard a Muslim student say that the hijackers just wanted to “start a conversation” with the West. After 10/7, an expert on sexual violence excused her public silence about the rape and torture of Israeli women because, she told me, such atrocities are “happening every day” around the globe. The Charlotte mayor responded to the murder of Zarutska, an utterly innocent victim, by calling for “compassion” for homeless criminals like the man who stabbed her. Some people even started crowdfunds for Zarutska’s murderer, which GoFundMe quickly shut down. As for Charlie Kirk, plenty of people, makeshift scales of justice in hand, would have us weigh his death against his supposedly hateful opinions.

Whatever else all this might mean, these responses serve to distract us from addressing the real issue: the problem of Evil. To be fair, people will go to great lengths to avoid peering into the dark abysses of the human soul. That includes contemporary philosophers and theologians, few of whom, even after the mass murders committed by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, have had much to say about Evil. Perhaps this is because these atrocities directly challenged the presupposition that human social existence is characterized by intelligible and relatively stable moral structures.

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Precisely this assumption is called into question by the behavior not only of the Holocaust’s perpetrators, but of its bystanders, among whom one finds few exceptions to the twin principles articulated in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah by Polish farmers who lived near Treblinka: “One can get used to anything”, and “If you cut your finger, it doesn’t hurt me”. Morally speaking, in other words, human beings are highly flexible, so much so that dwelling alongside a death camp need not register as anything more troubling than an inconvenience. Those who would dismiss such callousness as evidence of the stupidity and ignorance of peasants would do well to watch the numerous videos of educated progressives tearing down posters of Israeli hostages abducted on October 7.

I insist on capitalizing Evil for several reasons. First, because it is a metaphysically fundamental reality. It won’t do to describe it, as many thinkers have, as the mere absence of Good. Evil, the demonic willfulness and primal instinct of death and destruction that Freud called Thanatos, is a substantial force in its own right. As such, it resists all ordinary explanation. Can the Holocaust really be explained, as scholars have tried to do, as the result of social discontent in Germany caused by hyperinflation and other contingent factors? The very idea is obscene, not least because it implicitly relieves people of ultimate responsibility for their choices. Second, because Evil is as inexplicable as Good. In Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, a German officer captured at Stalingrad, surrounded by irate Russians, is approached by a bereaved mother who carries a brick to bash his head in. Seeing his frightened face, she instead gives him the gift of a breadcrust, a spontaneous choice for which she immediately berates herself. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who was himself a prisoner of the Nazis, was greatly impressed by this passage. For him, the fact that nothing in the totality of the woman’s strong emotions and urgent needs can explain her deed is one indication that it is Good. It is a pure act of kindness, from which she derives no benefit, and that she later regards as senseless.

Evil is similarly unsupportable by ordinary reckoning. Like Good, of which it is a kind of photographic negative, it is no longer on the moral continuum of everyday existence. It is a quantum leap to another system of human interaction, where violence reigns supreme and life is nasty, brutish, and short. The murder of Charlie Kirk — a young husband and father, slain on a university campus where he came to model the give and take of respectful argument for which universities were designed, and on which they used to pride themselves — was Evil. So was the celebration with which this despicable deed was greeted by an alarming number of people.

But there is something peculiar about the latest iterations of Evil. Here again, the Holocaust is instructive. The Nazis had an ambivalent relationship with their crimes. They recorded everything in ledgers, photographs, and films, making their war against the Jews one of the most extensively documented events in human history. Yet survivors of the camps report that their SS guards took solace in the idea that no inmates would live to see the day of liberation, and that even if they did, no one would believe their testimony. Osama bin Laden took a very different approach. 9/11 was mass murder as political theater, a tour-de-force performance for Islamists and radicalized Westerners. This tactic found its audience. At the university where I was teaching at the time, Saudi students cheered when the Twin Towers fell. A professor was happy to tell me that Americans would now understand the suffering they inflicted on other peoples. And my public endorsement of what would later become the policy of the Obama administration — hunting down bin Laden and killing him — made me an outcast among the faculty.

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The Hamas terrorists intuitively understood the effectiveness of al-Qaeda’s political theater, and doubled down on it. On October 7, they equipped themselves with GoPros, so that their spree of murder and torture could be broadcast far and wide. They publicized their acts, correctly betting that some would relish their death porn, and that the world in general would respond by blaming their victims. For those who’ve watched the 22 minutes of footage released by the Israelis, that response is unfathomable. We see images of a dozen older women at a bus stop, waiting to catch a ride to the stores. After the attack, they lie in heaps, blood pooling around their corpses. We see couples burnt to a crisp like the petrified victims at Pompeii, their cries at the moment of death frozen for all time. We hear a rescue worker describing what he saw in one kibbutz: the corpses of a father with his eye gouged out, a mother with her breast cut off, a daughter with her foot cut off, a son with his fingers cut off. What was the message sent by their torturers? To the father: what you see us do to your loved ones will pain you more than having your eye ripped out. To the mother: you gave these children life, fed them and gathered them to your bosom. Here, in the warm, severed breast we hold in our scarlet hands, is what we think of that.

That’s not all. The rescue worker explains that the murderers sat down for a meal in the presence of the slaughtered family. This is straight out of the Nazi playbook. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen — the mobile killing units that executed millions of Jews across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union — would sometimes set up a table alongside the pit into which their victims had fallen, and enjoy a hearty meal. (Not for nothing did Life and Fate include a scene in which Adolf Eichmann dines on ham in a gas chamber whose construction he is inspecting.) The message could hardly be clearer: your unfathomable suffering and grisly death is our sustenance and pleasure. This is ghoulish vampirism, and it is Evil.

Evil is not banal, but many people are doing their best to make it so. To characterize the Hamas pogrom or Kirk’s murder as understandable reactions to Palestinian suffering or Right-wing provocation is to normalize Evil — to pretend that it is something we can control, a problem that reasonable people can solve over coffee and talk. More honest, though hardly less blameworthy, is to avert one’s eyes, like the passengers who walked away from Zarutska as she bled to death on the train. Neither of these responses dare to confront Evil directly, and to call it out, nor to look into the faces of its victims and to say their names. Yet this is what all decent people must do if we hope to arrest our descent into limitless violence.

In his new book Animals, Robots, Gods, Michigan anthropology professor Webb Keane uses such case studies to tease apart the intuitions of his Western readers. Medicine is only one area where the scientific worldview can blend seamlessly with local customs and perspectives. A Buddhist temple in Japan provides funeral rites for broken robotic dogs. In Taiwan, “one of the most prosperous, highly educated and technologically sophisticated societies in the world”, urban professionals maintain relationships with puppets and religious icons as well as video game avatars. Modern practices and technologies are adopted by cultures with widely differing views of justice, the self and the cosmos. This raises important questions as algorithms and autonomous robots gain a more active, pervasive role in our lives. Whose view of the world will be encoded in these systems, and whose moral principles?

Silicon Valley would have us believe the problem can be outsourced to experts: to professional ethicists, scientific advisors, lawyers and activists. But as Keane emphasises, these authorities tend to come from “a small subset of the tribe WEIRD”, that is, Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. That they arrogantly claim to speak on behalf of a universal humanity does not make their assumptions any less partial and idiosyncratic. “There is no good reason,” Keane writes, “to take the WEIRD to be an accurate guide to human realities past, present or future.”

To see the force of Keane’s point, just consider Ray Kurzweil, a prominent thinker on AI and principal researcher at one of the world’s most powerful companies, Google. Kurzweil also has a book out, The Singularity Is Nearer, in which he resumes his decades-long project of encouraging us to merge with super-intelligent computing systems. Kurzweil does not think in terms of cultures, traditions or ways of life, only in terms of generic “humans”. What we all want, he asserts, is “greater control over who we can become,” whether by taking drugs to manipulate our brain chemistry or undergoing gender reassignment surgery. So integration with computers must be desirable, for “once our brains are backed up on a more advanced digital substrate, our self-modification powers can be fully realised”. Humans will then live indefinitely, and become “truly responsible for who we are”. This vision is both grandiose and astonishingly narrow-minded. Trapped in his utopian variant of secular materialism, it seems Kurzweil cannot fathom that a good life might be a finite one, that other principles might claim sovereignty over individual desire, or that acceptance of our limitations and fallibility might be integral to happiness.

Kurzweil also endorses the Asilomar AI Principles (drafted at a conference in California, of course), which state that intelligent machines should be “compatible with ideals of human dignity, rights, freedoms, and cultural diversity”. That sounds lovely, but try applying these principles to the Thai Buddhists we started with. Whose dignity and freedom should take precedence ­— the suffering parent who does not want further treatment, or the sons and daughters who feel compelled to provide it regardless? Should public health systems pay for “painful and expensive trips to the hospital and back”, even if they are “in biomedical terms, pointless”? How should we weigh karma as a factor, given its consequences for the Buddhist cycle of rebirths?

In Animals, Robots, Gods, Keane explores moral life beyond the abstract categories favoured by the WEIRD. If they are to be something more than thought experiments, he points out, moral systems must respond to the conditions that exist in a particular time and place; they must provide “possible ways to live”. In other words, “you simply cannot live out the values of a Carmelite nun without a monastic system, or a Mongolian warrior without a cavalry.” This may sound like the dangerous relativism of an anthropologist. Yet it simply illustrates that, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued, the search for moral truth is necessarily an on-going quest: a constant effort to develop our principles in relation to new circumstances. Of course, the principles and circumstances we start with are never ours to choose.

That said, there are commonalities across a range of moral cultures. These include fetishism, where, with varying degrees of seriousness, cultures assign quasi-human (or super-human) capacities to non-human things. This tendency allows for a variety of moral relationships beyond the immediate human sphere, including with animals, deceased or comatose relations, inanimate artefacts and invisible deities. And together with our locally rooted moral instincts, they shape our relationship with technology as well. “When people design, use and respond to new devices,” Keane writes, “they are drawing on existing habits, intuitions and even historical memories.” Such devices always arrive in cultures with their own ways of personifying the impersonal. In Japan, Keane suggests, the legacy of Shintoism makes people more willing to treat robots as living creatures, but also less worried about their moral agency; they assume that robots, like people, will be constrained by social roles and structures.

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Western societies have their own forms of fetishism, which Keane examines in relation to Large Language Models such as GPT-4. Since these algorithms are just stitching together words and phrases according to probability, they have no sense of their statements’ meaning. In fact, they have no sense of anything. It is we, their users, who “must play an active role in accepting that it is meaningful”. And we do more than that. Echoing arcane religious practices such as divination and speaking in tongues, we take the very inscrutability of the algorithm as evidence of “special powers and insight”.

Again, it is difficult not to be reminded of Kurzweil’s messianic view of artificial intelligence. Though his latest book avoids his earlier speculations about a great eschatological explosion of computing power, which will one day transform all the matter in the universe “into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence”, he does encourage us to embrace AI as a fetish. An algorithm may “think” by entirely different mechanisms to us, Kurzweil argues, but if it can “eloquently proclaim its own consciousness”, we should accept that it does indeed possesses “worthwhile sentience”. It is a good reminder that the WEIRD and the weird are rarely as distant from each other as they seem.

What Animals, Robots, Gods does not consider is the political context that has produced figures such as Kurzweil. The rise of advanced computing technologies in Silicon Valley largely coincided with an era of US hegemony after the Cold War. In that period, “globalisation” meant the spread of Western products and ideas, within a framework of American-dominated international institutions. At the same time, centres of business and research attracted talent from around the world, creating an illusion of diversity. All this allowed Western elites to persuade themselves that cultural differences could be managed through overarching, reductive moral rules like the “human values” listed in the Asilomar AI Principles.

Keane warns that, even if different peoples can adapt technologies to their own ways of life, many of them will still resent the prospect of powerful algorithms that are programmed according to Western assumptions. You cannot make the whole world WEIRD, he argues, “and if you try, you’re going to encounter a lot of anti-colonial resistance”.

But that horse bolted some time ago. Many societies in the far East already have distinct technological cultures. The Chinese Communist Party has long excluded US internet companies from the country, and closely regulates the moral dimension of digital media, down to the appearance of skeletons and vampires in video games. It is now testing AI algorithms to ensure they “embody core socialist values” — and avoid repeating politically sensitive information. The Russian state seeks a similar authority. In India, Hindu nationalists have infused the meaning and purpose of modern technology with their own religious and political mythologies. The achievements attributed to ancient Hindu science include stem cell research, spacecraft and the internet.

These centrifugal dynamics will surely continue. As the American world order fragments, so will our technological futures divide and multiply. Even if Silicon Valley continues to provide the most advanced tools, other regions of the world are knowledgeable enough to use them for their own purposes. If the West doesn’t like this, then China will be happy to export machine learning systems and intelligent hardware, as it already exports cloud computing and surveillance systems. Keane asks us to imagine Confucian robots, or artificial intelligence as conceived by cultures that locate the self across multiple bodies and lifetimes. These, too, may soon be more than thought experiments.

Since the article about the Collins family first emerged a fortnight ago, most scandalised public reactions have been about the fact that father-of-four Malcolm was observed slapping his toddler’s cheek in a restaurant — albeit that the reporter noted it was “not a heavy blow”. Collins said the practice was agreed with his wife beforehand and modelled on their having watched “tigers in the wild” disciplining their offspring with the swipe of a paw. (Let us hope they didn’t also see the part where an adult tiger sometimes kills a cub for food.) This week, he wrote a further defence, blaming “much of the media” for being “hell-bent on presenting pronatalists as evil and backward”. To my mind, though, Malcolm and Simone could do with being a bit more backward; for even leaving their disciplinary habits aside, they seem to constitute the reductio ad absurdum of attempts to freestyle the moral universe.

In the Collins’s world, every stage of the childrearing process is approached as if to be redesigned from scratch. For instance: the couple have given their two little girls “gender-neutral names” — Titan Invictus and Industry Americus — apparently on the grounds that this will make the girls “more likely to have higher paying careers and get Stem degrees”. The fact that future employers are bound to presume such names could only have come from a terrifyingly crazy bloodline seems to have been discounted. A further justification offered by Malcolm is that such “strong names” will predispose their owners to “a strong internal locus of control”: that is, to that inner feeling, identified by psychologists, of being fully in command of whatever happens to you in life, as opposed to a helpless passive drifter. Clearly, he hasn’t imagined having to spell “Titan Invictus” out over the phone.

But doing things differently is apparently the Collins’s way. They selected their IVF embryos for predicted intelligence as well as health before implantation. They chose the location of their Pennsylvania family home partly on the basis of the number of Nobel laureates produced in the region. They get up between “two and five” each morning to work before the children wake. Their two boys — Octavian George and Torsten Savage, aged four and two respectively — walk around the house with iPads strapped around their necks. And in case you worried that spirituality was missing from this touching scenario, the family follows an “intentionally constructed religion, technically atheist” religion, in which Christmas is replaced with “Future Day” for the kids. On the night before Future Day, “the Future Police come and take their toys, and then they have to write a contract about how they’re going to make the world a better place, and they get their toys back with some gifts and stuff”.

Putting this material all together, there could be few better adverts for the wisdom of crowds. As perhaps their “one weird trick” approach to parenting already suggests, Malcolm and Simone are effective altruists — part of a movement attempting to hack ethics, and maximise benefit-cost ratios in utilitarian decision-making. Saving the future of humanity is high on the bucket list of the founders of effective altruism, and they tend to talk as if hypothetical future humans were just as interesting as actual ones. Or as Malcolm puts it: “The kids who I haven’t had yet… are just as precious to me as the kids I already have” — a sentiment that is either good news for his future kids or bad news for his present ones, depending on how you take the remark.

Suggested reading

William MacAskill's ineffective altruism

By Arif Ahmed

The existence of the Collinses — and indeed of effective altruism in general — casts an interesting light on the central thesis of Liberalism As A Way of Life. Author Lefebvre argues that since liberalism is the “the water we swim in”, we might as well propel ourselves along with the current, and self-consciously turn its elements into a religion fit for modern times. That is: rather than continuing to pretend that the battered but still-dominant political ideology in Europe and the Anglosphere is neutral between competing conceptions of the good life, we should just admit that — at least for those atheists already steeped in it — liberalism and its contents is the good life. Once this is acknowledged, we can start positively aiming at liberal values in a more enthusiastic way, as spiritually rewarding objectives in their own right.

At the moment, argues Lefebvre, we are stuck in “liberaldom”: the sinful version, an uneasy admixture of liberal principles and other competing ideologies such as capitalism, nationalism, racism and patriarchy. Confined in this purgatorial space, what we tend to find admirable, desirable, erotic, funny, outrageous or offensive is shaped by everyday acquaintance with historically influential liberal ideas and their offshoots. In trying to establish this otherwise extremely plausible point, Lefebvre ventures one of the least persuasive, most naïve, and funniest explanations ever offered for the massive interest in incest porn on the internet — according to which “the taboo being busted … is not the prohibition on incest. It is merit: the [liberal] idea that reward should track talent, achievement and effort.”

Yet were we to grasp that the “core” of true liberalism is a “fair system of social cooperation over time, from one generation to the next” — the key idea of John Rawls’s liberal egalitarianism, as elaborated in his magnum opus A Theory of Justice — then according to Lefebvre, we would be moved almost seamlessly towards a wholehearted endorsement of further progressive ideals: redistribution, reciprocity and mutuality, a meritocracy, and so on. And we would also become much better people, he thinks. In a variation upon Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, it turns out that it is liberalism, not love, that is patient and kind, does not boast, and is not proud. It is even, Lefebvre suggests, “light, ironic, fun, and playful”.

Once past the wincing, there are a lot of questions to be asked about all this; not least, about why the supposed core of liberalism has to be fair cooperation, rather than freedom from interference, positive self-development or any other of the rather disorderly political category’s most famous historical elements. But for present purposes, a more salient point is that effective altruists like the Collinses are also aiming for a fair system of cooperation; though clearly their conception of “fair” is different to that of many others, and involves debts to future people as well as present ones.

Suggested reading

Are effective altruists more horny?

By Mary Harrington

In terms of moral character, though, these people seem obvious counterexamples to Lefebvre’s hagiographic account of the supposedly well-realised liberal spirit; not so much kind, humble, generous, and playful, as cold, somewhat arrogant, and monomaniacally obsessed with pursuing their own particular moral vision, with no idea when or where to stop. Along with many other archetypes in the present-day liberal universe, they give the lie to the comforting fantasy that focusing on progressive goals makes you a better person.

The bigger point against Lefebvre, however, is that aiming for as vague an outcome as “a fair system of social cooperation” could never be a very satisfying religious precept, no matter how badly atheists may unconsciously need one. It leaves far too much open — what counts as fair? Indeed, what counts as social cooperation? — and there is too much room for disagreement about what such a system looks like in practice. It is true that all religions have their hermeneutic traditions; but still, in arguing, there is a reliable sense of discovering something that was already there. In a godless world, however, the “discovery” of a detailed new set of precepts feels uncomfortably close to creation.

To put morality in the realm of discursive rationality, as liberalism effectively tells us to, automatically means the most you ever will get are thousands of clashing sects. For spiritual engagement, at some point you have to feel like you are following somebody else’s rules. And with present-day liberalism, it too often feels as if — just like the Collinses — we are making things up as we go along.

Now, TV foodie Gregg Wallace is not someone I had ever thought of as being in the same category as Lecter. Nor indeed, as some kind of public intellectual cum satirist, reflecting on the great social issues of the day. Yet his recent Channel 4 mockumentary on eating human flesh was clearly a satirical social commentary on the cost-of-living crisis. In it, people are forced to sell slices of their bodies; “with money from her donation, Gillian will be able to pay for two weeks of energy bills”. At one point, Wallace and Michel Roux consider whether the lifestyle of their dinner might affect the flavour: Alison, a former NHS nurse tasted a bit stressed, but children were the most succulent. “Our babies taste best with gravy,” explained the fictional start-up company, Good Harvest.

The show didn’t put me off my dinner, as it did many predictably outraged viewers. It was clearly a reference to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, in which he proposed that poor Irish children be sold to the rich for food: “A young healthy child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled.” People were outraged then, too.

Cannibalism has a long, politically charged history. In the early modern era of colonialism, the figure of the cannibal became the representative Other to Western civilisation. Soon after Columbus discovered the New World, the cannibal became a sensationalist spur to much European moralising about what counted as right behaviour. In this era, considerable legal attention was given to shipwrecked colonisers forced to eat their dead colleagues. As the Romanian philosopher Catalin Avramescu argues in his history of cannibalism, these extreme situations represented a crisis of Western civilisation, a descent into the kind of savagery only seen, or perhaps just imagined, in the distant societies that sailors encountered.

Cannibalism thus represented the boundary, and thus, to some extent, the defining feature of European moral consciousness. Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest — whose name, some argue, derived from an anagram of the Spanish for cannibal — is a very obvious counterpoint to the “civilised” colonialist, Prospero. Half man, half monster, Caliban is “not honour’d with a human shape”, and so is enslaved by Prospero. Cannibalism became a key link in the moral justification of slavery.

Suggested reading

Why we fear dead bodies

By Andrew Watts

I find cannibalism fascinating. Partly, I suppose, because as a high-church Christian, and one for whom the Eucharist is at the centre of his spiritual life, the invitation to consume the body and blood of Christ is a daily source of nourishment, albeit spiritual — that caveat a source of endless medieval dispute. Early critics of Christianity made much of the cannibalistic vibe of passages like this from John’s Gospel: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” I have often wondered why we who believe in transubstantiation do not experience at least a bat squeak of disgust when receiving the bread and wine.

Philosophically, though, cannibalism presents fewer issues than we might imagine. After all, if a body can be left to medical science, for the betterment of society, why can it not be left to feed the hungry? Where is the violation of the harm principle? The same may be true of something like incest. People say it is wrong because it may have negative genetic consequences, but those people don’t argue that incest with birth control is fine.

No, cannibalism is more a theological problem than a philosophical one because we treat human bodies — even after death — as in some way sacred. Those who blithely insist that after death anyone can do what they want with their bodies — throw them on the rubbish tip — are very much in the minority, and I often wonder how sincere they are. Even dead bodies are reckoned to bear some sort of imprint of the life that the body lived. That is why, in what remains at root a broadly Christian culture, bodies are treated with respect, not used as fresh meat for the butcher.

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The philosophy of Count Dracula

By Justin E H Smith

But in strictly ethical terms, the disgust with which we react to cannibalism is now reckoned to be a poor guide to moral assessment. That some may react to the thought of gay sex in the same way, for instance, is now widely understood to be, more or less, as morally insignificant as my child’s grimacing at eating something a little bit different. Disgust may originate in some evolutionary need to protect against infection, but outstays its welcome when translated into various forms of social othering.

Indeed, disgust seems highly illogical. You may kiss your partner on the head, nuzzling her hair, but then retch when you clean the same hair from the shower plug. Your mouth is constantly full of saliva, but we generally don’t like the idea of spitting into a glass and then drinking it. Intellectually, it’s hard to know the difference; viscerally, it matters.

Here we might recall Mary Douglas’s definition of dirt as “matter out of place”: what is called soil in the garden is called dirt on the kitchen floor. That is, our interpretation of things is rooted in a certain map of the world in which things have their place. Hair on the head, in its place: fine to kiss. Hair in the plug, out of place: disgusting. This is why conservatives, who tend to have a stronger sense of there being “a place for everything and everything in its place”, reference disgust more readily than liberals. And nowhere is this truer than the politics of the human body — transgender issues, for example. The breast-feeding man violates the conservative’s map of things.

Liberals argue that the “irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight”. But the limits of this viewpoint can be seen when it collides with cannibalism. Strict liberals may — philosophically at least — find no fault with the man who served tacos to his friends made with meat from his own amputated leg. My body, my choice and all that. But I doubt they would be first in the queue for that buffet.

What the response to Wallace’s documentary made clear is that strict rationality is not — and perhaps never will be — the fundamental basis of our morality. As conservative bioethicist Leon Kass put it, “repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate”. Yes, the liberal warning against disgust being weaponised against minorities is well made. But when used in the defence of human dignity, disgust can be a powerful moral ally. What begins as a biological reaction to a threat to our bodies can be a sign of a spiritual reaction to a threat to our souls.

One of them is individualism. In a society which lacks any strong bonds between its members, everyone is likely to have their own interpretation of the world, just as everyone is likely to have their own toothbrush. You wouldn’t want to borrow someone else’s version of the truth, any more than you would want to borrow their toothbrush. Truth becomes privatised. It’s a matter of my personal experience, and surely no one can challenge that. 

In fact, personal experience is as open to debate and dissent as the existence of God. There’s nothing absolute about it. One of the key insights of the late modern period, before the birth of postmodernism, is the recognition that human beings are constitutively opaque to themselves. “Constitutively”, because this lack of self-transparency is built into the kind of animals we are, not just some lamentable self-blindness which we could put right with a little more self-reflection.

When Oedipus in Sophocles’s drama finally comes to know who he is, he recognises that he is a stranger to himself. It has taken incest, parricide, pollution, self-blinding and self-exile to arrive at the conclusion that he has no certain grasp of his own identity, and that this is the condition of us all. There must be easier ways of learning this lesson. 

There was a time when we thought that we were transparent to ourselves and that it was others who were indecipherable to us. Nowadays, we tend to accept that we aren’t always in entire possession of our own experience, and that others can sometimes know us better than we know ourselves. Among other things, this is because other people are frequently well-placed to see what we do, and what we do is a surer guide to who we are than what we say or think we are. If someone insists that he’s a passionate lover of animals and spends his spare time dissecting live frogs, then he is self-deluded. It’s the beliefs implicit in our behaviour, not those recorded in our memoirs, that really count. If the truth is what we feel, there can be no place for self-deception in human affairs. It simply wouldn’t be possible for a prime minister to declare himself a pretty straight sort of guy, and probably believe it, yet seek to deceive the public about the invasion of Iraq. 

So I am no infallible guide to the meaning of my own experience. I thought at the time I was furious, but looking back I realise that I was afraid. It’s true that my experience is beyond doubt in the sense that I really am in agony, and no mistake; but to know that what I’m feeling is agony rather than ecstasy, I must have the concepts of agony and ecstasy, and this isn’t something I can achieve all by myself. I can know this only by belonging to a community whose language includes these notions.

In this sense, even the most private of experiences is public. Toddlers don’t spontaneously come up with the concept of unfairness. Rather, they take part in a form of social life in which the idea of unfairness has a function, they watch how their elders behave and listen to how words are used as forces in these contexts. If they have the misfortune to be brought up in Conservative Party headquarters, they will never get the hang of the idea.

Suggested reading

The death of historical truth

By Jonathan Sumption

Another insight of late modernity is that experience and reality are in some ways out of sync. It looks as though the sun circles the earth, but this is because the Earth revolves on its axis. (“The sun’s coming up — or as the new theory has it, the Earth’s going down,” as a 17th-century character remarks in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosenkrantz and Guildernstern are Dead). One purpose of science is to close the gap between reality and our experience of it, as well as explaining how the gap comes about. 

Like all concepts, truth is inherently social. There must be public criteria by which we can determine what counts as true or false, and these criteria are nobody’s private possession. The philosopher Wittgenstein imagines someone exclaiming “But I know how tall I am!” and placing his hand on top of his head. He hasn’t grasped the fact that tallness is a comparative notion, one that involves socially agreed modes of measurement. There must also be public criteria for conflicts over truth. Disagreement is only possible if you can agree on what you are disagreeing over. We aren’t conflicting over the value of the pound if you are thinking of sterling and I am thinking of the American poet of that name. 

A certain degree of consensus must underlie the most vehement of altercations. People who cry “Well, it’s true for me” (the #MeToo generation is also the “Me-Me-Me” generation) haven’t grasped this point, either. Rather than making the coldly impersonal idea of truth more warmly experiential, they end up abolishing it altogether. If truth is just what anyone happens to think is true, then the word drops out of use. It becomes impossible to distinguish between what I feel and the way the world actually is. There are people who insist that slavery is one of the most outrageous episodes in Western history, yet put the word “truth” in scare quotes. They tend to do the same with the word “fact”, while maintaining that it’s a fact that women are equal to men. 

Does all this mean that truth is beyond dispute? Certainly not for science. The fact that truth isn’t just subjective doesn’t mean that it must be absolute. The one is just the flipside of the other. Relativists and subjectivists fear that unless they are right, truth becomes dogmatic, infallible and authoritarian. But this is to be afraid of a bogeyman. To say that a proposition is scientific is to say among other things that it could be wrong. It’s the kind of thing that someone might always come along and falsify. It differs in this way from “Put that tiger down!” or “Sorry, make that two tuna sandwiches”.

Science is a never-ending argument, in which one’s conclusions are perpetually open to revision, and argument is fundamentally a political affair. You must make sure that everyone gets a chance to participate in the debate, that they do so on equal terms, that nobody is allowed to impose their own partisan interests on the discussion and so on. None of this guarantees the emergence of truth, but it’s an essential pre-condition of it. People who claim “It’s true for me” tend not to be interested in any of this. What is there to argue about? It is they who are the absolutists, since there would seem no way of disproving what they assert. Anyway, someone can always protest that the “it’s true for me” claim isn’t true for them.

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Prince Harry is a Freudian dream

By Giles Fraser

“It’s true for me” springs from a false egalitarianism. If everyone is to be included in political society, then everyone’s views must be respected as well. So what about the view that everyone isn’t to be included? Is that to be respected as well? And what of the so-called law of contradiction? If you think that reading Agatha Christie gives you prostate cancer and I disagree, then one of us has to be wrong. But postmodernists are reluctant to admit that anyone is wrong. It offends against the law of inclusivity, as well as making some people sound inferior to others. Anyway, from what Olympian vantage point can one make such a judgement? How can I possibly judge that there are some sexist police officers in Britain? Isn’t any such claim a sign of moral superiority or intellectual elitism on my part? 

Such is the addled thinking that passes for genuine argument in certain circles. A fear of sounding authoritarian, when all you’re trying to do is tell the truth, haunts contemporary culture. This is why it’s fashionable to qualify what one says with the word “necessarily” — as in “It’s not necessarily that people are passing themselves off as Tom Cruise, it’s just that there’s a crisis of identity”, where what you mean is that people aren’t passing themselves as Tom Cruise at all. But it sounds offensively dogmatic to say so. Similarly, to say “It’s nine o’clock” sounds unpleasantly absolute, so it’s advisable to throw in a “like”. “It’s like nine o’clock” sounds far more agreeably uncertain. A pervasive sense of uncertainty is one reason why truth has come into disrepute. But there are other reasons, which i’ll return to in my next essay.  

Bergman himself didn’t really get going till he was in his late thirties, just as he was leaving youth behind. The 2018 documentary, Bergman: A Year in a Life, pinpoints 1957, when Bergman was 38, as the year when he ascended to the fullness of his mature talent (both The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries were released that year). Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, he turned out masterpiece after masterpiece, working with the same trusted actors: Liv Ullman, Max Von Sydow, Ingrid Thulin, Harriet Anderson, Bibi Anderson, Erland Josephson, Gunnar Björnstrand. It’s telling that when you google Bergman’s best films, none of the lists even closely match up. The quality and consistency of the work he produced across decades resists consensus — everyone has their favourites.

Unsurprisingly, Bergman’s life and appetites match up with his output. The personality that emerges from Bergman’s memoirs The Magic Lantern and Images, and from other accounts of him, is not especially likeable. He wrote The Magic Lantern well into his sixties, but age had not blunted the cruel, petty, vindictive streak he wielded like a weapon against anyone who dared cross him. Recalling a chance encounter in Munich with one of his “most damaging critics” (whom he had previously tried to assault), Bergman can barely restrain his seething hatred: “There goes a Deadly Enemy. He should be destroyed. True, he was destroying himself through his deteriorating writing, but I shall dance on his grave and wish him many eternities in hell, where he can sit and read his own reviews.” In an open letter he wrote to the Swedish authorities in the aftermath of a humiliating tax scandal, he menacingly quotes his hero: “I say as Strindberg did when he was angry: ‘Watch out, you bastard, we’ll meet again in my next play.’” Bergman liked power, and had no qualms about using it for punishment or revenge. Possessing huge natural charisma, he inhabited all too comfortably the role of the ruthless and belittling male genius, trampling on the sensitivities of his underlings, humiliating other men to assert his dominance.

Nor had he any qualms about utilising power’s famously aphrodisiacal qualities on his beautiful female actors — half of Sweden’s talent seems to have belonged to his harem. In Images, there’s a strikingly intimate photograph of Bergman directing the radiant Ingrid Thulin: looming behind her, he cradles her head while murmuring in her ear with his eyes closed like a husband or a horse-whisperer. “Film work is a powerfully erotic business,” he wrote in The Magic Lantern. “The proximity of actors is without reservations, the mutual exposure is total… [T]he atmosphere is irresistibly charged with sexuality.” While some of his children seem to have loathed him or held him in contempt — only three out of eight attended his funeral — the loyalty his collaborator-lovers felt towards him tended to survive the ends of their intimate relationships. In some ways, it isn’t hard to see why they found him so attractive, so worthy of love. Bergman’s desire for women was matched by his curiosity about them — he was able to convey their inner lives with a perceptiveness and accuracy rare among male artists. Key films such as Persona, Cries and Whispers and The Silence have hardly any men in them at all.

But I’d argue that the key Ingmar Bergman film — the one that both unlocks the core of his troubled personality and provides a fascinating meta-commentary on his oeuvre — isn’t one he actually directed. Having announced that he was giving up directing for the cinema after his marvellous, life-affirming 1982 film Fanny and Alexander, in his later years, alone on the island of Fårö, Bergman wrote several highly personal screenplays to be directed by his friends (a control freak to the end, when he could no longer direct, Bergman directed the directing). Among these was Faithless, the lacerating 2000 autofictional drama directed by Liv Ullmann — Bergman’s former lover and enduring friend. In the film, an old man (called “Bergman”) converses with a younger woman whom we quickly realise is an imaginary character from a screenplay he is writing — and a ghost from his past. As the woman tells him her painful story — which is also his own — “Bergman” confronts his shame, guilt, and agony in a narrative that accesses zones of remote psychological darkness rarely breached in film. At the heart of the old man and the woman’s shared story is the adulterous affair they conducted when they were both in early middle-age — and the brutal consequences that ensued.

Suggested reading

Tár and the triumph of amoral artists

By Kathleen Stock

In The Magic Lantern, written well over a decade before Ullmann directed Faithless, Bergman devotes an entire chapter to recounting the episode that would inspire the screenplay. The two versions are identical in all but a few details. It’s as if, in first writing about the affair in his autobiography, Bergman failed to expiate his guilt, and so felt compelled to make a second attempt, this time in a (barely) fictive format. Going on the evidence in Faithless, as well as Bergman’s writings and remarks he made throughout his life, his most ferocious demon was not what he grandiloquently called “the silence of God” nor any such metaphysical concerns, but the more humiliating and private condition of retrospective jealousy — along with the corollary self-loathing he endured, apparently without ever achieving self-forgiveness, over an adulterous affair he conducted in his thirties with a woman named Gun Hagberg (whom he would later marry). While The Magic Lantern discloses only the emotional fallout from the affair, its restaging in Faithless results in suicide, violence, and shattered lives.

Retrospective jealousy — the experience of being tortured not by evidence of a present betrayal, but by intrusive images of sexual pleasure enjoyed in a partner’s past — recurs throughout Bergman’s self-reflections and in his films. In The Magic Lantern he describes this “demonic” form of mental suffering:

“A few years earlier I had been madly in love. Pretending professional interest, I enticed my beloved to tell me in detail about her multifaceted erotic experiences. The peculiar excitement of a fresh jealousy over her long-past actions scratched and tore at my innards and my genitals. The most primitive rituals of shame became a permanent alloy in my jealousy.”

I’d love to know what he means by “primitive rituals of shame”, but what is clear is that retrospective jealousy is very much a director’s affliction — a pathology of control whose essence is curiously metaphysical. To the sufferer, all time exists at once: there is no distinction between past and present. Transient erotic pleasures — and the psychological configurations of power, submission, lust and devotion that underpin them — exist in an absolute and transparent now. Great directors are great dictators: Bergman acknowledged his “inextinguishable need to control reality”, and suffered — horribly — from anything he could not control, including the sexual pleasure of his lovers as it extended into a past when he did not yet know them. Little wonder his actresses sometimes complained of being made to feel like his chattels — Bergman’s tortured conception of sexuality entailed an eternal, spiritual-carnal enslavement.

Suggested reading

The year of the femcel

By Mary Gaitskill

This obsessive conflation of past and present is synecdochic of a broader trend towards collapsed binaries in Bergman’s miscible life and work: art and reality, self and other, persona and actor, pain and pleasure, and especially dreams and cinema are always being run together. To Bergman, everything was cinema, theatre, performance — which is to say it was all dreams, or all nightmares. Love itself was a “bold production” in which ‘the decor was tasteful and the lighting well arranged”, whereas the sweetest dream of all was Bergman’s extraordinary career: “Sometimes I dream a brilliant production with great crowds of people, music and wonderful sets. I whisper to myself with extreme satisfaction: “This is my production. I have created this.”

But just as dream and cinema are analogues, so too are film and guilt, both of which entail the inability to forget. The miracle of film is also that which makes it infernal: the immortality of the filmed image mirrors the claustrophobic nightmare of the guilt- or jealousy-tortured psyche — the horror of the image that can’t be forgotten, the “mercilessly clear picture” whose vividness intensifies until it annihilates:

“There are moving pictures with sound and light which never leave the projector of the soul but run in loops throughout life with unchanging sharpness, unchanging objective clarity. Only one’s own insight inexorably and relentlessly moves inwards towards the truth.”

When he wasn’t tortured by nightmares, dreams for Bergman were a transcendent portal and the standard of his highest artistic ideal. As is true for the greatest artists, dreams were primary and waking life their pale reflection. In later life, Jorge Luis Borges spoke of his impatience for night to come around so that he could immerse in the enigma of dreams; for his part, Bergman insisted “Actually I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality”.

Suggested reading

Bob Dylan has no philosophy

By Geoff Dyer

Among Bergman’s obsessive motifs, dreams are second only to demons — the private demons of jealousy, shame and fear that tortured and stimulated him throughout his life, and the literal demons he summoned in his films, most menacingly in Hour of the Wolf, about an artist on an island who becomes overwhelmed by his terrors. Here again we find the collapsing of borders — between inner and outer, fear and desire, artist and art. The insane painter played by Max Von Sydow encounters his demons in living, corporeal form — and so too does his wife (played by Liv Ullmann), who is apparently sane. Likewise in Bergman’s life, the suspicion emerges that his “demons” are to be taken as metaphors only in a tenuous, provisional sense. “Ghosts, demons and other creatures with neither name nor domicile have been around me since childhood,” he writes in The Magic Lantern (at one point he even describes his penis as a “throbbing demon”, and the humiliating irritable-bowel syndrome that made him shit himself in public as “like housing an evil demon in the most sensitive core of your body”). Later in the book he confides, “Worst are the “hours of the wolf” in the small hours between three and five. That is when the demons come: mortification, loathing, fear, and rage.” In Hour of the Wolf the metaphor becomes psychotically concretised, all too literal.

On first viewing that disquieting, covertly confessional film, I was surprised to find that the solemn Ingmar Bergman had made a horror movie. While I’m partial to the genre, it seemed one too disreputable for the maestro to move in — until it dawned on me that Bergman’s métier was a sub-category which he arguably invented: the moral horror. While Bergman also made comedies, romances and much else besides, he was most at home directing films in this sub-genre within which he also lived, relentlessly vivisecting himself and those around him for the squirming, messy material of his immaculate works. He understood that true horror has little to do with the supernatural or the grotesque and everything to do with the demons, hells and torture chambers of the inner life. Only by directing films could he maintain his sanity “against torments so violent that they became interesting”, and “investigate with interest the torments tearing me to pieces” (how fitting that the first film he ever made was titled… Torment!).

Demons, hell, guilt, torment — it’s hardly surprising that these should constitute the core themes of an artist whose stern, emotionally distant father was a Lutheran pastor, and who grappled with theological doubts into middle age. By his forties, Bergman seems to have rejected religion, and yet the absent God left in its wake a transcendental perception, a structuring sense of the sacred that permeated Bergman’s increasingly compressed, humanist cinema. In the workbook he kept while developing Hour of the Wolf, he describes the inner and artistic breakthrough he had achieved with Winter Light, his mesmerically bleak 1963 film about a country priest staring down the barrels of religious doubt: “The images of God are shattered without my perception of Man as the bearer of a holy purpose being obliterated.”

And several years later, while developing the masterful Persona, he wrote: “Now that God is gone, I feel that all this is mine; piety toward life, humility before my meaningless fate, and love for the other children who are afraid, who are ill, who are cruel.”

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By Matt Feeney

Just as Andrei Tarkovsky has been called a modern-day icon maker whose images infuse a barren epoch with divine luminance, so too might we see Ingmar Bergman’s pellucid, anguished films as something like an expression of post-theistic religiosity. His famous close-ups — of dignified, anguished women and brooding, isolated men — have the clarity of religious paintings. Bergman had the ambiguous gift of seeing into the souls of others: damaged lives are at once exposed and redeemed in his camera’s calm, unblinking gaze. The allusive title of his 1969 film The Passion of Anna is well chosen: all of his characters are crucified, all tormented in their lonely gardens of Gethsemane, all burning in their unique and specific hells.

As I devoured Bergman’s ostensibly bleak films during a period of solitude and self-questioning last winter, no long dark night settled over my soul. All that torment and moral horror did not plunge me into a private hell — but rather uplifted me. To immerse in Bergman’s films is to locate one’s own pain, in all its bitter and unsung specificity, within a redemptive continuum of human distress as ebullient and limpid as a river. His films, ultimately, are a joy — and so it should not surprise us to find Ingmar Bergman insisting in his autobiography on a joy “that had carried me through crises and misery and functioned as faithfully as my heart”. He rightly regarded his films as a source of solace for himself and others, a healing catharsis for his damaged soul in which “Everything is burned clear, and personal growth now becomes a possibility.”

Starmer’s face gets fixed with a faintly creepy spray on grin. His line is that, as he tours the country, no one is saying to him “we need a few more jokes, we need a bit of entertainment”. This feels like a very boring person’s view of what an interesting person is. It is also a Boris reference. Starmer’s calling card is that he is the anti-Boris: safe, steady, reliable, moral. Steve “interesting” Davis with a few more policies — though not that many more, it has to be said.

So is the “boring” jibe anything more than optics? Starmer clearly thinks it’s a lightweight criticism, almost beneath him to answer. He prides himself on being a grown up, serious. He thinks boring is a frivolous line of attack. But it is not.

The trouble with boring people is not that they don’t keep us entertained, but that they don’t engage us on a recognisably human level. They feel flat, two-dimensional  — even when they try to smile. Perhaps especially when they smile. Where is their shame, or hurt, or embarrassment? Where is the joy, the anger, the passion? To call someone boring is to say that, instinctively, we don’t understand what is going on with them; we don’t have any sort of access to their inner world, so they leave us deflated. Somehow, they are absent even when they are there before us. So when Keir Starmer answers the “boring” question with the apparently interesting fact that he once played the violin with Fat Boy Slim, we are even more convinced that he doesn’t get it. This is not what we are looking for.

Take Milton’s Paradise Lost. Why is it that Satan is typically understood as exciting and charismatic while God — the redeemer of the world no less — somehow seems deathly dull? Probably because the bad boy feels more fully engaged with the human condition whereas the divine archetype is distant and unknown. The former is hot, the latter is cold. It is, in metaphysical form, the Keir Starmer problem. Indeed, it’s the same problem that novelists have in trying to write compelling characters that are good people. We often identify so much more with the messily and morally compromised because most of us think of ourselves this way. Saints don’t engage us because they seem to float above the human realm, unaffected by the trials and tribulations of ordinary existence. Starmer doesn’t feel real.

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How Labour became the nasty party

By Giles Fraser

Simone Weil wrote: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.” Here, she gives us a clue as to the conundrum: how do we make virtue interesting, compelling? The answer is first to show how real evil is empty and flat — ultimately life-denying. That it creates a wasteland of human flourishing. This is the place where nothing grows. This, Starmer could argue, is Boris Johnson’s Britain. In contrast, virtue really is much more exciting and deeply human – ultimately life-giving. It is the basis for human flourishing. This is how being good connects up with being more fully human.

But Starmer doesn’t give us anything like that. Like the Dementors in Harry Potter, he seems to suck all the hope from the room. He makes virtue feel as life-giving as a traffic warden. Take his reaction to having been exonerated by the Durham police over beergate. “For me, this was always a matter of principle. Honesty and integrity matter. You will always get that from me.” It is such a bad answer. Bad, because it’s way too confident in its own righteousness. “You will always get that from me” lacks humility and, even more importantly, any sense that as human being we get things wrong every single day. There is no openness and honesty in this sentence, no vulnerability to getting things wrong. And — worse still in electoral terms — it says: I am not like you.

Not having any access to Starmer’s hidden inner world, we begin to wonder whether his outer and inner life match up. Whether he’s wearing a mask. And the problem with wearing masks is that we inevitably begin to worry about what is being concealed. Does the reassuringly non-flashy Keir Starmer exist to disguise the persecutory instincts of his “never kissed a Tory” colleagues, the ones who will cancel us for any petty infringements of contemporary metropolitan standards? Is Starmer the safe frontman of the Manichean morality police who divide the country up into those with politically correct and incorrect views, sheep and goats, darkness and light? There never has been a one nation Labour Party, no sense of us all being in this together. Behind Sir Keir lurk the sharks of culture wars ready to feast on our sins.

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Privilege is the new original sin

By Costica Bradatan

Of late, the vices of the Conservative Party have been on display for all to see. They are generally the hot sins of lust and greed. I am not trying to defend them, but you know where you stand with these moral failures. Just as you did when John Prescott lamped a protestor after being egged. But Labour’s virtues I find altogether more sinister. I think they are out to get me. To find me out and bring me down, without forgiveness, without compromise. I find Labour’s virtues so much more frightening than Conservative vices.

Boring is not about the absence of gladhands. It is about not being present to others, not seeming to be on the same journey of messy human experience. The cardboard cut out Starmer will get some short-term benefit from being the not-Boris. But it won’t last long. Boris was popular for a long time and for a reason. Starmer still can’t work our why. The mystery will always drive him mad. 

Whoever wins the Tory leadership contest is likely to compound this issue. Faced with, say, Kemi Badenoch across the dispatch box, Starmer will look uncomfortably like every jibe that the culture warriors have thrown at the Right over the last few years: male, pale, and stale.

In fact, octopuses are one of the species about to gain a new level of protection in the UK, along with decapods (lobsters, shrimp, and so on) and all vertebrates. The new Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill, currently working its way through parliament, calls for the creation of a committee to assess whether government decisions have due regard for the welfare of animals “as sentient beings”. It will join EU legislation, which has recognised animal sentience since 2009, as well as that of countries including Australia, Switzerland and Brazil. Going a step further, a number of bodies in recent years have attempted to secure legal personhood for individual animals held in zoos and research facilities, though with little success to date.

These efforts owe much to the concept of “speciesism”, popularised in the Seventies by bioethicist Peter Singer. Drawing a provocative comparison with racism and sexism, he argues that there is no reason that a morality based on minimising suffering should be limited only to humans. Fifty years ago, this argument was radical. But today, the idea (or something like it) is banal enough that the passing of the Animal Sentience Bill has come up against virtually no opposition. Few would argue that animals do not have sentience (“the capacity to experience feelings and sensations”) — though the moral implications remain much more controversial.

The fact that this conversation is being had at all is in itself a striking reflection of how far the Enlightenment moral project has come. If you suggested to the average person living 500 years ago that keeping octopuses in confinement was an unconscionable cruelty, I expect they’d have thought you were mad. This was an era when public torture and executions were good family fun, and London Bridge was decorated with the severed heads of victims; when people thought nothing of children or servants being flogged for misdemeanours, and unwanted infants were left to perish in their thousands. People would have been inured to brutality and death to a degree that is almost unimaginable to us nowadays.

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Feminism has a biology problem

By Ellen Pasternack

While the world around us has become steadily less violent, until the very recent past any stirrings of empathy for animals would have been hammered out of people at an early age. If from childhood you are wringing the necks of chickens you’ve raised yourself and plucking them for dinner, there is no space for worrying about their sentience. What good would it do you?

The emotions that guide our morality — empathy, guilt, a sense of fairness — don’t exist to guide us towards some objective moral truth. We’re evolved creatures, and these are adaptations that help us get along with each other — and aid our relatives or allies in times of need. Depending on when and where we live, these emotions might take very different forms.

Today, a child’s interaction with live animals is most probably limited to pets, who are increasingly treated as part of the family, or even as an alternative to having children of one’s own. For many of us (or at least, the 99% who aren’t vegan), reminders of the flesh and blood origins of the food we eat elicit pangs of guilt, and feel like a hangover from a more bloodthirsty and animalistic past.

But this is the elephant in the room in all discussions of animal welfare. Despite our newfound squeamishness over seeing how the sausage is made, the exploitation of animals for food is central to our species’ way of life. As the human population has become much larger and wealthier in the last century, global meat consumption has climbed to unprecedented heights, both per capita and in absolute terms. When it comes to chickens in particular, the scale of increase boggles the mind — over ten times as many chickens are eaten today as at the beginning of the Sixties. Though supermarkets in the Anglosphere are increasingly likely to stock plant-based No Chicken Kievs as an alternative, these put barely a dent in the market for the real thing, which is projected to continue expanding for years to come.

For all our talk of animal welfare, the ancient and widespread practice of killing animals for food is not going anywhere any time soon. And while this is the case, legal proclamations like the sentience bill seem rather toothless and hypocritical. What can it mean to recognise animal sentience if we also condone the slaughter of animals in their billions every year?

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It’s not just the eating of animals where a true rejection of speciesism would have profound consequences. For instance, if we stop and think about the sentience of rats and mice — social, intelligent creatures — can we really justify razing entire communities of them simply because we don’t want them in our restaurants and cafés?

Then there are the animal genocides we commit in the name of conservation. Efforts to preserve the biological integrity of the Galapagos islands have seen sniper hit squads hunting down invasive goats by helicopter. In 2018, the largest eradication scheme in history led to the island of South Georgia, home to albatrosses and other endangered seabirds, being declared officially rodent-free. And if you have a pet cat, her continued survival depends on the deaths of the chickens, cows, and fish that go into her can of Purina, not to mention the hundred or so small mammals and birds she personally dispatches in an average year.

Should we let the albatross and the Galapagos tortoise go extinct, or euthanise our pets for the greater good of animal kind? And for that matter, what about all the carnivorous animals in nature subjecting their brethren to horrific ends every minute of every day? What of those that die in even greater numbers from exposure, starvation and disease? Why shouldn’t our duty of care for animals as sentient beings extend to preventing their suffering too, as it surely would for humans?

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By Mary Harrington

All of these questions become impossibly knotty unless we do what we’re accustomed to doing for our own sanity and convenience, which is to draw a sharp dividing line between humans and non-human animals, declaring that only the individuals on the near side of that line are worthy of our full moral consideration. Even if we could prevent all animal suffering, we wouldn’t want to — this would mean a total dismantling of the circle of life that keeps all the planet’s ecosystems in balance.

But this kind of approach becomes less and less acceptable to a world that is increasingly sensitive to violence, and where morality is derived from utilitarian principles (whose founder, Jeremy Bentham, said of animals: “The question is not can they reason … but can they suffer?”) rather than God-given (“Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you”). With speciesism, we may have reached the first point where modern moral sensibilities, having emerged from instincts evolved to help our species thrive as small bands of kin millions of years ago, hit a major roadblock imposed by the limitations of the physical world.

The UK’s animal sentience bill is brief, containing no detail as to how exactly animal interests should be weighted. Even PETA’s press release celebrating the passing of the bill doesn’t mention any specific practices that they hope it might restrict. As our aversion to violence increases further, I expect we will see a ramping up of non-specific proclamations in favour of animal rights, and of debates over banning things such as trophy hunting or foie gras, which are so minor in the scheme of things they might as well be symbolic gestures.

But at the same time, the number of animals killed for our consumption shows no sign of declining or even plateauing. A hundred years from now the prospect of putting a genuinely anti-speciesist worldview into practice is likely to remain as impracticable as it is today. Our moral intuitions may be changing, but we have no way of escaping the natural world that we’re part of, red in tooth and claw. A substantially brighter future for animals seems unlikely. And for humans, the future spells a lot more cognitive dissonance, as our evolving ideals will continue to bump up against the constraints of the world in which we find ourselves.

So, as Stephanie Hare rightly points out in Technology Is Not Neutral, it’s never just an object. Technology is as much social as scientific, as much economics as engineering. There’s little point in Silicon Valley companies hiring an ethicist to decide a product’s value — its effects go far beyond the shiny thing that comes out of the box.

Apple, for instance, might not have put AirTags on the market in their present form if they had paused to wonder whether a coin-sized tracking device — ideal for keeping track of keys, luggage or children’s toys — could also be ideal for stalkers to electronically track an unsuspecting person. Now they are forced to come up with solutions, most of which rely on the tracked person also having a smartphone.

But, precisely because technology is a social phenomenon, embedding ethics, and ethicists, in its development will never remedy its dangers. Take Facial Recognition Technology, for example. It’s an issue Hare has been actively — and critically — researching for some time. Like other biometric technology, it has been introduced in practice with remarkably little scrutiny, regulation, or debate.

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Today, with ubiquitous CCTV cameras and widespread availability of facial recognition software, British police forces are using it to pick out individuals in public spaces, with AI programmes that match faces seen on camera to faces in databases. But private spaces like shops, museums, casinos and arts centres were using Facial Recognition Technology first. Some cities and states in the US have moved to forbid or control its use, but in the UK there is no legal framework to prevent somebody from matching your face to your identity, and other data about your life.

How did we end up here, unable to reliably go about our lives anonymously in public spaces? Just as technology is inseparable from wider social structures, “tech ethics” can’t be seen as merely part of the technology development process. They make sense only in the context of wider social and moral frameworks.

It’s entirely possible that the designers of the Facial Recognition systems looked at the millions of photographs that people upload to social media every day, tagging themselves, their friends and families, and couldn’t see anything wrong with gathering all that information into one handy index. True, it could result in specific harms, like stalkers finding their victims, or innocent people being unjustly targeted by the police. But those could be relegated to the “unforeseen consequences” of a generally desirable change.

Yet the indifference of governments, businesses, and many individuals, to privacy is a much deeper problem than a few irresponsible tech bros. As the recent pandemic years have shown, the desire to be free from scrutiny unless there’s a good reason to be scrutinised is widely seen as, at best, eccentric and, at worst, automatic grounds for suspicion.

We simply can’t articulate why a private life is valuable. We have no sense of ourselves as autonomous beings, persons who need a space in which to reflect, to share thoughts with a few others, before venturing into public space with words and actions that we feel ready to defend.

Few question the desirability of exposing private messages that fall short of today’s acceptable attitudes. In-jokes are regularly taken out of context and used to condemn the joker. If a wrong thought has been expressed, even privately to friends or associates, it’s evidence of bad character and subject to public judgement. The use of Implicit Bias tests by employers shows that even subconscious thoughts are not safe from dissection and testing for impurity.

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Can our leaders cope with freedom?

By Timandra Harkness

And since Covid struck, the ethical implications of our relationship with technology have only become more profound. Consider the use of “contact tracing” apps which, as Hare notes, could be more accurately described as “exposure notification apps” since they don’t facilitate contact tracing, because they’re designed to be anonymous.

We owe that design element to Google and Apple, who added to their operating systems the capacity for devices to exchange tokens with nearby devices, using Bluetooth, but only anonymously.

Many governments, including in UK and France, didn’t want this anonymous system. They wanted to know the patterns of who was infecting whom, as well as the possibility of contacting individuals to make sure they were isolating when they should. Arguably, public health might justify that kind of intrusion. But the tech giants didn’t want to gift governments information about who spends time within a few metres of whom.

Perhaps they were right — but either way, we never got to have that argument. Governments largely evaded public debate about the measures they used against Covid, and tech companies decided what capabilities to build into their products. The successes and failures of the apps were only partly technical; they were largely down to the wider strengths and failings of Covid policies. It is, after all, little use telling somebody they may have been infected if they can’t get a speedy test result, or if they can’t afford to self-isolate without sick pay. Again, no amount of ethical tech development would have changed that.

As the pandemic moved on, the attention of the UK government moved from “Contact Tracing Apps” that weren’t, to “Vaccine Passports” that weren’t, but were really. Despite almost universal rejection of the idea by health, cyber-security and equality organisations, and repeated insistence that the government was not considering vaccine passports, the Government funded eight pilot schemes for vaccine passports, and gave the green light for private organisations to demand them.

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By Mary Harrington

Ethicists went public with their many warnings: vaccine passports would be socially divisive, discriminatory, needlessly intrusive, and a perverse incentive to get infected. But none of this had any impact on government plans: principles like privacy and social solidarity found no resonance in opportunistic policymaking. Neither did the Government have the courage to argue that these undesirable measures were proportionate and necessary, and trust the public to accept exceptional infringements in exceptional times.

This is the other limitation of technology ethics: they are no match for power. Britain is currently an outlier among European and other governments that are imposing highly divisive and restrictive vaccine passport regimes, and using physical force against dissenters.

And yet masses of people do seem prepared to accept restrictions on their lives that would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago. Why are we so willing to accept that a condition of participation in public life is an app that affirms our medical status? Why have we been so willing to accept the repeated reduction of society to one household in one space, connected mainly through screens to the wider world?

One answer is that technology has ridden to the rescue. Without the constant ability to connect to that digital network — a network of other humans, as well as data — it would simply have been impossible for half the population to just stay home for months on end. Work would have been done in offices or not at all. Education would have been unable to stagger on, even in its unequal and truncated form. The severance of social connections would not have been a reduction to two-dimensional faces on screens, but near-complete isolation.

But that is only half an answer. A retreat from shared public space, alongside the penetration of private space by always-on connection, was far advanced before governments told us to Stay Home. When bedrooms and kitchen tables became classrooms and desks, was it so great a change from answering work emails from the sofa, or chatting about homework on screens across many teenage bedrooms?

And that earlier change, accelerated but not precipitated by the pandemic, was as much social as technological. Through technology, we can be apart, but never completely alone. Interacting through screens, we are insulated by space and — when we’re exchanging messages — by time. Public space is increasingly digital, so we need never be fully there, but with a smartphone there is no fully private space either.

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Was the two-metre rule one big lie?

By Timandra Harkness

This shift away from shared social lives began in the mid 20th century. We lead more solitary lives than our grandparents. We start families later, we belong to fewer social organisations. Most of all, we lack a shared framework of morality and ideas about a shared future. When difficult times hit us, we lack a foundation on which to base our judgments. This is true of us as individuals, but also as a society. No wonder our governments cast about for technological solutions to moral questions.

Hare quotes John von Neumann in 1954, testifying about the development of the atomic bomb:

“We were all little children with respect to the situation which had developed… None of us had been educated or conditioned to exist in this situation, and we had to make our rationalisation and our code of conduct as we went along.”

Today, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t act — and probably feel — like a young child when confronted with adult responsibilities.

Part of the appeal of technologies like AI is the fantasy that a machine can take the role of wise parent, immune to the emotion and unpredictability of mere humans. But this tells us less about the real capabilities of AI, and more about our disillusionment with ourselves

The urge to fix Covid, or other social problems, with technology springs from this lack of trust in other people. So does the cavalier disregard for privacy as an expression of moral autonomy. Technology ethics can’t save us, any more than technology can. Even during a pandemic, how we regard one another is the fundamental question at the root of ethics. So we do need to treat technology as just a tool, after all. Otherwise we risk being made its instruments in a world without morals.

What form did this ‘high ground’ take? According to the Harvard student who introduced her 2019 commencement speech at the Ivy League college with a litany of her good deeds: “She has passed Germany’s first minimum wage, closed Germany’s nuclear plants after the Fukushima nuclear explosion, promoted marriage equality, led progress in tackling climate change, and opened her country to over one million refugees from the wars of the Middle East.”

Merkel’s junior coalition partners the Social Democrats would no doubt roll their eyes if they heard that; the policies listed by the Harvard student were all theirs. Take the legalisation of same-sex marriage. Merkel, a conservative, actually opposed it for all of her career, but, sensing a shift in the Zeitgeist, let it pass through parliament in 2017.

But that was typical Merkel. She always let the public mood determine her policy choices: she was the first German chancellor to receive a weekly detailed briefing on opinion research from her press department. Perhaps that’s why she was synonymous with dithering, sitting on the fence and remaining quiet on key issues — so much so that a neologism was spawned: merkeln, the Langenscheidt dictionary’s 2015 word of the year. “To Merkel” is defined as “to do nothing, make no decisions, issue no statements”.

It was not her strong convictions that endeared her with German voters. It was her lack of them. She is the opposite of a visionary; once asked what she associated with Germany, she said “well-made windows”. Not Germany’s rich cultural heritage, not its landscapes, not its football squad, not even its robust Grundgesetz (a set of basic laws put in place after the war, essentially a constitution). Far more important are its… well-sealed windows.

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By Peter Franklin

So, is she really the “liberal West’s last defender”, as the New York Times would have it? Much of the ‘moral compass’ talk is based on Merkel’s momentous decision to open the German border to more than a million refugees from Syria and elsewhere in 2015. No doubt it was an event of historic importance that changed Germany and Europe forever. But was it really on par with Willy Brandt’s epic 1970 genuflection in Warsaw, as some have suggested? Or, as some commentators said at the time, a monumental, healing gesture that showed the world that Germany had finally shaken off its Nazi baggage and become a force for good? Not quite.

Only two months before she opened the borders, Merkel had appeared at a townhall-style event called Living Well in Germany, in which she engaged with a group of teenagers from across the country. There, Reem Sahwil, a 14-year-old Palestinian refugee who spoke flawless German and had stellar marks in school, expressed her fear that her family would be deported, extinguishing her dream of attending university in Germany. Without a hint of empathy, Merkel told her that if everyone like her stayed, thousands of other refugees from the Middle East and Africa would flood into Germany, something the country couldn’t cope with. When Sahwil began to cry, Merkel said: “But you’ve done really well for yourself. Let me give you a stroke.” (Something she actually did.)

When, just two months later, tens of thousands of Syrians were passing through Hungary and Austria towards Germany, Merkel first considered taking a hardline approach and mobilising thousands of police officers to secure the southern frontier. Opinion polls, however, suggested most Germans favoured a compassionate, welcoming approach. So without consulting EU partners, she opened the borders. Within days, she was shooting selfies with young Syrian men.

In a matter of months, however, Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) started to haemorrhage support. And the supposedly moral Merkel was soon replaced by her old pragmatic, shape-shifting political self. She tried to export the refugee problem to the outer borders of the EU and brokered a dodgy deal with the authoritarian Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to stem the tide of human beings fleeing across the Aegean. To placate the conservative wing of the CDU, she spoke at a December 2016 party conference of banning the burqa — to jubilant applause. She also started to take a harder line on the deportation of refugees and asylum seekers who had committed crimes, even to war-torn Afghanistan and Syria.

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But for many it was too late. The massive influx of refugees was the boost the odious, far-right AfD had been waiting for. Largely thanks to Merkel’s shambolic immigration policy, the party is now a permanent fixture of German politics and commands a majority in two eastern states.

Merkel’s political contortions extend well beyond immigration, however. On climate policy, too, she has been immensely disappointing. Granted, she had a few successes on the diplomatic stage, such as persuading Russia’s Vladimir Putin to sign up to the Paris Agreement. But when it comes to actually reducing Germany’s climate footprint, her governments’ actions have been woefully half-hearted. Following a tiny slump during the pandemic, carbon dioxide emissions are up again, and it looks unlikely that Germany will hit its target of a 65% drop in emissions from 1990 levels.

Meanwhile, after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, Merkel rushed to fast track Germany’s plan to drop nuclear power. Yet renewables haven’t picked up enough to fill in the gap in power production. Instead, Merkel has pushed for the Nord Stream pipeline (admittedly initiated by her predecessor Gerhard Schröder, who now even sits on the operator’s board) through the Baltic Sea, enabling Germany to pipe in Russian gas directly without paying fees to those pesky middlemen such as Ukraine and the Czech Republic. Did her moral compass slide off deck?

And then, as always in Germany, there is das Auto. Successive Merkel governments have been slavishly beholden to the car industry. How else are we to explain Dieselgate, where it took the US authorities — and not the corrupt or incompetent German regulators — to reveal that Volkswagen was installing software that enabled its cars to cheat during emissions testing. Sales of German cars fell briefly. But few heads rolled.

Instead, Merkel merkelled: she held ‘diesel summits’ at which the hitherto extremely profitable carmakers — the perpetrators — begged for and received mountains of cash in the form of subsidies and government-funded customer incentives to prop up demand for electric, petrol and — yep — diesel cars of the slightly cleaner variety.

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By James Hawes

But Dieselgate was, for the most part, unexceptional. The Merkel years were defined by scandals of incompetence and corruption, none of which, incredibly, stuck to the chancellor herself. She had a knack for outsourcing difficult decisions to commissions, for delegating hot button issues to her foot soldiers. It was always easy for the press to point a finger to one of her flailing ministers. She remained aloof from the mudslinging — while working on her ‘moral compass’ act with earnest speeches and high-profile international negotiations.

Yes, she was Germany’s first female leader, and the first chancellor from the East. But the fact that she was a protestant pastor’s daughter in a communist country — a tale of humble origins spun in every English-language profile — didn’t make her the deeply moral politician so many made her out to be. Rather, during the Trump years, when it felt that the world was being taken over by blustering male populists, her plodding, unflashy style made her stand out. Against that backdrop, her measured mediocrity was mistaken for a moral virtue.

That probably isn’t what Obama had in mind when he spoke of her saintly principles. But let’s not forget that even saints are only human.

I owe my life, no doubt, to an American pilot I’ve never met, who dropped a bomb a couple of years ago on ISIS fighters in the garden of the surrounded farmhouse in rural Deir Ezzor where I and SDF fighters huddled, waiting to be overrun. In these modern wars, the bombs that come hurtling out of the sky, rending the air like a bolt of lightning, land with pinpoint accuracy, transforming the course of a battle in an instant, like the judgment of an angry and invisible god.

Over the years, in battles across northeastern Syria, I watched the US Air Force rain down death on ISIS fighters, and then wandered, hours or days later, through the carnage that ensued: mangled bodies in their dozens, grey with cement dust or black with putrefaction, hurled by the explosion into all manner of strange and inhuman shapes.

In Raqqa five years ago, I embedded with Arab fighters of the SDF as they called in airstrikes against ISIS militants, which would level entire apartment blocks to dislodge one sniper. A year later, I followed local volunteers as they dragged the shrivelled, stinking bodies of airstrike victims from the city’s rubble: ISIS wives or local civilians, identifiable only by the detritus of a life suddenly cut short — passport photos, purses, makeup bags and soft toys. 

The devastation of Raqqa after the battle, its apartment blocks crushed by the pinpoint precision of American military technology, looked hardly less total than that of rebel-held Eastern Aleppo, levelled by the wantonly imprecise barrel bombing of the Syrian regime, whose helicopters hovered unbearably over the city like flies over a dining table, disgorging their bombs at random. Yet even if the effect, in destroyed buildings, seemed much the same, surely the morality of the two approaches was different? 

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By emphasising precision and at least making a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties, surely the American way of bombing is an act morally distinct from the indiscriminate punishment dealt out by the Syrian regime? If the intentions are good, can the results be evil?

It is, in part, to answer this question that the Yale legal scholar Samuel Moyn has written the new book Humane, an exploration of how the West’s effort to conduct wars while minimising harm has had the unintended consequence of creating a world of forever war. He takes his cue from a speech Tolstoy puts into the mouth of his character Prince Andrei in War and Peace, in which the Russian aristocrat notes that war should be kept as brutal as possible, otherwise the temptation to keep waging it will become too great. As Moyn notes, “humanitarianism led advocates to compromise in pursuit of humane war and publics to feel good enough about themselves in the bargain to permit it to go on and on”, with the result that “endless war has become part of the way Americans live now”.

Rattling through the twin strands of the initially European effort to impose humanitarian rules on war, and the parallel American effort to abolish war altogether, Moyn assembles the evidence for his thesis: that from the Clinton era onwards, the mantra of Never Again has led the United States into an endless mission to bomb more and more of the earth in pursuit of global harmony. As he observes, “of all the peoples in the annals of warfare, Americans are the ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued as superior precisely for being more humane, and one tolerated by audiences for that very reason”.

A non-interventionist of a strain once dominant in American politics and only now slowly becoming the hegemonic worldview once again, Moyn is a critic of the process by which the postwar American empire legitimated itself through war for humanitarian ends. After World War Two, as he notes, “self-styled internationalists… insisted that America had to commit to a globalised peace ‘scheme’”, yet “it would only emerge slowly that this option meant committing the country to global war”. 

Victory in World War Two and then in the Cold War both stood for Moyn as roads not taken, as American leaders refused to give up the prospect of global domination. Following the Vietnam War, as American military elites committed themselves to eliminating its indiscriminate bombing and targeted war crimes, the new discipline of International Humanitarian Law fused with the fact of America’s sudden global preeminence to create the logic for liberal interventionism.

As Moyn notes, in the decades following Vietnam, the Western popular memory recentred the Holocaust into the war’s retrospective justification: “Peripheral in moral consciousness before, ‘ethnic cleansing’, culminating in genocide, became the defining evil of war past and present.” Coupled with unchallenged American hegemony, “the new Holocaust memory coincided with the aftermath of decolonisation, and a skepticism along with it that others were up to the challenge of ruling themselves. The result was not a demand for peace but for interventionist justice.” 

With the postwar taboo on initiating wars obscured, America was now morally entitled — encouraged, even — to launch its own wars in contravention of international law, as long as it could be argued that they prevented genocides: yet “no-one asked at the time whether that implied that war itself — especially if it could be purged of its cruelty — was not that bad”. For Moyn as for Realist scholars, the two notionally distinct strands of interventionist thought, “foreign policy neoconservatism and liberal internationalism”, found themselves “closer to each other than their followers liked to admit”.

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From the Clinton era, which “did the most to drive the drift into militarism, no matter the legality of the wars involved”, through to the advice of scholars like John Yoo, who famously provided legal cover for the Bush administration’s use of torture against captives in the War on Terror, Moyn traces the humanitarian and legal steps by which the American empire committed itself to endless, global war. Yet it was the Obama administration which really committed America to constant war, in a process by which the President elected on a peace platform became “a permanent if humane war president”, the architect of a massive expansion of drone strikes — a means to avoid the moral cloud of torture, by instead simply assassinating perceived wrongdoers — and of special forces operations on the ground. 

Moyn’s central thesis is that the well-intentioned humanisation of war functioned “as a spoonful of sugar intended to help the medicine of endless war go down”; and that the push to forever war was driven by the liberal interventionist pressures of human rights activists, who demanded “even more humane war than the good guys were willing to offer”. It is a neat argument, but surely an incomplete one.

It is primarily the vast disparity of power, and the almost total absence of risk to American pilots and drone operators that allows these wars to rumble on forever, not the minimising of harm to foreign civilians. It is only if American casualties were higher, and not civilian ones, that we would sooner see an end to America’s wars of choice. The pinpoint accuracy with which a missile can be sent to its chosen target does not mean that, in the fog of war, the target was well chosen in the first place. 

The recent extermination by drone of a blameless family in central Kabul only hit the headlines because it happened in the capital: if it had happened in the countryside, as has happened thousands of times in the past two decades, it is doubtful that anyone would know about it; and fundamentally, even in such a high profile case, few people in America cared much even then.

As for the push Moyn discerns by liberal interventionist commentators to drag American power into distant wars, a more cynical interpretation would be that moral causes only initiate American wars when the potential targets are already American foes. There was no clamour in Washington for a campaign against Saudi Arabia for its bombing of Yemen, for example, or against Bahrain for its lethal suppression of demonstrations, or against Turkey for its scorched earth suppression of armed revolts in the Kurdish east and invasions of northeastern Syria, or against Azerbaijan for its aggression against Armenia and beheading of captives. When the human rights oppressor is a US ally, advocates and journalists either tend not to make the case for intervention, or it is ignored.

Ultimately, for all his focus on the humanitisation of war, it is empire that Moyn is against: if America were militarily incapable of intervening in tangled squabbles at the other end of the world, it would feel no moral compulsion to do so. That compulsion may be the moral justification for empire, but fundamentally it is its product. Where there is no capacity to act, there is no moral compulsion. There will be no American war for the Uighurs, because it is not in America’s power to launch or win one; human rights abuses like Xinjiang are deployed as a diplomatic tool to delegitimise China in the international sphere rather than as a call to arms.

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Civilians will always die in wars, and Moyn does observe that it is better on the whole that fewer die, even if he is against wars in general, and American wars in particular. But did unipolarity foist on America the moral obligation to intervene in distant wars for humanitarian ends? Slightly unsatisfyingly, Moyn evades answering this question, but then it is perhaps an unresolvable one. He observes that the initial humanitarian cause in Libya morphed into “an illegal regime change, with deplorable consequences for that country”. Yet the later intervention against ISIS improved the lives of many Syrian and Iraqi civilians, even if it extinguished the lives of many others. 

But at this point, balancing this difficult central dilemma may already be a historical question. The 2015 Russian intervention in Syria marked the end of the unipolar moment by showing that a rival power, by committing itself to a cause peripheral to the United States’s core concerns, can call the fading superpower’s bluff. And contrary to Moyn’s assertion that we may be entering an era of total US global policing, the rise of China has vastly accelerated the end of unchallenged unipolarity.

A war with China where the US may lose tens of thousands of personnel in the first day is a qualitatively different prospect from vaporising a defenceless presumed enemy at the push of a button, and the Biden administration does not seem in a hurry to enter into it. America’s responsibility to protect was only ever a function of its capacity to do so. Now that capacity appears in doubt, the question is already moot.

We are back to a world of wars of necessity, for naked geopolitical advantage, and not wars of choice, driven by moral compulsion. The results, over the coming decades, may yet answer Moyn’s unanswered question of whether America’s attempted humanisation of war was really so bad after all.

In one, a white supremacist shot anti-racism protesters in cold blood, and was acquitted because of his skin colour. In the other, a teenager tried to defend a community from violence, and ended up shooting two criminal lunatics in self-defence.

But why are these stories so irreconcilable? It’s a good rule of thumb that where people find it impossible to agree, it’s usually because there’s a fundamental difference in their assumptions about the world.

The Rittenhouse argument is just such a case. It’s powered by a profound disagreement about human nature: one that fuels many of the most intractable modern culture wars, from Mumsnet bunfights about babycare to arguments about classroom discipline and what the police force is for.

Are humans naturally good given the right circumstances? Or are we flawed and in need of threats and guidelines to keep us on the straight and narrow? The split is a legacy of radical ideas stretching back to the revolutionary 18^th century.

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Perhaps the most famous proponent of intrinsic human goodness is Rousseau, who claimed in Emile (1762) that children are born virtuous. As Rousseau sees it, we only need freedom, love and the right environment to spontaneously come to an understanding of what’s right.

When Emile was first published, it stood in stark challenge to the then-dominant view, emerging from the Christian tradition, that humans are tainted by ‘original sin’. From this vantage point, we’re naturally flawed, and must always struggle against our less virtuous instincts. Rousseau’s claim so appalled adherents of this then-dominant view that copies of his book were burned in the street.

Today, though, the boot is on the other foot. The high-status view among contemporary elites is unmistakeably Team Rousseau.

At the tiniest scale, it’s expressed in the school of parenting that believes it’s wrong or even cruel to teach children how to live. I’ve written before about the currently popular ideas of ‘attachment parenting’ and ‘gentle parenting’, which emphasise self-discovery in a loving environment over routine, authority or punishment — and about how these views skew wealthy and liberal.

In education settings, the same idea appears as ‘child-centred pedagogy’, an approach that emphasises individual pathways and discovery over rote learning and teachers as authority figures. And at the biggest scale, it crops up as the claim that all the root causes of crime are external to humans: poverty, trauma, discrimination and so on. From this perspective, if we could only replace policing with tailored community services that eliminated these root causes, there would no longer be any crime.

Even outbreaks of mass public disorder are treated by Team Rousseau as an unfortunate-yet-understandable response to bad governance: when BLM protesters in Baltimore toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus last year, the Democrat politician Nanci Pelosi responded by shrugging it off as a natural expression of that community’s wishes. If the community doesn’t want the statue, she said, “the statue shouldn’t be there”. From this vantage point, public unrest is something akin to the weather: a naturally-occurring phenomenon in which leaders must strive to create the conditions for goodness, or else “people will do what they do”.

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If angry 18^th century moralists burned Rousseau’s book on education, today the moral majority is more likely to dogpile people who disagree with the belief that we’re all born good. Katherine Birbalsingh, headteacher of ‘Britain’s strictest school’, Michaela Community School in London, recently faced demands that she be fired after she referenced ‘original sin’ in the context of teaching. From the Team Original Sin perspective, as Michaela’s deputy head Jonathan Porter argued last year, providing empathy and interesting lessons won’t guarantee you good classroom behaviour. To Porter, children aren’t so much naturally good as capable of being habituated to the good. But that, he suggests, means making clear statements about what you believe to be good, setting rules on that basis, and enforcing them consistently.

This might be doable within a single school with a strong leader, such as Michaela. What happens, though, when a sizeable proportion of the ruling class think this approach is not just misguided but immoral?

Last summer, rioting broke out first in America and then worldwide —prompting US Senator Tom Cotton to write an op-ed arguing that order was important in and of itself and suggesting the army should be deployed to quell the riots. The ensuing shouting-match between Team Original Sin and Team Rousseau ended the career of the NYT’s comment editor.

Implicitly, then, for Team Rousseau, disorder is understandable when people are oppressed, while order is a nice-to-have, and only attainable if you create the right conditions to draw out people’s natural goodness. In schools, we can only expect pupils to behave if the teacher’s doing it right. And in the public square, we can only expect people not to riot if we abolish systemic oppression.

Applying this model to policing means diverting resources from enforcing order to addressing social issues. San Francisco, for example, voted last year to redirect $120m of funding from policing to community projects, with the aim of eliminating the causes of crime rather than simply punishing criminals.

But there’s always the nagging worry: what do you do with people who persistently refuse to have their natural goodness drawn out? And here, perhaps, we find a clue as to why Team Rousseau tends to skew wealthy: it’s easier to believe people are naturally good if you’ve led a sheltered life.

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As a child, Rousseau himself wasn’t allowed to play with other children. And it’s conceivable that more daily rough-and-tumble with his peers might have tempered the rosy view of natural childish virtue presented in Emile. When people who have led sheltered lives apply Team Rousseau beliefs in less rarefied settings, the result isn’t always as salutary as hoped. Even innocent experiments and self-discovery can impact negatively on others — especially where the experiment (innocent or otherwise) is in how far you can push one of your classmates.

For Team Original Sin, Birbalsingh advocates dealing with such schoolyard conflicts by imposing norms of public order: that is, ‘tight behaviour systems’ and ‘high expectations’. For Team Rousseau, though, it’s less clear what to do.

Research suggests that empathy-based ‘restorative justice’ approaches to school discipline yield mixed results at best. And when applied to law and order, Team Rousseau likewise runs aground on the problem of those who refuse to be rehabilitated. In San Francisco, as the focus of law and order has shifted to rehabilitation, incidences of burglary are rocketing — a fact that seems down to a minority of repeat offenders.

What can be done about this, especially where police no longer get involved? One plausible consequence is rising vigilantism. We can’t know definitively what motivated one teenager with an assault rifle to travel to a riot zone; perhaps he really was just attracted to the mayhem, and looking for a reason to join in. Or perhaps he thought he was making a last, heroic stand for order and in defence of those unable to defend themselves.

For when public norms of order collapse, or are undermined in the name of empathy, the only law that remains is that of brute strength. In San Francisco, even previously committed opponents of gun ownership are now responding to the disintegration of public order with talk of buying weapons.

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Most of the Rittenhouse culture war boils down to an argument over whether Rittenhouse was the bully, or the one who stands up to bullies. But what this argument ignores is the fate of those who are neither bully nor challenger. The weak, the old, the frightened or otherwise defenceless.

Perhaps the empathetic elites of Team Rousseau are simply secure enough in their leafy suburbs or gated compounds to ignore any unfortunate side-effects of treating order as secondary to freedom. But this raises the troubling possibility that sacrificing public order for empathy and individual freedom is, in practice, less high-minded than a dereliction of care to those that can’t defend themselves.

Worse still, the lesson from Michaela is that at root this isn’t really about scruples at all. It’s about a crippling lack of moral self-confidence. For you can’t set clear rules and form habits unless you have a clear idea of the good — and it’s this vision of the good that is the true missing piece.

Team Rousseau insists that human goodness is natural rather than ordered and enforced, and this in turn affords its believers the right to withhold judgement, and avoid making clear statements about the good. In practice, then, this amounts to an elite right — a duty, in fact — to shirk the central responsibility of elites since time immemorial: moral leadership.

And in the absence of clear moral leadership, the alarming prospect is that instead we’ll witness a proliferation of Rittenhouses: self-appointed individual guardians of a public order abandoned by the elites whose responsibility it is to uphold.

To describe Erasmus Darwin — the grandfather of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton — as simply a doctor would be selling him short. He was a figure the stature of Samuel Johnson. Unlike Johnson, however, he stayed in the Midlands and was transfixed by science. Darwin was a pivotal member of the Lunar Society, that constellation of thinkers who believed in the power of science to improve humanity. Coleridge, his friend and correspondent, described him as “the most original-minded man”.

He was also an abolitionist. The emancipation badge, the medallion with the inscription “Am I Not a Man and a Brother” that inspired Darwin’s verse, was made for the Society for the Abolition of the Slavery. It was the most popular symbol in the fight against the slave trade in the late eighteenth century. And it was created by Darwin’s good friend: Josiah Wedgwood.

Stoke has unfairly acquired the status of a provincial backwater. It is a Brexit city and its football team is a punchline: a foreign player can be good, but he can’t be that good if he can’t do it on a rainy night in Stoke. But Stoke’s most famous son was the emblematic figure of the long eighteenth century. Wedgwood’s work is mentioned in the novels of Austen and the letters of Gibbon. He made ceramics for Catherine the Great and the Georgian Royal Family; his family-surgeon and close friend was Erasmus Darwin; his other friends included Joseph Priestley, the minister and scientist who discovered oxygen.

Tristram Hunt, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and former Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, has written a fluent and insightful biography of Wedgwood. Near the start of The Radical Potter, Hunt states: “Wedgwood’s marriage of technology and design, retail precision and manufacturing efficiency, transformed forever the production of pottery, and ushered in a mass consumer society”. But what is clear from the biography is that Wedgwood was also responding to the demands of a new consumer society.

By 1700, Britain was behind in terms of ceramic production. Japan and China were masters of exquisite design. British ceramics, by contrast, were crude. Lorenzo de Medici, the most powerful supporter of art in Renaissance Italy, loved Chinese porcelain. And so did Henry VIII. Louis XIV of France adored Chinese porcelain so much he even created a porcelain pavilion for, Hunt writes, “ceramic-themed assignations with his mistress Mme de Montespan”.

However, as Hunt notes, “over the course of the early eighteenth century, the need to substitute Asian and European imports with indigenous manufacture was vital in the development of a mass-market, consumer goods industry”. This need was satisfied by Wedgwood.

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The Wedgwood family had been minor potters in North Staffordshire for two centuries before Josiah was born. What made North Staffordshire so useful was the proximity of clay and coal in the environment. Pottery ran through the veins of the family the way clay and coal veined the earth.

Wedgwood developed a leg disability from smallpox when he was 12. This meant he could never be a “thrower” — someone who operates the foot pedal on the potter’s wheel. Misfortune, was in this case, a stroke of luck. His disability allowed him to instead get stuck in on the more cerebral aspects of the business. “Design, innovation and business were aspects of the pottery trade”, Hunt writes, “to which Wedgwood could devote the attention that he could no longer apply to the thrower’s bench”.

The task of Wedgwood and his business partner Thomas Bentley was, in the words of Hunt, to “see off the attraction of luxury Chinese porcelain, dominate the fast-moving retail market, satiate the insatiable appetite of the middling sort with fashionable products sold at a healthy profit and soak up the emulative spending power of the increasingly taste-conscious Georgian consumer”.

Wedgwood came from a nonconformist religious tradition; he subscribed to political radicalism and popular democracy. His business success was nevertheless beholden to the patronage of the aristocracy. He made a creamware for Princess Charlotte, the wife of King George III “who set the fashion in London”. Hunt emphasises this ideological fissure when he notes that “a luxury product endorsed by high society was thus by far the most effective means for developing a profitable, mass-market commodity and if Thomas Bentley and Josiah Wedgwood were to secure the patronage of the trend-setting nobility they had to jettison their political radicalism, Nonconformist ethos and thirst for democracy”. The fissure, however, would be more brutally exposed by Wedgwood’s entanglement with the trans-atlantic slave trade.

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The demand for ceramics was linked to a demand for other goods in the eighteenth century; porcelain was a pretty appendage to drink and grub. In particular, the period witnessed a tea craze. Tea was imported by the East India Company from China. The Company also imported sugar from slave plantations in the Caribbean. Sugar went from being a luxury product to a “dietary staple”. It was used to make chocolate, jam and treacle. But most importantly it was used to drink tea. 8,000 tons of sugar were imported to Britain in 1663; it was 97,000 by 1775. Britain had developed a sweet tooth.

But it was a sweet tooth that encouraged an industry characterised by savage cruelty. As Adam Hochschild makes clear in his book Bury the Chains: “When slavery ended in the United States, less than half a million slaves imported over the centuries had grown to a population of nearly four million. When it ended in the British West Indies, total slave imports of well over two million left a surviving slave population of only about 670,000”. Wedgwood was complicit in this industry: he exported pottery to slave plantation estates in Barbados and Jamaica. And he personally took commissions from slave-owners. But by the 1780s, he was passionately opposed to the slave trade.

The committee for the abolition of the slave trade was founded in 1787 by William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp: the Three Musketeers of British Anti-Slavery activism (With Olaudah Equiano as d’Artagnan). Wedgwood was subsequently elected to the committee. During this period, he “wrote impassioned letters, circulated petitions, attended meetings and joined boycotts”.

He also created the emancipation medallion, which was, as Hunt notes, “the dominant motif of anti-slavery activism until illustrations from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin became prominent in the nineteenth century.

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Wedgwood was, so it seems, a bundle of contradictions. Much of his working life was spent trying to negotiate his desire for business success with his concern for social justice. Eric Williams, the Trinidadian statesman and historian, famously argued that the British ended the slave trade for financial rather than moral reasons. For Williams, this is an indictment of Britain. Many people today — on the Left and Right — denounce corporations and businesses who ostentatiously display support for social justice movements. The phrase ‘virtue signalling’ is typically used as an insult.

Although many critics denounce social justice warriors and woke capitalists as sanctimonious, the underlying criticism of them is that they are insufficiently moral; that they are engaging in activism to sell something or gratify their vanity or be in with the Cool Kids. They are not doing it simply because it is the right thing to do.

But what is clear from Hunt’s biography of Wedgwood is that the Staffordshire potter used our materialism and desire to emulate high-status people to advance the abolitionist movement. The materialism and trend-setting craze that fuelled the slave trade — the desire for sweetened tea and sumptuous ceramics to adorn them — also undermined it: this time by seeing respectable people wearing a beautifully-crafted medallion. As Hunt writes: “Even though the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century had helped to fuel the Atlantic slave trade, Wedgwood’s understanding of its ethos of emulation now enabled him to popularise abolitionism more effectively than any number of Sharp petitions or Equiano readings”.

Social movements, political ideologies and religions don’t spread because we individually analyse beliefs and say This is Obviously Good and This is Obviously Bad. We are sociable creatures: we care about what our peers do and the behaviour of charismatic people. This isn’t a normative judgement; it is a descriptive fact. Rather than bemoaning virtue signalling and woke capitalism, we ought to understand how we actually behave. The spread of an ideological movement through material interests is not necessarily a bad thing. 

Which is not to say it’s necessarily good either. The moral focus should be on the beliefs themselves, rather than how they are spread. I am critical of many contemporary vogueish social justice movements. However, I am critical of them because I think they are wrong and or harmful, not because many high-status people support them. 

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The assumption which seems to underpin the view that it is necessarily bad if moral movements are spread by non-moral means is that we are solely motivated by ethical reasoning. Any deviation from moralising therefore constitutes a betrayal of the principles we claim to espouse. But this assumption is untrue. We don’t only care about right or wrong; we also care about status.

A part of me thinks we should be more moralistic, not least because I think people who espouse an essentialist form of identity politics, and companies that jump on the bandwagon of social justice, flatten rich individual experiences. But that’s probably my religious prejudice speaking: talk of individual moral conscience only makes sense by presupposing a coherent and distinctive self. That we have a soul.

But we are also mammals. The means through which our moral norms spread will always be somewhat imperfect, haphazard, bungling; reflecting the vagaries of status. Charles Darwin’s paternal grandfather was Erasmus Darwin. His maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood.

I made a point of not watching this slaughterhouse video, even though for the past two years I’ve been doing a Leverhulme-funded study on how different audiences respond to jihadi execution videos. I’d already watched my fair share of jihadi snuff, and I doubted that watching another monstrous ISIS film would have enhanced my understanding of the group and its propaganda. (ISIS, let us not forget, has used children in videos to kill hostages and has filmed a group of men in a cage being lowered into a swimming pool.)

This is the bit in the article where I’m supposed to tell you about how watching copious amounts of jihadi atrocity porn has left me mentally scarred and traumatised, and how even the most innocuous thing can trigger a memory of watching a captive getting his head cut off, blown off or crushed by a tank. It’s the bit where you’re supposed to marvel at my bravery in taking on such a dark subject, martyring myself in the name of public social science: “I watched these godforsaken videos so you didn’t have to…”

Well, that’s not my “truth”, and we’ll get to that in due course. But in the meantime: what are we to make of the increasingly repeated claim that doing research on any one of the vast litany of horrors in human history is a mental health risk? Such statements must, of course, be taken seriously. But by foregrounding the experiences of the researcher at the expense of history’s actual victims, do they not risk veering into moral narcissism?

As part of my research, I’ve interviewed jihadism scholars, researchers and journalists who have exposed themselves to this material over an extended period. The overwhelming conclusion that emerges from these interviews is, as you would expect, that watching jihadi atrocity videos exerts a mental toll on those who do it.

Michael Krona, a media scholar researching ISIS and Salafi-jihadist propaganda at Malmö University in Sweden told me: “I think the videos with kids as executioners could be the worst thing that I have seen. That really got to me emotionally, especially as a parent myself.” Referring to the material he was watching and documenting back in 2015, when ISIS was pumping out more than 200 videos, radio programs, magazines and photo reports a week, he said: “It was impossible for me to switch off. I had to start counselling around that time when it became too much. It took a long time before I could learn to structure the exposure and to make it emotionally bearable.”

Other researchers have testified to similar feelings. “There are moments, I find, where my everyday life is invaded by these scenes,” jihadism scholar Charlie Winter has said of ISIS’s worst atrocity videos. Seamus Hughes, who researches extremism at George Washington University, has likewise said: “You look at violent imagery all day, and it gets to you. And you want to tell yourself it doesn’t, but it does.”

I can readily understand and empathise with their reactions; when I first started doing my own research on ISIS video-propaganda, I experienced several months of night terrors, which I duly treated with alcohol and antidepressants. (I don’t recommend this.)

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But the temptation to classify these unpleasant experiences as clinically traumatic seems to me not just overblown but also a category-error, mistaking spiritual harms for psychological maladies to be diagnosed and treated. This certainly seems to be the case with the historian and journalist James Robins, who, in a recent article, claimed that “the phenomenon of the historian traumatised by history remains unstudied and is not widely known”. A few sentences later, like clockwork, comes the bit about Robins’s own torments:

“After writing a book on the Armenian Genocide, a process that took me five years, I found it impossible to slip comfortably into sleep. All kinds of catastrophes visited me — still visit me — in that space before dreams: ugly visions, jarring scenes from my research.”

I have encountered similar expressions of anguish — mostly on Twitter, of course — from colleagues in my own field of criminology, especially those who visit prisons, detention centres and interview victims of abuse. Some have even published peer-reviewed articles about their experiences of trauma.

Of course, anyone who probes these accounts with a sceptical eye risks being denounced as an insensitive prick. But it is hard to avoid the air of moral narcissism that hangs over some of these trauma accounts. After all, the moral narcissist is, as Ed West recently observed, someone who manages to make everything, including the most atrocious deeds and crimes in faraway places, all about them.

The historian Karen Halttunen brilliantly captures the type in her article on “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain”. Discussing the English humanitarian reform movement of the eighteenth century, Halttunen described how it was inspired by a “cult of sensibility”, with its heroic exemplar being “the man of feeling” whose “tender-hearted susceptibility to the torments of others was the mark of his deeply virtuous nature”.

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Why is the Anglo media portraying France as the villain?

By Liam Duffy

The so-called “man of feeling” was also a man full of shit, buying and showing off the “tableau after tableau of pitiful suffering” for the purpose of, in Halttunen’s words, “enhancing (and demonstrating) their virtue”. And it didn’t take long for others to notice their hypocrisy, as Halttunen records:

“Oliver Goldsmith ridiculed sentimentalists for weeping over the sufferings of helpless animals even as they consumed at dinner the flesh of six different creatures in a single fricassee…. John Keats and William Hazlitt would soon charge that the poetry of sensibility actually explored not the feelings of the imagined sufferer but the feelings of the spectator watching that sufferer and was geared to demonstrating the spectator/reader’s own exquisite sensibility.”

However, the most serious charge levelled against the humanitarian sentimentalists was that they were secretly getting off on spectacles of suffering; that they were voyeurs. “The literary scenario of suffering, which made ethics a matter of viewing the pain of another, from the outset lent itself to an aggressive kind of voyeurism,” Halttunen noted. The reformers were aware of such criticisms, and therefore “filled their writings with close descriptions of their own immediate emotional response to the spectacle of suffering, to demonstrate that their sensibilities remained undamaged”.

This, I think, helps to explain the proliferation of trauma discourse among academics interested in human malevolence and cruelty: their public proclamations about how their research has left them traumatised serves to deflect or pre-empt any suspicion of voyeurism and resultant desensitisation. They are decent men and women of feeling, after all.

But there’s also another, perhaps even greater, incentive at work: namely, the seemingly inexorable temptation in our culture to proclaim a victim status. By portraying their research-work as potentially dangerous and traumatising, privileged academics who would otherwise have little or no warrant for claiming victimhood can do so, and thus enjoy the deference and accommodation that comes with such a status.

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Stop trying to explain mass shootings

By Tom Chivers

As one well-known war correspondent told me, on the condition of anonymity:

“There is a bit of a trauma sweep-stakes that has come into existence, where one of the ways that you can get credit is by describing how much you’ve been hurt, which creates an incentive for people to over-perform the wounds that they’ve received…

When I’ve given talks on ISIS, at least at every other talk there’s someone who asks about how awful it’s been for me, and I will always be honest about that. I’ll say I would not recommend that anybody do this who’s sensitive to these types of things, but I’m okay. I’m worse for having seen these things, but it’s not something that’s going to destroy my life. I know what the reaction of those audiences will be when I say that. They are hoping that I say that this has really fucked me up. There are correspondents who, throughout their whole careers, have made a lot of hay out of saying how war has really screwed them up, even though they were never well to begin with. You don’t get a book contract by saying I went to these horrible places and was fine. Nobody’s going to read that.”

But at least war correspondents, however prone some may be to self-pity and self-dramatisation, ventured out to war zones and, in many cases, put their lives on the line in doing so. By contrast, the trauma merchants of the ivory tower have taken no such risks, physical or moral. And yet here they are engaging in online bonding rituals over the profundity of their moral sensitivities.

For if trauma is to mean anything, it has to mean real suffering that comes from direct and close confrontations with death, dying and mortal threat. However uncomfortable it is to conduct research into dark episodes of human history, it isn’t remotely comparable to witnessing real horrors or being on the receiving end of them. That isn’t to doubt the sincerity of those researchers who claim to be traumatised. But it does strike me that the symptoms of psychological distress they report, from sleeplessness to anxiety to palpitations, are really vestiges of moral shock and disturbance.

 “Every time I saw an execution by ISIS, and felt my soul diminished, that feeling of diminution also reminded me that I still had a soul left to wound,” wrote Graeme Wood in a brilliant essay on his own experiences of watching jihadi atrocity propaganda. As I understand it, the diminishment Wood is referring to is the nasty realisation that, just like those poor souls whose grisly demise we have chosen or happened to watch, we, too, will die — even if it is in less violent circumstances. The problem with medicalising these universal feelings of dread and vulnerability is that it implies that they can somehow be “treated”, instead of accepted as an unavoidable part of life.

Lockdown has disorientated everyone’s social life, with the indefinite suspension of the night-time economy — pubs, bars, nightclubs, restaurants, theatres and music venues. Of course, some pleasure-seeking inevitably has to be sacrificed temporarily for the sake of arresting the spread of the virus and protecting those most vulnerable. But the sacrifice has hit singletons and voluptuaries particularly hard.

The last year has been a puritan’s wet dream: social distancing has devastated all the industries that facilitate casual sex; some countries have imposed alcohol restrictions; the film industry even consulting the old priggish Hays Code for filming intimate scenes; universities restricting parties and hooking up on campus in the interest of public health. And now a third lockdown has once again cancelled all opportunities for us to go out and enjoy ourselves.

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Don't demonise the 'male gaze'

By Ralph Leonard

Worse, it’s felt as if the risk of spreading the virus has been exploited to bolster an old prejudice: that spending time in these places is inherently immoral. The stench of puritanism, which H.L Mencken summarised as “the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy”, has risen to the surface to pollute the nostrils of society. Official Western morality — whether represented by Plato, Christianity or Kant — has always regarded hedonism as fundamentally bad. The new Puritans, like the old ones, like to police the way other people get their pleasure.

You don’t need to have broken any rule to earn their ire: to even complain about what it feels like not being able to date or party, or even socialise with friends over a drink, is regarded as inappropriate, dismissed as inconsequential, in comparison to the noble goal of saving lives.

And so no one protests that the lifestyles of the lustful, the promiscuous, the sluts and fuckbois (“libertine men and scarlet women” as The Music Man refers to them) have been turned upside down. Some hopeful young romantics gave e-dating a go; others tried out “Zoom nightclubs”. The use of online porn has increased and OnlyFans has risen meteorically. But the pleasures of the flesh have been out of bounds.

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Even though I knew this state was temporary, in the early days of lockdown an irrational, paranoid voice inside me did entertain fears that the so called “new normal” would irrevocably abolish these pleasures. In stark contrast, the neo-puritans celebrated the current chaste state of affairs — even calling for it to continue. They imagine Covid-19 to be the nail in the coffin for the “soul-eroding” hook-up culture; they reminded us that there are dangerous “consequences” to casual sex again.

Thank science for the vaccine then. Not only is it a testament to human endeavour,  it is also a precious golden ticket to the return of a varied and exciting social life. Some predict, or rather salivate over, an explosion of decadence and debauchery — a “roaring twenties” of the 21st century. Epidemiologist Dr Nicholas Christakis certainly thinks such an era is on its way, arguing in his recent book, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live, that the rest of the 2020s will be defined by “sexual licentiousness” as people will be “relentlessly seeking social interaction”.

During the peaks of pandemics, he argues, people tend to be more risk-averse, frugal, abstemious and socially reserved. Afterwards, all of these trends reverse, and people spend and socialise more liberally than ever before. The most obvious comparison, of course, is the Jazz Age following the Spanish Flu and the First World War that witnessed “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it. The era was made legendary by the Flappers and Greenwich Village; it developed new social and cultural freedoms, especially for women, who turned against stifling domesticity (as so many of us now long to.)

During the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the 14th century, the belief that the end of the world was near was so popular that survivors became wildly hedonistic, organising lavish parties and feasts in ale houses, simply to celebrate the fact that they were alive amidst the spectre of death and misery all around them. “They spent day and night moving from one tavern to the next, drinking without mode or measure…engaging only in those activities that gave them pleasure”, observed the contemporary writer Boccaccio on the excesses of the era.

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Russia's brief encounter with the sexual revolution

By Daniel Kalder

There are even accounts of survivors going to their local graveyard for a quick shag before repenting in church to laugh in the face of death, which later led to the Papal office threatening fines and excommunication. Moreover, the plague saw the de facto institutionalisation of prostitution, with brothels providing a new source of income for the authorities and arguably ensuring social stability by serving as an outlet for riotous lower class men, especially in areas where they outnumbered young women.

In the 1980s the HIV/AIDS epidemic was supposed to have been the end of the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s. It was viewed by religious fundamentalists as cosmic karma for the promiscuity of gay men. The epidemic contributed to the demise of the gay-centred bathhouse culture and shifted campaigners’ focus from sexual liberation to gay marriage. The porn theatres that were once a hallmark in Time Square, New York were gentrified in favour of “family values and safety”.

Still, the HIV/AIDs epidemic was succeeded by the sex positivity of the 1990s, during which the West was drunk on the rather shallow liberal optimism of the ‘end of history’ following the end of the Cold War. That era saw the Spice Girls, the golden age of lads mags and the rise of queer culture, kink/BDSM and Tantric sex in mainstream pop culture — and their steady integration into the consumer economy.

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Will coronavirus change the world?

By Ed West

A pattern is apparent: human beings are pleasure seeking-creatures. After a period of retrenchment, sacrifice and austerity, an orgy of decadence and debauchery isn’t too far away. All that pent-up energy and desire just waits to express itself. Why? Because it feels good. Don’t underestimate the sheer endurance of the human libido, and the lengths we will go to, even in unbearable situations, to satisfy it.

For the neo-puritans who are surreptitiously giddy that Covid-19 will somehow put an end to casual sex and hook-up culture in favour of marriage or at least long term “emotionally committed” relationships: if even HIV/AIDS couldn’t do it, then Covid-19 sure as hell can’t. Humans have always hooked up despite what traditional morality said — and will continue to do so. Once this third — and we can only hope final — lockdown comes to an end, lust will be in the air.

One key motif of modern politics in the past decade has been the recurrence of the antinomy between individualism and communitarianism. This has especially been the case in the Covid-19 pandemic, during which activities like partying have been condemned as individualist selfishness in contrast to our communal obligations to “protect our NHS”. It is important to stress, nevertheless, that hedonistic proclivities aren’t simply about satiating individual desires, but about forming bonds, connection, even intimacy with others.

The “anarchy of the flesh” is an essential part of social life: we drink, eat, party, dance and screw with other people. There is a particular intimacy that one can experience on a dancefloor or in a concert that can evolve into a transcendent experience. This is something to be valued and cherished as part of the human experience — and something to invest and indulge in, when the pandemic is in the past.

Liberalism, the story goes, emerged with the dawn of science in seventeenth century Europe. Instead of “finding certainty in god”, Descartes found it “in the individual”. Each human became “not a subsection of our family, or class, or tribe, or religion, or race, or nation,” writes Dunt. “We are individuals. We can think for ourselves. We have a capacity for reason. This was the philosophical truth that emerged from the ruins of the world certainties.” 

Before Descartes came along, we had the Middle Ages — the age of tyranny and enforced superstition. Then these two revolutionary ideas came along in the early modern period of Descartes — that you are an individual and you are capable of reason — and would, Dunt writes, “go on to destroy the old world and create a new one, based on rights, reason, and liberty.” These two ideas are the axioms of liberalism, and in the seventeenth century they were disseminated, along with the affinal values of scepticism, science, democracy, and human rights.

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Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

As a piece of narrative, this story is enchanting. Imagine the solitary Descartes, in his damp Dutch bedroom, stumbling across the simple idea that would revolutionise his conformist civilisation: cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. This is, in fact, how Dunt presents it. But as a historical account of liberalism, it is erroneous. Liberalism didn’t emerge as a revolt against the certainties of Medieval Christianity; its origins lie in Christianity.

If any individual could be said to have conceived liberalism, it would be the father of Christianity, St. Paul, in the first century. As Larry Siedentop writes in his book Inventing the Individual, “Followers of Jesus began to claim his sacrificial life and death amounted to a dramatic intervention in history, a new revelation of God’s will”. This, not Descartes’s epiphany, was the insight that gave rise to the concept of the individual:

Previously in antiquity it was the patriarchal family that had been the agency of immortality. Now, through the story of Jesus, individual moral agency was raised up as providing a unique window into the nature of things, into the experience of grace rather than necessity, a glimpse of something transcending death.

In other words, in antiquity, your sense of self was grounded in the family network you belonged to. Then came the Pauline moral conviction: you had individual agency.

Siedentop’s direct quotation of Paul’s words is striking in their similarity to Dunt’s exaltation of Descartes: “So if anything is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new”. This moral revolution was grounded in the view that we are all equally made in the image of Christ: neither Jew nor greek, slave nor freeman. And the moral universalism implied by this conviction suggests, as Siedentop puts it, there is “a moral agency potentially available to each and everyone, that is, to individuals”. Rights, like identity, used to belong to tribes — now, they belonged to us, as individuals, since we all individually belong to Christ. And so the individual, as we now more or less understand it, was born. And liberalism depends — fundamentally — on the existence of individuals.

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Why I was wrong about liberalism

By Giles Fraser

Dunt has a habit of presenting historical incidents as clean breaks from the past: Descartes’s discovery; the work of the Leveller philosopher Richard Overton; the French revolution. But it’s worth remembering that these are moments in a gradual evolution of ideas. The effects of epochal events take time to be measured. Siedentop argues, for instance, that although that initial conception of the individual can be traced back to Paul’s moral revolution, it was the canon lawyers of Medieval Europe that really lay the groundwork for our modern conception of liberalism.

The notion of natural law, for example, was rooted in the ancient world, but was revised by Christian moral intuitions to become natural rights. These rights were ascribed to the individual, based on the assumption of underlying moral equality between all persons.

Of course, these principles were not genuinely applied in practice until about five minutes ago in historical time. Nevertheless, as I’ve said, ideas and concepts take their time. As Siedentop puts it:

the pattern by which liberalism and secularism developed from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century resembles nothing so much as the stages through which canon law developed from the twelfth to the fifteenth century…The canonist, so to speak, ‘got there first’.

The person who conceived of the individual was not the embodiment of early modern scepticism but a rambunctious Jew from the 1st century. The people who lay the foundation for modern liberalism were not English Puritan radicals, French Enlightenment libertines, and eccentric Victorians; they were the lawyers and theologians ensconced in the ivory towers of Medieval Europe.

This may seem intuitively strange, but to consider it another way, let’s consult another book published last year: Joseph Henrich’s The Weirdest People in the World. WEIRD stands for western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic. It describes, in short, the psychological profile of people from western countries. This profile is unique. As Henrich writes:

Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, we WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles.

This profile is exactly consonant with how Dunt depicts the liberal — not as a subsection of family or tribe, but as an individual. And indeed, the people in WEIRD countries are the most receptive to liberal concepts and beliefs. But reading Henrich’s book shows clearly that what led to us seeing ourselves as individuals, rather than as simply parts of a larger network, was not the innovation of early modern thinkers. Rather, it was a consequence of the marriage and family proposals of Latin Christianity’s early churches.

Throughout much of history, people lived in dense family networks. Your social circle consisted of your cousins and in-laws. The social norms that came about as a result of this, what Henrich calls kin-based institutions, “constrain people from shopping widely for new friends, business partners, or spouses. Instead, they channel people’s investments into a distinct and largely inherited in-group”. The Medieval Catholic Church changed this. Between the first and thirteenth century, they prohibited both marriage to relatives and polygnous marriage; required bride and groom to publicly consent (I do!); and encouraged couples to set up independent households.

By the end of the Middle Ages, well before Descartes burst onto the scene, Europe was already defined by monogamous and nuclear marriages. People married comparatively late, with both men and women marrying in their mid-20s. Many women never married at all — by 30, 15-25% of north-western European women were unmarried, compared to China where the figure was between 1 and 2%. Families were relatively small, and fertility rates relatively low.

This, ultimately, led to WEIRD psychology. Because we were freed from the constraints of our family or tribe, we became more interested in the idea of ourselves as individuals. It was the policies of the Medieval Catholic church, then, that led to the psychological profile which makes us most receptive to liberal beliefs and concepts.

Dunt does concede in one part of his book that “although modern liberalism is overwhelmingly secular, one of its ironies is that the seeds of its growth were planted by Christians making pious protests against Catholicism”. But he doesn’t go far enough. In fact, it’s only “ironic” because Dunt doesn’t recognise that the term ‘secularism’ is in fact profoundly Christian. As Tom Holland writes in his book Dominion, the very words with which we reject religious authority and proclaim individual conscience derive from Christianity itself: “‘Religion’, ‘secular’, ‘atheist’: none of these are neutral. All, though they derive from the classical past, come freighted with the legacy of Christendom. Fail to appreciate this, and the risk is always of anachronism.”

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The end of secularism is nigh

By Tom Holland

But Dunt, of course, very much wants to stress that liberalism is a radical ideology — perhaps because the word itself has often, in recent years, been characterised as stodgy and slightly embarrassing. Badly dressed centrist dads who revere the EU and Radiohead are liberal. Calling yourself a classical liberal on Twitter is like confessing you wear socks with sandals. Liberalism is also, nowadays, in opposition to populist nationalism and identity politics — beliefs which, in contrast to the popular conception of liberalism, possess a certain vigour.

Dunt’s worry about the anaemic nature of contemporary liberalism is well-founded. So is his wish to present a compelling narrative — the Age of Science against religious tradition and authority. Because narratives are a powerful way of expressing belonging. And liberalism, Dunt stresses, needs to find a better way of articulating belonging, being a part of something greater than the individual self, without sacrificing the underlying principles of liberty and equality.

One way to do that is perhaps, as Siedentop suggests at the end of his book, emphasising that our values are Christian — that we are not simply individuals: we also have a collective custom and a tradition that gives dignity to our individualism. The problem is, a lot of liberals will feel squeamish about this, arguing that our values are universal, not religious. And liberals are meant to be sceptical about tradition.

But the assumption, shared by many of all political or religious beliefs, that these principles belong to all of us is itself a product of our Christian inheritance, which dictates that we all belong in the body of Christ. That we deny this religious inheritance in favour of a vague moral universalism is proof of just how powerful that inheritance is: our intuition is so universalist, we forget it comes from a particular place — that it is WEIRD.

Liberalism is not simply a live-and-let-live philosophy, a radical questioning of tradition and old certainties; it is also a product of the Christian tradition. Which is another way of saying the tradition is itself radical: prior to it, we were not seen as individuals, but merely extensions of a tribe; after it, liberal thought intuitively makes sense to us. The answer to Dunt’s title — How to Be a Liberal — is through absorbing, knowingly or unknowingly, some of the moral assumptions of Christianity.

Caro’s ongoing multi-volume life of LBJ has everything. On one level, it is a political thriller. On another, it is a history of the US in the second half of the 20th century. It is so much more, besides, including a meditation on one of the enduring questions in history: can a bad person do good things?

Which brings us to Donald Trump’s role in securing peace between Israel and the UAE, with Bahrain now following and, soon, more Arab states. President Trump provides the latest incarnation of that question — the answer to which is plainly yes. History is littered with figures with whom one would rather not engage on a personal level, but whose contribution to humanity was immense.

Take, in our own times, Martin McGuiness and Ian Paisley. The latter was a bigot, who proudly trumpeted that bigotry and even flirted with paramilitaries. The former was almost certainly a murderer. For the bulk of their time on earth, they both lived lives that should have sent them to the hell in which they believed — and yet when they died they were widely and genuinely mourned, with a legacy of peace that endures to this day.

How about Steve Jobs? As close to a monster as the rules of the modern workplace allowed, but who used that monstrous ego and personality to change our world for the better. Or there is Henry Ford, a grotesque bully and a bigot beloved of Hitler and his circle. But one of the great industrialists, whose vision transformed capitalism and who enabled huge numbers of people to afford a car of their own.

More interesting, perhaps, than that simple question — and one reason why LBJ is so fascinating a figure — is a variation on it: can a bad man do good things for bad motives?

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By Stephen Pollard

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the deals between Israel, Bahrain and the UAE and with Bahrain, both in their own terms and as harbingers of what is likely to follow. Diplomatic and political reality, as well as the Arabic concept of mu-wazana (balance), mean that the rest of the Gulf States and other Arab countries will follow. And thus, quite apart from the obvious lessening of one set of tensions in the region, recognition by Gulf states will cement an alliance standing up to Iran, a nation which threatens peaceful existence far beyond the Middle East.

Much of the credit for this must go to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, whose story is itself an example of the enduring question. Mired in corruption allegations, with a trial due to start in weeks, Mr Netanyahu is a ruthless operator who ditches allies when they no longer serve his purpose and who will say almost anything to secure re-election. But unsavoury as he may be domestically, as a geopolitical strategist he is a genius. For almost any other Israeli leader, the security threat posed by the Iran nuclear deal would have marked a disastrous failure. For Mr Netanyahu, it provided the opportunity to regenerate Israeli relations with its neighbours.

Building on his long-term strategy of using Israeli strength and resolute defence of its security to persuade its neighbours that they have no realistic choice but to formally acknowledge its existence and build a relationship, the Israeli leader leveraged Arab opposition to President Obama’s Iran deal to Bismarckian ends.

But while the presence of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed in the UAE were necessary for a deal, which led to Bahrain joining them, there was one figure without whom no deal would have been possible: President Trump.

A fortnight ago, the US leader was nominated by a Right-wing populist Norwegian MP for the Nobel Peace Prize. Understandably, the idea has been mocked almost universally. Understandably, because President Trump is an appalling figure — a man who stokes racist fires, who traduces democratic norms, who treats the office of president as a form of ego-massage, who bullies and who lies. His re-election as president might endanger the US’s democracy itself — and perhaps still more so if he is not re-elected and refuses to accept the result.

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By Stephen Pollard

And yet. As Christian Tybring-Gjedde, the Norwegian MP behind the nomination, put it: “I think he has done more to create peace between nations than most other peace prize nominees. The committee should look at the facts and judge him on the facts — not on the way he behaves sometimes.”

In 2009, President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for not being President Bush. He conducted himself with dignity and propriety throughout his two terms in office — but his foreign policy legacy was a disaster, with his main accomplishment a deal with Iran so dangerous and bad that almost all of Iran’s neighbours have tried their level best to scupper it.

And it would take some beating for murderous negligence than his refusal to back up his own language over Syria, when he announced in April 2012 that the use of chemical weapons by Bashar Assad would be a “red line” and then did precisely nothing when, a year later, Assad killed more than 1,400 of his own people with sarin gas. Obama gave off the vibe of a wise and good leader. The reality was disastrous for the US — and its allies.

President Trump, on the other hand, is a prize shit, who disgraces his office in ways more previously unimaginable with every passing day. But he is also responsible for one of the most significant and important breakthroughs ever towards Middle East peace. Which president is more deserving of a prize for peace?

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By Michael Tracey

Trump is hardly the first US president to embody this dichotomy: Richard Nixon, the only president to resign and a byword for paranoia, bigotry and the abuse of office, was also responsible for one of the great foreign policy breakthroughs of the modern world when he visited Beijing.

And then we return to Nixon’s predecessor, LBJ. He was corrupt, lied with impunity, was a megalomaniac, a misogynist and a bully. He was also a coward. He urinated into his washbasin in front of secretaries and shouted orders to his aides while defecating. But he also changed the lives of hundreds of millions of black Americans for the better through the civil rights legislation that he pushed through — when few others (including many of those in his administration) thought it possible.

What makes LBJ so endlessly fascinating is his motivation. He had next to no interest in the cause. As Caro’s biography shows, his interest in civil rights was — as with everything else in his life — entirely political. No southern politician could be elected president while the South remained so reactionary, so he used his skills to remove that problem for him — the skills of a lying, corrupt bully.

Civil rights may have been a vehicle for Johnson rather than a cause, but what are President Trump’s motives? For Johnson, civil rights were a means to an end. For Trump, Middle East peace deals are the end, but not because he has any interest in the region or in policy more generally. Rather, he portrays himself as the Deal Maker Par Extraordinaire. One day it is North Korea, the next Abu Dhabi. One may turn out to be a charade, the other to have substance. But both — and everything else — are about the Trump brand and the braggadocio that is its foundation. The components and substance of any deal, of any policy, are an irrelevance; what matters is the fact of President Trump’s involvement and how that is sold to the electorate.

And so, once more, we contemplate that eternal question of what makes a good person. President Trump may stretch that label to breaking point. But not quite…

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

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

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By Timandra Harkness

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

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

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By Niall Gooch

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

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

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By Tom Holland

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

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

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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Is Harry Potter an apologist for neoliberalism?

By Polly Mackenzie

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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Harry Potter and the importance of soft power

By Ed West

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.

Suggested reading

Why J.K. Rowling had to be denounced

By Douglas Murray

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.

Which is all very well, but actually sort of nonsense. Yes, clients almost never confess while fighting a trial — and when they do the advocate will usually have to step away from the case. But the best answers to many tactical decisions, including how to cross-examine the other parties’ witnesses, vary according to the likelihood of guilt. A wise barrister will keep an eye on it.

And the truth is that defending an almost-certainly-guilty man can sometimes be difficult and unpleasant at first, depending on what he is supposed to have done. The early clouds of moral judgment tend to evaporate, though: feelings can be made to follow action, and there’s nothing quite like going in to bat for someone to make you realise that, deep down, they’re actually not so bad.

This is how criminal barristers of all political stripes come to inhabit, at least while they’re at work, an unusually non-judgmental shared moral landscape. You could argue about whether this tendency is best characterised as enlightened or psychopathic, but either way it’s why there is such limited enthusiasm in Crown Court robing rooms for the latest bit of knee-jerk canting from Home Secretaries and Justice Ministers.

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The Kafkaesque nightmare of British justice

By Jenny McCartney

Chris Daw QC is no outlier in this regard. His short new book, Justice on Trial: Radical Solutions for a System at Breaking Point, which is aimed at a general audience, does not suffer moralising lawmakers gladly. Policy announcements with judgmental overtones are variously described as “grandstanding nonsense”, “populist garbage”, “brazen ignorance”, “idiocy”, and so on. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that there are few things Daw dislikes more than moral judgment. A late chapter draws to a conclusion with the following:

“…I see these men and women, some grey and ashen from decades ‘behind the door’, others fuelled with anger, drugs and resentment, and I just cannot bring myself to judge them evil. I cannot place them in a cage marked ‘outsider’ and draw comfort from my own superiority, just because I am not one of those designated by society as ‘criminal’.”

One might cavil about moralising against moralising, but the sentiment is respectable enough. We are not the architects of our own characters; the extent of our inclination towards criminality is not something we have much — or perhaps any — control over. But even if we go full Sam Harris on Free Will and accept that every choice we make literally could not have been made any differently, we are still left with a lot of rapists and murderers that need locking up. So, what to do?

After a potted history of crime and punishment (the Romans, Magna Carta, witches) Daw embarks on the first proper chapter of four, “Why we should close all prisons”. Last year’s shocking report from the Chief Inspector of Prisons is briefly quoted — “The blood of another prisoner, who had self-harmed two days previously, had not been cleaned from the cell floor… Rubbish was left lying around in bags and there were problems with fleas, cockroaches and rodents” — but the meat of this part of the book is derived from a visit to a grim County jail in Alabama. While Daw may be right in saying that’s where we’re headed if we’re not careful, he does lay himself open to avoidable accusations of straw-manning, since powerful evidence is available closer to home.

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Pity the prisoners who remain locked up

By Carlo Gébler

That aside, while apathy towards prison conditions — and even towards its effects — is commonplace, few who take an interest in the subject could claim we are currently in the Goldilocks zone. But the question remains, how should we do things differently? Like the Scandinavian countries perhaps, whose well-funded, non-violent and rehabilitative systems are mentioned with approval? Not quite. The peroration begins as follows.

“I believe that the answer is simple. We should close down all prisons and start again. For the vast majority of inmates, locked up for non-violent crimes, incarceration […] – without question – increases rates of recidivism.

Non-violent criminals should never be sent to a prison of the kind that we have now. All of the Victorian and other traditional institutions, designed in a bygone age, should be closed down and turned into entertainment complexes or apartment buildings. Or razed to the ground once and for all.”

But does incarceration increase rates of recidivism “without question”? Compared with what? Never arresting anyone for anything? I’d be surprised if a judge could be persuaded to carry out a randomised controlled trial on the point, but I can’t help but suspect that, as Tom Chivers in these pages occasionally observes, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Daw’s much-trailed “radical solution”, to replace all the closed-down prisons, is then revealed: “Leave those convicted of most crimes in their own homes…we have the technology to monitor every breath, every heartbeat…” A visit to a London security Expo is described, and reference made — with what degree of approbation it’s hard to tell — to “a smiling and enthusiastic Chinese saleswoman, whose technology was by far the most sophisticated on display”.

“There is no doubt”, Daw goes on, “that we have the technology to provide a ‘virtual prison’ environment for every person who has become embroiled in the criminal justice system, which would allow an unlimited variation of restrictions and permissions so as to cater for each individual.”

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Abolishing the police is a cop out

By Mary Harrington

Quite apart from the fact that a criminal’s home environment will often contain its own collection of crimogenic influences, even if we do find ethically palatable technological solutions to replace some prison sentences we are still left with the problem of the rapists and murderers. Daw finally concedes that something with a “secure perimeter” is required, perhaps containing “shared houses”. “Prisoners would have access to medical care, addiction and mental-health services, counselling, and the opportunity to engage in productive work and education.” A properly funded prison, then. Is this really so radical?

Still, Daw is right to call for something different. Our prison system is a product of tradition and inattention, occasionally buffeted by politicians’ whims and their sometimes well-meaning attempts to appease angry voters. Perhaps the best proof of its current irrationality is its inconsistency.

A great deal of time and care is taken (still, just about) to ensure that a defendant is dealt with fairly and effectively from arrest to sentence, including much ink spilled over precisely how many months the sentence should be. But what he is actually then subjected to — that is, the aim of the whole endeavour — varies wildly according to geography and ever-shifting political expediencies. The newly convicted could get anything from rats and sexual violence to mere books-and-boredom.

Nevertheless, even if the custody bit were to be consistently applied, we still have to decide what prison conditions should be. Which would require us to consider what prisoners are actually for.

There’s incapacitation, of course. Taking criminals off the streets does have some effect, though research suggests you have to lock up an awful lot of people to achieve a relatively modest reduction in crime. Then there’s punishment, which Daw claims is an “illusory notion.” It’s hard to argue with the parents of a child killed by a drink driver — or the children of a pensioner defrauded of life savings — who tend to think the culprit should have at least a slightly hard time. People want criminals to be rehabilitated, yes, but it’s not the only thing they want.

Lockdown may have a lesson to teach us here. Even the substantial minority who opposed it complied with this extremely onerous restriction — not due to the vague possibility of a sixty quid fine, but because of social pressure and the threat of public humiliation. A fresh look at crime reduction could experiment with a bit of this; but ultimately I suspect we’ll stick to the punishments we’re used to.

And yet Daw’s “radical solutions” are offered just as the terms of reference for the first Royal Commission on Criminal Justice since 1993 are being fixed. We can only hope that prisons, and punishment more generally, are within its remit. How radical an overhaul the system needs isn’t obvious, at least not to me, but it’s certainly time that some proper attention were paid.

Not that I really have to search. In the homepage thumbnails, everyone is white, unless their race can be sold as a kink. Japanese wife. Chocolate. In the sidebar, I can click on the category “interracial”, because this is 2020 and apparently two people of different skin tones getting down is still as niche an interest as “babysitter” or “smoking”. “Female orgasm” is also a category, for that subset of men who are interested in whether a woman actually enjoys it. Have I mentioned, I hate PornHub.

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There's nothing woke about the sex trade

By Julie Bindel

But I am a brave journalist, so I press on. (Is this sex? Do people like this? Are women people? No, we are sluts and milfs and bitches, according to PornHub.) Will PornHub let me search for racist porn? Spoiler: it will. I put the word “racist” in the search bar, and am served multiple videos, all of which are definitely racist.

Some of them, though, have a veneer of woke, which is very heartwarming. I search for Black Lives Matter: I get a video tagged “black cocks matter”, and one “ebony slut”. All this should be a surprise, because PornHub was recently vaunting its progressive credentials. “Pornhub stands in solidarity against racism and social injustice”, the company tweeted, along with links to Black Lives Matter-adjacent campaigns that followers could support. It’s not a surprise, though, because PornHub is horrible.

If I wanted to be chippy, I would call this a perfect example of the indulgence model of modern liberal mores. Pay your tithe to the bail fund as directed, get back to whacking off over racism with your conscience salved. But actually, I would probably be being both chippy and incorrect, because does anyone really feel bad about their porn? The generally agreed position is that porn exists somewhere outside morality. Things which, at a tenth of the strength, would be instant cancellation offences in any other medium are granted licence in porn because someone, somewhere got an erection from them.

More from this author

Why is the Left so hypocritical about sex?

By Sarah Ditum

The porn industry’s success in positioning itself beyond petty questions of good and bad is one of the great marketing triumphs of modern times. If it feels good, watch it. Heck, watch it at work if you want to. Here, I run into some tricky terrain, because what happens in the dark between our own heads and hands is really no one’s concern but our own, and if you want to think about that particular woman bent OTK in a lace chemise then what does it have at all to do with me. Hectoring our fantasies seems a spectacularly fruitless endeavour.

But porn is not fantasy. Porn is business, and a profoundly exploitative one. I don’t mean that in the no-doubt tiresome feminist sense that it exploits women, although it does. I mean it in the sense that, in its modern form, pornography is an industry where the capitalist rinses out the worker, then puts up a blogpost to mark International Sex Workers’ Day, which aims to “honor sex workers” and “push for better working conditions”. The fact that PornHub is a major driver of those working conditions is, well, wouldn’t you like to look at some tits instead of thinking about it?

PornHub belongs to the conglomerate MindGeek, which also owns multiple other “tube” sites for watching free porn. Where does this porn come from? From production companies, many of which are also owned by MindGeek. In many cases, if a performer wants to defend their royalties on a clip, they’ll need the help of the copyright holder, which just happens to also be the company drawing down a profit by serving it for free, so good luck with that. Another group of people have also struggled to get PornHub to remove content that violates their rights: victims of “revenge porn”, whose abusers upload their images to the “amateur” category.

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Just how harmful is porn?

By Tom Chivers

At this point in the argument, people like to say: but what about ethical porn? Here’s what’s about ethical porn: it doesn’t matter. It makes up such a tiny proportion of the industry, it’s like putting a chicken in your back garden and claiming you’ve fixed factory farming. Apologies to those who twist themselves into astonishing shapes to produce the kind of porn they think should exist, but at best all they’re doing is providing a talking point for people who want to stall the discussion by saying “what about ethical porn?” so they can get back to their vertically integrated faux-incest.

If you want to talk about ethics in porn, let’s discuss why the industry has yet to have its #metoo moment. There was a possibility of one in 2015, when the performer James Deen was accused of on-set assault by multiple female costars; but the reckoning failed to come. (Deen denies any wrongdoing.) Journalists with an interest in the porn industry proved surprisingly incurious about following these allegations up. For example, writer Emily Witt met Deen during a set visit for an article published in n+1. The abuse claims emerged while she was revising that piece for inclusion in her 2016 book Future Sex: rather than address them, Witt cut him from the copy.

Now another porn celebrity has been not just accused, but charged: the performer Ron Jeremy faces three counts of rape and one of sexual assault. And perhaps this will, finally, be the occasion for a conversation about the attitudes inculcated by an industry which makes a show of brutality against women. Probably not, though. The porn industry could hardly survive if it went in for any self-reflection at all. But, then the hollowness of PornHub’s ethical credentials is obvious. It’s the credulousness of porn’s defenders that’s the really shocking thing.

He would not have been out of place in Frankfurt or Berlin in the 1850s, where the great rabbis of German Jewry, of whom Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch was the exemplar, reconciled modernity and Orthodoxy. They built new Jewish Communities in which tradition and citizenship, Kant and Moses were brought together, under the slogan Torah im Derech Eretz — Jewish teaching and respect for the way of the land. It is to the great credit of Rabbi Sacks and Anglo-Jewry that he held the office of Chief Rabbi for 22 years and resurrected that tradition in Britain, so that the voice of the dead could be heard once more.

In the book, Rabbi Sacks defines us as “meaning-seeking beings” for whom relationships are central, and he reveals an Aristotelian turn in seeing happiness as the “expression of the soul in accordance with virtue”. He laments the passing of a ‘Common Good’ in favour of twitter echo chambers, the hateful denunciation of those who disagree, and the apotheosis of self-definition rather than recognising that other people have something to say about whether you are a good person or not.

His statement that “love is the supreme redemption of solitude” is worth repeating. The chapter on self-help being no help at all is instructive, and his critique of multiculturalism and safe spaces is a reasoned refuge from a demented kind of liberalism.

His central thesis is that while there has been a parallel growth in the power and scope of both the state and the market, there has been a simultaneous disintegration of civil society, which is the source of relationships, ethics and happiness. We have never had more things or more rights; and we have never been so unhappy. This paradox is the driving force of the book. It is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

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All hail Good King Boris

By Maurice Glasman

In lamenting the disintegration of a shared public culture, Sacks develops certain dualities, between selfishness and altruism, power and morality, contract and covenant — in which the first term has become dominant when the second term should prevail. He particularly identifies politics as “about power and the distribution of resources”, and morality with “civil society”. The problem is that the examples he gives of a covenant are profoundly political, citing the American Revolution and the Burkean Covenant between the generations.

But the American Revolution was constitutively political, and it embodied a certain form of ethics; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It enshrined the separation of the powers and the primacy of rights. In the case of Burke, it refers to Parliament, the Monarchy, the Church and the body politic as embodied in the sovereignty of the Ancient Constitution.

Brexit is a sublime example of this ambiguous duality. The Remain side accepted Sacks’s view of politics, and fought the battle on the terrain of policy and prosperity, emphasising the threats to our livelihood imminent in rejecting the sovereignty of the European Court of Justice, the Customs Union and the Single Market.

In contrast, the Leave side drew on the idea of the renewal of a covenant between the generations, of keeping an ancient promise, the restoration of Sovereignty through the reclamation of the inheritance of Parliament, the common law and our tradition of combining democracy and liberty.

“Take back control” is not best understood as a policy decision. Brexit was political but it was also moral in its assertion of the primacy of democracy as the ultimate decision-making process. That is what made it so alarming and threatening.

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Ditch the City, enrich the nation

By Maurice Glasman

As a result, Sacks’s narrow view of an instrumental and utilitarian politics, a desacralised politics, gives the book a whiff of a lament for the era that has passed — of the Third Way, of Blair, Brown, Cameron and May, in which the nation state was a regional administrator of a global system of capitalism and individual rights. There is no recognition here of the power of democracy to resist the domination of capitalism, of the primacy of people over things. This was the crux of the issue in Brexit and is absent from the conception of the Common Good developed by Sacks.

Left to itself, capitalism pursues the highest rate of return on its investment at the greatest speed. Invariably this involves the attempt to turn human beings and nature into commodities organised in labour, land and food markets. In other words, in a language familiar to Rabbi Sacks, capitalism wishes to commodify creation itself. This is unsustainable to life, community, society and ethics, and is at the heart of the inequality he dislikes and the ill-defined ‘populism’ he fears, which is mentioned eight times in two pages in the chapter entitled “Democracy in Danger”.

The problem, as mentioned, is that in denying the ethical content of the resistance to globalisation, the move is reduced to “populism”. But the demonic energy of capitalism needs to be constrained, and democratic politics is the traditional way of doing so.

Perhaps there are two reasons why Sacks relegates politics and democracy in this way. The first is a lack of a mediating principle between selfishness and altruism, which would be that of mutuality and reciprocity, of self-interest broadly conceived as a political concept embodied in shared institutions. Civic peace, mutual security and a reciprocal welfare system are political as well as civic achievements.

At one point Sacks refers to “reciprocal altruism”, but this phrase indicates that what binds us in political community is mutually beneficial and not altruistic at all. Sacks argues that both Darwin and De Tocqueville conclude that both co-operation and competition are necessary for a good society, despite their different disciplines and objects of observation. But this is not developed politically.

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Farewell free trade, and good riddance

By David Goodhart

The second problem with the book is its lack of recognition of the power of capitalism as an incentive system. Sacks uses the phrase “structure of grace” to describe the well-ordered relationship between market, state and civil society. It echoes that used by Pope John Paul II in describing capitalism as having a “structure of sin”, in incentivising vice in the form of greed, selfishness and unconstrained desires.

Catholic Social Thought, though, does not turn to the state as the exclusive refuge and remedy, but to decentralised institutions, worker representation on boards, regional banks that can only lend in the areas in which they work, and the upholding of vocation and status in the form of apprenticeships as a necessary condition of labour market entry. These are civic institutions but they are not voluntary: the state underwrites the strengthening of society and constraints on capital by embedding mediating institutions within the economy.

Catholic Social Thought recognises the need for ethical constraints within a competitive market which preserves a sense of relational accountability. It also stresses the need for limits on interest rates and for a living wage in response to inequality and the dehumanisation of people as mere commodities. But despite the lauding of civil society in this book, it does not present any institutions through which the market and the state could be constrained or held to account.

The final problem in a book subtitled “Restoring the Common Good in divided times” is that the Common Good, as a tradition of thought and practice, has always been political and participative in both its secular and religious forms. It is rooted in the governance of cities with a recognition of estranged interests and the necessity of their reconciliation within the polity.

In other words, the Common Good requires an active citizenry engaged in democracy which respects the dignity of difference and the mutual interests that bind them. It is an ancient tradition of immediate contemporary relevance. And while Jonathan Sacks deserves great credit in restoring it to our national conversation, he does not quite recognise the radical consequences of its restoration for the redistribution of power and the renewal of our democracy.

You can't have morality without politics

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For instance, a 24-year-old PhD student, Shelby Judge, goes on a visit to Sterling Castle and takes exception to something she reads in one of those little Mr Men books on sale in the castle gift shop. In the book she flicks through, Mr Clever is patronising Little Miss Curious, who cannot understand why the Forth Bridge is so named. “What happened to the first, the second and the third bridges?” Miss Curious asks. “It was going to be a long day,” sighs the book’s narrator. According to Ms Judge, this story reinforces antiquated gender stereotypes. “It is meant to be a funny joke but then it’s always at the expense of women.” “Mansplaining,” Ms Judge later tweeted, with a picture of the offending page. It was that tweet that went viral and became “a story”.

It was hardly a shocking or surprising comment. Even Telegraph readers cannot have been shielded all their lives from the existence of feminism.

No, it was a story for some simple reasons. First, it provided the opportunity to print some colourful images of Mr Men that worked well to offset all the dreary stuff about the election. Second, it played to the cultural prejudices of its readers — the “po-faced feminist academics taking offence again at a simple bit of fun” attitude. But also — and here, I suspect, is where that deeper and elusive quality of ‘a story’ comes in — it put its finger on one of those cultural anxieties about how we bring up our children, and what moral lessons we are exposing them to. It represents a battle for the ethics of the bedtime story.

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Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

Every evening at about half past seven, I settle down to read my three year-old son a succession of bedtime stories. Bathed and in his fire-engine pyjamas, with his warm milk, this is my time with him. He sits on my lap and we get through maybe three or four stories every night. Our current favourite is The Runaway Pea a terrific tale of the adventures of a solitary pea who thinks there must be more to life than ending up on a plate for tea.

Every evening we fire up our imaginations with tales of Vikings who want to make dinosaur stew, Mog the cat hiding on the roof from the Christmas tree, or Harry and Gran and his robots. As I snuggle down with my son and kiss him goodnight, I do not want this moment to become some sort of ideological battleground, the next space to be conquered in the ever-widening gyre of our increasingly rancorous culture wars.

But politics keeps banging on the bedroom door. A is for Activist is a classic of the genre. B is for banner, C is for Co-op, X is for Malcolm X: you get the picture. I Have the Right to be a Child explored the United Nations’ 1989 Convention of the Rights of the Child for a children’s audience. A few months ago, Afua Hirsch published a children’s book about Lady Hale and the importance of the Supreme Court. And best of all, The Little Girl Who Gave Zero Fucks — a children’s book by Amy Kean published last year:

“Elodie-Rose was a girl on a mission
In a town where girls act like obedient kittens,
Sing soft the same tune and dance neat the same jigs
Wear the same flowery dresses and pretty blonde wigs.
But Elodie-Rose vowed to change this old world.
Because Elodie-Rose isn’t like other girls.”

In many ways, these books share much in common with the very earliest of children’s literature from the 17th century, all being pious and instructional. First published in the 1640s, the Puritan minister John Cotton’s Milk for Babes was a collection of improving religious stories and prayers, designed as a catechism for young children. It goes through the Ten Commandments, the nature of the church and grace, the last judgment and so on. This was characteristic of much of the children’s literature that followed.

Further reading

Is Harry Potter an apologist for neoliberalism?

By Polly Mackenzie

The new moralism in children’s literature replaces the church with the courts, the Ten Commandments with human rights, prayer and the inner life with authenticity, being true to yourself, not giving a fuck. Yet the purpose today is exactly the same as it was back then, to pass on to children the parent’s view of the world. In other words, when liberals denounce religious parents for brainwashing their children, the truth is that they are up to exactly the same sort of thing.

And so they should, by the way. It is absolutely right to use children’s literature for moral instruction. It is a parental responsibility to nurture your child’s moral and spiritual sense as much as to look after his or her physical needs. The idea that a parent shouldn’t intervene morally, should respect the child’s autonomy and wait for the child to grow up so that the child can choose their own values (see my piece on the problems with adult baptism) is a load of old nonsense that liberals sometimes say they believe in theory but never accept in practice.

But apart from the fact that my own worldview is in many ways closer to 17^th-century Puritans that to 21st-century liberals, the thing I most have against the modern moralism in children’s literature is that it is so clumsily issue based. Here is one author introducing a reading list of “Nine books for woke kids”:

“It is a challenging time to be a parent right now. Thousands of families have lost their homes in the devastation of Hurricane Harvey. Los Angeles is burning. White supremacists are marching in plain view on our city streets. The president has just declared that children of immigrants should be punished for the ‘crime’ of growing up American. Climate change is real. Bigotry is on the rise. And on top of all this, the unthinkable threat of nuclear war is getting more real every day. How do you help your children make sense of all this?”

by the same author

Our modern parenting is making monsters

By Giles Fraser

It is not a problem that children’s literature reflects adult concerns — it always has, it always will. But I question the idea that value transfer can be successfully achieved through stories that have little sympathy with a child’s mental world, and that are merely picture-book illustrations of things only an adult would recognise as moral.

Here the Mr Men stories are much better at moral instruction. Mr Noisy learns how to be considerate. Mr Rude learns that anger doesn’t always help. Mr Tall learns self-love. Part of the success of these books is their use of archetypes. That’s why they can be successfully translated into Chinese and Icelandic and Hebrew. On the other hand, I don’t know how much a Chinese child would gain from the improving story of Lady Hale and the Supreme Court. Or what they would make of Elodie-Rose in Nigeria.

What makes for a story in newspaper land is the current, the immediate, the topical. And, too often, woke children’s literature fails because it follows this very adult sense of what counts as important. The best of young children’s literature — though written and bought and read out by adults — knows that children think differently. The Oi series of picture books are a favourite — so much fun, so much to laugh at together: “Cats sit on mats, hares sit on chairs, mules sit on stools, gophers sit on sofas and frogs sit on logs.” Seemingly, not a moral message in sight.

And then, after reading them night after night, you realise there may be. Louie starts telling me that things in his bedroom have to go in specific places. The world is ordered in a certain way. A place for everything and everything in its place. There are rules. Until the revolutionary Frog comes along and changes them. Perhaps there is nothing more properly basic in moral and political philosophy than the battle between order and chaos.

It’s all so much more subtle, funny, and interesting than the flat-footed moralistic instruction of those who are only really using children’s literature as a delivery mechanism for their own narrow ideological concerns.

Over 100 people in this dreaded year alone have been killed by knife-wielding assailants, the highest number since Home Office records began in 1946. What is particularly disturbing is just how young many of the victims and perpetrators are. Hospitals report that the number of children aged 16 and under admitted for assault by a knife or sharp object rose by 93%, from 180 admissions in 2012/13 to 347 in 2017/18. Meanwhile fatal ‘blade offences’ committed by those aged 18 or under are reported to have risen by 77% between 2016 and 2018 –from 26 to 46 deaths.

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Do police numbers really affect knife crime?

By Tom Chivers

The recent surge in knife crime is undoubtedly disturbing. It has sparked a fierce public debate and demands for action. Boris Johnson has announced that his government will recruit 20,000 new police officers, create 10,000 new prison places and expand stop and search powers as part of an effort to ‘clamp down’ on knife crime. The aim being to emphasise deterrence and punishment, reassure the public and send a message to criminals.

Meanwhile, the blame is put at various doors, including drill music, austerity, cuts to police numbers, pupil exclusions and fatherlessness among other pet theories. Each is an attempt to fit a complex issue into a simple explanation.

Take, for example, the question of fatherlessness, especially as it concerns black communities. In a column for the Sunday Times, published shortly after the murder of Jaden Moodie, Rod Liddle claimed that absentee fathers are to blame for knife violence among black youth. Inevitably, it stirred up a storm on social media with David Lammy labelling Liddle a “national disgrace” and “a living, breathing personification and definition of white middle class privilege.” The irony is that Lammy made virtually the same argument in 2012 when he suggested that the absence of fathers was a “key cause” of knife crime. Earlier in 2010 he also urged black fathers to be more involved with their children.

Clearly, family dysfunction is a significant issue and ought to be discussed seriously. But too often it is discussed in a narrow and at times an overly racialised manner, as if it were disconnected from wider social and economic trends that affect white people too. We should neither essentialise the issue as an exclusively black cultural problem, nor avoid the issue for fear of offence.

Other policy suggestions, such as the clampdown on drill music that some people call for (because the genre supposedly incites violence), would be counter-productive infringements on free speech. Likewise, stop and search is not a viable solution because of its record of indiscriminate use against ethnic minorities. These are authoritarian solutions that, at best, deal with the symptoms, not the causes, of violence while causing resentment and curtailing liberties.

By way of contrast, the Left tends to view the knife crime debate as a “moral panic” perpetuated by elites to justify draconian policies of social control. There is indeed a history of such panics, some of them trafficking in racial stereotypes, such as the supposed epidemic of ‘black muggers’ in the 1970s (as documented by Stuart Hall in Policing the Crisis). A lot of the recent reporting on knife crime, particularly around drill music, does seem designed not to inform, but frighten, people.

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Sadiq Khan, the knife-crime fall guy

By James Bloodworth

In place of policies based on punishment and deterrence, there are those on the Left who argue we should frame knife crime as a public health issue, pointing to how Scotland tackled its knife crime epidemic over a decade ago. “You can please the Right wing press or you can be effective,” said Ash Sarkar of Novara media, “what we know is effective is a public health driven model where you increase the role of social services and early intervention…if you want to please disgusted in Tunbridge Wells then increase stop and search.”

It is clear that the social indicators that factor into crime occur pretty much universally: poverty, domestic abuse, dilapidated communities, school exclusion, lack of opportunities, structural inequality, overburdened services and so on. A high level of crime and violence usually correlates with the poorest and most run down areas. So any strategy that is serious about tackling crime and violence at its root must address the material and social conditions that allow it to thrive.

However, to simply treat knife crime as a ‘public health’ issue that requires ‘early intervention’ and ‘containment strategies’, as if we were dealing with a medical crisis like AIDS or Ebola, is somewhat evasive because it doesn’t address the full picture and ignores the question of moral poverty.

Many of those who get involved in knife crime at a particular stage in their life are usually socially disengaged and detached from the wider community. They have no sense of respect for their fellow humans or the community in which they live. Slaves to nihilism and despair they are not just the products of economic poverty, but of moral poverty too. Many of them join gangs, who are almost a surrogate family to them, feeding a need for solidarity and purpose in a society that cannot provide it to them.

Because the Right is adept at appropriating the language of morality, there is a tendency on the Left to reject it, regarding it as reactionary. On some level this is understandable because the Right often uses moral arguments to individualise social problems and obscure the structural roots of crime and violence. However, the moral dimension is as important to the Left as it is to the Right, though for quite different reasons. One cannot have an alternative political and economic vision for organising society without a moral one too.

Throughout many communities institutions such as the church, the patriarchal family and trade unions that once socialised young people and gave them a moral framework have declined and no longer have the influence and trust they once did.

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Why Polly Toynbee is wrong about God

By Freddie Sayers

The relentless promotion of market ideology (what is often referred to as neoliberalism) over past few decades, and the more recent experience of austerity, have helped to atomise society, weaken social bonds and fragment communities. With the increasing marketisation of society in areas such as health and education, value for money and economic self interest have been elevated above deeper social and moral needs.

Responding to the devastating consequences of these policies, politicians have expanded the scope of the state and officialdom. Where once families and community institutions helped define morality, increasingly that role has been outsourced to the public sector – filling the void with everything from citizenship and consent classes for children to parenting courses for adults.

Morality has become a set of ‘skills’ that can simply be taught, or a set of rules and guidelines handed down by the state from on high, instead of a set of difficult choices individuals have to wrestle with, or a set of norms deliberated over collectively. The effect of all of these developments has been to undermine moral autonomy and retard the genuine moral development of individuals. In other words, morality no longer belongs to us.

The question of moral decay should then at least form a critical part of any discussion on knife crime. The Left is very good at talking about the social and economic impact of neoliberal policies, but not so good about its moral impact, beyond cliched rants against individualism and ‘greed’. The irony is that in forgetting how to talk about morality, the Left can only retreat into shallow moralism.

Left-wing politics is not viable without moral autonomy, because it is through exercising this capacity that people are able to transform society for the better. Moral autonomy is the prerequisite for social solidarity in any meaningful sense. People are not simply automatons who are eternally victims of circumstance, blown about helplessly by impersonal economic and social forces. They are moral agents who have a will and a mind of their own.

You cannot challenge austerity and structural inequality without restoring the bonds of social solidarity within the communities devastated by them. This doesn’t mean playing up to tabloid style ‘moral majority’ politics or responding to Right-wing racist authoritarianism by proposing a Left-wing racist authoritarianism. What it does mean is that the Left has to reclaim the language of morality and renew institutions that help individuals to realise their own moral autonomy.

It only in this way that we can wake up from the nightmare of violence.

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By Ralph Leonard

Hunt’s view seems grounded in his faith – he’s a devout member of the Church of England – but he was quick to clarify that he would not seek to change the existing law.

While he stuck to his principles, Hunt didn’t want to present himself as the “Christian” candidate for No 10. But what if he had? Could Britain, a country synonymous with secularisation and declining church attendance, embrace a politics grounded in religion? If Britain learns from the examples of its political and cultural kin, the US and Europe, the answer could be a strong “yes.”

Forty years ago this summer, American Evangelicals launched the Moral Majority, a religious organisation that put a face to the then-emerging Religious Right, the conservative Christian voting bloc that helped propel Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and even Donald Trump to office.

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The British would hardly tolerate the kind of faith-based politics you see in the United States, where believers have been seeking to use state and national law to implement their ideas on everything from abortion to LGBT rights to prayer in schools. Surveys show that even religious Christian voters in Britain place low emphasis on these types of social issues, focusing instead on economic policies.

But there is an underestimated number of Britons who, I suspect, would be receptive of the type of faith that Hunt suggested; one that respects the separation of Church and State and doesn’t seek to impose sectarian views on society, but a faith-based politics motivated by religious beliefs to seek policies that promote freedom, rights and individual and public welfare.

In this regard, a political Christianity in the UK might look less like the Religious Right of America and more like the Christian Democratic parties of Europe. Since they emerged in the late 19^thcentury, these Church-backed parties have played a major role in many nations: Christian Democratic parties or their successors currently lead ruling coalitions in Ireland, Germany and Austria, and have a major role in European Parliament as well.

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How political should the Archbishop be?

By Andrew McKie

Although Christian Democracy did not take hold in the UK the way it did elsewhere in Europe, there is, of course, a long history of entanglement between politics and religion in Britain. England had the most overtly political entry into the Protestant Reformation when Henry VIII ripped the Church of England away from Rome and declared himself its head. The acrimonious split between Catholics and Protestants led to everything from the Glorious Revolution to the Troubles of Northern Ireland. And the modern party system in British politics was heavily influenced by religion. As the think tank Theos, in its study of religion and voting in Britain, describes the history of party politics in Britain:

Britain never developed a tradition of Christian Democracy or a major Christian party because, by the time this happened in Europe, it already had three – Anglican Tory, Nonconformist Liberal, and Nonconformist and Catholic Labour.

As recently as the 1980s, the Conservative Party could be thought of as the “Church Party”. Religious-based politics has been the rule, not the exception, in Britain’s history.

The obvious objection is that religious politics, and to a large extent, religion itself, are just that: British history, fading relics of the country’s past. The UK is an increasingly secularised society. In some surveys, more Britons now identify as non-religious than as members of all the Christian denominations combined. And high-profile political figures have often treated their faith as a political liability (see Tony Blair’s secret Catholicism). In this environment, it might seem foolish to put much stock on a new religious politics. But the declining numbers may be just what is needed to spur the faithful to political action.

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The Christian Democrats of Europe arose in the late 19^thand 20th centuries in contexts of the rise of political liberalism (in its classical sense), and a growing hostility towards religion, and Christianity in particular, that came with it. Similarly, the US Religious Right arose in response to the changes of the 1960s and 70s – communism, the sexual revolution, the counterculture – that it saw as bringing about an end to a traditional Christian social order.

Whether or not this anti-Christian sentiment was real or merely perceived – after all, American Religious Right pioneers even railed against government encroachment on religion in the context of desegregation, a fact they’d like to forget now – it’s undeniable that the idea of a society turning against the Church motivated Christians to come out in force behind candidates who would champion their interests. The politics are different in Britain, but the Church is facing a crisis because of its steeply declining numbers and political clout, and this situation may just be ripe for a political response. Hunt did not want to present himself as the “Christian” candidate, but the potential for mobilising British Christians as voters is very real.

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Does a big society need a Big God?

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What’s more, the declining numbers among all branches of Christianity could actually foster unity between the disparate denominations that are individually struggling to survive in Britain. Their differences seem minor in comparison with the shared challenge of secularisation. Marginalisation and the threat of extinction are great motivators towards unity and action, and leaders could mobilise Christian believers into an effective voting bloc.

To do so, Christian politicians in the UK can draw from an American example; not the Religious Right, but the socialist Left. There is technically a Christian Democrat party in Britain (several of them, it turns out) in the same way that there is a Democratic Socialist party in the United States. But the US socialists did not gain any traction until some of their brightest or most promising stars, such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, injected their beliefs and perspectives into the existing dominant two-party structure that governs American politics.

Similarly, Christian mobilisation in Britain would probably have to come from within one of the two major parties in order to be effective. Fortunately, British Christians tend to sit near the centre of the political spectrum, putting them in an ideal position to be courted by Tories and Labour alike. The key to a successful Christian political mobilisation would come down to sincerity and vision.

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Are capitalism and Christianity really compatible?

By Giles Fraser

To return to the American example, “socialism” had been a dirty word in the US for decades. But in the past few years, it has rapidly emerged as a viable platform because of a few principled politicians such as Sanders, who won over audiences with his firmly-held convictions (Bernie was a socialist for decades before it was en vogue) and by offering a modernised form of their ideology as a solution to the economic divisions facing American society.

It’s hard to predict where such a figure might emerge for the UK’s Christian community. Hunt did not take up the “Christian” mantle in his political life. Perhaps he will in the future, or maybe another candidate will emerge to appeal to this community. Rising stars and political movements often move quickly: five years ago, Sanders was a backbencher from a small state and Ocasio-Cortes was a bartender. But when the moment came, they stepped up and channelled the discontent that existed among many Americans by presenting socialism as the answer to an America that seems to be increasingly driven by the ultra-rich and corporate interests at the expense of the working and middle classes.

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Likewise, a political movement based on Christian values would be well poised to provide moral leadership on some of the most pressing issues facing the UK, such as tackling poverty and fixing the social safety net. An injection of organised Christianity into British politics could also be an asset for UK foreign policy, from strengthening ties with the United States to establishing a moral high ground in dealings with China (persecution of Christians – an issue that Hunt highlighted during his time as foreign secretary – has been a significant but underappreciated aspect of the current protests in Hong Kong).

Before the era of sectarian rivalries, Christianity was a source of unity within Britain and across Europe. Now that secularisation and social divisions trump any denominational differences, Christianity could again become a unifying force in the UK. Mobilised Christians could find at least limited common cause with the country’s Muslim and Jewish populations, tapping into a mutual Abrahamic heritage and co-operating to push back against secularisation and religious-based discrimination.

A modern political Christianity – morally principled but not divisive or exclusionary – could help the nation refocus and find a new sense of purpose and identity.

We shared a taxi back to her home and, with a slightly fan-boy giddiness, I distinctly remember the thrill of being able to share with her my gratitude for the things she had written. Years later, I met her on a number of occasions in Oxford town centre when I had become a College Chaplain. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s and spent her days watching Teletubbies.

My grandmother, too, had Alzheimer’s at the time. She had a difficult life, rejected by the village she lived in for fraternising a little too intimately with German and Italian prisoners of war. For my grandmother, Alzheimer’s proved to be a release from her demons. For Murdoch, it felt more like a tragedy.

In church, we would sing a line from a popular hymn “re-clothe us in our rightful mind”. Iris Murdoch’s rightful mind was that of a writer and intellectual. For my grandmother, dancing around her nursing home with a newfound fondness for bright colours and fancy scarfs, it almost felt as if Alzheimer’s had given her a new lease of life. I will always think of this period of carefree abandon as my grandmother’s “rightful mind”. It wasn’t so for the great philosopher.

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Who broke the Left?

By Giles Fraser

Murdoch would have turned 100 next week. Her great contribution to moral thought was to articulate the nature of our rightful mind as an orientation towards the Good. I capitalise the word Good because, like God, the Good was almost a person, a thing in itself, independent of our all-too-human way of seeing things. And, for her, the true journey of the human self – like the journey of the self in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave – was to travel from illusion to true reality. Unlike Plato, and more like the Christianity whose doctrines she found impossible literally to accept, this moral journey required what she called unselfing.

“In the moral life,” she wrote, “the enemy is the fat relentless ego.” A few decades earlier, the great Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple had written “the great aim of all true religion is to transfer the centre of interest from self to God”. Substitute the word Good for God, and that is Murdoch’s philosophy in a nutshell. In her novels and within her academic philosophy, Murdoch sought to describe exactly what this process looked like within real lives and for flawed characters like you and me.

The importance of this insight has to be understood against the background of the prevailing winds of academic philosophy of the time. Much of Oxford philosophy had abandoned the idea that goodness was a challenge for the self, a life’s work to get beyond the constantly nagging, insistent demands of the “fat relentless ego”.

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Utilitarianism, partly designed as a moral system that had no need of God, sought to make the moral life into a kind of calculation, an attempt to establish what the best decision might be in particular circumstances. Though there are various formulations, roughly speaking a decision is good if it maximises the sum total of pleasure (or utility) in the world. There is nothing here that speaks of the reconstruction of the self.

Alternatively, the existentialists sought to describe a moral life in which being true to one’s self – being authentic and thus rejecting the demands of social conformity – was its defining feature. Here the task is to create by will and live more fully within one’s ‘true self’ (whatever that is), rather than seek to overcome it. Murdoch had no time for any of these positions.

Murdoch’s novels often describe human beings caught up in ever descending, ever narrowing cycles of self-absorption, of people trapped within their own selfishness. These are people who collapse in on themselves, crushed by inward pressure of their own egos. The ego functioned, for her, as a kind of Freudian version of the Christian idea of original sin. And release from its bondage required a movement outwards, towards others.

Further Reading

How moral is mockery?

By Giles Fraser

This unselfing could be prompted by the needs of other people and also – unlike for Plato – by art. Looking at a work of art demands attention, an important concept in her moral vocabulary. It requires that one allows the work of art the time and the intellectual space to reveal itself on its own terms.

One of the proudest moments as a parent was when my eldest daughter returned home from art school with her first tattoo. Most middle-class parents tend to go spare at this discovery. But my daughter had chosen well. Inked on her arm were words from one of Murdoch’s favourite plays, The Tempest, spoken by Prospero to his daughter: “What see’est thou else.”

The demand to look again, and look deeper were, for Murdoch, as essential to the moral enterprise as they were to the artistic enterprise. It is attention to that which is other – to other people, art etc – that leads us out of the cave-like labyrinth of the self and towards the true reality of the sun, the Good. And this attention needs to be schooled. As Oxford philosopher Anil Gomes rightly put it: “A talented botanist, for instance, sees more in a field of wild flowers than a bored urban walker.”

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Likewise, with people. Murdoch’s novels are a study in attention towards flawed humanity, schooled over hours of watching and listening.

And finally, attention is redemptive. In The Sovereignty of Good, she gives the example of looking out of the window, “brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige”, when all of a sudden a hovering kestrel comes into view. All at once, everything changes. The centre of attention is shifted from self to other, to a perception of reality as something other than oneself. And with this shift, the pain of self-regard is momentarily lifted. The gain of morality, of unselfing, is that one is released from one’s demons. One finds one’s rightful mind.

Yes, there are things to quarrel with about Murdoch’s moral vision. For my money, hers is located a little too parochially within the moral concerns of bourgeois, North Oxford academia. Murdoch rarely faces the effects of, for instance, crushing poverty upon the trajectory of unselfing; she’s not always sufficiently aware that there are those for whom the circumstances of their lives mean that their self needs self-protecting, cradling, from the ravages of chance and fate.

I also think she underestimates the role that something like church-going has in the formation of our moral sensibilities. Attention requires liturgies, the discipline of constant practise, mini-rehearsals of organised goodness. Going to the art gallery and the theatre, the whole structure of university life – these things don’t do it for most people.

Further Reading

Jesus was a ‘somewhere’. Paul was an 'anywhere'

By Giles Fraser

But these are minor cavils when set against the current and diminished state of moral thought, with its widespread and uncritical acceptable of rights and law as being able to do most of the heavy lifting of moral purpose – see the brilliant John Gray article published here last week. None of these set the self the same sort of challenge that Murdoch proposes. Nor do they offer the increasingly abandoned idea that morality has some sort of redemptive effect.

Iris Murdoch came closest to offering a moral world view for a post-religious world with something of the same dense moral texture of the Christianity she rejected. Though personally, I prefer the real thing. “Reclothe us in our rightful mind” – taken from the hymn, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind – goes on:

“Drop they still dews of quietness
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from out souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess,
The beauty of thy peace,
The beauty of thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Your coolness and your balm.
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire,
Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,
O still small voice of calm.
O still small voice of calm!”

We are back to the kestrel again. This is the promise held out by the sovereignty of the Good. The redemptive power of the transference of interest from self to reality. But it is expressed more poetically, more powerfully, more universally – I believe – by the sovereignty of God.

It’s never been high up on the to-do list. But the fine weather of late has made me look for an excuse to spend some time outside. And so I have been to the garden centre to buy manure, and I have started to break open the shell of hardened ground and feed it with sweet smelling, life giving fibre. It’s a strangely satisfying thing to do. Hands filthy, I’m feeding the dead earth with biological energy in order to return it to life.

A few miles from here, over the river, the Chelsea Flower Show is in full bloom. I have been a couple of times, but it’s become a bit too corporate: this year’s Gold Winners include the Morgan Stanley garden and the M&G Investments garden – M&G also being the sponsors of the whole event. And at £107, ticket prices are steep. I think I’ll stick with B&Q rather than M&G.

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I also find that the themed gardens at Chelsea strain a little too much for social relevance. The pictures of the CAMFED Campaign for Female Education garden did indeed look splendidly colourful, recreating a Zimbabwean schoolyard in the heart of SW3. But it struck me as more of a sermon than a garden.

Of course, there is nothing at all wrong with a sermon on the subject of women and education in Africa. Far from it. And I also do think that gardens have long been places of moral edification. But there is a crucial and telling difference between the way our own gardens work on us morally and the sort of moral instruction that is being offered by a themed garden in SW3.

In the morally-themed garden, the flowers and planting are being used to illustrate a moral concern, like a poster or a promotional film might. But the really important moral point of gardens is not that attractive flowers and planting are used to illustrate some important wider cause, but that the very act of being in a garden – tending to it, playing in it, eating in it, weeding, watering, walking about in it – all contribute to our moral formation. And a roped-off, do-not-touch garden in Chelsea just cannot achieve that.

In other words, to borrow an idea from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, some virtues are ‘internal’ to certain practices. And the morally-themed garden is not virtuous in this sense – the morality it illustrates is not the morality internal to the activity of gardening.

The philosopher David Cooper makes a similar point about morality and gardens in the context of a much wider discussion of moral philosophy’s history. Cooper rightly regrets that moral philosophy has moved away from the Aristotelian idea that our moral take on the world is bound up with the sort of life we live as a whole – with our friendships, our jobs, our lived environment.

Morality is not a separate compartment of ourselves – a stern-faced bit, only concerned with important things like human rights and vulnerable people. Morality is not just for when we are ‘on duty’, as it were: it involves cultivating virtuous habits of the mind that are always in play, including in our ‘off duty’ activities.

Morality is everything: it is the whole of our lived life, including the bits that we have mistakenly come to regard as private and morally neutral.

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By Henry Olsen

My soil is a case in point. Working the ground, feeding it manure, involves a form of care for the natural environment that is not all about some immediate advantage for me. Yes, I and others will hopefully benefit from the beauty of the delphiniums I imagine one day growing there. But that’s only half the story. Because the very act of pottering about in the garden establishes an increasingly fond alliance between myself and the forces of nature, which sets my own life in a wider perspective.

To put it in Christian terms, it feels like a mini collaboration between me and God. Success is only party in my own hands. When it comes, I am thankful. So, gardening teaches dependency: the idea that life is a gift, and that the gift itself should be gratefully received.

Why do my own tomatoes “taste better” than the ones I buy from Sainsbury’s? Objectively, they don’t. But it makes perfect sense to say they taste better than shop-bought ones because taste, here, is not just a matter of sensory experience: it has a much more expanded sense of what the tomato means.

A garden is, of course, part nature, part human artifice. At times, garden fashions have emphasised the latter – straight lines, geometric planting, topiary. At other times, a more ‘wild’ look has been in vogue, as with the Romantics.

But whatever one’s preference, the garden is always an intersection between nature and human activity. And so the garden always feels to me like a sustained meditation on our human place within a world that does not do our bidding. A world in which the weeds will always finally win.

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Over the coming summer, the garden will be a place of great joy. Laughter, barbeques, den-making, lawn-mowing contemplation. For Aristotle, being good is always an aspect of the good life – of a life well lived. From this perspective, morality and personal happiness are not set against each other as if being good always involves a sacrifice to one’s personal happiness. That is more a Christian perspective – always more concerned with the emergency ethics of dramatic situations. And from this Christian perspective, the ethics of Aristotle’s Eudemonia can feel a little too complacent – in danger of being conscripted by what one might call bourgeois complacency.

Well, I will bear that in mind. But for now, I will linger in my garden. Drink tea with friends. Fight the weeds. Play with my children. Host parish parties. Watch the delphiniums grow. In terms of modern culture wars, all this might be called a sense of place. And the garden might therefore be regarded as the spiritual headquarters of the ‘somewheres’ as opposed to the ‘anywheres’.

But the great thing about the garden is that when I’m in it I don’t much care about such matters. Feeding the ground with life, hands stinking of the farmyard – that feels so much more important.