That isn’t the only parallel between the massacre last year and its precursors in New York and Paris. As with 9/11, the horrors of 7/10 were initially marked by shock, then calls for huge retaliation. As after 9/11, a backlash swiftly followed. Over the past 12 months, campuses and city streets have been swept by anti-Zionism, just as anti-Americanism became the rage on the Left in the early 2000s. Two decades ago, moreover, there were massive protests decrying America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and calls for the troops to stay home, much like today’s demands for a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon. And as after 9/11, the backlash proved impotent. The US hung on in Afghanistan until 2021. Today, Israel is busy expanding its war to Lebanon — and perhaps soon to Iran as well.

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Yet surely the strongest parallel between those earlier atrocities and October 7 isn’t the bursts of violence, or the reaction, or the escalation. It’s that term I started with. It’s Islamism, and the way the West consistently refuses to name its true enemy. I mean the Muslim Brotherhood, which created Hamas, along with those other barbarians at the gates. On September 12, 2001, after all, we declared a war on “terror”. But terror is a tactic, not an ideology. In later years, as the enemy started to strike us at home in Western towns and cities, we called it “violent extremism” and lumped it together with fascism and other forms of homegrown zealotry.

This happened first, and most importantly, because the enemy told us it was fighting in the name of Islam, and we refused and still refuse, categorically, to wage war on one of the world’s great faiths. Second, we thought we could use our vast military and intelligence resources to weaken and destroy the enemy without being trapped into starting a war with a fifth of humanity. We failed to understand the difference between Islam and Islamism — between Muslims and the Muslim Brotherhood.

By failing to name Islamism as our enemy, we allowed it to prosper. Consider, for instance, what happened in Afghanistan. After 20 years of fighting that enemy without a name, spending trillions of dollars and wasting thousands of lives, we abandoned the country to the Islamist thugs of the Taliban. It was one of the most disgraceful retreats in American history, cloaked by shabby political expediency. We looked away as the Islamists catapulted Afghan women and minorities back to another Dark Age.

There have been other consequences too, often much closer to home. As we remained silent, the Muslim Brotherhood and its many offshoots quietly entrenched themselves across Western cities, from Australian universities to Manchester suburbs. Enabling them to build mosques and take over schools, moreover, our silence has allowed them to proclaim themselves as spokespeople for every Muslim in the West.

This continued reluctance to see the enemy before us allows it to burrow into more and more hearts. As increasing numbers of desperate people arrive upon our shores from war-torn lands, many are finding solace in a new community in those same mosques and schools, as well as online. And for those of us unwilling to turn a blind eye, our Islamist enemies are ready with their tried-and-tested accusations of Islamophobia, carefully deployed to shut down discussion of the true nature of their threat. Any critics of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots are defamed as racist and intolerant — as purveyors of “hate”.

In this effort to freeze discussion the Islamists are aided and abetted by the ideological Left. In Europe, they proclaim their faith in multiculturalism. In America, social justice warriors do the work on campuses and adjacent institutions.

And so, for the moment at least, we find ourselves at an impasse. More than 20 years after 9/11, and only one year after October 7, we are still refusing to name our enemy. The irony is that not everyone struggles as we do in the West. Consider Saudi Arabia, Islam’s foundational home, the protector of Mecca and Medina, yet which has nonetheless banned the Muslim Brotherhood. A host of other Muslim countries have managed something similar: Syria, Jordan, the UAE, Egypt. This has been a startling transformation. Back in the last century, the Saudis welcomed the Brotherhood, put them in charge of schools and mosques — and funded the Islamists to spread their ideology right across the region and beyond. I witnessed this firsthand, in Kenya. They came to my home when I was only 15, and seized control of our local mosque. One reason I understand the Muslim Brotherhood is that, as a teenager, I was recruited to it.

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At first, the Saudis thought they and the Brotherhood were ideologically aligned. But the Brotherhood eventually turned around and tried to overthrow them. At that point, the Saudi princes, capable of ruthlessness as well as generosity, rounded them up and expelled them from their schools, their mosques, their newspapers — and their soil.

Today, a year on from Hamas’ heinous attack on Israel, we should welcome Israel’s war against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and most importantly, against Iran. Yet Israel must also learn from America’s mistakes. Remember that the war isn’t over until the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood is destroyed. And for that to happen, we must first recognise our enemy in our midst, and that begins by naming it.

Perhaps it’s all showbiz. Or perhaps all these putative messiahs are signs of the End Times. Certainly the idea that the American Republic needs rescuing at all — let alone with prayer — suggests there’s an apocalyptic mood afoot. Last Sunday, even Donald Trump — not renowned for his piety — got in on the game, posting the Catholic prayer to St Michael on X.

Beneath all the internet showboating, a deeper vibe shift is under way in the relation between men and religion. For a long time, this relation has been shaky, with the “feminisation of Christianity” a longstanding complaint and amid a deluge of books on why men are quitting church. Now, if St Michael is triggering controversy on Trump’s X account, this is part of a larger picture: the return of Christianity in a masculine key. And it isn’t just celebs and politicians: last week, The New York Times reported that young men are turning to the Christian faith in markedly greater numbers than young women, who are more likely to embrace the fluffier doctrines of progressivism.

What is happening? Is this just another aspect of the more widespread politicised sex war? Perhaps this contributes, but I think it goes deeper. Two interlocking patterns are contributing to the new macho Christianity: firstly, that the world in general is growing more disorienting, extreme, and uncanny. This is spurring a widespread sense of existential spiritual conflict, in which post-war Christianity simply doesn’t cut it any more. And, secondly, young men conditioned by video gaming to pour all their energy into dematerialised battles have responded to this new disorientation, by extending their interest in ideational war beyond gaming to the fabric of reality itself.

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who kick-started the modern backlash against Christianity, claiming in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) that it was a creed of slaves which exerted a stifling, feminising downward pressure on individuality, energy, and self-confidence. Three decades later, the First World War drove many ex-soldiers to agree with him that “God is dead”. But it wasn’t until 1945 that this germ of mass unbelief flowered in earnest, in the mushroom-clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki: world-shattering events that, as the Catholic writer Ronald Knox described at the time, felt for many like the decisive triumph of secular science and a Godless universe over the divine and loving order of Christian tradition.

If the atom bomb seemed, to Knox, an existential threat to faith, it also seemed for many to represent the end of war. How could war even start, between industrialised nations, when its conclusion might be another Hiroshima? Under the shadow of mutually assured destruction, then, both Christian belief and the value of “manly” courage and martial vigour came to seem as though they no longer had anything to offer the world. Amid the smoking civilisational rubble this left us, it seemed to many as though the only safe place for Christians to stand was not for anything that might raise an enemy against you, but on the side only of peace, welcome and safety, and the deification of “the vulnerable” and “the marginalised”.

The brouhaha over Trump’s post was partly in response to just how starkly the warrior archangel St Michael contrasts with this post-war sensibility. Most representations of St Michael show him subduing a dragon, understood to represent the Devil, while his prayer implores St Michael to “defend us in battle”, and to “thrust into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls”. This is a combative style of faith long deprecated by the modern Christianity of universal niceness.

And I suspect it’s returning for a straightforward reason: secularism as such is collapsing and everyone — even the avowed secularists — are already behaving as though we’re in a spiritual war. Even the objections to Trump’s post, for example, have this febrile quality of spiritual battle about them. One notable Trump hater interpreted the Michael post literally, as evidence that Trump views Kamala Harris as an evil spirit who needs to be “thrust into hell”, calling this “terrifying”. And a still more striking instance of the now increasingly pervasive post-post-religious weirding came from one of its most staunch opponents: James Lindsay. Lindsay, the co-author of a 2020 book critiquing “woke” academic theories as threats to Enlightenment values, worried that Trump has been manipulated into name-checking the Archangel Michael by “Operation Michael”. This, we are to understand, is part of an occult plan concocted by the Theosophists who run the UN and something called the Fetzer Institute, to channel the Archangel to bring about and control the next stage of spiritual evolution via something called Social-Emotional Learning.

The fact that even so staunch a defender of the Age of Reason is now mounting that defence in terms I can only describe as barmy suggests forcefully that his cause may already be lost. And this is thanks to our high-tech age. In part, as I argued last week, it’s because this teaches us to visualise complexity but not how to control it, encouraging a deification of natural forces such as “climate”. But it’s not just weather gods: it’s also those demons that might or might not be real, and which we meet in our own information machines.

Ideas, images, and even policies travel like lightning online, seeming to take on a life of their own. Groups of people define themselves through love or hate of any theme, idea, or individual you can think of. And sometimes an idea can appear so overwhelmingly powerful it seems to occupy everything and everyone at once: as though some ideas have us, rather than we them. Think of the weird way every alternative to lockdowns came to seem unthinkable, even evil.

And as we’ve grown accustomed to watching memes travel and mutate like this, across millions of individual minds, it’s become less eccentric to imagine them as more than the sum of their parts: as though they have a “spirit” and agaenda of their own. Some will say this is just an illusion; or that we don’t know but it’s a useful shorthand to talk about “egregores”, meaning entities composed of multiple consciousnesses. From there, though, it’s only a short step to saying ideas or moods are aware in some sense, with agency and their own plans; at which point we might as well just call them “demons”.

Do that, and the world is suddenly very much weirder, and very much more alive. This isn’t just my overactive imagination: the slippage between metaphorical and literal demons is widespread. All the way back in 2014 Elon Musk warned that with AI we are “summoning the demon”, while more recent reports of unsettling interactions with AI chatbots suggest some are already entertaining the possibility that we have summoned it.

And this isn’t just a superstitious reaction by techno-illiterates to new machines beyond our ken: far from being an island of reason, the world’s cutting-edge technologists seem aboil in occultism. According to the writer Rod Dreher, Blake Lemoine, the man fired by Google for claiming its LAMDA programme is sentient, recounted that he and his colleagues involved the machine in a ritual committing it to the ancient Egyptian deity Thoth. Another Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Dreher reports, tells him everyone he knows in the Bay Area performs rituals to enjoin “aliens” to supply technological wisdom.

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And the now rapidly-emerging new age of AI-powered robot swarms brings these ambivalent egregores-or-maybe-aliens-or-demons still more concretely, and terrifyingly, into the material world. Yes, drone swarms are (we are told) controlled by humans: but they seem powerful, unstoppable, and “intelligent” in wholly inhuman ways. Video footage attests that they aren’t just for making pretty lights in the sky, unnerving though these displays already are; they’re also for dropping explosives or killer robots on people, a power that shifts such technologies, and the alien-seeming “intelligences” that power them, decisively into the realm of cultural and political (even geopolitical) game-changers.

In those circumstances, it doesn’t matter what you believe: gods and demons might as well walk among us. There isn’t anywhere very rational left to stand – especially when trying to stand there means you sound even barmier than the believers. Even the erstwhile rationalists are peddling conspiracy theories, or ritually invoking Thoth. Given this, I don’t blame those young men who read the signs and portents, and conclude that the world really is stranger than the moderns thought and maybe gods and demons actually are real.

And if this is so, perhaps we really are in a spiritual war — and the only rational place left to stand is in a longstanding spiritual tradition, with a well-worked-out approach to demons and the uncanny. No wonder, then, that Gen Z men are returning to religious practice: with over 90% of them raised on video games, they are as primed for de-materialised war as for remote-piloting combat drones. All that needs to happen is for the field of conflict to expand beyond gaming to the whole world.

Are they right? Certainly between signs, portents, natural disasters, wars, and a proliferation of would-be messiahs, these are strange times. If I saw the angel with the key to the bottomless pit buying milk in Tesco tomorrow morning, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. And if they get any stranger, one thing is sure: woolly inclusivity and a limp handshake won’t be enough. We will all need the Armour of God; and also, perhaps, the intercession of St Michael.

In theory, this is because of the art — the hard-hitting, big-statement, generously-funded art. It’s supposed to be a celebration of excellence, an opportunity for countries to showcase the heights of their culture. But what happens when this is no longer the case?

With this year’s theme, “Foreigners Everywhere”, the cultural status quo of the last few years became crystallised. Identity politics and decolonisation ruled above all. The Spanish pavilion showed a Peruvian artist who spoke about historical colonialism; the American pavilion featured a First Nations artist who used Native American performative rituals as the basis for his work. Each was applauded more than the last — except in the case of Germany.

In the German pavilion, there is an artwork called “Light to the Nations” by Yael Bartana, an Israeli artist living in Berlin. It is an installation of a Sixties-style model spaceship, suspended at the top of a dark room, floating like a distant solar system in a mist of mesmerising light patterns. The title refers to the Book of Isaiah, when God tells the prophet that Israel’s outward mission will be led by the principle of light. It is about the future of the Jewish civilisation assuming the worst has already happened, posing the haunting question: where would Jews live if they were unwelcome everywhere on Earth? 

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This was my favourite artwork of the whole Biennale; and, one night, over proseccos in Dorsoduro, I confessed as much to the Emerati pavilion gallerina. I watched as the blood rushed to her face: “That kind of artist shouldn’t have a platform,” she replied. “With everything that’s going on right now, how could any country promote an artist like her?”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by her response. Since October 7, art galleries across the West have faced criticism for spotlighting Israeli artists. And since the Biennale opened in April, there have also been anti-Israel protests outside not only the already-closed Israeli pavilion, but also the German one. 

What was peculiarly ironic in Venice, however, was that under the logic of identity politics favoured by the Biennale, Germany’s decision to spotlight a Jewish artist was entirely fitting. Isn’t the whole premise of this ideology to shift “the culture” away from those who have “held the power” historically? Why is a German attempt at cultural reparations to the Jewish people not valid, when most other pavilions were essentially a cultural apology to their oppressed peoples? 

The answer, I suspect, lies at the start of almost every artist’s career — at art school. Even before October 7, the popularity of the BDS movement in universities, particularly among the coolest art students, was obvious. After October 7, however, more overt anti-Jewish sentiment became firmly embedded in the universities, falling in line with the trends of wider society. 

At art school, this is even more pronounced because, on an educational level, the bare minimum is expected from you. I remember from my time applying to art schools how difficult it was to find a course that taught electives in both academic and practical subjects. I was lucky to find a course which doubled as a history of art degree, as one of the only things I was taught on the art side was “artistic research”. Here, lecturers told us that, as artists, walking around a park is as valuable as reading a book. More than anything, they prized transgression for transgression’s sake. Yet transgression has its limits.

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For Ben, an Israeli artist and student at a London art school for the past year, the repercussions of this became all too apparent following October 7. Having lost a close friend at the Nova music festival, and one of the only Israelis in the school, Ben (not his real name) felt it his duty to have a conversation with a fellow student about the anti-Israel banners she was hanging around the university, including ones that depicted the state of Israel eliminated from a map of the Middle East and which called for an “end to our university’s research, commercial and institutional partnerships with the ‘Israeli State’”. Concerned by their presence on campus, Ben sent her a polite message, hoping to open up a channel of communication. The activist declined. Ben didn’t push, and assumed that was that. 

A few weeks later, however, Ben was summoned by the university. He was told that the activist had filed an official complaint against him for bullying, and was instructed to attend a meeting about his “harassing” behaviour. He was also warned that its outcome could affect his ability to graduate. Eventually, the claim was dismissed, though the university still issued Ben with an “official warning”: if he ever contradicted the student again, his time at the institution would immediately be terminated. Luckily for him, it was his last month before graduation, and he obviously has no plan to return for more. 

Ben’s experience is far from unique. Noa, a London-based artist who is exhibiting at Frieze for the first time this year, is also Israeli. A few months ago, a British friend she used to be close to told Noa (also a pseudonym) the reason she’d has stopped talking to her. “I was worried you might be a Zionist,” she said. Her evidence, she explained, consisted of the fact that Noa followed a Jewish art collector and actress Amy Schumer on Instagram — both of whom had posted about the Israeli hostages. Of course, this is something that works both ways. I felt a deep sense of betrayal too when artistic colleagues of many years, in the wake of October 7, started posting about the need for “Palestinian resistance”, or shared a conspiratorial infographic about the impossibility of being antisemitic because “Jews aren’t semites”.

In an industry where being trendy is the most precious commodity, galleries have been equally nervous about taking on Jewish artists. “It’s a big risk for any gallery to take on a Jewish artist right now,” says Sarah, a Jewish artist with gallery representation in London and also speaking to UnHerd anonymously. “As fucked up as it is to say, I feel lucky. It could be much worse.”

Even with Sarah, her Jewishness was a cause for concern. When she joined the gallery, she was asked if she planned “on becoming an online activist”, despite the fact that another artist on their roster is an active pro-Palestine protestor online. At one point during her induction to the gallery, she was told: “We’re going to downplay the fact that you are Jewish.” 

In such a climate, it’s perhaps not surprising that many Jews in the arts feel the need to hide their identity. It is striking, after all, that everyone I spoke to for this article insisted on remaining anonymous; all of them fearing the negative impact that speaking freely might have on their careers. One artist told me: “I would love to be open and use my name for your piece, but I can’t risk being dropped by my gallery.”

For some, like Maya, an emerging curator, seeing this has not only been heart-breaking but also discouraging. The pseudonymous artist decided to leave London and move back to Israel. “I miss my friends and family a lot,” she told me. She’d found it exhausting to deal with the relentless anti-Jewish sentiment during her MA in London over the past year.

I understand this. October 7 marked a change in my life, too: I was no longer able to live in a world with so many painful barriers in front of me, so I took several months out, returned home to Madrid, and focused on building myself in other ways. After overhearing artists in my studio talk about how the “Jews control the media”, I wanted to make sure I had skills beyond the art world. I needed to be prepared, just in case, like countless other Jews this past year and throughout history, I am forced to pack up and leave.

There is a broader tragedy here, too. Art dies when there is only one right way to understand and react to the world. It comes alive, however, when it touches on something we can’t quite understand, or something which remains unspeakable. And so, I am reminded once more of Bartana’s work. Standing in that dark room with pounding techno reverberating through the walls and inside my chest, with the plumes of gaseous CO2 unfurling onto the floor, I craned my head towards the light.

When Stanley Kubrick needed a truly disturbing haunting for the bathroom of room 237 of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980), he latched onto one of the most effective and elemental terrors imaginable: an old woman. More specifically, a nubile young woman who rises from a bathtub to seduce main character Jack Torrance, and then reveals her true form as a sore-ridden, saggy-breasted crone, cackling at her own deceit. 

It’s a scene that I suspect plays differently depending on the viewer’s sex. For a man, the horror comes from identifying with Jack. He, too, is aroused by the youth and beauty of the ghost’s first form; he, too, is appalled when he realises he has been tricked into lusting for old, degraded flesh. For a woman watching, the horror isn’t about what you want. It’s about what you are — or what you will become. You will age into monstrosity, and your only power will be the power to disgust. Every female body contains the terrible fact of its own future.

Coralie Fargeat’s new satirical body-horror The Substance contains a lot of visual nods to The Shining: corridors with sinister geometric carpet, blood pouring down walls, a bathroom decorated in an upsettingly lurid shade of red. But the most important nod of all is this: it’s a movie about the horror of female ageing, in which the ultimate nightmare is a woman’s body made grotesque by time. This time, though, it’s not a male filmmaker seeing this horror from the outside. It’s a female filmmaker seeing it from the inside. 

The film’s concept is a bit complicated and pretty clever. Elisabeth Sparkle (played by Demi Moore) is an Oscar-winning actress turned fabulously successful aerobics instructor (shades of Jane Fonda), just hitting her 50th birthday — which is the point at which “it stops”, as her repellent producer (Dennis Quaid) tells her. “People always ask for something new.” She loses her show. She loses her celebrity. She loses her purpose. 

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Enter the substance — a mysterious black-market medicine that promises to create the best version of you. When Elisabeth injects it, she gives birth to a whole second self through a gory vaginal split in her back. The new her (played by Margaret Qualley) is young, luscious and beautiful, and takes the name Sue. The only snag is that, while Elisabeth and Sue have separate bodies, their existence is shared: one of them can live for seven days while the other lies insensate. Disturb that balance, and you pay a price.

Of course, the characters (character?) can’t simply follow the rules. As Sue steps into Elisabeth’s old life and job, it becomes unbearable to sacrifice herself so the older body can live. “Just one more day,” she whispers to Elisabeth’s prone body, as she draws another dose of serum from the spine. The cost is borne by Elisabeth, who becomes more decrepit with every liberty Sue takes. Unable to coexist, they end up in a battle to survive that neither ultimately will win. Sue will end up savagely kicking a wizened, hunchbacked Elisabeth to death. 

There are more gruesome parts of the film, but for me, this moment of obliterating overkill directed at the despised figure of female age was the most horrible. Sue, of course, is ensuring her own hideous death by murdering Elisabeth. But in that moment, she cares less about her own life than she does about destroying the saggy, sunken portent of her own future. Elisabeth’s body represents everything she fears becoming, and everything that she will be, because Sue is Elisabeth and Elisabeth is Sue. 

The writer Victoria Smith dissects this particular form of ageist misogyny in her book Hags. “From the moment we are born female,” she writes, “we are conditioned to feel ashamed, not just of our appearance, our biology and our desires, but also of other women and our connection to them.” One way to manage this entrenched internalised misogyny, argues Smith, is through “hag hate”, which “provides a means to pacify that fear and shame by directing it onto the older woman.” The enthusiastic way in which some younger women embraced terms of abuse for middle-aged women like “Karen” and “terf”? That’s hag hate. The young woman understands, correctly, that to age as a woman is to become hated; her futile defence is to hate harder than anyone else.

But the self-destruction begins with Elisabeth’s choice to take the substance rather than accept her own decline into maturity. In an interview about the film, Demi Moore has said, astutely, that “it’s not about what’s being done to us [us here being women] — it’s what we do to ourselves. It’s the violence we have against ourselves.” And having worked to Hollywood’s punishing physical standards since she was a teenager, Moore knows a few things about this violence.

Inevitably, as a young woman Moore was told that she wasn’t thin enough (“before I ever even had children”, said Moore, in a phrase which ever so slightly and heartbreakingly suggests she might have accepted some justice in it after having children). She doesn’t, however, see those comments in themselves as the most harmful thing inflicted on her: “those were humiliating experiences, but the true violence was what I was doing to myself, the way in which I tortured myself, did extreme crazy exercise, weighed and measured my food because I was putting all of my value of who I was into how my body was, how it looked, and giving other people’s opinion more power than myself.”

Yet all the while Moore felt inescapably inadequate, her body was the peak of commodifiable perfection as far as the film industry was concerned. In Indecent Proposal (1993) she played a woman so gorgeous that a man would offer a million dollars to sleep with her. For going topless in Striptease (1996) — and for appearing to be fully nude on the poster, which may have been more important for the film’s commercial prospects — she was paid an unprecedented $12.5 million. 

It would have been sensational for any woman to appear naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair. But it was Moore who did it, in a 1991 shoot by Annie Leibovitz that drew both feminist praise and moral majority ire. It was talked about by everyone for most of that summer. Moore might never have received much critical recognition for her performances, but her body has always been significant in itself. It stands for the ideal.

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Which is why it is shocking to see her naked in the early scenes of The Substance. Her breasts are a little less perky than the last time you probably saw them, her butt a little less perfectly round. In the mercilessly full-screen close ups on her face, you can see that her skin’s plumpness is fading, its texture not so refined. She looks undeniably like an older woman. She does not, however, look her age — which is 61. She doesn’t even look her character’s age of 50. She could pass easily for 40-something. 

And that is partly the point. “Part of what was interesting is that Elisabeth is being rejected, and it’s not that I look that bad,” Moore has said. But it also points to a different kind of horror taking place off-screen. Moore has denied ever having plastic surgery, despite extensive speculation that she had undergone procedures including breast implants, fat transfer and eyelid reduction. Regardless, her body speaks of relentless discipline in diet and exercise: slim, toned and exquisitely proportioned, even if some parts of her are very slightly drooping. 

Keeping the hag inside you at bay requires constant vigilance. While Moore looks 40-ish, stars who are actually in their 40s have begun to look nearer to 20. This month, Dazed declared the advent of the “Undetectable Era” of beauty — the beauty itself is detectable, but the means used to achieve it are not. “We strive for dramatic results,” explained one surgeon. “The undetectable part is that it’s done so well, so beautifully, that to the natural observer it just looks like a person who’s maintained some youth.”

This, of course, is the dream that drives Elisabeth to the substance: to be younger, more beautiful, more perfect. That possibility — of youth stretched into decades — is not dystopian anymore, or at least not dystopian if you have access to the money and expertise that Hollywood success can offer. You can look as poreless and full-lipped at 30 as you were when you were a pre-teen. A beauty that looks born, not made, is there for the purchasing.

No procedure, though, can bargain away time forever. The portrait in the attic (or in the case of The Substance, the unconscious 50-year-old body in the closet) is still there, awaiting revelation. The hag is in her bathtub, waiting to be found. The horror of female ageing is that you can’t kill the crone inside yourself. She is you, and the alternative to reconciliation with her is mutually assured destruction. The only way to live, in the end, is to accept your mortality.

There are, of course, books the church once condemned. The Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum contained some of the cornerstones of modern thought — Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, Milton, Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Kant and so on, right down to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). In Ireland, there was even a Committee on Evil Literature, which led to a Censorship of Publications Board that prohibited some of the nation’s finest writers, including Edna O’Brien and Brendan Behan, as well as material from abroad.

There were books so heinous that their authors were regarded as being agents of the devil. Cardinal Pole wrote of The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, the earliest author to appear on the Vatican’s list in 1559: “Though it bore the name and pen of a man, I hardly began to read it without recognizing that it was written by the finger of Satan.” The Irish philosopher John Toland, reputedly the first figure to be called a “freethinker”, was accused of selling his soul to the devil on a Donegal hillside. Similarly, Spinoza’s pioneering Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was slandered as being “Forged in hell by the apostate Jew working together with the devil”. 

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What these all had in common was that they exposed humanity as it is — rather than what it claims or desires to be. Exposing the hypocrisies of their times, they threatened the existing order. Where would we find such characters and texts today? For all the onanistic claims of progressivism, these are starkly conservative times in publishing. Yet if there’s one contemporary writer who could be studied at Scholomance, it’s Michel Houellebecq.    

Provocateur, professional controversialist, literary enfant terrible, patron saint of trolls — the image is as cultivated by the author as it is inflicted upon him. Far better, though, is to think of him as the smoke of literature’s guttering candle. Alternately reviled and lauded, there’s always been more than a hint of brimstone to Houellebecq. The reasons why are worth exploring; they result not necessarily in a portrait of the writer, who’s both exposed and enigmatic, but of us, his readers, inquisitors and targets. 

It’s difficult to imagine the Anglosphere producing or permitting a homegrown Houellebecq. For one thing, the bar for “daring” literature is ridiculously low here, where endless writings about the breakup of marriages or relationships at university are hailed as radical or edgy. The bar for heresy is exceptionally low too. Though many feign to question our orthodoxies, as every great writer should, the penalties for dissent are severe — the Crucible-like puritanical witch-hunt of Mark Fisher only proved the accuracy of his warnings. 

It’s tempting to contrast France and applaud its history of transgressive writing: Rabelais, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mirbeau, Colette... Some parallels do exist in English literature, but they’re relatively scant. The Earl of Rochester was no Marquis de Sade. And when Oscar Wilde was destroyed by the British establishment, and partly himself, where did he go but Paris? In France, the “liberty” part of their revolutionary inheritance remains strong. The French tradition demonstrates it’s often only on the outer reaches of decorum, only when we are brutally honest about our deepest desires and worst impulses, that we can truly know ourselves. There’s a nobility in such aims, even if the means appear ignoble, or even diabolical. And this is Houellebecq’s realm. 

The demonic power of Houellebecq’s writing comes primarily not from what he’s creating, but rather what he’s feeding off: the hypocrisy of Western neoliberal society. He’s not, however, a moralist. Houellebecq makes little attempt to rise above the fray. If there is a ship of fools, as medieval artists used to portray the corruption of civilisation, the author is on board, smoking below deck. Houellebecq’s references to himself in his prose and interviews are fairly disreputable. The fact he sees himself among the wretched and the doomed is telling.  

It’s a shame that controversy clouds how we view him. It obscures his scope, from studies of sex to political thrillers, via ruminations on desire, parenthood and the spectre of terrorism. It misses the fact that he’s a funny writer, reminiscent of Beckett; sometimes conditions are so grim and melodramatic that his writing circles back into amusement. “Look at the little creatures moving in the distance; look. They are humans. In the fading light, I witness without regret the disappearance of the species.” This is not to say that there is a soft-centred optimist within the demon imp caricature waiting to get out. Like Beckett, beneath layers of pessimism, there is a rich seam of humour — yet beneath the humour is an endless fall to oblivion. “Irony won’t save you from anything,” one of his characters claims, “humour doesn’t do anything at all.” 

Houellebecq sees and writes the world without the blinkers that more “civilised” authors possess. He obsessively studies people in all his novels, like an ape turned anthropologist. He notices the things — petty, distasteful, criminal, insulting, exploited, decadent — that we can afford to ignore, and which in-group policing would forbid if ever seen. His talent for prophecy — incels; the rise of nativism; the anti-immigrant reaction; the resurgence of the right; psychoanalysis becoming a tool for narcissists; the commodification of sex — makes him foolish to ignore and difficult to dismiss as a Right-wing troll. He’s much more problematic than that. 

In elite Western cultural circles, there has been such a successful commodification of the self that anything conferring status and credentials, anything that might give an edge over a competitor, is fair game. Ideally, this involves exploiting real and deep things but ones that are conveniently unverifiable (queerness, neurodivergence, that sort of thing). Marxism is one such device. By Marxism, I don’t mean the economic theory and movement for societal transformation but rather the imposter that bears its name and wears its face in Western cultural circles. I mean an identity politics performed online by a cultural elite, and espoused by discreet landlords, trust-fund nepo-babies, deconstructionist Ivy League professors, and multimillionaire “creatives”. I mean an identity politics that gives an edge and an alibi to those reaping the benefits of luxury capitalism, one that steals the valour of the poor and profits by obstructing meaningful change. For all the Right’s panic that the Left have been undertaking ‘a long march through the institutions’, there’s very little attention paid to how the Left has effectively been body-snatched by wealthy pseudo-liberal entryists in the past few decades.  

Rereading Houellebecq, I wondered if he might be one of the last genuine Marxists. Not in terms of solutions or idealism — we’re much too lost for that — but rather in diagnosis. The author has admitted to nostalgia for the old faith; he was raised by his Communist grandmother, after his hippy parents moved on. Houellebecq has insisted he does not write in attack, like a polemicist, but rather in defence. From what? One answer is neoliberalism. “To increase desires to an unbearable level,” he writes, “whilst making the fulfilment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.” 

This leads to an estrangement from ourselves, each other, and the world, and brings the author under the shadow of Marx, especially his theory of alienation. The following passage from The Communist Manifesto fits Houellebecq’s work, and our current conditions, to a shocking degree: “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” 

Just like with Marx, every aspect of life becomes debased in Houellebecq. For both the Frenchman and the German, the market must always keep growing, keep metastasising, into every aspect of existence. As Marx put it, capitalism must “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere” — and so too in Houellebecq’s world, almost everything ends up for sale, including love, innocence, the soul. Almost every promise is betrayed. Almost every effort ends in squalid disappointment, as the cheap thrill fades or the cash disappears. In Platform, it’s the promise of sex, adventure, exoticism, travel. In Annihilation, it’s the promise of the internet, politics, family, optimism. 

Yet Houellebecq shows we rarely face up to this grim reality, at least not initially. Instead, consumerism keeps the truth at bay: we procure younger faces or partners, covering up how everything is sourced. Denial is big business. There are no costs or consequences, indeed no end, until all collapses. People continually become ill in Houellebecq; Annihilation is no exception. All the artifice we conjure to convince ourselves of our own invulnerability cannot keep the truth at bay forever. Our society may be rich, but exploitation, decline and death all remain the same. It’s often right at the end of his novels that an epiphany finally comes, too late but not too little. These are small Ivan Ilyich moments that make you question everything you’ve previously read and thought of him. 

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Indeed if you actually listen to Houellebecq, rather than reactively dismiss him, he’s insightful. Forget capitalism for a moment — he also redirects our attention to political correctness as a tool of evasion and/or destruction. He is strong, too, on the theme of ageing, and on the loss of innocence. Part of his callousness, perhaps, is a survival mechanism; he switches off his emotions. How to remain romantic when faced with entire industries dedicated to debasing all that is good? 

“Those who love life do not read,” Houellebecq claims. “No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.” Elsewhere, he has asserted, with more than a hint of gallows’ humour, that writing is “like cultivating parasites in your brain.” This is immensely refreshing to hear, as the contemporary literary world often congratulates itself that literature is a saintly act of empathy. The implication is that writers are innately good, indeed better, people. Writers are good, it naturally follows, because “good” is what you declare — not what you actually do. Anyone who points out the falsity of this joins the list of the forbidden. There’s no greater sign of goodness, after all, than the occasional necessary witch-hunt or search for the devil’s mark, sifting through the digital dirt, on the accused. Houellebecq has no such delusions. “We are both rather contemptible individuals,” is how he opens his dialogue with Bernard-Henri Lévy in Public Enemies. He prefers to be a circling vulture than a cuckoo in the nest.  

The word “Satan” comes from the Hebrew for “adversary”; “devil” from the Latin for “slanderer”. Lucifer is different. The name of the rebellious angel, the morning star, comes from the Latin for “light-bringer”. Surveying the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Committee on Evil Literature, and their present-day equivalents, it’s clear their opposition was not to sinful texts per se — but rather those that enlightened. The light cast by some illuminates extraordinary things, liberating things. In Houellebecq’s case, what it reveals is painful, wretched, disgraceful, with only occasional joy. There have always been those who oppose diabolical writers. But whether they know it or not, what they’re seeking is not the purging of evil but the extinguishing of light. 

Looking back, there are a number of reasons why my identity transitioned so abruptly to that of a tomboy. The wildness of the guys was different from that of the girls: the risks they took were ones of daring and skill. The girls took risks with emotion and intimacy (being sexually intimate was an emotional risk). For another, the manly virtues were powerful: courage and valour and strength. I admired them, and I coveted them. I wanted to test myself, to prove my worth. More than anything I wanted others to see these qualities within me and to respect me for them. Femininity was disenchanting, with little to offer. While I was out on the mountain trails with the guys, testing and challenging my strength, the girls would be lazing on a lake dock, reading magazines, painting nails. Girliness was boring.

But there was another force at work, deeper and less comfortable to name. Being boyish was an escape from the anxiety of being a woman. It is one thing to jump off a 40-foot bridge into swirling water, quite another entirely to grapple with the pressures of being a young woman. I resented male sexual attention. It was exhausting, that constant awareness of male hunger. I wanted to be free from that background buzzing.

Instead, I was privy to their locker room talk. They would often tease each other about whom they had bedded the night before and laugh about the way the girl would wake up hoping for more commitment, more connection, more promises of care. Though I see only now that the guys were also afraid of the risks involved in love. Their mockery often concealed a lurking fear and resentment of their own need for female affection, a threat to their independence and autonomy. But I had a secret terror of becoming one of these girls, of being treated casually, of feeling unvalued. There are differences in how young women and young men respond to the risks of intimacy. As a woman, I was afraid that I might become callous and disillusioned, or wounded and hurt. The promises of the sexual revolution that offered freedoms and pleasures without guilt held little appeal for me. It wasn’t guilt I wanted to avoid, it was the self-protective cynicism that disappointments often lead to. I wanted to avoid the sexual marketplace altogether. Shedding my femininity was the easiest way to do this.

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But it wasn’t just because of the influence of men that I became a tomboy. Women, too, in ways that are subtle, judge other women, especially pretty ones, with preconceived notions that I was keen to avoid. Young pretty women are sometimes seen as superficial, as dumb, as less serious than a type of woman who covers up her attractiveness by appearing to not care about her looks. Young women often earn social points with other women for having a type of look that loudly says, “I’m not vain, and not pandering to socially constructed expectations of beauty.” Baggy clothes become a sign of ethical enlightenment. Not wearing make-up a signal that one has inner beauty. That this style is itself carefully cultivated, an exercise of moral vanity, often seems to be lost on young woman. Cutting off my hair as a young woman was taking this aesthetic one step further. It was a decisive striking out against the femininity of my teenage years and a clear signal to those around me that I was not to be confined by gender expectations. (It was the late Nineties. I shudder to think of what I may have been tempted to cut off were I to be in my late-teens now.)

At any rate, it worked. Immediately I was taken more seriously by my professors, by my friends, by guys and by girls. I was seen as tough and as independent. And the more I was seen as tough and independent, the more I became tough and independent. We tend to become the person we pretend to be.

There were three aspects to the change in my appearance that seem to be absent from today’s discourse on young women and gender, all of them related. The first was that I had a deep and genuine affection for men and for masculinity. I had no interest in correcting their “toxic” attitudes and humour. I had no desire to domestic their behaviours. I adored their swagger. I loved their courage. I delighted in their jokes, their irreverence, their ridicule. The second is that virginity was a concept that had not yet been entirely corrupted by the accusation that “The Patriarchy” employed it as a weapon to keep women controlled and confined. And the last was that though I wanted to push against convention, this push was aimed at enlarging what it meant to be a woman rather than what it meant to be merely “gendered”.

I am often surprised, and troubled, now by how quickly a young woman will abandon being a woman because she isn’t at home in the stereotypical idea of femaleness. That rather than redefine the female stereotype, she jettisons her female gender. What makes her dislike it so much, I wonder? The added irony is that when she becomes a “he” or “they”, as we often see today, he/they does so without any genuine affection for masculinity. That is, rather than challenge the feminine stereotypes she clearly doesn’t fit, he/they becomes a boy who isn’t, often, at all masculine. He/they appropriates the concept of maleness into herself (himself, themself), making it safe rather than wild and scary and foreign and fun.

I am sympathetic to the young women I see today who seem to want to escape the burden of being a woman by becoming some form of nonbinary. It may feel like it offers freedom from the confines of a girlish stereotype, frees one from social expectations, and, importantly, from sexual pressures. Identifying in ways that cut against the norms of gender is often seen as a kind of power move, a way to position oneself so that others take one seriously as an individual. It answers to our desire for uniqueness and self-expression. But as it does so, it often forms a young woman into a new stereotypical type, while cementing the idea that femaleness is merely girly, an idea that feminism once worked hard to break.

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I remained a virgin into my early twenties. This allowed me to not only slowly grow into my skin as a woman, but also gave me the independence from gender I was so keen to embrace. But once we label virginity as a form of male dominance, a remnant of a more repressive sexual era, one in which men controlled women’s sexual experiences in an effort to eliminate their own anxieties around female sexuality, it makes it much harder for a young woman to remain a virgin while being an oppression-fighting ethical person. (And why would men be so keen on keeping women virgins, exactly, we might ask? Isn’t it possible that men might be the primary beneficiaries of sexually available women?), In an effort to express their sexual freedom – a moral imperative – young women may feel internal pressure to have sex in order to be unrestricted from traditional sexual mores.

Being a tomboy freed me from the anxieties of sexual relations. I was able to indulge in my deep affection for males without the demands of being on the sexual marketplace. And I won respect and admiration from others I desired by succeeding in masculine pursuits. I was able to do this because, not in spite of the fact, that I remained solidly and joyfully a female. I was granted respect from the guys I spent the summer months with not because I was seen as their equal and certainly not because I demanded that they respect my “inner-truth”, but because I was a girl doing the same things they were — and sometimes even doing them pretty well. That I was a girl doing tough-guy things made me even more admirable. I didn’t have to persuade anyone to respect me by ideologically brow-beating them.

I am now a grown woman with teenage daughters of my own. I grew out of my tomboy phase but the toughness and the confidence I developed have stayed. Though often deemed as toxic, this strength helped me to deal with a painful intimate relationship when it eventually occurred. (The poetic irony of the human condition is that we often run headlong into the thing we are keenest to avoid.) The risks of the sexual marketplace are very real, and the power of a man to manipulate and wound a woman something that recent feminism has been right to emphasise. But this should not be at the expense of colouring over women’s affection for men with resentment towards them. It is this affection for manliness that I want to instill in my daughters, an affection that grows into their own identities. It is important to man-up in life, even if you’re a girl.

I think the spirit of this writing got inside them as they read and soon their own thoughts were infused with it, so that their internal monologues took on the rhythms and diction and authorial attitudes of William Faulkner. From this they came to believe themselves worthy of the great endeavour, to write at the William Faulkner level, because, simply in thinking their private thoughts, they already were writing like William Faulkner. Bits of their experience already were being milled into Faulknerian sentences, with which they would sometimes narrate their lives to themselves more generally, in paragraphs.

I was not in their heads and so I can’t absolutely confirm that this is how Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo came to want to write their great novels, but both of them began to write seriously very soon after they began to read seriously, which suggests I’m onto something. And anyway, I was in my own head when the thing I describe happened to me. Like them, I read very little as a boy. I was physically restless and mentally scrambled, and also the third of six loud children born in an eight-year span to my poor mother. I lacked the cognitive and bodily inclination to read for pleasure, as well as a quiet place where I might try it, until I was done with college.

Or almost done. I was in my final term, student-teaching at a rural high school in Michigan, bored on a warm Sunday in a tiny village roughly 80 miles from both my home town and my college town, when I cracked open my gigantic literature anthology and began to read a short novel wedged, somehow in its entirety, amid the hundreds of poems and stories also gathered into the fat book. Yes, I was an English teacher at that country school, and an English major at my undistinguished university, and I’d liked the fiction I read for my classes, but not enough to read the stuff in my free time — until I opened my Anthology of American Literature, randomly as I remember, at the first page of Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth.

Unlike the novels of Faulkner, McCarthy, and Delillo, Roth’s fiction is not distinguished by self-consciously daring and luxuriant prose. What Goodbye, Columbus offered instead, to a reader like me, was voice, attitude, the funny and haughty and brainy commentary of its young narrator, Neil Klugman. Before I had even finished this little novel, my thoughts were taking a Neil Klugman or Philip Roth sort of form. I was describing things as they might. Of course I desired Brenda Patimkin right away. I also started wishing I was Jewish. And, almost immediately, I started wanting this new activity I was performing in my head, this mental making of Rothian sentences, to define me in some larger sense. I thought it should. From what I could tell I was really good at it. Reading Philip Roth I thought, I can do that.

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In other words, before I’d even finished the first “literary” novel I’d ever found myself reading merely because I liked it, I started thinking I could be a novelist. I don’t relate this to compare myself with McCarthy and DeLillo, but rather to illustrate how far down the ladder of literary talent this tendency can be found. I suspect that, for certain readers, perhaps especially reluctant or belated ones, the thrill of discovering a love of serious and stylish fiction translates very quickly into a sort of literary will to power.

It might be by accident or obligation that the type of person I speak of becomes a reader, opening a book because there’s simply nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon, or dutifully doing the reading for a university course, but then continuing as an avid reader because reading now fuels his uplifting hubris about writing, because that one book he stumbled on got the stylish sentences going in his head. This sent him after other books that might do the same thing.

You’ll notice that I dropped the coy neutrality and started using masculine pronouns just then. The particular reader-writer, the “type of person” I’m referring to in all this, is a male type of person. I’m dealing in gender stereotypes here. This is a risky and suspicious activity, I know, but these stereotypes are so consistently affirmed in both my reading and my personal experience that I feel I can use them as a sort of crude literary sociology. And these stereotypes are consistent with a phenomenon that comes up a lot when people talk about literature and publishing, the fact that men read very little fiction anymore, and, when it comes to the publishing category called “literary fiction”, they read almost none. Some gloomy ironies attend this fact, which I’ll go into below.

In my gender stereotypology, the woman fiction writer has been reading her whole life. She read easily and prodigiously as a girl, consuming and then producing stories that grew in sophistication as she herself grew older. Thanks to her fast and effortless reading, she developed a capacious feel for the arc of character, the full span of narrative time, the novel as a single experience, a single order. Her mature writing serves these broader elements. It is thus less showy than that of her male counterparts, more story- than style-oriented. By contrast the male reader-writer in my scheme came to reading as McCarthy and Delillo did, fairly late, perhaps after finding reading unpleasant or difficult when he tried it as a boy. His reading, when it did begin in earnest, was spurred by encounters with novels written in daring or quirky prose or bearing some other bold stylistic signature.

This style aspect is key. The male reader-writer in my stereotype understands writing, when done by the masters he admires, as a sort of exalted mischief — like the laddish riffing of Martin Amis and that early Philip Roth, or Delillo’s droll tabulating, his deadpan dropping of synecdochal nouns, an uncanny comic method whose influence is obvious and everywhere among lesser (male) writers. Perhaps consciously but at least subconsciously, our reader-writer pursues his own fiction writing as masculine self-assertion, and also — in rough consonance with Harold Bloom’s famous theory — as a quest to commit a few Oedipal murders, to transcend and thus kill his literary influences with an even more daring, more excellent, more distinctive style.

There are of course exceptions to these gender stereotypes in current fiction. For example the best, most intoxicating novel I read in the last year was Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which — with its supersaturated prose and Bunyanesque heroine, a polymathic giantess who rules a surprisingly sexy medieval convent — calls to mind male novelists like David Foster Wallace and John Barth more than any prominent female novelist I can think of. By contrast, Jonathan Franzen’s intricate, stylistically modest family sagas code as fairly female in my scheme.

Still, despite their imprecision and offensiveness, these stereotypes have real descriptive value. Indeed, much feminist criticism of toxic and laughable masculinity in the worlds of writing and publishing seems to assume some version of them. The partly justified, often philistine, and increasingly pointless mockery of male literary striving that became popular in the 2010s — exemplified by the “Guy in Your MFA Program” Twitter account and subsequent book, and their many imitators — leans on and propagates categories that resemble mine, even as its adherents would surely repudiate my gender stereotyping on grounds that it’s gender stereotyping.

But I’m less concerned with the exalted strata inhabited by Lauren Groff and Jonathan Franzen, who don’t have elderly neighbours and helpful loved-ones suggesting that they “self-publish”, than with the lower levels where most male reader-writers read and write. Shouldn’t the final collapse of literary reading among other men be something of a bummer to them? Shouldn’t the idea that their potential audience has largely disappeared kill their desire to keep writing?

In these times of hegemonic psychotherapy, many educators and functionaries would answer “No! Of course not!” Writing is fundamentally a mode of self-expression, they believe. It should be an end in itself, its own reward. Teachers of writing, at every level from primary schools to MFA programs, often base their writing pedagogy on this assumption, implying or even stating that the point or goal of writing is “finding your voice”, which means that a writing effort could be considered successful if it resulted in this bit of therapeutic self-discovery and nothing else. But the male reader-writer wants something very different from this. He’s on a quest to kill his Oedipal fathers. He writes because he thinks he is, or might be, uniquely excellent at writing. His standard for success in a writing effort is having it read by people who agree that it and he are excellent. For him the truly therapeutic outcome is not him finding his voice but other people finding his voice, and then declaring in newspapers and magazines and end-of-year award ceremonies that it is the best voice.

But in order to do that he has to get published, and in order to get published he needs a publisher to believe he might have an audience. It’s true that, while male fiction readers rarely read female authors, women fiction readers often read male authors. So he has that going for him. Still, if our reader-writer is writing as a mode of masculine self-assertion, publishers are going to expect his audience to skew male. He surely wants women readers, but his paradigmatic reader is another man, if that man can be assumed to exist — and on this point the numbers are extremely discouraging. A statistic much-repeated is that women buy 80% of published fiction and men only 20%. And it is largely agreed-upon in the publishing world that the imbalance is even greater, perhaps much greater, when it comes to literary fiction — as opposed to other fiction genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and especially spy novels and military thrillers, which sunburnt men in Bermuda shorts can often be seen reading on airplanes.

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This is obviously a problem for publishers, who want all the genders shelling out for their books, but for some commentators it represents — as either symptom or cause — a moral problem. In two recent articles, male commentators agonise over the lack of literary reading by their fellow men. Writing in GQ, Jason Diamond confides that reading quality fiction made him a better person. He believes it might help other men gain “a better understanding of what drives… people to do terrible things” — the implication being that men who don’t read novels are perhaps at greater risk of doing terrible things themselves. In the Daily Beast, Jeff Hoffman offers a nearly identical lesson about men being at moral risk because they don’t read award-eligible fiction. Hoffman points to various small-n, non-randomised studies that claim to find an empathy boost from reading novels, especially for teen boys. The fake science is a minor problem, though. The more basic problem is that, for boys and men looking to enjoy and not just endure their lives, this eat-your-vegetables case for reading literature is more likely to stigmatise than encourage it. Of course, it’s easy for me to criticise such earnest wrestling with the issue, instead of offering my own suggestions. Then again, I’m not convinced it is an issue, and, anyway, I suspect my own case for reading good fiction — it gets the stylish sentences going in your head — has limited resonance in the larger world of men.

As to the supposed moral problems, I haven’t noticed any among men I know, but the statistics about women and men and literary reading are corroborated in my experience, and with almost total fidelity. Most women I know who went to university and maintain some cultural interests — women who see serious movies occasionally, who like the idea of museums and sometimes visit them, who are willing to converse about decent TV shows as a way to survive a dinner party — read at least a few literary novels a year. But, most of the men I know — men from my local parenting and social worlds, who have university degrees and respectable taste in television — read virtually no literary fiction, though some read sci-fi or detective novels. When my kids were little I met a fellow dad who told me (probably because I’d gone on at tedious length about the novel I was writing) that he had just finished reading a well-regarded recent novel. I thought, “Finally, a dad I can talk fiction with.” It wasn’t until several years later that he and I finally sat down for a cup of coffee. I started talking about contemporary fiction, assuming he was keeping up with literary things like I was, but it turned out that the novel he mentioned when we first met was the last one he’d read.

Conversely, when I do meet a man who’s an active reader of serious fiction, our conversation usually travels a familiar path. I learn that we like the same edgy, stylistically daring types of fiction, and that we’ve read many of the same recent novels. Sometimes the overlap in our reading seems quite improbable, given how little-known and low-selling these novels can be. A couple years ago a man I didn’t know mentioned to the group of people we were in that he was a huge fan of the Irish writer Kevin Barry. I’d just finished reading Barry’s brilliant, edgy, stylistically daring novel The City of Bohane. It was my new favourite novel! What a coincidence! But then, well, to make a long story short, this other Kevin Barry fan and I were eventually exchanging manuscripts, each of us reading the novel the other was currently “working on”. That’s right, we were both fiction writers, of the unpublished variety.

Further, on the rare occasion when I meet another man with a serious interest in literary fiction, I typically learn that he and I like many of the same edgy, stylistically daring writers, and, with absolutely zero surprise, I also learn he’s not just a reader. He’s a reader-writer. Like me he has at least one unfinished novel on his laptop. The identification I experience in these moments has become a little deflating, I have to admit, unflattering for both of us. Ruefully I consider this other reader-writer and think, “You too.” Even more ruefully, I think of the absurd ouroboros of literary creation and consumption that we reading-writing men make up — reader-writers writing for the small population of other readers who also write. The intimations of cultural glory I once felt while reading my literary heroes and thinking “I can do that” would have been much less seductive had I known my potential audience was, basically, me.

I felt this gloomy identification while reading those two earnest articles on the crisis of non-reading men that I cite above. I was mildly depressed but entirely unsurprised when, in each article, the author lets on that he, alongside his admirable, gender-atypical reading of literary fiction, is also a writer of it. “You too,” I thought, ungenerously. Still, I should give these articles a little credit. They don’t seem to realise it, but both authors have revealed the one reliable method for solving the urgent problem they’ve identified, the one proven way to create the empathic, evolved, morally enlightened type of man who reads literary fiction — convince him to become the grasping, vainglorious, most likely deluded type of man who writes it.

Our own century’s William Dalrymple is an anachronism down to his name (incidentally, the conservative writer Anthony Daniels took on the pseudonym “Theodore Dalrymple” because he felt it sounded like that of a “gouty old man looking out of the window of his London club, port in hand, lamenting the degenerating state of the world”). Once William Dalrymple might have been governor of the Punjab; now he hosts a podcast. The only comparable figure in contemporary Britain is that other prize stallion of the Goalhanger stable, Rory Stewart — with whom Dalrymple in fact lodged in Kabul in the late 2000s, when he was writing Return of a King.

Even Dalrymple’s outspoken criticism of Israel, which recently got him into genteel Twitter fisticuffs with his friend Simon Sebag Montefiore, has a smack of the old school about it: one can situate him comfortably within a Toryish tradition that disdains the Balfour Declaration as a betrayal of our Arab friends and a cause of national dishonour. In a similar vein, he has done more than most Israel-critics to highlight the plight of the Arab Christians swept up in the conflict, for whom he has agitated since he wrote From the Holy Mountain in 1997.

That book, retracing John Moschus’s steps, completed a trilogy of travelogues that started with In Xanadu, where he followed the path of Marco Polo. Dalrymple’s account of his Silk Roads adventures, written when he was only 22, was praised far and wide by all the greats in the game, including his hero, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Then came City of Djinns, a colourful telling of life in Delhi. Eunuchs and dervishes feature prominently. “Delhi ladies very good,” says his driver at one point, “having breasts like mangoes.”

It is a cliché for the travel writer to find more of himself, and of his home country, the farther he ventures afield; but what seems to have most startled Dalrymple in City of Djinns was the absence of Britain and Britishness in India, which had somehow “managed to shed its colonial baggage”. The only traces of home were to be found among the depressed Anglo-Indians: they too are presented as an anachronism, and Dalrymple writes about them with warmth and fellow-feeling. “The dish I like is that Kentucky Fried Chicken,” says one, Joe Fowler, regarding a recent visit to the motherland: “A very popular dish over there, a delightful dish.” His tone becomes gradually more mournful: “It was born and bred in us that the British Empire would last for ever. They promised us that they would stay.”

In his travel books, Dalrymple himself is the main character, but his move to history as his preferred genre has occasioned a retreat. Already he was blurring political commentary and historical anecdote with tales of his own derring-do: the first chapter of The Age of Kali, for example, tells us a lot both about the origins of the Left-wing movement of Lalu Prasad Yadav, and the author’s efforts to flag him down for an interview (which eventually occurred when they happened to end up on the same flight). Dalrymple declared his intention to retreat from the fore in the introduction of his 2009 book Nine Lives. When he wrote In Xanadu, “travel writing tended to highlight the narrator”; now he prefers to stay “firmly in the shadows”.

Dalrymple’s acclaimed series on the East India Company pursues themes already present in The Age of Kali and City of Djinns. In the latter, he decried the savagery and rapacity of the Company, empire, and — especially — of the British response to the Mutiny of 1857, in which were manifested “all the most horrible characteristics of the English character — philistinism, narrow-mindedness, bigotry, vengefulness”. The date 1857 hangs over much of his writing. It marked the starting-point for what he has called “the world of Kipling”, characterised by “decree from London, complete racial segregation, and the Brits behaving according to stereotype”. It is a shift that Dalrymple bitterly laments.

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But Dalrymple’s interpretation of history has always been more sophisticated than bog-standard empire-bashing. In White Mughals, he illustrates and underscores the extent to which a genuine love of, and respect for, India coexisted alongside avarice and exploitation within the East India Company. On one early episode of his podcast Empire, co-hosted with Anita Anand, he goes out to bat for the great bogeyman of Company Rule, Warren Hastings. Far from prosecuting Hastings in the manner of Edmund Burke, Dalrymple finds something redeeming in him: his learning, his curiosity, his enthusiasm for Indian letters and manners. All this stands in contrast with Robert Clive, the real villain of the piece, whom Dalrymple takes as representing the less urbane, more cynical dimension of British imperialism — the dimension which ultimately, on his telling, came to dominate the stage.

Dalrymple has now moved back in time with his latest book, The Golden Road. Here he tells the grand and gripping story of how India shaped the ancient and medieval world. “Why”, he asks in the introduction, “is the extraordinary diffusion” of Indian influence “not better and more widely known?” “Some might argue that this is a legacy of colonialism,” he answers. This construction anticipates a “but”, but none comes: in any case, Dalrymple, as his appreciation of Hastings makes clear, knows better than anyone that British attitudes to India were always a good deal more complex than regarding it as an “ignorant backwater”.

In The Golden Road, he gives the impression of self-consciously hamming up his Indophilia, perhaps for comic effect. Early on he cites, with a wink, Sanjeev Bhaskar’s Goodness Gracious Me sketch: “Christianity? Indian! Leonardo da Vinci? Indian! Royal family? Indian!” Then, as we progress through his narrative, more and more things turn out to be Indian in origin. The university? Indian! The wealth of the Roman Empire? Indian! Our numbers — and with them “a revolution in commerce, leading ironically to the creation of trading companies that would pioneer the domination of Europe over Asia in the centuries to come”? Indian!

It may therefore be that the old travel writer hasn’t completely disappeared from his own narrative, and that he’s playing a character that is in some ways an imperial throwback. It is as though he goes into overdrive to undo 1857: this may be said to be his overarching mission, if he has one. In a recent interview, he bristled at being described, in jest, as the “last of the White Mughals”, but perhaps this can be meant as a compliment. White Mughals, Indophiles, and William Dalrymples have been a perennial presence in Britain’s intellectual culture, and we are better for it.

And yet, the Eternal City didn’t fall. Under General Quintus Maximus Fabius, the Romans abandoned their formerly aggressive strategy, instead shifting to hit-and-run attacks. Though Fabius was roundly criticised for this cautious approach, and was promptly dismissed by his compatriots as a “cunctator” or delayer, Hannibal’s supply lines were soon cut, and the Carthaginians ultimately forced to leave Italy.

It is a dramatic story, but hardly ancient history. Adopted by Beatrice and Sidney Webb in the late 19th century, the old general’s pragmatism was revived as “Fabianism” — a form of socialism, but one framed by economic gradualism and respect for tradition.

And if, to quote one historian, the Webbs’ ideas were “perfectly suited to British prejudices” in their own sepia-tinged world, what Fabius understood remains starkly relevant now. As Keir Starmer has shown — and Kamala Harris proved in her debate with Donald Trump — remaining level-headed wins debates and often elections. More than that, practical Fabianism can be a salve for some of modernity’s most tender wounds, especially when compared to the dreamy utopianism so common elsewhere in politics.

We are living in an age of dogma. That is clear right across the political spectrum, from the Left’s extreme approach to climate change and gender, to populist demonisation of immigrants and other outsiders.

The specifics, of course, are different. But like their ancient namesake, the original Fabians found themselves in a fraught political climate. Faced with a complacent establishment that despised socialism — and the growing popularity of radical politics, epitomised by a spate of anarchist attacks from New York to London — they were forced to thread a path between the two.

How did they manage this practice? In a word: moderation. Though embracing a range of progressive economic causes, advocating for a national health service as far back as 1911, the Fabians were equally careful not to forsake capitalism entirely. For the Webbs, small businesses were to retain their assets, even as the movement’s leaders were broadly conventional in their personal morality. No less important, the Fabians also made their peace with Britain’s ancient monarchy, even as they preferred a professional civil service to the revolutionary vanguard.

As late as the Nineties, these ideas were successfully practised by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and even today most developed countries boast mixed economies and lively welfare states. All the same, recent years have seen caution and thoughtfulness replaced by emotion and zealotry, with disastrous results across a range of policy areas.

Consider climate change. While doubtless a major challenge, leading physicist Steve Koonin nonetheless suggests that current environmental policies are underpinned by implausibly catastrophic projections, including mass starvation and a huge rise in weather-related fatalities. To quote John Clauser, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics: “Climate science has metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudo-science.”

Prodded along by allies in the media — Associated Press and National Public Radio are two of the organisations to accept money from climate lobby groups — this extreme approach may yet prove harmful for regular people. Like Fabius’s opponents in the Senate, the climate lobby ignores inconvenient facts, instead preferring bold action, and a grim future encompassing smaller homes, less mobility, and worse diets.

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Apart from anything else, the science underpinning the pessimists is decidedly shaky. For one thing, net zero is a fantasy that can likely never happen even in the medium term, particularly given the rising energy needs of developing countries. That’s before you consider an even more essential problem: physics. Renewables suffer from low power density, which means they require much more material to work. As even the CEO at Siemens Energy recently conceded, economic realities are starting to assert themselves, despite massive and continuing subsidies for wind and solar.

Beyond the scientific folly of climate-change extremism, this zero-sum approach is bound to be unpopular. A recent Gallup poll shows that just 3% of Americans consider climate change the most urgent problem facing the country. Besides, adaptations of various sorts, from better flood defences to clever agricultural practices, have helped reduce climate-related fatalities dramatically over the past century, despite a massive increase in global population and higher temperatures. Why, in short, don’t we try things that actually work?

To be clear, this is not to suggest we should dismiss climate change as fake — the planet really does seem to be getting warmer, albeit more slowly than climate lobbyists suggest. But rather than clinging mindlessly to performative, ineffective and fundamentally unsellable policies, a more Fabian approach would embrace hybrids as opposed to less desirable EVs, or else invest in economically viable alternatives to fossil fuels, notably hydro and nuclear power. Placing your faith in wind or solar seems like a fool’s errand — and a good way to lose money.

If climate change is one area that could do with a strong dose of Fabianism, our attitude to race is another. Once again, it is clear that the current radical approach, popular on both sides of the Atlantic, is doing more harm than good. Current “anti-racism” ideology requires schools, companies and governments to use racial metrics in hiring and spending. Yet this approach has proved a massive failure. After making steady progress in the Fifties and Sixties, the relative economic status of African-Americans has largely stalled compared within other groups, including Latinos. That is even as inner-city problems remain as intractable as ever. The primacy of racial identity politics is also socially counterproductive, as we can see in the ethnic rioting in the US in 2020, in Britain in 2024, and in France almost constantly.

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It is understood, of course, that some on the Right are guilty of similar neuroses, especially when it comes to demographic replacement. But the multiracial reality of contemporary Western societies cannot be wished away. And besides, ideologues of both Right and Left miss a basic point: so-called “people of colour” are not monolithic, and often share little beyond not being white. That is apparent from the numbers, with the latest data from the US Census Bureau showing a wide disparity between different ethnic minorities. Korean-Americans, Indonesian-Americans, Taiwanese-Americans, and Filipino-Americans all report higher incomes than whites. Among immigrants from Africa, females apparently do better than their white counterparts already. That’s even as Asians now constitute perhaps a third of leading tech CEOs in the US.

To put it differently, might it not be best to adopt a Fabian approach to race — both in terms of level-headed pragmatism, and in class and upward mobility? Fabianism, for its part, would avoid a racialist approach to public policy, instead adopting a strategy of general societal uplift, one less likely to stir resentment among white majority populations. There’s evidence, moreover, that this can work in practice: Denmark’s policy of integrating immigrants into the labour market has arguably seen the Nordic country suffer less ethnic strife than neighbouring Sweden.

Success there is echoed by the advantages of Fabianism for immigration policy. Once again, the radicalism of Left and Right has caused problems. A massive wave of immigration, embraced by business and intellectual elites across Europe, has in turn energised Right-wing populists across the continent, even as native workers (especially those on low incomes) face rising competition for jobs, homes and social services. Spurred by record numbers of people crossing the border with Mexico, American attitudes to immigration have hardened too — roughly 60% of Americans, and a majority of Latinos, support mass deportations.

These realities lead some on the Right to favour cutting off immigration entirely. Yet it will be extremely hard for Western societies to thrive without it. That’s obvious demographically: across the OECD, the so-called “dependence ratio” (those aged 65 and over as a proportion of people aged 20-64) will hit 46% by 2050.

At any rate, a Fabian approach to these challenges would acknowledge these facts while rejecting open borders. Robust controls are crucial here, with countries from Australia to Canada prioritising high-skilled migration until liberal activists and big business encouraged them to change tack. To put it differently, a Fabian approach to immigration is not only possible. It has actually been proven to work in the recent past — and the sooner nations rediscover it, the better.

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In the current environment, prospects for a Fabian revival may seem dim. Practicality is not a virtue much taught in universities these days, with the academy instead seeking to turn students into activists more than citizens. Social media tends to accelerate the ghettoisation of information too, meaning people get little exposure to ideas outside their presumed comfort zone. Then there are the challenges specific to Fabianism as an ideology: in an age of rampant inequality, to say nothing of general disgust for politics, can a softly-softly approach really succeed?

Perhaps not. Yet as Fabius so vividly proved, in difficult times societies need pragmatists not ideologues. One cannot expect either the current liberal oligarchy — nor Right-wing demagogues like Trump — to embrace such a rational response. But like Rome or the British socialists, success can only come by recognising political, economic, and social realities.

Today, in short, Fabianism provides an elegant route away from our current travails. Like the ancient Romans, we are past the point where dogma and vainglory can be afforded. In an increasingly divided, debilitated West, a shift towards greater realism therefore seems the healthiest alternative.

When I first saw the sign, at the beginning of the school year, it barely caught my attention. It was typical, something you might see in any public school in America. I’m also very much in favour of being kind. But, seeing it every day for several months, it started to bug me. Is that true? Is kindness “kool”? What is the school trying to communicate here? Suddenly, the banality of the sign was precisely what made it worthy of my attention.

Let’s start with the obvious fact that, no, it isn’t always true that kindness is cool. The cool kids often act unkindly. And I can think of many scenarios in which I would want my son to be kind, even if it meant that everyone would regard him as uncool. So this seems to be a classic case of a category error: what’s moral is not always what will make you popular or cool. Perhaps we ought not to be lying to our children about the nature of good and evil.

But, I can hear you protest, surely, the sign is meant to be merely aspirational. It’s a way of saying that we hope to live in a community in which it’s cool to be kind. I fear, though, that this makes things even worse. For it seems to concede that morality is secondary to “coolness”, and all we can do is hope that the Arbiters of Cool decide to use their considerable powers to promote kindness.

And yet I think the sign hints at an even bigger problem. Like many of our cultural institutions, my son’s school seems to have elevated kindness to the top of the moral hierarchy.

Here is the school’s mission statement: “Be kind and encouraging; Accept responsibility; Respect others and be safe!” Again, utterly banal. But also wrong-headed. Kindness is not some kind of Uber Value from which all moral behaviour flows. In fact, when I think back on the acute moral crises of my life, these were the times when kindness wasn’t nearly enough, and I had to summon the courage to be unkind in order to do what was right.

My son’s school is actually quite a good school, and there are lots of strong, moral people who work there. The question is: why are they talking about morality in this depleted way? Why are their stated values so bland and so weak?

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Our public understanding of morality is in crisis. Indeed, even outside of school, we struggle to talk about morality at all. In a recent advice column in The New York Times, a reader asked whether it was okay for her adult daughter to bring her married lover on a family trip to Greece. Instead of telling the writer to keep this creep as far away from her family as possible, the NYT expert advised her to be more tolerant:

“This is about respecting your adult daughter’s choices. You have substituted your idea of happiness for hers. This is a common (and often well-intentioned) trap for many parents. It’s not productive, though… As a show of respect, read up on polyamory before you broach the subject with her.”

The phrase “not productive” is doing a lot of work here. We often now use words such as “unproductive” or “inappropriate” or “unhealthy” to describe behaviours that we want to eliminate, either in ourselves or others. But those are borrowed concepts — one from economics (“productivity”), one from etiquette (“appropriateness”), and one from medicine (“health”).

Economics, etiquette, and medicine are wonderful. I’m in favour of all three. But these are clumsy metaphors for morality, and I fear that talking this way has led us astray. For the production of something may be for good or for ill; what’s appropriate or polite may not be what is morally right; and a healthy body may be engaged in deeply immoral activities. (And, no, I’m not just talking about sex.)

I think what’s going on here is that we’ve become very uneasy about using the moral categories of the past. “Kindness” and its cousin “tolerance” are the only values that seem consistent with our current age of agnostic pluralism. We’ve also been trained to defer to an individual’s preferences, and it seems wrong to pass judgment on another person’s choices (unless, of course, they’re being “unkind”).

A certain kind of conservative sees all of this and argues that we just need to get back to the simplicity of Right vs Wrong. Perhaps all this talk of being kind, encouraging and respectful is just a muddled-up way for us to avoid making the difficult judgments about good and evil. And there’s some truth in this critique. But I also believe that “Right vs Wrong” is already an impoverished framework. Those categories are dualistic, and they imply a flat moral world in which every action can be plotted on a sort of number line and given a positive or negative value. That’s not how we experience questions of morality.

I think it’s right, though, to look back into our past. There we can rediscover the concepts of Virtue and Sin.

“What have you learned about virtues?” I asked my nine-year-old daughter last week. We have her in a small classical school that was founded by Catholic lay people. (My son is joining her there this fall.) Defiantly counter-cultural, the school has a very different approach to talking about morality. I was curious what she would say.

“I think there’s perseverance and fortitude,” she said. “And a couple others. I can’t remember.” Then a pause. “Wait, wait! I remember,” she exclaimed, breaking into a proud smile. “From my catechism!” Here she started reciting: “The three theological virtues are faith, hope and charity.”

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In the Christian tradition, there are several different lists of virtues. Kindness is one of the seven capital virtues, standing in opposition to envy, one of the seven deadly sins. The other capital virtues are: humility, temperance, chastity (not what you think it is!), patience, charity, and diligence. Other Christian formulations include things like endurance, devotion, and wisdom.

But those concepts have no place in a public school, right? We live in a multicultural society, and I probably shouldn’t have smuggled Christian values into a discussion about public morality, especially not in the public schools. (Well, except for kindness. Let’s keep that one.)

But the project of naming and defining virtues is not a uniquely Christian one. The pre-Christian Greeks talked of the four cardinal virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice. This is the list that my daughter was trying to remember. Plato adds piety. Aristotle writes of courage and truthfulness, among others. The Romans had an even longer list.

Of course, these are Western cultures. What about someone from Africa or India or China? What about a Muslim student?

You might be surprised to learn, like I was, that all of these cultures have concepts that are quite similar to the idea of Virtue. And all of them identify individual virtues that stretch far beyond the idea of kindness. India has the ideas of dharma and aram. In Ancient Egypt, the goddess Maat represented the virtues of harmony, truth, and justice. Buddhism has the Ten Perfections. In Confucianism, there are ren, xiao, and li.

I’m not an expert in the moral and ethical traditions of any of these cultures. Indeed, like almost everyone else of my generation, I went to schools — both secular and Christian — that downplayed talk of the virtues, so I don’t even have a great handle on the Greek or Christian understandings of that concept. I wish I did.

What I’m starting to realise, though, is that we need to revive the concept of Virtue if we’re going to talk clearly and accurately about morality. Pluralism itself, instead of undermining the case, demands that revival. In our effort to be culturally sensitive, we’ve purged our moral conversation of concepts that occur again and again across all the wisdom traditions of our species. We’ve created an alien life form in a petri dish, and we’ve unleashed it on our children.

We all need Virtue. And wherever you have Virtue, you also have Sin.

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Let’s look again at the school’s list: Be kind, encouraging, accept responsibility, and be safe. All good goals. But ask yourself what isn’t on their list.

What’s missing are all the virtues that have anything to do with strength or excellence: Prudence, Fortitude, Chastity, Diligence, Wisdom, Perseverance, etc. The closest the school comes to any of these is its humble request that the students “accept responsibility”. Pretty weak stuff.

To state the obvious: you can’t be a good person without being strong. You need to be strong enough to resist your own baser instincts. You need strength in order to stand up to others who are intent on doing evil. And you need discipline — daily strength — in order to do all the good that you are capable of in this world.

The Latin word virtus comes from their word for man (vir), and it originally meant a brave warrior. But it came to mean moral strength as well. This weirdly echoes with the Confucian concept of ren, which originally meant “virility” but came to encompass morality. Other cultures also link Virtue with strength and manliness. Look at the Buddhist perfections of viriya or adhiṭṭhāna. Or the Hindu concept of dhriti.

What’s wonderful about the more traditional understanding of Virtue is that it inspires. Yet this world of virtues also leaves a ton of room for complexity, for it is quite difficult to balance truthfulness and kindness, prudence and perseverance, or diligence and humility. And this is where Sin comes in.

I know, I know. We’re all uncomfortable with that word and that idea. And certainly it has been overused as a tool for denouncing other people’s behaviour. But the idea of Sin is absolutely essential for understanding yourself from the inside. To be human is to be in a constant state of Sin.

Marilyn Simon, a literature professor, has written a beautiful essay “In Praise of Sin” about the damage we do when we try to understand ourselves purely psychologically, without recourse to the idea of Sin. And James Mumford has written about his own struggles with mental illness within a health system that, on the surface, claims to deny the reality of Sin by letting each person define his own values. “When I’m feeling worthless,” Mumford tells his psychologist, “you don’t act as if values are subjective. You don’t reply, ‘Yes, you’re right. If you feel worthless, you are worthless!’”

You can’t be a full human being without acknowledging your own capacity for Sin. If we set the bar high enough, it will inspire us to moral achievements that we can only imagine. But it will also set us up for daily failure, even when we mean to do well.

We call that daily failure Sin.

I will confess here that I don’t routinely talk about Virtue and Sin with my six-year-old son. And even just this morning I told him that his behaviour was “inappropriate” before giving him a timeout for taking a swipe at his brother. It would have been passing strange for me to say: “Son, you’ve been sinful this morning.”

But I also don’t try to shield him from these ideas. In our house, we try to talk clearly and honestly about morality. The concepts of Virtue and Sin, when they aren’t explicit, are often implied. What are we striving for? And how are we falling short? As a parent, I find that I frequently need to ask my children (or my wife) for their forgiveness, for I am always falling short of my own ideal of virtuous parenting.

Two years ago, my daughter had to go to Confession for the first time, as her school made it a prerequisite for receiving her First Communion. At the time, I hadn’t yet come back to the Church myself, and it had been at least two decades since I had gone to Confession. I was quite nervous about helping my daughter prepare to acknowledge her sins and ask for God’s forgiveness.

We sat down on our couch, and we began to go through a very simple “Examination of Conscience” based on the Ten Commandments. Her teacher had given me some helpful guidance, but I found the conversation to be quite difficult. She and I both knew exactly which incidents needed to be confessed, but she had a hard time talking about them.

It’s not that she’s particularly sinful; she’s actually an incredibly good kid. And that was precisely the problem. Being good is a part of her identity, and it was very painful for her to recollect and try to talk about these incidents when she had behaved sinfully.

She started to get upset, and tears started to flow. For a moment, I thought I had messed the whole thing up. I had triggered her shame response. Maybe this was all a terrible mistake. Maybe a second-grader shouldn’t be going to Confession.

So I slowed down. I reassured her that this was a natural part of the process. It may be shameful to sin, but it’s not at all shameful to admit that we have sinned. And I reminded her of some of my own sins, all of which she was quite happy to help me remember.

In the end, she was able to write down some of her sins on the paper which she took into Confession. And, by her account, the Confession went well, and she felt so much better afterward.

The whole incident had opened my eyes. Isn’t this the danger for all of us? That our shame will prevent us from looking at our sins squarely? I was grateful for this ritual, this sacrament, that helped my daughter confront — and accept — her own shortcomings. She will often now tell me cheerfully, unprompted, that she did something that needs to be confessed.

Later that year, I went through the same process when I confessed over 20 years of sins to my priest. My life was quite rocky in the years before I met my wife, and I had been through years of therapy and confronted lots of my own “unhealthy” and “unproductive” behaviours. But now I had to be honest and clear that decades of difficulties had often been the product of my sins.

Which is why I’m going to say something now that is going to sound crazy in our current environment, perhaps even appalling. Our children, in elementary school, need to be learning about Virtue and Sin. By the third grade, they are fully capable of comprehending these ideas and applying them to their own lives. That doesn’t mean it will always be easy. Being human isn’t easy. But “Kindness is Kool” isn’t going to cut it anymore.

All the more shocking, then, to hear the allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against him in recent months. And how strange the silence that they were met with. Until now, that is. 

In a six-part podcast series by Tortoise Media, hosted by Rachel Johnson and Paul Caruana Galizia, a succession of women air allegations of sexual impropriety or abuse against Gaiman, author of Good Omens and The Sandman series. They raise serious questions about consent within relationships that were, at best, highly asymmetrical. Writer and broadcaster Julia Hobsbawm, for example, says Gaiman “jumped on her… out of the blue” in an “aggressive, unwanted” pass in London in 1986, when she was 22. Another, “K”, claims she and Gaiman began a romantic relationship in 2003, when she was 20 and he was in his mid-40s. She alleges she was subjected to rough and painful sex “she neither wanted nor enjoyed.” In 2007, she claims he performed non-consensual penetrative intercourse on her after she had repeatedly asked him not to. 

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Scarlett, another accuser, claims Gaiman assaulted her in a bath at his New Zealand home, hours after they had first met. He was 61, she a 22-year-old nanny. Gaiman said that they “cuddled” and “made out” in the bath — and that the encounter was consensual. But Scarlett claims that Gaiman also assaulted her with “rough and degrading penetrative sexual acts” she hadn’t agreed to. When Scarlett attempted suicide, Gaiman’s response was to say that he was also suicidal. In May 2022, after her employment with the author had ceased, Scarlett signed an NDA with Gaiman which was backdated to her first day of work.

When I spoke to Scarlett last week, she told me how it felt impossible to not be impressed by Gaiman’s fame and status, while at the same time not feeling at all sexually attracted or drawn to him. “I’ve never read any of his books,” Scarlett tells me. “He just talked about himself all the time.”

For Scarlett, “Gaiman’s superfans somehow seem to think that they have personally been betrayed by the allegations because they see him as sharing their own tick-box ‘progressive’ values,” she told me. “It’s beyond belief for me that people just aren’t acknowledging that a man in his Sixties has admitted that he got into the bath with his 23-year-old employee within the first few hours that they met.”

Scarlett, as with the other women who have come forward, was vulnerable at the time she met Gaiman, and, as she describes it, “desperate for love”. “Pretending to myself I had fallen for him was a way to kind of trick myself to think that I had not been sexually exploited,” she said. 

Given the seriousness of the allegations made against such a famous author, you might have expected the Tortoise podcast to have been met with righteous anger. And it was. But not the sort that you might think. Despite the careful reporting — which includes regular reminders that Gaiman denies any wrongdoing whatsoever — many of his fans have expressed their outrage at the podcast, claiming that Johnson is a “Right-wing Terf” with an axe to grind. The podcast, they say, is an attempt by anti-trans activists to smear him. As Rachel Johnson tells me, “The trans activist lefties discrediting the podcast as ‘terf’ made by the sister of Boris is purest misogyny. It’s meticulously researched and it’s fair to a fault.”

Perhaps his impeccable Left liberal feminist credentials have confused people. A whole book has been written about how women-friendly Gaiman’s work is: Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose. The podcast also found two female advocates. One says she’s known Gaiman for 12 years, and that while she’s alive to his faults, doesn’t believe him capable of sexual misconduct. She says she would “go to the wall for him on this” and be “stunned if the allegations were true”. Yet the same friend also said that Gaiman has autism, suggesting that perhaps “some of his mistakes” may be explained by its contribution to what she called his “naivety”. 

That she talks about “mistakes” nods, perhaps, to the fact that these women were all in consensual relationships with Gaiman. But to claim that he was “naive” is to disregard the fact that the vast amount of sexual abuse takes place within consensual relationships. I have heard women who should know better describe the allegations against Gaiman as “not really abuse” because there was no force involved, and the women did engage in certain activity willingly. But each of the women who has come forward about Gaiman described instances of coercive control.

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At least one of the women that have made allegations against Gaiman has approached the police — but with limited success. In October 2022, Scarlett filed a complaint with New Zealand police. In response, Gaiman has claimed the police have not taken him up on his offer to assist the investigation, claiming this showed the complaint’s lack of substance. But officers said they had made a “number of attempts to speak to key people as part of this investigation and those efforts remain ongoing”.

How did the big corporations who profit from Gaiman’s work respond? While Disney and Netflix quietly paused their Gaiman adaptations, it took Amazon until last week to announce that filming of the final series of Good Omens had been halted due to the allegations. “I may be cynical,” Scarlett told me, “but I don’t imagine that Amazon or Disney have paused production because they altruistically care about allegations of abuse. Amazon and Disney have likely suspended production because they are a business, and the only thing that drives a business is cost. This is about cash and not care.”

As ever with allegations of a sexual nature, we have a “he said, she said” situation, complicated by highly asymmetric nature of the relationships, the vulnerability of the women and his claims of their “false memory syndrome”. And unless — or until — there is a criminal trial, there will be no resolution. 

As for Gaiman, he has said very little, only issuing a statement denying the allegations. The storyteller has fallen unusually silent. 

We may over-notice a certain type of youth — brittle, indoctrinated, uncritical — only because they have been primed in a culture war. We see what we expect to see and perhaps this accounts for the gloomy and myopic view of youth many of us have. But what of the other view?

I saw a lot of another type of youth these past few months. We may have come to the end of summer now, but in my own household of teenage girls, it was decidedly a “hot girl summer”. Sleepovers. Tans. Evening bike rides. Candy salads. Nail polish. Crushes. Pop music. Pool days. Sneaking back in past curfew. I often felt that I could just as easily be watching an Eighties teen rom-com as standing in my own kitchen surrounded by young and happy high school girls. They are still frequently on their phones, using them to communicate, share funny photos, and choose their favourite new songs. But they leave their phones on their beach towels as they run to play in the water. And their phones often buzz away completely ignored, so engrossed are they in the conversations with their friends in the room. The same can’t always be said for me and my friends. We may get fewer messages, but we attend to them immediately. As for the boys who come around, they are similar to the girls: funny, daring, audacious and confident.

None of the summer’s visitors has fit the caricature of the brittle teen. The time of the “alt-girl” — the goth or “emo” who fits the picture of fragility and ethical sensitivity many of us have of teenagers — has passed. The “basic bitch” is back. She is like teen-classic. She is into hair and boys and frappuccinos. She is funny. The basic loves her body, and she isn’t shy about showing it. She is the one whose youthful vitality oozes through her pores and shines through a casual flip of her hair. The media has worked to make her uncool, though. Uncool, because pretty and strong. But “cool” moves quickly. And cool always — always — operates in rebellion to hegemonic culture. That the “alt-girl” is still portrayed as cool by the media is precisely the reason why she is now uncool. That “alt-girls” are portrayed as the ethical heroines of movies and TV is the very thing that is making them lame. This is a kind of moral pandering to teens that their animal vitality resists. Millennials — anyone over 20, for that matter — who are the promoters of ethics, are the new squares. Keep up, Boomer!

From my observations, I have come to realise a few things. Firstly, physical vanity increases sociability, which helps to form a strong individual, and in this way is preferable to moral vanity, which is often uglier and harder to cure. As Dorothy Parker pointed out, “beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.” The second is that introspection in youth is probably unhealthy. Hot girl summer, then, is a good thing.

A group of sexy, beautiful girls in the world creates its own safe space. They form a kind of closed community and look out for each other. It is called “girl code”, and the rules are pretty simple: don’t go after your friends’ crushes or exes, be honest, even if it’s hard, and always have your friends’ backs. This last one is crucial, and it is what contributes to beautiful women being safe in the world. Well-socialised males help in this regard, too. But typically, of course, the socialisation of males occurs in response to what women demand from them. Girls come and go in groups. These groups do more than keep young women protected; it makes them powerful. One feels their approach as a kind of force of nature. They talk and laugh and draw all our eyes, but they are indifferent to us. This is the source of their power: it is not simply their beauty or their confidence that makes them unapproachable. It is that they really seem to exist on another plane.

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This makes them highly social creatures. And it makes them strong, as opposed to “empowered” in some political or bureaucratic sense: expert in relationships, empathy, social cues, and social graces. They feel their competency in the physical world and trust in some of nature’s benevolence. That the human brain’s prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for making considered decisions, does not fully develop until sometime in the twenties is itself just such a benevolent gift of nature. We are hardwired to first develop faith in the goodness of the world before we are able to give circumspection and prudence their proper due.

The basic girl is sensual, which is to say she takes pleasure in her senses. I watched this summer as a group of them sprinted the length of a long ocean pier before diving into the sea below without, seemingly, giving a thought or care to the way in which they might crash into each other as they landed. It was reckless… and exuberant. The hot girls of summer value physical bliss over wellbeing. The morally vain, by contrast, emphasise a body’s health rather than its delightfulness. This makes them more suspicious of risk, more alert to un-safety, less grateful, and somehow less than joyfully alive.

Most of all, hot girl summer takes a youth out of her head and into the real world. One’s own feelings take on less gravitas through girl talk, where things are analysed, commiserated with, and laughed about. Politicised ideas of sex and gender fall into the background as real dramas are discussed. What a more ideologically trained young woman might consider “toxic masculinity” is laughingly termed “being a player”. Men are condemned not for failing to have consciousness-raised gender values, but for being a “man-hoe” or “fuckboy”.

They don’t need to defer to the authority of a school administrator or a workplace bureaucracy to enforce socially acceptable sexual behaviours. They do this on their own — or rather, in their own group. The absence of any ideological background for these dynamics to operate in makes them — to borrow a word that a more ethically focused individual might choose — “authentic”. The authenticity comes precisely because the hot girls of summer are not thinking, really, of themselves, but of the interplay between themselves and others. They are vigilant about infractions on sexual norms in service not of a cause but of each other. They are too busy being girls to think about their gender identities. And too busy imposing sexual norms onto guys to think about sexual policies that should be formally implemented by institutions.

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The cost of turning our kids Inside Out

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Hot summer girls are vain. They are absorbed in themselves and their own little dramas, but not necessarily in their own heads. They are superficial rather than merely shallow. But it is precisely because their self-understanding is relational and social that they are rescued from the more sinister peril of moral vanity, a type of self-regard that so easily masquerades as virtue that it usually convinces the one who has this vanity that she is righteous instead of egocentric.

Matt Feeney has recently written about the ill-effects of a film like Inside Out on a child’s or youth’s mind. His argument is, in short, that while the film is intellectually truthful and emotionally insightful, children themselves shouldn’t be trained in therapeutic self-talk and psychologised self-understanding. For some Gen Z teens, it is true, propaganda is the real origin of what they regard as their identities and values. But we shouldn’t fall into the error of thinking that this is the norm, lest we in our own way contribute to youth hyper-introspection by making the mental health youth crisis bigger than it is, validating it through our own doomsaying.

Youthful energy is a powerful force, and joy is an anti-ideological feeling. As adults we may do well to trust a bit more in the animal spirit of youth, like the teens who would hurl themselves into the sea. The antidote to fragility can’t be more moral panic about phones, media, and influencers; that is not thinking low enough. It is their animal spirit, not our ethical arguments, that might rescue Gen Z. What might smell like suntan oil and hairspray and perfume to some smells to me like the return of teen spirit.

I like to imagine a similar exchange being inserted into David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club, with the same brassy blonde asking the question, but instead of Marlon Brando giving the answer, it’s Fight Club’s Edward Norton. “What are you fightin’ against?” the blonde would ask, and Edward Norton, looking even poutier than Marlon Brando but also sleepy and a little bruised around the eyes, would answer, “Well, a lot of things. For example….” Then, in his sad nasal voice, he’d start to list all the ways the imperfect world has wounded him and let him down and left him unfulfilled. On the beat where the blonde’s brilliant laugh is supposed to erupt there is no laugh because there is no beat, because Ed Norton is still listing his complaints. Then the movie cuts to where the blonde was standing but she’s not there, and so the camera whirls to the bar where, without waiting for Ed Norton to finish his list of complaints, she’s gone to get another beer.

In The Wild One, Marlon Brando’s Johnny is making a short declaration about himself — he’s rebelling because he’s rebellious. But in Fight Club, Ed Norton’s talkative “Narrator” is looking outward. He has a critique, of society. This distinction is pleasingly, neatly periodising. Brando’s famous response — hinting at violence and upheaval that he disdains to justify — is redolent of the early Fifties, when Sartre-style existentialism would have been circulating among the sort of people who wrote movies. On the other hand, the answer I’ve imagined Ed Norton’s Narrator giving in my extra Fight Club scene — which he does give throughout the actual Fight Club, and gives even more fully in the Chuck Palahniuk novel the movie’s based on — is so Nineties.

This year, Fight Club is celebrating 25 years as a box office disappointment that became a cult obsession for teenage boy and young men. That it came out at the very end of the Nineties is almost too convenient, making it not only a faithful document but also a consummation or climax of that decade.

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But I should start at the beginning, at the moment where our unnamed “Narrator” is battling a small handful of afflictions, both physical and spiritual, that seem to stem from his crushing insomnia, or that might be the reason he can’t sleep in the first place. It’s not clear. Mainly, he’s listless and disaffected at his white-collar job, which requires a fair amount of airplane travel. And he’s feeling cynical about the many material comforts this well-paying job has allowed him to assemble, instead of comforted by them. Other issues are probably festering below the surface, but these are the ones we know about when the Narrator visits a young doctor who, instead of handing him a prescription for sleeping pills, suggests he check out a support group for men whose cancerous testicles have been removed.

The Narrator finds this suggestion befuddling, understandably, but he decides to give it a shot, and he’s pleasantly surprised when it works. After sitting in the testicular cancer group, and other support groups for people with real afflictions, the Narrator’s insomnia dissipates completely. He’s finally able to sleep — until a raggedy beauty named Marla Singer (Helena Bonham-Carter) starts showing up to his groups. She’s obviously a “tourist” like him, not a true sufferer, and her presence in the groups destroys their healing powers for him. After a brief, sweet spell of sleeping like a baby he’s thrown into a new insomnia, this time with added bitterness at Marla Singer.

It’s in this bitter and bleary state, on an airplane during another work trip, that he meets the heedless and charismatic hipster who made this film into a cult object, the movie demigod whose name has echoed through one generation already and will surely echo into a next: Tyler Durden, played indelibly by Brad Pitt. On the night they meet, after they’ve been drinking in a bar, the Narrator and Tyler start fighting in the parking lot, more or less out of curiosity. Neither man has been in a fight before. When, on subsequent nights, they repeat these outdoor recreational fistfights, men start gathering to watch, and then some, and then a lot, of these men pair off to fight as well. The Narrator and Tyler thus expose two powerful forces working, hidden, among the sizeable population of men like them: a desire to fight, and a desire to join a club. Or, to put it less glibly, they discover that men like them carry a desperate hunger to learn something true and essential about themselves outside of their numbing and boring lives, even if this entails pain, injury and disfigurement; and they learn that, for these men, the best way to start on this path of discovery is in the company of other men.

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This message isn’t new, of course. For example, young men terrified at being shipped off to war have often missed it — the extremity of experience, the deep camaraderie forged in this extremity — once they have returned to the safety and comfort of regular life. Nor is Fight Club the first work of art to use this opposition as critique, to make regular life look false and decadent by comparison with pain and terror. When I say that Fight Club is so Nineties, I mean that, in both its content and its tone, its critical message expresses specific fixations that flowered in that decade and in some ways defined it. In the movie, these seem some combination of kitschy and stylish, silly and serious. Fight Club is cornier and more callow than an adult viewer should be able to tolerate, but, thanks to David Fincher’s genius at conjuring paranoia through image and action, and thanks to Pitt’s exhilarating performance, it carries a convincing suggestion of deep meaning and high stakes that transcends the period-specific details of its worldview.

In certain ways, these details are interesting precisely because of the fertile, frivolous decade they illustrate. Among the things the Narrator laments or derides throughout the novel and/or movie are: having a job, having a boss, the Ikea catalogue, having a wife, friends who got married, his table settings, rich people, his sofa, the contents of his refrigerator, his condo, his condo building, advertising, fathers, his father and risk analysis. Many of these minor beefs reflect the anxieties that congealed into popular form after the dramatic disappearance of Soviet communism, when the idea of nuclear war receded and, to young people in the affluent West, a perpetual peace of liberal capitalism seemed to spread like a fog in all directions. It’s fitting that the Narrator is portrayed as a budding bourgeois, with a university education and a desirable job managing abstractions. Unease with the new order grew most conspicuously among the affluent and well-educated, who stood amid the geopolitical calm and abundant opportunity and wondered, “Is this all there is?” And the Narrator’s attempts to cope with this ambiguous triumph through a sort of postmodern drollness about his own consumerism perfectly convey the knowing critical style of the time, when magazines like AdBusters and The Baffler went after capitalism by hurling irony and mockery against the symbolic worlds built by its entertainment and advertising subsidiaries. Even when the film turns more violent, and the fighters of the fight club turn into a sort of insurgency, their acts of mayhem generally have an ironic, symbolic, theatrical character. They are countering the spectacle of capitalism with spectacular gestures of their own. Again, all this is very Nineties.

What’s also very Nineties is Fight Club’s way of capturing the Narrator’s inner turmoil, the spiritual and emotional sickness that sends him and his followers on their quest for relief and redemption in the first place. This is where the film’s current relevance, the meaning it’s been given in the contemporary culture war, gets a little weird. Some conservative writers see Fight Club as celebrating the lost masculine virtues of warlike hardness and sacrifice, and offering a critique of today’s increasingly, oppressively feminised regime of public morality and political economy. The young men who turned it into the ultimate cult film have generally embraced it in this spirit. Given the masculine eros of the film, this is understandable. But Fight Club’s extremely period-specific understanding of what men are and what they lack makes it a strange candidate to play this culture-war part.

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Why, for example, can’t the Narrator sleep? What does he need? What he needs, apparently, what his culture won’t let him do, is to cry. He’s been holding it in, but now, thanks to his attendance at the testicular cancer support group, he can let it all out. Once he cries, he sleeps. At the brain parasites group, he learns to identify the “power animal” — a cute penguin — that lives deep inside his mind, perhaps frolicking there with his “inner child”, which he seeks and finds in testicular cancer and brain parasites, until cursed Marla shows up and blocks his inner-child access. This all expresses a particular Nineties therapy culture that has been left behind in its particulars, for the most part, but that is an obvious precursor to the therapy culture shaping the human spirit today. In other words, the therapeutic schema that informs Fight Club’s view of the male psyche is a close ancestor of the outlook that reluctant men are now cajoled and hectored to get on board with. In Nineties psychotherapy, the emancipatory metaphysics of the Sixties counterculture gained new power thanks to this figure of the inner child, and to the therapeutic dispensation that encouraged patients to blame everything on their parents, even if they had to invent memories to make their case. These tropes are so ubiquitous in Fight Club they function as a sort of anthropology.

It’s not just the sad-sack Narrator. When floridly macho Tyler shows up and starts riffing on what’s wrong with the world, he sounds the same themes that the Narrator does, though in his brasher and more buoyant tones. When at one point he declares, “We’re a generation of men raised by women”, it sounds like a call to arms in the battle of the sexes. He seems to be naming the torment of today’s men — their subjection by women. But neither he nor the Narrator ever actually criticise the influence of women. Tyler’s declaration cuts against a different villain — men.

Or, more specifically, fathers. The generation of lost and yearning fight clubbers was raised by women because those women were abandoned by their husbands. The Narrator and Tyler weren’t stunted in their incipient manhood by tyrannical women. They were wounded, their inner children are wounded still, by their feckless fathers. Assuming the diseased testicle thing is supposed to be a metaphor — it’s both too on-the-nose to assume it isn’t and too clumsy, too obscure in its culprit, to be totally sure about — the testicle problem with Fight Club’s men isn’t that they’ve been castrated by women. It is more likely that they were left emasculated, or un-masculated, by the flight of their male role models. As an illustrative side-note, I’ll just point out that Chuck Palahniuk’s Wikipedia page says his parents split up when he was 14. I’ll also point out that one thing both the Fight Club novel and the Fight Club movie seem to carry on every page and in every frame is the sodden mess of feelings of a teenage boy whose parents just split up.

The idea that a man needs to be able to cry sometimes, to rage a little at the injuries that the world has inflicted on his inner child, to punch and be punched as a way to feel his emotions in a world that denies validity to those emotions might, indeed does, help fuel the melodrama of a fun movie like Fight Club, but it doesn’t fit very well into any Right-wing critiques that I can think of.

By this point, some readers may have thrown up their hands in exasperation because I’m taking the movie literally, because I don’t realise the film is really a critique or even a satire of the Narrator’s tale of manhood lost in the Nineties and redeemed by masculine camaraderie and collective violence, not an endorsement of it. This is the sophisticated liberal’s reading of the movie. For example, popular liberal writer Matthew Yglesias makes fun of “the guys I knew in college who thought the point of Fight Club was that launching fight club was a great idea”. “[I’m] begging everyone,” he goes on, “to pay more attention to what’s happening in this movie!” He’s confident that, if people would only pay more attention and remember that (spoiler alert) the fight club devolves into a terrorist cell that blows up a bunch of buildings, they’d realise… what? That the whole thing was a prank? That the film’s masculine pathos is an aesthetic ruse, and that anyone who felt it unironically as they watched the movie missed the real, anti-masculinist messaging?

A rather simple response to this is that it’s totally possible, even common, for a movie to portray a course of life as genuinely motivated and powerfully appealing that eventually goes astray or goes too far without ironising or satirising or repudiating the genuineness and the appeal. Life is complicated. Things often go too far precisely because the motivation behind them is so organic and potent. There are human passions that would grip a movie audience as true and beautiful even as they began pointing at bad results, after which the movie audience, instead of repudiating their sympathetic identification with the people who took things too far, would be reminded that life is complicated, and movies are movies. For example, they might sympathise with a movie’s portrayal of male lostness and thrill to parts of its portrayal of male solidarity and also leave the theatre unshaken in their belief that blowing up buildings is bad. This doesn’t inevitably trap them in some kind of paradox they can only resolve by retconning the movie into a critique of the things they were just grooving on. Even the juiced-up teenagers and Right-wing agitators who swoon at Fight Club’s melodrama of empowered machismo don’t go on to blow up buildings — despite the fact that some of them actually started fight clubs.

But there’s an even simpler response, which gets much closer to the true, unironic appeal of Fight Club as both a movie experience and a cult fixation, that revises the thing Francois Truffaut supposedly said about anti-war movies: “There’s no such thing as an anti-war movie.” In case it’s not clear, Truffaut (supposedly) meant that war is unavoidably thrilling on screen and so even anti-war movies end up glorifying war simply in portraying it. Fight Club is the most powerful, most incontrovertible evidence for my altered version of Truffaut’s saying: There’s no such thing as an anti-Brad Pitt movie.

In other words, the idea that David Fincher cast Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden in Fight Club, and had Brad Pitt give the performance he gave in Fight Club, so as to simply discredit the values Brad Pitt’s character embodies and the things that come out of Brad Pitt’s mouth is not just hard to believe. It’s hilarious. Pitt’s charisma in that movie is so ridiculously powerful, his performance is so infectious, that, even if he were saying and doing patently odious things the whole way through, the odiousness would still have an aura of sexy persuasiveness around it. Rather than a totally superfluous critique or satire of odiousness, we would have what the fancier critics call “moral ambiguity”.

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But Brad Pitt’s not even praising odiousness, for the most part. He’s lamenting feckless fathers. He’s denouncing the spiritual pathogens of spectral capitalism. He’s mounting a critique of inauthentic living. These aren’t profound positions, but a director would take their appeal to a movie audience entirely for granted, especially if the coolest, most charismatic movie star in the world, in the most magnetic performance of his or maybe anyone’s career, is expressing them in beautiful bursts of physical movement while wearing retro fashions and wraparound sunglasses.

In one account of the making of Fight Club, Fincher is quoted as saying, “We were making a satire.” The account’s author and others are eager to take this claim at face value. After all, it’s Right-wing Neanderthals and teenage boys with distasteful urges who are turning the movie into a movement. It’s wise to make up a satire alibi that establishes some hygienic distance from such losers. But pretty much everything else that everyone involved in making the movie — the screenwriter, Pitt, Palahniuk, Fincher himself — says about the source material shows that they found the Narrator’s story of men adrift extremely powerful and relatable. It resonated, unironically, with their own lives. If, like those teenage boys and Right-wing Neanderthals, they also understood the Narrator’s sad story as valid, and the need for a remedy like fight club as thus real, what, exactly, is Fight Club a satire of? Blowing up buildings?

Pointless as that would be, Fincher indicates that the film’s final violent act really is the thing he’s satirising, but he says it in a way that totally confuses the issue. Fight Club, he says, “is as serious about blowing up buildings as The Graduate is about fucking your mom’s friend”. As a guy who saw The Graduate in his late teens, I’m tempted to take this statement literally, that is, as meaning that Fight Club is totally down with blowing up buildings. But I think he’s trying to say something else. He’s trying to say that if it’s Brad Pitt dressed in disco polyester telling people to blow up buildings, you’re gonna have to count on those people to understand that it’s a movie and to make the right decisions when it’s over, despite the strange attraction that blowing up buildings suddenly has.

Billed as “a new book of fantasies for a new generation”, Anderson makes a conscious nod to Friday’s seminal oeuvre in her introduction, enquiring, Carrie Bradshaw-like, “how have women’s deepest internal desires changed?” For the purposes of girlboss science, ethnicity, religious belief, wage bracket, “sexual identity” and relationship status are recorded for each participant, though weirdly not age. And as with Friday’s written contributions, there is a lot of quasi-feminist posturing at the beginning of each section. “Sexual liberation must mean freedom to enjoy sex on our terms, to say what we want, not what we are pressured or believed we are expected to want,” we’re solemnly told. “Fantasies can help crystallise our wants and needs.”

One thing that definitely seems to have changed since the Seventies is that aesthetic standards in sex writing have improved, presumably honed by contact with a thousand self-published erotic novels on Amazon Kindle. In Friday’s day, the means of expression was often rough and ready but in Want it tends to be silky smooth. Devouring looks and quickening pulses are swiftly followed by competently handled flushes, swellings, openings, and so forth.

In this professionalised context, the odd bit of purple prose stands out all the more starkly. One image unlikely to leave me anytime soon describes “a saintly stake of flesh that points to the heavens, aloof and destined to do good” whose presence is soon to be felt against the protagonist’s “sopping dividing wall”. Other bits are simply baffling: “She pulls out a large onion and rubs it across my erection,” writes one contributor.

But perhaps a more interesting way in which desires seem to have changed over the decades is that they have got a lot more boring. Things like racial dynamics, incest, slavery, and bestiality — all casually included by Friday, to the point where it was hard to find much else in there — are absent from this collection, said to be the result of whittling down eight volumes worth of responses to the publisher’s call. In fact, this book is generally so vanilla that, perhaps anticipating disengagement from readers in advance, Anderson is forced to entice us with the promise that her own fantasy is included among the anonymous offerings. Certainly, this keeps the reader more alert than she otherwise might have been. Is it the one about the door handle, one wonders? Or maybe the one about the Weasley twins?

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But since many of the main fantasy themes of Friday’s era still appear on message boards all over the internet, it seems likely that their invisibility in Want is not because women have become more repressed in the meantime, but rather because publishers have. Even in its relatively etiolated form, I presume extra fainting couches were required for this book’s sensitivity readers. The closest we get to genuine transgression of old taboos is a bit of water sports and a few tentative rape scenes, rushed through with evident embarrassment and a lot of editorial emphasis that — in this case only, for some reason — the fantasies absolutely do not crystallise the author’s “wants and needs”. Not all of the participants are so convincing. “I’d probably be super-upset if my actual dentist tried to fuck me,” writes one, with an interesting use of the word “probably”.

All this coyness makes something of a mockery of the collection’s main conceit: that it’s offered in the cause of freeing women from shame about what turns them on. Predictably, contributions are not even exclusively from women: “women” is described by Anderson as “an imperfect term” and there are male voices here too. Rather than boldly illuminating the wellsprings of the contemporary female libido, Want is probably more profitably read as a guide to respectable sexual mores in the 21st century. As with female-associated activities generally, there are a lot of unspoken rules. And frankly, the news for men who don’t identify as women isn’t great.

Reading between the lines, it seems that women should expect physical encounters with men to require imaginative supplementation in order to be successful. One writer, not even particularly into robots, puts the point baldly: “Robots are necessary for this fantasy because a group of real men could never focus on a woman sufficiently to participate.” In the main, contributors seem to fall into two groups: those who are not having sex at all, and those who are, but are thinking about having sex with someone else when they do.

Of course, this is scarcely a representative sample. It seems likely that well-satisfied women have much better things to do than write down their innermost desires and send them to Gillian Anderson. And there is also a big information gap here, since we are not told whether men also have to imagine hotter versions of their partners in order to get themselves off. I assume we never will know, since it is very hard to see how such a thing could get off the ground. Friday managed it once, but even then, she had to give the book the sappy name Men in Love — a title quite hard to reconcile with the image of two nurses chopping a man’s cock off after his final orgasm, as I recall.

In any case: according to Want’s subtext, ideally as a woman you should be bisexual, or more grandiosely “pansexual”: what seems like the vast majority of participants describe themselves this way. And whether you describe yourself as lesbian, bi, or heterosexual, based on the numbers exhibited here, fantasising about women is preferable to fantasising about men — even if in practice you say you only ever sleep with the latter.

Partly due to the obvious omissions of certain topics — priests but not imams, Bigfoot but not the family dog, etc. — it seems you should also be alert for the immoral aspects of your fantasies, which is somehow not the same thing as feeling shame about them (bad). One anxiety-ridden participant writes: “Every time I find a woman attractive, I fear that it will come across as predatory, and any time I find a man attractive I question my own feelings, wondering if they are true or if it’s the patriarchal conditioning of society.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same woman says she has never been kissed.

As this quote perhaps suggests, despite the clear ideological bent of the book, tantalising glimpses of reality sometimes break through. Hinting at a fascinating back story, the woman whose kink is to flush her knickers down the toilet says it started in her college dorm bathroom, but “I now do it in a safe manner in a way that cannot affect anyone other than myself”. Her other fetish is wetting the bed every night, which she does in practice: “It took over a year to fully commit to it, and I’ve never looked back.” (She too is single.)

Other fantasists also don’t sound particularly liberated or functional. One woman describes crying each time she imagines that her partner, unfaithful in life, has sex with another woman. Another laments that “it feels like my life is made up of sex dreams punctuated by an occasional real-life event”. Equally, there are those who seem unable to shake off worldly responsibilities entirely, even for a stolen moment alone. Writes one woman, imagining the aftermath of an energetic threesome: “Impressed and shaking with pleasure, I cover myself in a luxurious robe and offer crackers and dips to balance out the wine.”

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By Hanif Kureishi

The main subtext I drew from the book, however, is that there seems to be a new range of social “taboos” shaping some women’s sex lives. These are not taboo enough to be omitted entirely by the book’s censors, but still forbidden enough to become thrillingly desired. One woman masturbates at the idea of her boyfriend proposing. An exhausted mother and wife has an orgasm when she thinks of an anonymous couple having emotionally engaged sex. To the delight of the manosphere, no doubt, there are several feminists who want to be tied up. A woman who is fed up with planning everything for her exes wants someone who takes charge: “How about you do it for a change?”

Strikingly, three separate fantasies involve the simple act of a man ejaculating inside a woman, presented as something incredibly transgressive. And one woman dreams of vanilla heterosexual sex with a man who loves her, in a “clean suburban home”, yet is appalled by this: “This fantasy is the one that makes me feel fucking sick. What does that say about sexuality? About me?”

Perhaps we should not read too much into all this. Perhaps it is mostly just a case of grass being greener. For the record, there is also a “very shy” Buddhist who imagines being a male crime boss slapping a submissive blonde in the face before she gives him a blow job. There are asexuals dreaming of couplings, lesbians craving men, three women who long to have sex with themselves, and a “Church of England (lapsed)” heterosexual who imagines being a man watching his wife being gangbanged at a sex club.

Leaving the book behind me with some relief, though, I couldn’t help concluding that Anderson might be right: there are still some honest conversations about sex that we up-to-the-minute modern women are afraid and ashamed to have. I’m just not sure they are the ones Anderson has in mind.

The building of the Colosseum was overseen by the father-and-son Emperors Vespasian and Titus, to celebrate the destruction of Jerusalem, which they had personally directed. In response to the rebellion known as the Great Jewish Revolt, which began in 66AD, Titus, who was not yet Emperor, laid siege to Jerusalem, putting the city and its Second Temple to the torch. To hammer home his victory, he enslaved thousands of Jewish prisoners and took them back to Rome, where they were forced to build the Colosseum. Titus had his victory commemorated in style on a triumphal arch that still stands, not far from the remains of his family’s amphitheatre.

I visited the Colosseum this summer. It was as crowded as I expected — which is to say that it was barely possible to move — but it was bigger than I had imagined. The sheer scale of the stones that Titus had his Jewish slaves shift (while quietly bedding the Jewish queen Berenice) was astonishing. The fact that, 2,000 years on, it is one of the most recognisable ruins in the world probably ought to tell us something. But what?

This question wandered around my head as I wandered around Rome. What is it about ancient Rome that still speaks to us? Why has everybody heard of Nero, Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius? Why do we all still know, two millennia later, about Roman baths, gladiators, straight roads, centurions, Vestal virgins and the Colosseum? I like to spend my holidays developing spurious and lightly evidenced theories about human culture while I drink my espresso. It’s my idea of fun. This time around, my theory was simple and unoriginal: the Roman empire never actually ended.

Yes, Rome itself “fell” to barbarian invaders in the 5th century, but that, as every Orthodox Christian knows even if no-one else does, was not the end of the Roman Empire, which by then already had a new capital in Constantinople. There was a Roman Emperor reigning until that city fell to the Ottomans in 1453, which was when the Empire technically ended. But that’s not really what I’m talking about.

What I mean is that today’s “West” is really just Rome under another name. Not just because the Western Christian Church was and is quartered in the old Imperial city, and behaved like an imperial power itself for much of the Middle Ages. Not just because, for that reason, “the West” was in many ways ruled from Rome until the modern period. It’s something bigger than that, and yet also more nebulous. It’s the fact that, despite the Christian or pseudo-Christian, veneer, Western culture still really has many of the same values as those of Rome.

True, we don’t take slaves anymore, or throw people to lions, or crucify them, and all that is due to the legacy of the most famous man ever to be crucified. But we’re still, in some ways, Roman. We still valorise power and straight lines. We still have Emperors, even if we call them Presidents, and we still have Empires, even if we pretend we don’t. We still build vast amphitheatres for entertainment, even if the entertainment is an AC/DC concert or a Premier League match instead of a lions-vs-slaves face off. We still use Corinthian columns to demonstrate our social status. And we still make endless films and write endless books about the Romans — rather than, say, the Greeks or the Babylonians or the Assyrians or the Ottomans — because, deep down, we think we are their heirs.

Very near to the Colosseum, you can also visit the ruins of the Forum and the Palatine Hill, which are much less crowded. Walking around the Forum in summer will take it out of you. Fortunately, there is a cafe on the site. I took my children into it to buy a drink, and came out with some more evidence to back up my half-formed holiday theory. The young woman behind the counter, who took my money with a cheery smile, was covered in tattoos and piercings, but this wasn’t what made her stand out. That stuff is barely worth mentioning in the 2020s. It was her T-shirt that said the quiet part out loud, and it was quite a contrast to the optimistic cross which peered over the lip of the massacredome next door.

On the woman’s chest was emblazoned a giant inverted pentagram. In case you were in any doubt as to what this was supposed to convey, the words below it read: DEICIDE 666. “That will be €20 please”, she said, still smiling. Being English, I smiled back.

Deicide turns out to be the name of a bad metal band which began life when I was a teenager in the late Eighties. As a semi-metaller myself back then, I was more than familiar with the anti-Christian iconography that was required by any band that wanted to make a splash in the metal scene. From Black Sabbath onwards, if you weren’t praising Satan, wearing inverted crosses and pentagrams and writing songs with titles like “Death to Jesus” and “F**k Your God” (both stone-cold Deicide classics), you were in danger of being left behind. But we all knew it was an act. Nobody really believed it, so it was all OK. Most of these guys were probably playing golf in their spare time.

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Our Godless era is dead

By Paul Kingsnorth

That was a long time ago, though. Since then, the Satanic, witchy and openly neo-pagan iconography has crept steadily out of the crepuscular corners of the culture and into its centre. In recent years, in fact, there has been no creeping about it — it has been a sprint. This, for example, was Ireland’s entrant for this year’s Eurovision song contest: Bambi Thug.

Bambi is an openly anti-Christian “non-binary” witch who performs what she calls “ouija pop”. Her songs include spells and hexes, and in her spare time she likes to practise “blood magic”. All of this makes her almost entirely uncontroversial in 2024. In fact, unlike the God-hating pioneers of the Seventies and Eighties, it makes her pretty mainstream. After all, other mainstream musical acts like Sam Smith and Lil Nas X have also been working hard to push the pagan-Satan-witch thing to the max.

What is the connection between Bambi Thug, Deicide and our continued fascination with ancient Rome? Pretty obviously, the answer is that none of these things are Christian. In fact, they are all openly anti-Christian, and we are increasingly obviously an anti-Christian culture. It is often suggested that the modern West is “anti-religious” in a more general sense, but this is not really true. Witness, for example, the easy ride given to Islam by progressive elites, or the open arms extended to Buddhism and neo-paganism, or indeed the patronising tolerance extended to the Bambi Thugs of the world. The West is not really against religion. What it is against is its own heritage. And that heritage happens to be Christian.

In my series of essays on the Machine, I wrote at some length about what I called the culture of inversion which now governs us. This is, at root, quite a simple thing, and it is not a novelty either. Ancient Rome went through something similar after the Christians almost miraculously captured its Imperial centre and the Empire turned, in a remarkably short time, against its ancestral gods and towards the new one that would supplant them.

Today’s culture of inversion is the result of the 20th century social and cultural revolution which some have likened to a new Reformation. It has manifested in the sexual revolution of the Sixties, and an accelerating trend towards individualism, radical liberation and technological solutionism. It is resulting in the reshaping of nations, families, cultures and values of all kinds. Most of all, it has manifested in a rejection, conscious or unconscious, of the religion — Christianity — which built the West. For better or for worse, that “West” is now being superseded. We are leaving what we were behind.

Where, though, does this leave us spiritually? As we reject our Christian past we leave an empty throne at the heart of our culture. An empty throne will always attract candidates to be the new king. Who, in the age of Bambi Thug, is vying for it now?

One notion that is currently doing the rounds is that the post-Christian West is “repaganising”. The argument is simple and in many ways convincing. “Paganism”, in this reading, is the default state of humanity, and now that Christianity is receding, it is returning. Paganism is here defined, in Louise Perry’s words, as “an orientation towards the immanent”; a definition with which most Christian theologians would probably agree. If the word “pagan” is frustratingly vague (it basically means “not Christian”), the religious systems it tends to refer to find their object of worship or veneration in this world, among created things.

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Britain's future is Pagan

By Tom Roswell

To Christians, this is a terrible category error. But it is also an understandable one. Worshipping, making sacrifices to, or performing rituals with the things we can see — trees, mountains, fire, the sun — makes intuitive sense, in a way that Christianity, which looks beyond this world, does not. This is why Christianity is a genuinely revolutionary faith; something we tend to forget due to our familiarity with it. But paganism often ends up making practical sense in more sinister ways too, whether by justifying infanticide, sacrificing animals or humans to capricious nature-bound “gods”, or simply by reducing us to the base level of our humanity, as our passions and desires are justified or promoted by deities who personify them. This, it is argued, is where we are headed as we move further and further away from our Christian past.

I think there is a lot to this argument; and yet I don’t think it is quite right, for two reasons. The first is that there are a lot of people around these days who call themselves “pagans”, and they would all reject the values that this argument ascribes to them. The reason for this, ironically, is that most of our new “pagans” are in fact Christians in disguise. Their values — human rights, feminism, ecological sensitivity, and broadly liberal views — are derived from Christianity, and the “old gods” they claim to worship often have suspiciously modern attitudes. It’s true that there is a minority of far-Right pagan types who hang around on the fringes, blathering about the volk and the “old gods” of the Aryans, but the fact that they are roundly rejected by the majority of modern pagans just helps to prove my point.

This brings me to the second reason. Say what you like about modern paganism, but however you quite define the word, it implies religious belief. Pagans and Christians might tear chunks off each other for all sorts of reasons, but they are essentially fighting over the nature of the divine. They — we — are all religious people.

If we were really “re-paganising”, then, we would be returning to the worship of the old gods. And yet, despite all the Satanic witchery of popular culture, we are not actually doing so. What we are seeing with the likes of Bambi Thug, Sam Smith and the rest is not the resurgence of a threatening new (or old) religion. It is an aesthetic. Nobody would die for it. Nobody would fight for it. It is LARPing and play-acting. Rather than signifying a sinister new development or threatening new faith, it is a flimsy veil drawn over a gaping void.

As evidence for this claim, I offer you an image of the notorious drag queen parody of the Last Supper which was part of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. This featured a large lesbian in place of Christ, and Dionysius, god of dark drunken revelries, in place of the Eucharist. A pure product of the culture of inversion, this very public, very global tableau, was as anti-Christian an insult as could possibly be made on the world stage.

Or was it? It was hard to tell because, as soon as mass complaints began and sponsors began withdrawing, and nations began demanding explanations from the French Ambassador, our brave iconoclasts swiftly copped out. Lesbian Christ deleted the tweet in which she had described the tableau as the “new gay testament”, complete with an image of Da Vinci’s famous painting, and the organiser of the show put out a new story. Rather than being a parody of Christianity, this was in fact something called “the feast of the gods”. In the twinkling of an eye, as is the way of the things on social media, all right-thinking progressive people swung in behind this new message. After a few days, everything died down, and people began looking elsewhere for something to be outraged about.

Were these people “pagans”? Not if that word denotes religious belief. If this had really been a “pagan” tableau — if these people had been true believers in and worshippers of the god Dionysius, for example — then they would have stood by it. They would have damned the offended, and defended their gods. They would have made a case for paganism and its metaphysics. They would probably have been quite popular in some elite quarters had they done so.

But they didn’t: instead, they ran away. They did that because they did not, in fact, believe in or respect the “gods” that they were portraying at all. They were just playing with images that meant nothing to them, but which in some way seemed “queer” or “subversive” or “brave”. The fact that the images were none of these things did not seem to register. In some way, they were on autopilot: blaspheming against the God of a long-dead culture, but not believing in the ones they pretended to put in its place. They certainly weren’t wrestling with the implications of what Dionysian worship would actually mean for society.

Some theologians hold that hell is the result of getting everything you want. If the choice we are faced with is between following God’s will and following our own, and if we no longer believe in God, where does that leave us? It leaves us here. But “here” is not a new pagan age. Not yet, anyway. Neither is it a “secular” age. We dwell, rather, among the consequences of our liberation. We got everything we wanted. Now we have to live with it.

In the West today, this means that we have to live in a culture without faith. Without faith in the Christian God, obviously, but without faith in anything else either. We are not pagans because pagans, like Christians, believe in something. We believe in nothing. Most significantly, we are now even ceasing to believe in the ideas which arose to replace all religions in the age of “Enlightenment”. Reason, progress, liberalism, freedom of speech, democracy, the enlightened rational individual, the scientific process as a means of determining truth: everywhere, these “secular” beliefs, which were supposed to replace religion worldwide, are either under fire or have already fallen too.

Is this an atheist age, then? In one obvious sense, yes. We are perhaps the first godless culture in human history. Religious cosmologies have differed vastly across time and space, but no society has ever existed without one. Ours has tried to, for a brief, violent and explosive time. I don’t think that time has long to run. So yes, we are living in an atheist age — and yet, that’s not quite the full picture either.

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What Pagans can learn from Christianity

By John Michael Greer

Atheism, like religion, implies some sort of confidence; some sort of actual stance. A-theism is a position. It states: there is no God, and it can state that because it has a set of alternative beliefs, usually those which emerged from the European “age of reason”: the ability of science to demonstrate universal truth; the objectivity of rational thought; the knowability of reality. Atheism often also refuses religion on moral grounds: religions, it is said, are archaic, irrational, unjust and oppressive. Some version of “humanism” is a better and fairer fit for the modern world.

All of these are positions. They are statements of faith in the world working in a certain way, and in the way that it should work, and should be arranged. Atheism can even amount to a quasi-religious system itself. Orthodox convert Seraphim Rose, formerly a committed atheist himself, once wrote that “atheism, true ‘existential’ atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God”.

Does our age believe this? Hardly. These days even Richard Dawkins publicly regrets the results of the ignorant anti-Christian fatwa he helped to lead. So no, this is not an atheist age either. It is not any kind of “age” at all. It has no shape, no centre. Nobody sits on its throne. It is simply a vacuum, a void.

This is what I have taken to calling the time we live in now, here in the post-everything West: the Void. The Void is our new Colosseum: both bounded and empty, a place of entertainment and terror. In the Void, nothing is real, nothing has meaning, and nothing leads us in any direction but inward. When we get there, all we find is our passions, and they drag us in every direction we can think of. We have no idea who to turn to for help, and despair rises all around us as a result. In this culture, Satan is cool, but not because we believe in him: precisely because we don’t. In the Void, we all hate Christianity, but not that much. It is barely worth hating. Nothing much is worth hating, or loving anymore.

In the Void, we can believe anything we want. And so, we believe in nothing at all.

This can all sound apocalyptic: but what, after all, is an apocalypse? It is a revelation, an unveiling, a reflection of the failure of something. What is it that has failed us? The “Enlightenment”? The “West”? Some pseudo-Christianity we mistook for the real thing? It is probably too early to say. Perhaps we will never know.

No matter: here we are. And despite it all, we should be of good cheer. For the Void is, by its nature, a time-limited phenomenon. Precisely because it is empty, it cannot last. The Void is a phase; it is the place you come to after the end of a culture, and after the end of a theology. The challenge now is not to mourn, to cling or to look back. We are not in charge of this thing, after all. The challenge for us is to think about what comes next — and how to live in, through and with it.

***

A version of this article first appeared on Paul’s Substack, The Abbey of Misrule.

In the opening seconds of Kneecap’s new film, the old cliches we all carry about Northern Ireland are swiftly dispensed. Car bombs, graffiti on gable walls, checkpoints, border signs, Molotov cocktails, barely pubescent British army cannon fodder, hoovered up from Brixton to the Gorbals, kneeling with their rifles on street corners while ragged kids gather round them. If they were following the prevailing models of film in the North of Ireland, as they put it, the movie would be more dewy-eyed trauma porn. People don’t live like that though, not all the time, and even when they are forced to, innate resistances begin.

Kneecap is an inventive, picaresque, often hilarious, fictionalised origin story of the Irish hip-hop trio. It’s defiant in subject and form, rejecting the kitchen-sink misery or Stage Oirish paddywhackery usually demanded of the Irish, while simultaneously flirting with and subverting these modes. The irreverence itself is political, given Northern Ireland was a place where false piety was weaponised by every side to damn the other and whitewash themselves. But the band, and film, embrace the farcical nature of the post-Troubles North with a playful defiance. When the Belfast writer Louis MacNeice wrote of “being various”, it didn’t just mean virtuous things. It is our best and worst sides, and this film shows them, taking place in a contemporary world of dead-end jobs, k-holes and breakbeats rather than newsreels from the Seventies and Eighties.

They go for all the sacred cows of Norn Iron — the PSNI and the British State, philistine Unionists, Republicans who abandon their familial responsibilities and switch to new-age beliefs, anti-drug vigilantes who end up with drug dealers working for them, all the petty lords of their particular fiefdoms. Even tedious Gaelic teachers come in for a bruising, particularly as there’s no excuse for making such a mercurial language boring (“May the lowest stone in the sea be on top of your head” is one memorable line in a film bursting with them). Full of healthy self-ridicule, the irreverence is radical because reverence, as Northern Ireland has shown, is the first step on the road to solipsism, corruption, essentialism and eventually hell.

More than anything, Kneecap the film and the band are concerned with the present, which has long been squandered in the North of Ireland. People chose or were forced to live anywhere but the present. Republicans, for example, were obsessed with the future. Their favourite slogan was/is Tiocfaidh ár lá meaning “Our day will come”. After the Brighton bomb killed five people, the IRA released a statement: “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once — you will have to be lucky always.” There was always a suitably opaque sense of the utopia of a future United Ireland, which untested could become any fantasy the imagination could conjure, rather than what it would and will be — the end of one set of colonial troubles and, after the inevitable sesh, the beginning of a new self-inflicted set of troubles.

Meanwhile, both sides of the divide remain obsessed with the past — King Billy, the Hunger Strikers, the Apprentice Boys, the Easter Rebels… One side trapped and deluded in triumphalism, the other in martyrdom and magical thinking. Catholics could console themselves that the future belonged to them via demographic replacement, something Unionists such as Paisley (“they breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin”) obsessed over. On the other side, Loyalist siege mentality gave way to paranoia and a zero-sum game, whereby a job or house for “one of them” is “one less for us”. This mentality has fuelled a race to the bottom, with the main difference in their deprived neighbourhoods being the colour of the kerbstones and bunting. It is this betrayal of the present, the neurosis of trying to exist in the past and future, that Kneecap reject with a film and discography that are manifestly about the only place we ever inhabit — the now.

What is the present that Kneecap and their generation face in Northern Ireland? Back home this month, I found mixed signals. There’s lots of talk of (parts of) Belfast buzzing with young professionals drinking London-priced drinks and the inflated cost of property. Beyond this bubble, things are different. Poverty and disaffection flourish in inverse proportion to opportunity. Escape comes mostly in the form of criminality, drink, hard drug use and abuse. Communities are beset by paramilitaries turned gangsters and the police are mistrusted by both sides. Minimum wage jobs and food banks are standard. In many places, someone who’d be an entrepreneur somewhere else, somewhere more functional, ends up a dealer. The communities are still largely segregated, beginning at primary school.

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By Alexander Poots

All along the north coast, there are endless paramilitary flags, a tent revival, a drive-in gospel service, even a fence upon which a man was crucified by loyalist paramilitaries a few months ago. There are few signs of any post-Troubles Enlightenment and, in working-class areas where I grew up, few signs of there being a post-Troubles. Even the great symbol of Belfast, the Samson and Goliath shipyard cranes, is one of post-industrial decline. It’s certainly better to live in farce rather than tragedy, and the Peace Process was hard-earned and vital, however flawed, but worryingly it feels like suspended animation. The idea that tourism and investment would save us was always suspect because it’s not capitalism’s primary purpose to do so. The idea that integration, economic justice and eventually real peace could occur is hamstrung by the many politicians and religious figures who benefit from division, paralysis and bad faith.

No wonder, there is such an anarchic element to the likes of Kneecap. Who could blame them for wanting more? “A free Ireland,” one of Kneecap’s heroes, James Connolly, claimed, “will control its own destiny from the plough to the stars.” By contrast, the least one could hope for is some agency over their own life.

It takes a movie this intentionally juvenile to signal a newfound maturity in Northern Irish film. Kneecap takes the tropes and ciphers and turns them inside out, it deflects the gaze back at itself. Cheap moralism and sentimentality are dispensed with, in favour of something more reflexive. There’s little doubt where the trio’s allegiances lie, with the “Northern” scored out on signs of “Northern Ireland”.

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Is anyone at home in Northern Ireland?

By Aris Roussinos

Yet the fact that they are scathing about so many things, in an impish way, the fact that they arouse the ire of so many — including the UK government, the DUP, the UUP and even the mild-mannered Alliance Party — is a sign they are treading where the sanctimonious rarely dare. And their attitude of “show, don’t tell” is remarkably effective, as exemplified by their use of the Irish language. With an indigenous language vanishing at a pace of almost two a month, there’s the temptation to give in to sanctimony and lecture the world about “To hell or Connacht”, hedge schools, the Famine and the real reason so many people speak English around the world. Kneecap choose instead to help Irish survive by simply allowing it to breathe or, as they put it, letting the dodo out of the glass. The film is also a testament to working-class DIY culture, which because of the state of mainstream culture here, now a playground for the vacuous progeny of the rich, may be our only source of hope.

There are those who have taken umbrage with the band. The trio has been condemned by politicians and the media, many of whom have profited from how dysfunctional the North has been while denouncing those who dare to speak the truth. If Kneecap represent disorder, indecency, abnormality, it might be worth considering what order, decency and normality have looked like for the hundred years of Northern Ireland’s existence. Rejecting the archetypes one by one, refusing to migrate to survive, insisting on creating something organically from the ground up themselves, Kneecap have found a path where they were told there was none. They have made their own hope and it’s a raucous but exciting thing. They convincingly demonstrate that laughter is never a singular thing. It can mean and contain multitudes — joy, mockery, self-deprecation, relief, even the crazed elation of having nothing to lose.

The face, and the body, she has now is very different from the one she had when we knew her as Jordan. In her first Page 3 appearance in 1996, she was 18, fresh-faced and natural-breasted. Today, her breasts are enormous architectural domes constructed over 17 operations (her last was a slight reduction after a 2022 procedure gave her the “biggest breasts in Britain”). After facelifts, fillers, nosejobs, Botox and veneers, her face has long crossed the line from “enhanced” to “done” to, now, an alien kind of hardness.

She has been called a plastic surgery “victim”. But Price sees it differently. She has made the choice to look “fake”. “Why do you think I spent all that money on it?” she asked in one of her autobiographies. “That’s how I want to look!”

Pre-surgeries, she was a perfectly attractive girl. But she was only a perfectly attractive girl, and the supply of those outstripped demand so much that (according to Price) in her early days of Page 3 modelling, her take-home from a photoshoot after agent’s fees and travel was just £30. It was only after she had her first set of implants that she began to be something exceptional. As she wrote: “I finally got the boobs I wanted and they brought me a great deal of work and made me famous, so respect to the boobs!”

Price’s profession was model. But her career was really in something different: she’s a body entrepreneur. She understood herself as an object, and she understood that the value of that object consisted in pushing it to its most extreme form. It was not beauty that she offered. It was shock. Her gigantic breasts were not a promise of fertility or an exaggeration of youthful perkiness. They announced exactly how much Price was willing to undergo in the service of making herself attractive to men — a willingness to undergo a gratifying level of pain and inconvenience.

The sharp edges of her implants declared her submission, and her submission secured her elevation. Page 3 girls almost never became stars in America: the concept didn’t translate. But Price was put on the US cover of Playboy and labelled “London’s legendary bad girl”. She also caught the eye of the century’s sharpest student of celebrity. In 2009, a starstruck Kim Kardashian tweeted: “Omg Katie Price aka Jordan and her husband Peter [Andre] are on my flight home from NYC!”

It’s easy to see how Kardashian — then barely two years into a reality TV career — could see a media role model in Price, who had been packaging her life as television content since 2002. But what Kardashian learned from Price’s body is probably just as important. Like Price, Kardashian made her fortune from one wildly exaggerated body part, though in Kardashian’s case it was her butt rather than her breasts, and according to Kardashian no surgical intervention was required.

Nonetheless, Kardashian’s public embrace of “waist training” (severe corsetry) and restrictive diets (the drastic slim down necessary to fit into Marilyn Monroe’s dress for the Met Gala, for example) encouraged scrutiny of her body, and that scrutiny encouraged speculation about what more radical procedures were allegedly involved; and that, in turn ensured her place in the public view. How she looked was fascinating, but the question of what she might have done to look that way was even more so.

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How Big Food feeds fat positivity

By Sarah Ditum

Price’s embrace of the body as business was prescient. Her path to celebrity was one that would be in many regards followed by the woman who became the most famous person alive. And although Price was formed in the now-redundant print economy of Page 3 and lad mags, her attitude was right for the arrival of social media self-commodification. Filters and Facetune made it normal to reshape your image. Price was simply earlier in going one step further and reshaping herself to become the image.

All that matters for the consummate object is what shows up on screen. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is the last refuge of red-blooded heterosexuality in print now that Playboy has shut down, but over the last few years it has been keen to show inclusivity in its objectification: in 2023, its cover stars included the trans woman Kim Petras, and 81-year-old Martha Stewart. That both could be represented as desirable might be seen as a win — neither age nor birth sex can stop you from being sexy!

But there’s also an implied threat. If it’s possible to be this hot while being male or old, what’s stopping every other woman from achieving perfect body status? What parts of your personhood, or even which bodily organs, are you stubbornly holding onto at the expense of becoming the ideal image? You, too, could have a body like this. All you have to do is let go of the idea that your body exists for anything other than to be looked at.

The problem for the body entrepreneur is that she has to keep changing. Jodie Marsh — Price’s Page 3 peer and rival for the “biggest implants” title — reinvented herself in 2011 as a bodybuilder, boasting that she had dropped four dress sizes in seven weeks. The pictures of her, chestnut-tanned and flexing her ripped muscles, ensured a round of publicity for her at a time when she was in her mid-thirties and in danger of ageing out of sexiness by lad mag standards (which were themselves sinking towards redundancy).

But Marsh couldn’t keep pace with Price’s sheer commitment to transformation. (Today, Marsh has taken the Bardot option in post-sexiness: she runs an animal sanctuary.) The question for Price is whether her body is still able to serve her needs. Her willingness to remould herself sustained her when the fashion for supersize implants waned: as the natural look was revived, the sheer bizarreness of her look ensured interest even while other women were opting to have their implants removed. As the old soft porn income streams (magazines, calendars) dwindled, Price remained compelling enough to move into new markets such as Only Fans. Here, she could make the relationship between body modification and her commercial viability even more explicit: she offered a deal to fans whereby those who contributed to her boob job fund got a first look at the results. And, she promised, “The bigger the contribution, the more of my new boobs you will see.” Horrific? Absolutely. Desperate? Transparently. But also honest about the bargain she has always made. Her body is a resource, and she made her living by treating it not as a living thing but as matter to be chopped up and remade for other people’s paid pleasure.

It is possible and even profitable to treat yourself as an asset. It is, though, not sustainable. The surgically crafted body is less an ideal of the flesh than an ideal of mastery over the flesh. But it is a hollow ideal, because eventually the physical will prevail. Price has suffered from scarring, ruptures and infections in the pursuit of remaining the perfect object — and her financial woes suggest that project is coming to the end of its term. The body entrepreneur pushes herself harder than anyone else, but that only means she learns the same lesson as everyone else sooner: there is nothing but the body, and when the body is exhausted, there is no you.

According to apocrypha and Christian folklore, the Roman centurion Longinus pierced Christ in the side with his spear during the Crucifixion. There are several versions of this. In almost all, he’s punished for his crime. In one, he is sentenced to eternal life, fated to wander the earth, reborn over and over, stuck in a helical loop, a universal soldier condemned to die in successive wars. This reincarnation myth made its way subliminally into fiction (Barry Sadler’s Casca series), music (Jimmy Webb’s “Highwayman”) and cinema, in the form of Nick Cave’s script for his lamentably unfilmed sequel to Gladiator.

I first encountered Nick Cave through the medium of terror. At a young age my impressionable brain was inundated by orc metal, the sound of industrial accidents, and electronic plague dances. Most were too theatrical to be truly menacing but some got under the skin, to the extent I was compelled to hear them again.

Chief among them was “Tupelo” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I listened to it disturbed: a glorious moment of lightning-struck damnation. Describing the birth of Elvis Aaron Presley, alongside his still-born identical brother Jesse Garon Presley, it was an unholy chasm through which the night poured. I could barely piss straight with fear, and I’ve not stopped listening since.

Following the parting of Mick Harvey in 2009, the group changed their sound, embracing the absence. You can hear the space that had suddenly appeared and the unlikely influences that helped to fill it — electronic music, ambient drone.

“Well, if I were to use that threadbare metaphor of albums being like children,” Cave noted at the time, “then Push The Sky Away is the ghost-baby in the incubator and Warren’s loops are its tiny, trembling heart-beat.” And these claims were not hyperbole. It required a different kind of listening, and there were fans who were left behind, preferring, to continue the threadbare metaphor, the feral street urchins of their earlier work.

The four albums that followed feel like a sequence or an era; cinematic, measured, atmospheric. Yet as Cave and Ellis continued, and the cruelties of fate took the heaviest of tolls, they changed again. The boundaries of songs began to blur into one another, verse/chorus/verse dissolved. The music felt more and more like painting. The moonless nocturne of Skeleton Tree. Or the vast Turneresque swirls and washes of Ghosteen.

Now Wild God, the new album, marks a new phase. It’s lush, built from vast walls of sound and sudden explosive choral crescendos. An album of the most extraordinary joy, it’s not a complete abandonment of the new or the old. Traces of both can be found throughout (the horses, myths, meta lyricism, Jubilee Street, an eye for the debauched) but the synthesis has resulted in a different creature, an album that feels blissfully out of time. The choirs, bells, crashing of cymbals, the hard-earned euphoria, feel antithetical to these days of lamentation and the gnashing of teeth.

The imagery of the title track feels like something bursting out of one of William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts. ‘Final Rescue Attempt’ has an astonishingly wistful feel. At the other end of the spectrum, the finale of ‘Conversion’ is the band’s most intense climax since ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’. ‘O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)’ is a tribute to the late Anita Lane — once Cave’s partner in love and song — with lyrics free of piety but showing signs of the cloven-hooved Old Nick, proving the sacred and profane are never opposites but rather are wound around each other. ‘Frogs’ is open-hearted uplifting, filled with the sheer intoxication of life when faced with the smallest moments, a frog in a puddle “leaping to God, amazed of love, amazed of pain, amazed to be back in the water again.” A triumphant cloudburst of a song.

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The production throughout feels like something beloved that’s been long-lost and recovered; Leonard Cohen Death of a Ladies’ Man with MDMA instead of barbiturates. The mood is one of escape but to escape you first need to recognise you’re confined.

The Bad Seeds have had their fair share of critical acclaim, yet in recent years an interesting development has taken place in the way Nick Cave is perceived and depicted. It centres around the idea that Cave has changed, become conservative, a God-botherer, betraying his earlier self. There’s a vague sense of disgrace in the air, quite different from the now-fashionable disgrace he cultivated as a young, shock-headed degenerate in Berlin in the early Eighties. The reasons can be guessed at — a typical sneering attitude towards success, a disdain for artists who are prolific or even just visible, a reaction against his role as agony uncle/psychopomp/semi-reluctant oracle of the internet in his stoical Red Hand Files. Yet there’s another deeper more reflective reason for the sense of casual disdain and it’s encapsulated in the album’s title.

Let’s consider that perhaps Nick Cave hasn’t changed at all, or at least not in the ways we’d like to think. A superficial reading of this would be to say that he has stayed still and the whole world has moved or slid. It’s a familiar claim, often voiced by tech bros claiming the Overton Window forced them to the Right when they’ve always been Liberal. The argument usually continues along the lines that all the pearl-clutching censorious Mary Whitehouse types on the Right, whom artists have had to battle for free expression are now to be found on the Left. The pendulum swings too far and if only we could get it to settle in the middle where the reasonable apolitical people are then everything would be hunky dory. Which of course is palpable bullshit.

Set aside the overly convenient dichotomy of Right and Left, and the comforting illusion of the Centre, and think instead in terms of orthodox and heterodox. The former always conforms, whatever the climate, however shameless. The latter didn’t fit then, doesn’t fit now and will never fit.

But the idea that Nick Cave’s religiosity is suddenly a problem or even a recent conversion is belied by most of his discography. In fact, it was those looming biblical shadows that first attracted me to his work and at times alienated me from it. Now a recovering Catholic, I was educated in schools run by nuns and priests and repeatedly locked horns with them. At the time, the church was infallible, hardly bothering to conceal its horrendous crimes against women and children in Ireland and beyond. It wasn’t just taboo to raise issues of abuse, homophobia, hypocrisy etc. It was forbidden to ask questions. I would ask the priests questions about the strange, puzzling details I’d chanced upon in the stories and language of the King James Bible and was completely unprepared for the hostility such enquiries would ignite. I realise now it was simply a case of orthodoxy. Questions, any sign of curiosity, were a threat to dogma. The Christian flock was not supposed to bleat, even if some had got wind of the slaughterhouse.

From the beginning, the Bad Seeds lyrics were steeped in that misty Jacobean version of the Bible. It was there in their album titles — Kicking Against the Pricks, The Good Son — and in countless songs. For every murder ballad, a spiritual. It’s even there in their name, with the Bad Seeds originating in the Good Book. This was a rich mine, and what was salvaged could be adapted in surprising subversive ways. When he used Jesus or God, at times he might just as well be singing about drugs, sex, pain, or love and its catastrophes. The themes allowed for the illumination of life at its most wretched and beautiful. It’s almost animist at heart but fed through Christian iconography – the thorns and the waves and the errant stars.

Witnessing the unfolding church scandals and how those who’d spoken out publicly like Sinéad O’Connor were made into scapegoats or sineaters, I gradually transformed into a righteous little bastard or to put it another way an evangelising atheist. Twenty years ago, I saw the Bad Seeds on their incendiary Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus and left in a state of shock, such was their energy and charisma. Yet I felt a nagging reluctance in my heart. Cave’s brilliant, frenzied tent revivalist/snake handler/faith healer performance set off alarm bells. Having escaped one cult, albeit a very powerful 2,000-year-old one, I was overly cautious about signing up for another.

Eventually, I realised there was a reactionary mirroring quality to atheism, where you could become as self-righteous and rigid as your enemy, defined and controlled by a form of negation. Mainly, I was turned off by the joyless tiresomeness of some of its primary advocates. I also had not suffered quite enough to be relieved of certain egocentric illusions. I had not yet come to know the things you don’t want are the things that give your life real knowledge — grief, heartbreak, illness, estrangement and exile. But where do you go when you begin to doubt your own doubt?

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It turns out Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were already there. The religiosity in the songs was built from doubt, suffering, absurdity, closer to Dostoevsky or existentialism than tele-evangelism. We are in the eternal, the songs tell us, every little moment, and life and death are in here with us. Wild God feels like an opening and a radical one, given the constriction we’re increasingly subject to. How narrow, for instance, to think that writing about religious themes shackles you to the moribund, slowly sinking religious establishment, discarding the realms that Cave has tapped into.

Certainty is a curse, damaging for activists, and fatal for artists. Cave gets it. There are wry lines, wrapped in enigmas in Wild God, “Who are these gods that you now defend? / And what purpose do they serve now at the end of time?” He replies not with apologetic laments or millenarian doom but with perfect inarguable euphoria. With the ecstatic doubt evident in the title track, whether the lead character is a soaring deity or just an old man in a retirement village propelling through his memory.

I still don’t believe in God, and I loathe the Church, and though I may be dumb, I am not dumb enough to deny I’m a Catholic writer. Whether the heavens are empty or not, I was permanently moulded by Jesuits. The hints were there, though it took me a while to recognise the compulsions. The countless pilgrimages. The need for rituals. The love for iconography and disdain for those who know only how to dismantle and not how to build. Listening to this cathartic album, it started to occur to me that maybe I’d got Longinus wrong. Maybe he shouldn’t have been a soldier after all. Maybe this cursed fallen figure should have been an artist. One who wanders, not smug and privileged in their certainty, not wielding belief or unbelief in order to judge or cudgel others, not resolving anything except for the small but significant consolation that some other poor wild bastard is out in the storm-beaten night with us all, bearing a lantern and somehow singing a song of joy.

I tried my best to blend in, but one moment in particular exposed the jig. Amid a hellish game involving ping pong balls and cups of flat Carling, a ripple went through the crowd and everybody started to act out choreo from a video I’d definitely scrolled past. I racked my faltering memory: I’d heard this song before, diced into infuriating snippets on social media. TikTok crack. A blonde apparition entered my mind: Sabrina Carpenter, the befringed, “Espresso”-crooning doll inflicted with Fifties swimming-costume outfits by an army of corporate promoters. Barry Keoghan’s erstwhile gf.

It rocks me to my core that these slick 23-year-olds, not yet ravaged by the horrors of 25, think this is cool — or, at least, don’t care whether it is or not. We insufferable elder Gen Zs are usually fiercely resistant to such mainstream intrusions, wanging on about Nick Drake and pretending we never liked One Direction (I swear I never did). But looking around me, I had to ask: has TikTok finally killed music?

Sabrina Carpenter is the latest Venus to emerge from the great Disney clam. To extend this shaky metaphor, she has emerged from the severed testicles of a hit Disney Channel sitcom, Girl Meets World. She barely existed six months ago, but with the help of two hits and a relationship scandal — Keoghan supposedly ditched his ex and baby for Carpenter, the rat! — she is now front and centre. Her music is extremely polished, the performances perfected for vertical TikTok filming. She is shiny and new, with a distinctive haircut and a glowy face. And she has a new album out, Short and Sweet, which might as well be about the diminutive but amiable Barry.

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Observers outside the fanbase would be forgiven for thinking Carpenter and her ilk are all a bit, well, samey. But there has always been an element of fakery to the cult of pop stars; in the Sixties, EMI had teenage girls believing John Lennon didn’t have a wife (who he continually beat up). We like to think of the golden age of rock as an army of absolutely original geniuses inventing new sounds every day — but we forget the imitation bands history has kindly forgotten, not least the teenybopper flops (the Cyrkle, the Knickerbockers, the Beau Brummels). Yes, there was less filler and more terrible teeth, but the record label image-polishing was absolutely the same.

Even the news that Oasis are getting the band back together after 15 years of bitter feuding is not the “antidote” it may seem. The Gallaghers themselves shamelessly ripped off the Beatles with added simian swag; and though their original albums represent a rough-hewn, more interesting provenance than anything a former Disney star could conjure up, this “massive” tour is likely to be as corporate as they come.

And yet, we are much more accepting of trades in blokey nostalgia than in girly, attention-seeking glamour, though this is probably down to keenly felt snobberies about different calibres of fans. The Oasis Man and the Disney Girl couldn’t be further apart in terms of cultural prestige; one is a discerning and hard-bitten gig-goer, the other little more than a receptacle for glossy makeup products and plasticky tunes. But there is nothing exceptional about liking a band which dominated the charts for more than a decade, and for which middle-aged bores tune into Chris Moyles on Radio X. Besides, the vices of scruffy rock stars haven’t been shocking since the Seventies — whereas the dark arts of big studios are worthy of the name.

Disney is in the habit of belching out stars like Sabrina. Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez — there is a surfeit of once-new kids on the block, still kicking about in West Hollywood like ageing teenagers. The formula is thus: five to 10 years of mainstream success with a few earworm hits, then a rocky patch (Justin and Britney break up, Britney goes bald, Christina and Demi gain weight, Selena gets some alleged immune disease which miraculously has the same effect as a boatload of facial filler). Then they are left to either drift, becoming sad phantoms of their former selves (see Amanda Bynes of Nickelodeon, or Justin’s inglorious mugshot after allegedly drink-driving in June) or redeemed, continually recreating their foetal pop star look (43-year-old Christina Aguilera’s recent re-teenifying makeover is nothing short of witchcraft).

The way we lap up these creations is so routine now as to be unremarkable. But for the teenage girls plucked into stardom, this process involves signing an unspoken deal with your loving public: you must remain a teenager for as long as you can. Taylor Swift, whose never-ending Eras tour finally wrapped up in London last week, is 34: she’s been on the scene since about 2006, beginning as a curly-haired country singer, warbling about trucks and princesses and the like. Now, at the height of her powers, there’s a quality of Blanche DuBois about her. A grown woman, she has spent the past innumerable months singing about long-ago break-ups to millions of teenage girls who haven’t yet had their braces off. She is forced to replay the heartbreaks of her tender years again and again, courting an image of vulnerability which in no way befits the steamrolling corporate machine she now represents.

Part of this performance of teenagedom involves recruiting younger versions of herself as support acts: Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter have both appeared on the tour. In doing so, these artists are often accused of being industry plants, which is not strictly fair as to be plants they must come out of nowhere. Child stars are, by definition, already celebrities in their own right. But they certainly represent the decline of independent artists: most of them do not play instruments or write their own music or lyrics, but instead have embraced the TikTok music factory. As Paula Harper, a musicologist from the University of Chicago, told me: “Creators are thinking about making a song that has really audible, clear lip-syncable lyrics that are both weird, but can also be applied to a variety of settings.”

This system enforces a kind of creative dogma; even the most left-field talents never end up producing entirely whacky, inaccessible music. Consider Chappell Roan, the 26-year-old singer with a crimson-haired “drag” persona and a six-month-old career as a bona fide megastar. She has a startlingly original look compared to most TikTok-friendly singers; though her music has the sheen of homogenising big-studio production, her “performance art” is genuinely novel — something she confirmed by emerging from a giant apple as Lady Liberty at this year’s Governors Ball in New York, complete with assless chaps and what appeared to be a spliff.

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Yet Roan is simultaneously a blend of self-conscious artifice — the costumed garishness of drag — and authentic vulnerability. Last week, she went viral for a lengthy confessional post in which she, fairly graciously and understandably, bemoaned weird stalker fans. Social media did not sympathise: the new contract between fans and artists expects the latter to sacrifice any sense of safety or privacy because “you asked for this”, a haunting argument when trained on a woman. More than anything, our idols must be grateful.

This, then, is what awaits the Gen Z celebrity: fame, money, psycho fans and public breakdowns. And for women, there’s an extra kicker: the Disney machine bestows on them the curse of perpetual adolescence, which petrifies its princesses in a state of girlhood.

What’s new about the Sabrina Carpenters of this world, though, is that women for the first time have accrued the obsession-inducing power of a lone rock god without the need to involve men. Older female icons — Aretha, Madonna, Mariah — held some broad appeal; though love-centric, their music would not embarrass a sample or feature with a male artist. Now, the top female performers, the Swifts-in-waiting, are guardians of “girlhood” and resist even an appeal to gay men. Corporate pop has finally passed the Bechdel Test. The feminisation of the charts is complete. And as no doubt we’ll discover next summer, the division between Oasis Man and Disney Girl is irrevocable, crystallised in the diverging masses queuing to see American princesses or grungy Mancunians at Wembley.

“Imagine waiting 15 years for Oasis to reform,” wrote one snarky X user on Monday, “only to lose out on tickets to Chloe, 21 from Stockport who just wants to hear Wonderwall live.” Stick to your frilly pop, girls — we free-thinking individuals have Brewdog, bucket hats and bus passes to boot, and we aren’t afraid to use them!

But there are limits, ones that are now being stretched to the point of deterioration by the phenomenon of “looksmaxxing”. Referring to a broad category of practices aimed towards maximising your attractiveness, looksmaxxing follows the same ideology of “optimisation”, where every facet is quantifiable. Attractiveness, in this reading, is not subjective, but rather dictated by millimetres of bone and degrees of “canthal tilt” (another term for eye angle placement). And increasingly, this obsession with surgical levels of improvement is creeping into the vocabularies of teenagers.

What’s curious is that this is happening at a time when beauty standards are allegedly becoming more flexible than ever. Most young women, after all, have been raised in a culture that claims to embrace all bodies and faces. No longer, as many Dove campaigns seem to say, do girls need to starve themselves to a perpetual size 0. Have acne? Throw a convenient star-shaped patch over it and head off to school. Crooked teeth might even get you a modelling contract.

Of course, the reality isn’t quite that wholesome and carefree. Sure, braces might not get you bullied anymore, but social media has allowed us to find flaws we hadn’t known existed. Meanwhile, the pool of people to compare ourselves with is no longer confined to those within our immediate community or those exceptional enough to be seen on TV. Rather, thanks to social media, we are exposed to an endless array of individuals, attractive or otherwise, and have been given a new language to label and scrutinise not only them, but ourselves.

Yet over the past decade, such discourse has been marked by a glaring absence: men. Although periodically a trend like “dad bods” might come along, brands rarely champion for widened acceptance towards their aesthetic pressures. It’s into this vacuum that looksmaxxing first took form.

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As KnowYourMeme explains, the term emerged in 2015 on forums like 4Chan and Reddit among incel and manosphere-adjacent groups desperate to improve their social and romantic standing. The term soon creeped into other corners of Reddit in the early 2020s with subreddits such as r/TrueRateMe, where users share pictures of themselves seeking honest opinions on their appearance. During this time, Reddit itself became increasingly mainstream: between 2018 and 2024, its monthly active users jumped from 331 million to an estimated 1.2 billion.

Meanwhile, TikTok also proliferated, presenting not only an addictive feed of comparison but a new platform for looksmaxxing and its philosophy to grow. Here, we’re shown unlimited hours of beautiful people paired with detailed explanations of why they’re beautiful, and, of more importance, why exactly we don’t look like them. Your jawline isn’t square enough. Your cheekbones aren’t prominent enough. Your nose is too wide. Your skin is too dull. Your lips are too thin. Your face is just asymmetrical enough that, whenever people gaze upon it, they will not see a worthy mate. And crucially, all of this can be quantified with precise traits and measures.

While looksmaxxing is practised by plenty of young women (one could argue women have long been participating, just not under that precise term), it is most rigidly pursued among young men. For women, our options may be more expansive: not only are the majority of skin and haircare products marketed towards us, but makeup offers us a culturally acceptable form of day-to-day improvement.

Absent of these same opportunities, it seems that men have applied looksmaxxing with more of a stringent, pseudo-scientific approach. In one TikTok from January, for example, an anonymous creator rates the attractiveness of influencer SyrianPsycho, a fellow looksmaxxing TikToker with 1.7 million followers. “Syrian has equal facial thirds, almond hunter green eyes with low set, thick and positively tilted eyebrows. He has excellent jawline visibility… he has a good nose shape and good chin projection. Syrian’s main flaws are on the jaw region, his lower jaw is slightly recessed and his gonial angle is on the higher side. He has a narrower than ideal lower third. His midface is on the longer side. Syrian is a 7.5 out of 10 facially.”

The video is filled with comments from fellow young men saying that if SyrianPsycho only scores a 7.5, then it’s “over” for them in comparison.

But through looksmaxxing, of course, any of this has the potential to be fixed. A person can “softmaxx” by getting a more flattering haircut, losing weight through diet and exercise, or improve their skincare routine. If this isn’t enough, they can “hardmaxx” instead — add filler to their lips, have the bones in their face shaven down, undergo excruciating surgery and months of recovery in order to become three inches taller. Through the help of men such as SyrianPsycho, who sell online courses on looksmaxxing and “self-improvement”, they, too, can be attractive.

It is possible, though, that as the language of looksmaxxing — and inceldom — enters the dominant lexicon, it becomes defanged. Searches for looksmaxxing topics on TikTok yield a blend of advice, criticism and jokes. While some young people continue to look towards looksmaxxing creators for insight into how to improve their perceived flaws, others have transformed it into a meme. Now, ironic references to canthal tilt likely outnumber earnest ones. For some, though, the jokes are a means of coping: “Eyebags detected, time to ropemaxx,” one TikTok with just under 1 million views reads, alluding to hanging oneself.

Ironic or otherwise, the damage may still be occurring. With guys like SyrianPsycho naming their courses “Mogwarts” — a reference to “mogging”, or being significantly more attractive than somebody — parsing what’s genuine becomes a challenge. As this all trickles down to younger audiences and becomes filtered through even more layers of memes and internet references, perhaps the true threat any of this presents has become niche. “Mewing”, for example, which refers to the practice of attempting to enhance one’s jawline through various facial exercises and tongue placement, has become a joke even in elementary schools. Among kids, mewing has become associated with a specific gesture and facial expression of pursing their lips, putting a finger up in a “shhh” symbol and then pointing to their jaws. Last week, Parents.com wrote that mewing has “taken over classrooms”, with many teachers lamenting how “disrespectful” the trend is.

Of course, every generation has had their childhood jokes that adults just didn’t understand. I was eight, going on nine, when Napoleon Dynamite was released and “Tina, you fat lard, come get some dinner” entered my lexicon. I remember my mother being appalled by how my friends and I would repeat the line. But we didn’t even understand it. The Tina, who was described as a “fat lard”, was a llama in the film. We weren’t calling each other “fat lards”, but simply quoting the film of the summer.

I think of this now as my niece, 11, has begun making her own jokes about mewing. That she, a young girl who does not have her own mobile phone and isn’t even old enough to have an interest in makeup, would be aware of anything remotely associated with this phenomenon frightens me. Is she growing up in a culture with increasingly rigid beauty standards, despite all the talk of body positivity? Or is this just her generation’s set of Napoleon Dynamite-esque jokes?

Of course, the answer is probably somewhere in between. Was I not, even at that young age, already concerned with my body? And would I not have felt shame if I’d been something like a “fat lard” myself? After my niece showed me her rendition of the mewing meme last week, did she not stop to ask if her jawline needed improvement?

Be it through jokes or otherwise, the culture of looksmaxxing among young people reflects a broader anxiety towards beauty in an era where some would claim these standards to be flexible. It’s as if as some parameters have shifted, we’ve responded by drilling down with even more intensity on others. What good does body positivity do when everyone around you is assessing their faces with protractors?

Here was the essential problem: even with the best will in the world, the League had no power to enforce any of its edicts. For this it had to rely on Britain and France, who were notorious flakes. The United States never even joined. And so it went on. The General Secretariat would pronounce, the Permanent Court of International Justice would rule, the levers would be pulled, nothing would happen. None of their high ideals were able to survive first contact with reality — that is to say, state expediency and national egoism. Whenever it counted the powers would look to their own alliances, their own security. Mussolini was left to annex Abyssinia in 1936 despite the League’s protests, because Britain and France were trying to court him as an ally; Japan was allowed to overrun Manchuria for similar reasons. It all seemed to carry a brute lesson: whatever the merits of internationalism and international law, the facts of life ran against them. 

Why does English schooling fixate so much on the League, this odd sideshow? A corrective to teen idealism, maybe. These events, as told, seemed to be a mini fable in how the high ideas can’t compete against ordinary selfishness. It certainly had its appeal for teenage me: a smirker, an online troll.

But as a story this was over-keen and over-cynical. Too cynical, because it always underpriced the power of these ideas. “Why can’t we all just get along”, or, latterly, “global problems require global solutions” — these are powerful notions, at least among the very powerful. The armies that conquered Europe in the middle of the Forties were technically those of the United Nations, marching under its own banner of war: the “Honour Flag” — this just 10 years after the League of Nations was pronounced a dead letter. Had F.D.R. lived a little longer, something approaching a world state under the aegis of the UN would have resulted, with the planet governed as a kind of American-Soviet condominium — even Wendall Wilkie, his Republican rival, called for such a course. A lunatic idea, but not one that school-of-hard-knocks international realism can really assimilate. 

Too cynical then, and too cynical now. Over the past 10 years almost everyone has again been announcing the decline of liberal international norms and the return of the nation state. Terrorism, strongmanism, populism, migration, and global diseases would force some collision with reality, the old niceties would be forgotten, and we would then revert to a harder and simpler form of rule under sovereign nations. What would this entail? Nearly every literary or political weekly at one point carried the front piece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan as its cover. Even the vogue for the term “geopolitics” spoke to the new mood: a politics founded in expediency and the facts of life, not liberal ideas.

But nothing of the sort has happened. Whatever factors might be making the case for the nation state anew, the real story of the past decade has been a huge growth in the scope and depth of international law and obligation. These are advancing over the developed world much faster than they’re receding elsewhere.

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For all the foam of the past 10 years, it’s hard to think of any period in diplomatic history that’s been less defined by expediency, national egoism, or the cold accounting of interests. A classic example is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which, unlike the old League of Nations, doesn’t require a sponsor power. In 2015, a British exit from the ECHR was Cameronite boilerplate. Now it is deemed radical and eccentric. Giorgia Meloni heads up a party that can claim lineal descent from Italy’s National Fascists. Emmanuel Macron was billed as a statesman of Jupiterian standing, a liberal answer to the age of the strongman. For all this neither can bring themselves to face down the court in Strasbourg, or even the Dublin Convention. France has now been reduced to paying the ECHR an out-of-pocket charge for each deportation. 

So too with the climate. 10 years ago climate agreements like the Kyoto Protocol were a byword for the well-meaning dead letter. These have since grown teeth. Switzerland, grand doyen of the international system, was in April ruled against by the Strasbourg court for insufficient zeal on Net Zero. The Swiss government is now drawing up a list of climate measures which it hopes will appease the court.

The same is true for technology. All the world powers have now accepted global AI regulation, even though the first to defect from these rules would surely reap huge commercial advantages for itself. So much for the new egoism.

In this sense many jumped too soon. In the 2010s, a number of political leaders and factions bet on the revival of the Westphalian system and took the national plunge, only to end up disappointed. Though China has been menacing Japan in the Spratly Islands for over a decade, this has not been enough to force a revision of Article 9 of the Constitution — which forbids Japan from waging aggressive war. Some of the more slapdash Brexiteers took it as a given that, during talks with the EU27, national interest or even the needs of European exporters would prevail, and that things like the integrity of the EEA were in fact wink-nudge negotiating positions. Wrong. The process ended up turning almost entirely on legalese such as the Good Friday Agreement — never on trade or even grand strategy. They had counted on a new smirking Bismarckianism that never actually materialised. 

Subsequent events only underline the point. Two years after this bruising course of negotiations, the United Kingdom decided to commit huge resources to defending the EU27’s eastern flank. The UK is also backing Ukraine’s accession to the EU: now a closed market to British goods. Even for a relative tearaway like Brexit Britain, the international principle is still unanswerable. Under similar circumstances, any 18th-century British cabinet would probably be concluding a treaty with Russia. 

Liberal internationalism has been challenged only to come out stronger. That’s not to say it’s come through unchanged. In the 2020s, global institutions no longer justify themselves with anything so sensible as, say, cheap imports and just-in-time supply chains — these were all torched in the name of “global action” against Coronavirus four years ago. The only argument now really made for these things is that any alternative to them is morally unconscionable. Britain can’t exit the ECHR to exercise ordinary border controls because that would put it in the same company as Belarus, and would be an aid and comfort to bad men everywhere. 

Border control. Great power politics. National rearmament. A liberal course on AI. These are not bankrupt ideas. History will probably vindicate them. But their proponents can’t count on some inevitable global crack-up to accomplish their work for them. So far, the only successful reassertions of the nation state have come not from “wider forces”, but from small, organised conspiracies like Vote Leave and Boris-Cummings that were willing to act in the face of events and force the issue. Nationalism and internationalism are moral premises. Events cannot prove or disprove them. More than anything else, what the last 10 years have shown is that these ideas are more powerful than realism, expediency, and the so-called facts of life. Those who oppose these reigning ideas shouldn’t count on reality intruding in on them.

Nate Silver’s compelling new book, Living on the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, is ostensibly about mathematical risk, and how it can be understood and used to benefit society accordingly. But I think it’s more about something else: the way we live now. It’s the book Trollope might have written if he had spent his life not as a post office employee but gambling, reading libertarian philosophers and hanging around on the underbelly of 4Chan and Reddit.

The first thing to understand about Silver, best known for his polling website FiveThirtyEight, is that politics does not come naturally to him. As he tells us: “I played poker professionally before I ever wrote a word about politics or built an election model. I still feel more at home in a casino than at a political convention.”

From this starting point, Silver guides us through his world, a particular group of people who he describes as living in “the River”. Poker players, he explains, love water metaphors, and the River is full of “tributaries and niches” inhabited by various types who have indeed spent their lives in the underbelly of the internet and, most importantly for Silver, in casinos. Often, they have played poker for huge sums of money. But the River also has “a canon of influences and ideas”. These range from “game theory and Nash equilibria to expected value and marginal utility” and various other things you have only dimly heard of.

These are people obsessed with numbers, especially ideas of probability so important to games like poker (the book’s first section is all about gambling). This has several effects, not least that it all makes you live a certain way. River people like Silver are “EV maximizers” (“expected-value maximizers”): Rivermen (and, as Silver points out, the River’s inhabitants are overwhelmingly men) take an analytical, strategic approach to gambling, investing and other aspects of life, trying to calculate the most optimal “play” in any given situation. This leads them down some curious paths, not least when Silver considers whether it’s “EV maximizing” to have fries with your sandwich or opt for the healthy side salad. “It might,” he concludes, “depend on how good the fries are.”

For the River, sacred places are not Harvard Yard or the Capitol, but Las Vegas, a “shrine to risk-taking, excess, progress, and capitalism”. All of this is, of course, an affront to what Silver calls “the Village”, which “consists of people who work in government, in much of the media, and in parts of academia (although perhaps excluding some of the more quantitative academic fields such as economics). It has distinctly Left-of-centre politics associated with the Democratic Party.” It is, in other words, the River’s nemesis.

See what’s happening here? Almost all that the Village, shorthand for the established elites, has traditionally prized is viewed by the River with scepticism, not least elite higher education. And this is probably no surprise. It’s hard to think of places that would be less welcoming to Rivermen. More than this, if the River esteems poker players, hedge funders and venture capitalists (gamblers of a different stripe), its emperors are Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Elon Musk — all college dropouts (Musk, admittedly, only at postgraduate level).

What emerges is by now familiar: suspicion of “experts” or “elites” — and the desire to disrupt, or more correctly, take an axe to them. Confrontation is unavoidable. As Silver writes: “Harvard is the grand cathedral atop the hill — there is no more quintessentially Village institution.” So, when hedge funders such as Bill Ackman, rightly enraged by Harvard President Claudine Gay’s tawdry failures to condemn calls for genocide against Jews as hate speech, led the successful drive to remove her, it was “a symbolic coup” for the River. (“Want another sign that the Village and the River are explicitly at war?” Silver asks. “The New York Times’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI.) VCs, Tech titans, data scientists, hedge funders — these are the master-gamblers of Silver’s universe. As he concludes: “The quants won… We’re living in their world.”

Naturally, this can be problematic. First off, revolutionaries almost always curdle into the despised elites they worked so hard to overthrow. Considering the market dominance of Venture Capital firms, Silver concedes that “if success is concentrated only among a few elite firms… to the point where they essentially can’t lose, then VC is becoming more and more like the incumbent institutions that Silicon Valley would deign to disrupt”. The Ivy League’s elite capture doesn’t disappear; it’s merely replaced by that of Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Google and Tesla.

And who are these people? Well, many of them are just Riverman who hit the jackpot. Elon Musk may be a first-rate engineer and businessman, but he’s also an example of what happens when an incel makes $200 billion.

Back in the day, to amass a fortune as an industrialist or oil baron, you had to at least deal with people. Now, the Masters of the Universe are more comfortable with code than conversation. A few years ago, I watched Mark Zuckerberg launch the metaverse, which he did while performatively “chatting” with a grinning — and to my mind clearly terrified — young woman. It was just weird.

Silver understands this. “In the River, it’s common to find people, like Elon Musk or the poker player Daniel ‘Jungleman’ Cates, who self-identify as having Asperger’s syndrome or autism,” he writes. “It’s also common to hear people refer to themselves or others with terms like ‘Aspie’… Depending on the context, this may be derogatory, but it isn’t always so.” For the River, this is more of a cultural marker than a medical diagnosis. What the mainstream views with suspicion or does not understand becomes a source of pride. What it prizes, like Ivy League universities, the River eschews.

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The problem with gambling and risk is that, in irresponsible hands, it can be catastrophic. Silver tells the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto-king turned felon. SBF, he writes, is “a nerdy, overconfident, Adderall-popping, video-game-playing, youngish white guy who has a severe gambling problem and is probably somewhere on the autism spectrum”. This makes him “a common typology” for the River. But he is also a crook, which Silver well understands. SBF’s problem was that he could mouth all the platitudes about EV, Effective Altruism, Rationalism and all other River obsessions — one consequence of reading this book is that I finally understand Dominic Cummings’s blogs — but it made no difference. It’s not even that he didn’t understand risk: he just didn’t care.

So why did so many stats-literate, data-munching, probability-obsessed altruists and tech bros fall under his spell? Once more the answer centres on ideas about the way we live, or rather the way the River seeks to live, and how it will ultimately always fall short of its loftiest aspirations. You can try to game all aspects of life, seek out the EV in every situation, calculate the odds, run your models and algorithms, but in the end, you remain (for the moment at least) irreducibly human. In the words of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz when assessing the SBF disaster: “It must have been the cult of personality. I guess it’s the only explanation.”

And it’s sometimes the only explanation elsewhere, too. It’s no coincidence that gambling, geopolitics and war all centre on the effective calculation of risk. Of course, there are vast and obvious differences between them in terms of cost, scale and repercussion; not least because risk in gambling is typically confined to the realms of chance and individual choice, while geopolitics involves a vastly greater degree of multifaceted interaction and its consequences can be global.

But there is a similarity too: if many of today’s finest minds are gamblers, history has thrown its greatest thinkers at geopolitics. And even when the stakes are life and death, when the players are so various, the same patterns persist. The cult of personality moves history — and it does so repeatedly. The River may have given us SBF, but geopolitics gave us Mao and Stalin and Putin. This is the price of being human, and it will continue to be so. You can bet on it.

The eponymous machine learns from existing works and can write entire novels in response to manual prompts. By pressing buttons and pulling stops similar to that of an organ, the machine’s inventors “pre-select literally any type of plot and any style of writing”. They choose between “historical, satirical, philosophical, political, romantic, erotic, humorous, or straight” categories, then between themes such as childhood, civil war, or country life, and finally between literary styles such as “classical, whimsical, racy”,or specific authors such as Hemingway, Faulkner and Joyce. Within a year, half of new writing is generated by the machine. The ending of Dahl’s tale is harrowing.

More than half a century later, the fear felt by some writers, artists, and musicians, when faced with generative artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT, is not unfounded or foolish. Those who dismiss it as posing no threat to the creative industries, on the grounds that it can never be good enough, are the deluded ones; AI is more than capable of producing content comparable to that created directly by humans.

Contrary to popular opinion, however, this is not intrinsically dangerous. Rather, the danger is us — or, more specifically, our refusal to engage with it seriously. The current state of AI in the film industry, and the varied reactions to it, exemplifies this. Already, generative AI’s role in film ranges from writing scripts to creating visual imagery, and its adoption has sparked a range of reactions including celebration and anger. Few and far between are those who say simply and rationally: it’s here, so let’s see what it can do, and let’s talk about it, because in doing so, we can shape our creative future.

In this camp sits Swiss director and producer Peter Luisi. When ChatGPT 4.0 was released, Luisi wondered whether it could write an entire feature film. He set about finding out, ensuring his input was that of a typical director, and was not enough to grant him a writing credit. ChatGPT 4.0 was given the initial prompt to “write a plot to a feature-length film where a screenwriter realises he is less good than artificial intelligence in writing”, and asked to generate each scene in turn. Screenshots of the prompting process are available on the project’s website along with the film itself: The Last Screenwriter.

London’s Prince Charles Cinema was hired for the premiere in June, and in keeping with the aim of stimulating discussion, the team made tickets publicly available (although the film is not-for-profit, they decided to charge admission to discourage no-shows) and agreed to pay for promotion. But when posts went up on the cinema’s Twitter and Instagram, there was a furore; many were angry that the cinema was apparently supporting the use of AI in film. The Prince Charles cancelled the screening, citing “the strong concern held by many of our audience on the use of AI in place of a writer”.

When I spoke to Luisi the next day, he was sanguine — “We were sort of hoping that this discussion would happen, we were just hoping it would happen inside the cinema” — and invited me to the relocated premiere. Sitting there felt utterly surreal, a new page in a history book. How good ChatGPT’s screenplay was didn’t seem to matter: what was significant was that we were watching the first film written by a machine. This was just the start.

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Kevin Maher, writing in The Times, missed the point when he called The Last Screenwriter a “dud” that should “allay fears” about AI’s threat to the arts. In arguing that the film is sufficiently bad for the Prince Charles protestors to safely “stow those pitchforks”, Maher presents the now tiresome line that AI content is intrinsically worse than human content.

None of which is to say that the writing quality wasn’t worthy of discussion; much of the conversation afterwards centred on the screenplay’s flaws, and how challenging the film had been to direct and act in as a result. (It was novel to join the director of a film in criticising its writer.) One glaring issue is ChatGPT’s penchant for a cheesy phrase, but whose fault is that?

Lead actress Bonnie Milnes was deeply frustrated by the online reaction and the premiere cancellation. She describes The Last Screenwriter as “an exposé of the biases of AI that, if ignored, could have catastrophic consequences for the future of the arts”, and argues that the people who most need to see the film are the ones boycotting it. Watching the film, the challenge Milnes faced in creating any depth of character is palpable; her character had no personality beyond being a wife and mother and much of her very skilled performance was limited to facial expressions.

Meanwhile, away from the glare of mainstream critics, large corporations do what they want. Netflix’s recent three-part documentary on Ashley Madison, the US dating site for people seeking affairs, which faced a huge data breach scandal in 2015, used a number of poor quality AI-generated images, and nobody batted an eyelid. The series is lazy in other ways, too; in one re-imagined scene, an iPhone ringing on a hotel bedside table shows the caller as “Home”, but the call is being made through WhatsApp. The phone is using 5G, miraculous for a decade ago. Additionally, footage which illustrates an interview in the first episode — a hand selecting a shirt from a rail, a male figure walking out to a car — is recycled in the third with a different voiceover.

The choice to use AI to illustrate the fake female profiles set up by the Ashley Madison team to entice men to use the site was hardly surprising, but the brazenly unreal imagery was. Pausing the programme during montages of these “profiles”, I was treated to women holding miniature wine glasses, floating limbs, unusual finger counts, and plug sockets from a parallel universe. Is this just life now? AI can “do hands” these days, but that doesn’t mean we’ll bother, apparently.

So if AI imagery is becoming commonplace in film and TV, where does ChatGPT fit in behind the scenes? The resolution of the 2023 Writers’ Guild of America strikes requires companies instructing screenwriters to edit AI-generated content to pay as much as they would if writers were composing the whole screenplay. AI cannot be a writer, according to their rules, so any editor becomes the writer. But this means that some stories have no writers at all, which doesn’t make sense: it’s an obscuring of the truth, a refusal to accept the reality that AI can write, an ongoing suppression of the situation. (ChatGPT itself isn’t keeping quiet about this: at one point in The Last Screenwriter, the lead character, Jack, says wondrously “this AI is like having an entire writers’ room working around the clock”.)

The day the Prince Charles made its announcement, I attended a preview of the short film The Future Can Be Yours at the Clapham Picturehouse. I’d been invited by the director, Simon Ball, at an AI event. Before the showing, producer and co-creator Ieva Ball handed round homemade chocolates, and their toddler roamed around.

That this was a low-budget production wasn’t remotely evident from the eight minutes of film. Most shots look rather like paintings, and the low frame rate and constantly shifting objects and facial expressions suffuse the whole film with a dreamlike quality. At one moment — my favourite — we suddenly see the actors as they really are, walking down a London street. AI — in this case, a locally run version of the image generator Stable Diffusion — not only enabled the film to be made with a low budget, but induced effects that simply wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. When used thoughtfully and imaginatively, AI can both enhance the artistic process and raise up small, independent projects.

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After the screening, I spoke to Leo Crane, fresh from launching the inaugural AI Film Academy Awards in Lisbon. Fizzing with energy, he described the effect of AI on film as a “new wave”, with AI “revealing something that’s almost risk-free. It’s so experimental, you don’t need big budgets, you don’t need experience in filmmaking.” Of course, for scared creatives and their supporters, the idea of those without experience and training being able to make films is precisely where the threat lies, but I found Crane’s optimistic alternative perspective to be irresistible:

“I’ve been in the art world for 25 years, seen a lot of stuff, and some of this is unlike anything I’ve seen before. It’s like a new language. It’s coming from all corners of the world and it’s coming from people who might otherwise be excluded from the film industry. The fact that this is not polished and it’s not perfect makes it more human, even though it’s AI, and that kind of battle between humanity and the machine just reveals that depth of what it means to be human, especially when it breaks down.”

This idea of a creative renaissance, and one which involves people who might not otherwise be expressing their creativity at all, reflects what I hoped would emerge from AI image generators when I first started using them in July 2022. For six months I messed around with Midjourney, making images that made me happy; it didn’t matter that other people didn’t quite “get” them. When I decided to explore what other people were generating, my bubble burst: horrific and illegal content, namely images of children being sexually abused, was the answer. After working with The Times and then the BBC to investigate and expose this, I never regained my initial optimism — until now.

Creativity is not a zero-sum game. There is no limit to how many of us can be creative, no cap on how much art can be enjoyed. Crane’s words capture the inherent artistic possibilities of generative AI, which, unlike us, has no creative inhibitions. It can open up new avenues for anyone who wants to explore, and the more people that do so, the better. Ultimately, it is possible and necessary to simultaneously celebrate creative work like The Future Can Be Yours, analyse projects like The Last Screenwriter, and castigate shoddy AI use like that in Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal.

And if we are living in a dystopia, Dahl’s story brought to life, as some people seem to believe, we should at least be speaking about it. For the alternative doesn’t benefit anyone: by instilling a culture of shame, stigma and silence, its critics are working to bring about the very scenario they fear.

And yet it is the fastest growing fertility treatment in the UK. Between 2019 and 2021, egg-freezing cycles surged by 64%, making it the fastest growing fertility treatment type in the UK. In 2011, there were just 373 cycles; by 2021, there were 4,215. Nor is it now uncommon for women at gold-plated companies to receive extensive “fertility benefits”: Spotify gives female employees £40,000 towards treatment, while Apple and Meta subsidise egg-freezing for up to £16,000.

However, as appealing as it might be, this narrative of career-focused women delaying motherhood barely scratches the surface of a much deeper societal shift. Contrary to popular discourse, recent data reveals a startling statistic: approximately 70% of women who freeze their eggs are not motivated by career ambitions. Rather, they’re either single or struggling to get their partner to commit to parenthood.

To understand this social phenomenon, Dr Inhorn, a medical anthropologist at Yale University, embarked on a decade-long study that looked beyond the fertility clinic and into the changing dynamics of modern relationships. “We’re seeing a growing disparity between ambitious and educated women, and the availability of equally educated and committed male partners. It’s creating a demographic crisis that few are talking about,” Inhorn tells me. Her study of 150 women, later developed into a book published last year, found that many were either in relationships for several years and tried to get their partners to commit to fatherhood, or were single because they were not able to find a partner of equal educational or earning status. According to her research, at the time of freezing their eggs, 82% of the women were single at the time of freezing their eggs; meanwhile, 18% were with a partner when they went through the process, but had relationship issues and were not able to get them to commit to fatherhood.

This shift, largely overlooked when exploring social egg-freezing, points to a phenomenon Inhorn calls “the mating gap”. This refers to the disparity between men and women in terms of relational, and eventually reproductive, expectations. While the women in the study, on average in their mid to late thirties, were ready to make a commitment to a partner, settle down and have children, they found a misalignment with the men they were dating. These men weren’t interested in the responsibility that comes with committed relationships and fatherhood — they wanted to play the field and live as free agents for as long as possible.

As Inhorn notes, “there is a lack of eligible, educated and equal male partners” for college-educated women, who now outnumber men in the labour force, not just in the US, but across developed nations. This pattern of course means a substantial number of women will not find a partner with a similar educational background. And even those who found partners were not always satisfied. “While most of the women in the study were highly educated women who were not able to find a partner of equal status, some of the women were actually in relationships, and tried for several years, but couldn’t get the person ready,” Inhorn notes. “Other women were married, who had hung in there, and got to a make-or-break moment where they were like what do I do?”

Inhorn dubs these male partners the “unready men”. She frequently found that they were neither on the same timelines nor wanting the same things from dating and relationships as their female partners. Wishing for what Inhorn calls the “three P’s” — pregnancy, parenthood and partnership — the women in her study turned to egg-freezing as a last resort to these unexpected social differences.

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But the mating gap isn’t just about education. Inhorn’s study also uncovered a darker shift that relates to a misalignment of values. She explains how the educated women in her study were raised on ideals of gender equality — seeking partners who are their equals and share their ambitions and values. However, she found in her research that women were dissatisfied. “Men have not been socialised in the same way with the same expectations,” Inhorn notes. According to her female interviewees, men “are less interested in being fathers in the way women want them to be”.

The women in the study spoke about the “Peter Pan” men: “They wine and dine you, act like they will settle down with you, but they are having fun in life and have no intention of being with you.” Of course, as many commentators like to highlight, the sexual revolution has changed the nature of courtship and dating — as women are liberated by contraception to engage in casual, consequence-free sex, so too are men able to have their cake and eat it.

While these social technologies, along with digital technologies like dating apps which suggest an endless supply, give men more options, the women in Inhorn’s study and beyond are stuck in a stalemate. The lack of pressure to settle down has meant that more educated women are getting to their late thirties with little choice but to preserve what they have left via egg-freezing. Here in the UK, the HFEA reports that the average age of egg-freezing is 38.

One cannot help but question whether hypergamy, the desire to form a relationship with someone of superior status, plays a role. This dating strategy is defined as women marrying up, seeking a male partner of high social status — proximity to power and wealth. And likewise, men marrying women of higher sexual status — youth and beauty. As women rise the educational and professional ranks, their social need to find a partner of higher social status doesn’t necessarily diminish, but based on these social patterns, their prospects diminish, with a smaller pool of potential partners. And likewise, the longer women focus on their social and economic independence, the longer they leave it to find a partner and, according to this theory, their sexual status diminishes.

When I asked Inhorn about the relevance of this theory, she dismissed it as  socio-biological and, thus for her, misogynistic. “Men need to stop being intimidated and to change the way they think about these things,” she explains. “And women need to expand their view of what an appropriate partner is.” While Inhorn says 90% of women did have something positive to say about it, she is defiant that egg-freezing is not a solution to these social divides, but rather simply a stop-gap.

As the gatekeepers of sex, and with more demanding fertility deadlines, it is perhaps no wonder there is so much insight into the struggles, attitudes and behaviours of female courtship. Lower in sociosexuality and cultured into coyness, it is said women court with greater caution than their male counterparts, and therefore hold greater power when making the first move. But perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on women, at the expense of the reproductive equation. As Inhorn notes, she didn’t interview any men in her study. We need more research on male reproductive aspirations — do men desire long-term partnership? If so, what are their expectations of mothers, wives and women today?

There is no doubt we are in the middle of a relationship revolution; and the growing divide between the sexes is a major cause for concern. Those on the Left wish to feminise men by encouraging them to become more emotionally expressive by engaging in therapy or by imagining a world of female breadwinners and stay-at-home Dads. But it’s uncertain whether this gender role reversal is so appealing to either sex.

Those on the Left wish to feminise men, encouraging gender role reversals which might not be so appealing to either sex. While those on the Right believe women should give up some of their social and economic freedom in favour of a more traditional relationship setup. The toxic experience that some tradwives suffer helpfully reminds us of women’s fight for equity, and the need for a new co-operative and collaborative blueprint for dating, courtship and relationship formation.

In the meantime, we need to ensure new reproductive technologies like egg-freezing don’t create further unintended social consequences. When the contraceptive pill was introduced in the Sixties, we couldn’t have known it was going to lead to hook-up culture and a new sexual revolution of non-committal relationships. I think we must proceed cautiously to ensure the mass adoption of egg freezing doesn’t further exacerbate these issues. Freezing time might be good for our careers — but it might not be for forming relationships.

Every few months a celebrity is papped with a cigarette, and lifestyle columns declare that we are living through a dangerous vibe shift — that this will be the generation which finally revives one of the most surefire ways to off yourself. But these latest viral moments simply represent another passing hiccup in an unstoppable project to stub the habit out entirely. The new smoking ban, which will prevent those born in or after 2009 from ever buying cigarettes, will ensure that in 20 years, smoking will just be something quaintly associated with Dot Cotton or Krusty the Clown, an anachronistic curiosity like a monocle or a pocket watch.

Charli XCX is 32, and Charley Hull is 28. In Bishop’s Stortford and Kettering respectively, their classmates would have smoked, not vaped, behind the bike sheds — a dying breed. But surely, you splutter, cigarettes are still cooler than Elf Bars? Well, yes. In the panopticon of Gen Z life, peering at one another through the fabricating prism of social media, being an “icon” is about carefully orchestrating optical illusions, gesturing towards passing “aesthetics”. Cigarettes are, according to internet people who never go outside, “iconic”. Charli’s apparent obsession with cocaine — “bumpin’” her way through her early thirties — is precisely the same as her brand’s fixation with smoking: 100% vibes-based, and curated to be just another feature of “brat”. It is all, of course, meaningless — and whether fans have ever seen cocaine in real life is irrelevant. Smoking, coke, negroni spagliatos: these are the modern-day equivalents of carnations, pearls or a tome in an Early Modern portrait. Whether they are truly used or owned by the sitter is beside the point: they simply gesture towards coveted attributes (betrothal, chastity, learnedness respectively) and so function as pure abstractions, symbols.

Gen Z will only ever see smoking in this light: as a symbol of rebellion, of thinness, of stress, of whatever they like. The thousand interpretations of this humble habit owe themselves to a few smoking-motif-obsessed filmmakers, including David Lynch — who last week revealed he had not left the house in two years over concerns about contracting Covid, having ravaged his emphysema-ridden lungs over a long career measured in glowing American Spirits. Nevertheless, the damage is done: the cigarette is so irrevocably a cinematic totem — standing in variously for a gun, a penis, a poison, a panacea — that nobody can now start smoking without feeling the weight of a century of associations. And as it becomes more verboten, more dangerous, the symbolism of the cigarette grows more and more unbearably self-referential.

For new Gen Z smokers, being “iconic” is the habit’s only social appeal — and it is entirely offset by other ideological neuroses. This is a generation which is so bound by the strictures of self-censorship, so boggled by the conventions of social media, that they have begun to use the term “unalived” instead of “killed” in general conversation. They are wimps, and looking cool (the only incentive for anybody ever to have picked up their first cigarette) cannot survive this.

Besides, is vice itself cool anymore? Once, substances were era-defining. From the birth of counterculture, each decade had their corresponding drug: the Sixties has its slow insanity, its hierarchy-smashing lassitude, the wonder-filled inertia of acid and marijuana. The Seventies has its bleak heroin, its fall from innocence, a decade of dark. The Eighties was all manic extravagance, cocaine to a T. On the dubiously sticky floors of Studio 54, the fast-paced, high-cost, high-speed shit chatting of coke crystallised that era’s gaudy hedonism. The Nineties had its euphoric, crashing manias, its acid house, its MDMA. After that, house parties dabbled in micro-trends — the bath salts, the ket, the NOS — but youth culture in general had by now stabilised, fuelled by immortal alcohol and a cocktail of other things that had all come before, becoming smugly ironic. All the while, smoking limped on, a sulky vampire in the corner of every sweaty student bedroom.

Vapes have blown all of this clean out of the water. During Covid, sprawled on Power Rangers bedspreads or being stared at by ancient posters of long-gone boy bands, students who should by rights have been frying their brains in nightclubs began to dream of other possible lives. Another vision of young adulthood began to curl into shape on their TikTok feeds: one in which you might declare yourself, with a straight face, “sober curious”. I recall how, in the first tentative gatherings post pandemic, it became immediately clear that these new habits had already set in: erstwhile “legends” were now “Bristol sober” (just doing ketamine); soon-to-be ex-friends were doing dry January (zealots). Being sober at uni changed, when I was there, from totally verboten to semi-acceptable, even admirable. Club culture began to fizzle out — and with it, the vomit-swallowing teenager trying to remember which way to light a Marlboro Gold.

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This shift has brought with it a sense that actually, smoking might be unappealing. Not just vibes-wise, but sensually: “I feel like I can taste their bronchitis”, says one friend, who dislikes kissing smokers (but is known to pilfer rollies himself). There is a recognition that cigarettes may not only kill you slowly in the future (they are the largest single cause of cancer in the UK) but may usher in a kind of social death — may make your clothes honk, turn your fingers yellow, fragrance your breath with eau de ashtray.

The old guard have become indignant outcasts — like in that IT Crowd sketch, aired two months after the original smoking ban came in, where Jen must brave a literal Siberia outside her office alongside the other addicts; Russian accents through chattering teeth. The image of vapes, conversely, is entirely different and wonderfully new: they are marketed as consequence-free, fresh and fruity solutions sailing straight out of techland. You can buy one fairly cheaply without knowing how to roll or having to buy a lighter, papers and filters, all the while anxiously hiding the smell from your parents. And you don’t have to like the admittedly challenging taste of burning leaves to claim camaraderie with other smokers, or for a reason to leave a dancefloor. So perfectly executed was the e-cig takeover that the number of vapoteurs has now hit an all-time high.

The minor smoking revival that we’re seeing now is simply a last bronchial gasp. Cigarettes have become subsumed in clouds of various half-hearted “aesthetics” — Anthony Bourdain sitting at a European cafe table wearing little black sunglasses; Kate Moss; ghosts from Tumblrs past. Gone is the Marlboro Man, swashbuckling his way around the West in a 10-gallon hat. For Gen Z have other options: they can vape, use the lisp-inducing abomination that is Zyn, or smugly abstain in favour of other “hyperfixations”. Only this generation could swap cigs for “journalling”.

And why shouldn’t they? Many of them have grown up around wrinkled, spluttering adults who were once slick, young smokers. I will not forget meeting a dying great aunt, Marlene, who the family called Auntie Marlboro, sparking up in her old people’s home between liquidy-lunged coughs. I was about 15, and I remember crying in front of her (she, fag in hand, was unfazed). It did not kill her in the end — on the contrary, it kept her sharp — but you couldn’t help but feel sorry for that yellowed woman in her yellowing, sunlit living room. That is, really, what smoking is about.

These are just the latest examples of a growing trend of shock-activism that combines political protest and public nuisance. Ostensibly, they are carried out by distinct groups motivated by a particular cause, such as immigration, the environment, or Palestine. In reality, however, all are animated by the same, self-destructive ideology: neotoddlerism.

This movement has its roots in the digital revolution of 2009, when use of smartphones and social media reached a critical mass, allowing strangers to easily unite and mobilise around shared views. But protests didn’t just become bigger and more frequent; they also became more outrageous.

In infants, the chief causes of outrageous behaviour — impulsivity, attention-seeking, and a sense of entitlement — are considered normal, but in adults they’re key symptoms of the “cluster-B” personality disorders. All four such traits —  narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial and borderline — are associated with heavy social media use, most likely because such platforms offer cluster-B types a stage for their theatrics. Social media is thus the perfect meeting place for society’s most overemotional people.

Further, the ease with which theatrical behaviour goes viral online has convinced many that a better world doesn’t require years of patient work, only a sufficient quantity of theatrics. Many activists — on both the Left and Right — now hope to bring about their ideal world in the same way a spoiled brat acquires a toy they’ve been denied: by being as loud and hysterical as possible. This is neotoddlerism: the view that utopia can be achieved by acting like a three-year-old.

It’s an ideology for an age of instant gratification. Just as convenience culture has led us from hours-long films, to half-hour-long TV shows, to minutes-long YouTube videos, to seconds-long TikTok clips; so the same dumbing-down is happening to politics: the arduous process of discussion and debate is giving way to the instant hit of shocking outbursts and other viral moments.

Instead of trying to produce the best arguments, neotoddlers try to produce the most shocking video clips, which typically involve vandalism, desecration, or some other kind of public meltdown. Thus, they outrage others by embracing their own outrage and lashing out at the world. This surrender to their own impulses makes them first-order thinkers, meaning they consider immediate consequences but not consequences of consequences.

This chronological myopia was starkly illustrated after the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel. Many neotoddlers celebrated the massacre because, in their fairy-tale worldview, Palestine is the damsel, Hamas is the knight, and Israel is the dragon. However, the cheering neotoddlers, trapped by their hatred in a perpetual present, couldn’t think far enough ahead to realise that Israel was going to retaliate, and that its wrath would be catastrophic for the Palestinians. When the inevitable retaliation came, the neotoddlers’ joy turned to horror as it dawned on them that actions have consequences.

One young pro-Palestine activist, Riddhi Patel, learned this lesson the hard way. In April, she addressed councillors at a Bakersfield City Council meeting in California, and, outraged by their refusal to pass a motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, proclaimed to the councillors that she’d murder them, adding: “I hope one day somebody brings the guillotine and kills all of you motherfuckers.” Later, she appeared in court on 16 felony counts, sobbing uncontrollably as she was confronted by the second-order effects that her first-order thinking had failed to foresee.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely she’ll learn much from her punishment. Not only do neotoddlers lack impulse-control, they also mistake their lack of impulse-control for morality, and mistake the impulse-control of others for callousness. “Where is the outrage?” they commonly yell, demanding everyone be as irrational as them. For the neotoddler, impatience is a virtue.

The Civil Rights movement succeeded because it was guided by leaders who had clear, specific and realistic goals, and were able to negotiate to achieve them. Since neotoddlers “organise” mostly on social media, they’re decentralised, and don’t have leaders that can guide them or negotiate for them. They therefore don’t have the means to create, only to disrupt.

And so they disrupt, with the goal of spreading awareness. Yet their attempts to do so are misguided because, for all the issues they protest about — from immigration to climate change — the problem is not a lack of awareness; it’s a lack of solutions. We don’t need to be told that war, injustice, and pollution are bad, because we learned these lessons in primary school. What we need are realistic plans of action — but the neotoddlers have none. A “ceasefire now!” would quickly be broken by Hamas. To “just stop oil!” would be to cause Western civilisation to regress technologically into an age of famine, war and superstition. On immigration, the Government can’t just “get them out”.

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Even more dysfunctionally, neotoddlers often try to disrupt attempts to meet their own demands. Many pro-Palestine activists call for peace in Gaza and yet praise Hamas, the main obstacle to peace in Gaza. And many eco-warriors oppose fossil fuels but also try to stop viable alternatives such as electric and nuclear by, for example, storming Tesla factories and atomic energy conferences. And recent Right-wing protesters in Sunderland, who claimed to represent the unheard, burned down a citizens’ advice centre, one of the few places to offer an ear to the unheard.

Unsurprisingly, nuisance-protests often end up alienating ordinary people. While the public supports climate action, it has a negative opinion of Just Stop Oil. And while the public supports a ceasefire in Gaza, it has a negative opinion of the campus protesters. The same is true of Right-wing nuisance protests: while the public generally believes immigration should be curbed, it has a negative opinion of those, like Tommy Robinson, who incited the recent riots. So, though nuisance-protests do get attention, little of that attention is converted to sympathy and a lot to spite.

But if nuisance-protests are counterproductive, why are they spreading? Because protests are usually motivated more by emotion than reason. Take the recent Southport riots. These have been driven not by any rational plan but by the frustrations of Right-wingers and ordinary working-class people about their concerns over immigration not being taken seriously by politicians. These frustrations, stoked by fake news, have led them to engage in infantile — and dangerous — actions like vandalising mosques and setting fire to police cars, which will hurt their cause more than help it. But it does make them feel good for the moment, and they live mostly for the moment.

As for Left-wing neotoddlers, their motivations tend to be more complex (but no less childish) than those of their Right-wing counterparts, because, instead of being impoverished and alienated, they tend to be privileged and popular. For instance, an analysis by the Washington Monthly revealed that the Gaza campus protests were largely confined to the most expensive and elite colleges. And Just Stop Oil members are themselves quick to admit that their movement is “privileged” and living in a white middle-class “student bubble”.

This is no accident: it’s often the affluent, not the downtrodden, who have a greater motivation to protest. As the philosopher Eric Hoffer explained in his 1951 book, The True Believer: “There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom.” People need struggles. If their supply of problems dwindles too low, they begin to embellish the problems they already have, and invent completely new ones. As Hoffer writes: “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.”

Overall, Left-wing neotoddlers and Right-wing neotoddlers tend to come from different demographics — with the former being younger, richer, more educated, and more female than the latter — and this gives them different motivations, and different modus operandi. For instance, research suggests that the cluster-B trait of narcissism, which is a feeling of self-importance, takes a different form in the two groups. In Right-wingers, it mostly manifests as a sense of entitlement, while in Left-wingers it mostly manifests as a need for exhibitionism.

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This is borne out in the different approaches Left-wingers and Right-wingers take towards their public tantrums. Right-wing nuisance-protests, such as those in Southport, are primarily attempts to relieve their frustration at not getting what they want. As such, they typically take the form of straightforward thuggery and hooliganism: starting fires, overturning cars and hurling bricks.

In contrast, nuisance-protests for Left-wing causes tend to be less about relieving frustration and more about getting attention. As such, they are usually more calculated and creative: throwing soup over paintings, releasing insect-swarms into hotels, or, most recently, painting the hands of a statue of Anne Frank red.

Generally, the Left-wing approach is more effective at getting attention. It took mass destruction by hundreds of Right-wingers in Southport to make news headlines, but it only took two Just Stop Oil activists with orange paint at Heathrow to achieve the same. Left-wing nuisance-protests are also treated more kindly by the mainstream. Right-wing protests tend to be roundly condemned by polite society, firstly because they tend to be more violent, and secondly because upholders of mainstream culture — such as liberal journalists, academics, and entertainers — are culturally programmed to dismiss concerns about Islam or immigration as “far-Right”, placing such concerns outside the bounds of polite discourse (and into the hands of actual extremists).

Left-wing protests, on the other hand, are generally viewed by Western cultural elites as well-meaning. The West’s mainstream knowledge-producing institutions, from academia to the liberal media, tend to be populated mostly by Left-leaning people who see Left-wing neotoddlers as a force for good because they’re broadly ideologically aligned with them and judge them by their perceived intentions rather than their results. For this reason, the mainstream treats Left-wing neotoddlers as its golden child, always seeing the best in them, while Right-wing neotoddlers are treated like the red-headed stepchild, worthy only of scorn.

This is particularly true at universities, where a decades-long encouragement of cluster-B infantilism reached a tipping point this summer with the campus protests. We saw the students put everything they’d been taught — exhibitionism, catastrophisation, hysteria — into practice. The protests quickly came to resemble a LARP. Whenever the protesters occupied a new part of the campus, they hung banners and declared it liberated. All this liberating eventually made them feel peckish. But when they demanded refreshments from university officials, and were denied, they claimed they were being deprived of “basic humanitarian aid” and might die of starvation.

This kind of grandiose fantasising is emblematic of people with narcissistic traits because it makes their struggles seem bigger than they actually are. As such, we commonly see similar kinds of catastrophisation among other flavours of neotoddler; every flood or forest fire is an omen of “climate catastrophe”, Israel is an “apartheid state”, biological facts about sex are “erasing trans people”, and immigration is “white genocide”. Such histrionics, whether propagated in error or with intention, serve to manipulate other hysterical people into becoming neotoddlers.

And the grim irony is that, by believing the world is worse than it actually is, neotoddlers make the world worse. Their disruptions and vandalism exert a huge economic and social cost on society, and they prevent ordinary people from getting to work, attending funerals of loved ones, and meeting vital medical appointments.

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Unsurprisingly, the harm neotoddlers cause to liberal democracies has endeared them to foreign dictators. The Ayatollah developed a soft spot for the Ivy League campus protesters, cheerleading them on X, and even writing them a letter of support. It also recently transpired that Iran has been funding and directing activists across the US, and that they even masterminded an anti-Israel protest at McGill University in Canada. Closer to home, the misinformation that caused the Southport riots was amplified by a fake news website linked to the Russian government.

So, how can we end this age of neotoddlerism? The simplest way would be to cut off its main source of support. And that isn’t the Ayatollah or Putin, or even the universities. No, the neotoddlers’ main source of support is, in fact, you and I.

Neotoddlerism endures because it is much more effective at making news headlines and going viral than traditional forms of protest. As a case in point, on 22 June, celebrity environmentalists like Emma Thompson and Chris Packham led a huge march of over 60,0000 people through London, to raise awareness of habitat destruction and wildlife loss. It received little press coverage. Around the same time, a handful of Just Stop Oil protesters squirted orange paint on Stonehenge; it made the front page of every major UK newspaper, and coverage in the global press too.

Likewise, last week in London, there was a generally peaceful march against mass immigration, involving tens of thousands of people of all ethnicities, and led by figures like Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox. It was ignored by most of the press. One week later, when Robinson embraced his inner-toddler and stoked violent riots, they made global headlines.

At a time when competition for attention is fierce, it makes business sense for the press and social media platforms to boost stories that outrage people into clicking and sharing. Such platforms naturally form a symbiosis with people who seek to outrage their way to fame: demagogues like Robinson; vandals like Just Stop Oil “poster girl”  Phoebe Plummer; and more bizarre figures still, like the “performance artist turned political activist” Crackhead Barney, who wears little but a diaper and seeks to save Gaza by being as obscene as possible.

By giving these figures platforms, we’ve not only allowed them to proselytise to huge audiences, but we’ve also turned them into idols — living testaments that you can get what you want by acting like a baby. And we can’t blame the media for this; they’re just showing us what we prefer to see. It is ordinary people who have made being a public nuisance pay. Neotoddlerism needs nothing more than attention to thrive — it is physical clickbait — and we just keep clicking.

But there is a way out. The solution to neotoddlers is the same as the one to regular spoiled brats: to ignore their outbursts and deny them attention. If someone sets fire to a car or makes a mess with orange paint, it shouldn’t make global or even national news. The media will stop reporting on these stories when we stop engaging with them. They’ll stop amplifying — and thereby incentivising — the neotoddlers when we do. So we should learn to react more slowly to news, to pay attention to what we pay attention to, and to give more of our attention to behaviours we wish to encourage rather than those we disapprove of. It’s not just the neotoddlers who need to be less impulsive, we do too.

And there are many people in this world who deserve our attention. The Dutch inventor Boyan Slat, for instance, has for the past 10 years been quietly removing plastic from the oceans through his startup, The Ocean Cleanup. His project recently hit a milestone of 15,000,000kg of trash removed from oceans and rivers worldwide, but it’s hardly been reported by the press. Meanwhile, Greta Thunberg became world famous by yelling and blocking entrances to public buildings.

We don’t yet have any start-ups to clear the oceans of rubber dinghies, but such a thing is possible, if addressing illegal immigration can be made more palatable to polite society. And that will only happen when the people who wish to “stop the boats” refrain from acting like the violent thugs they’re often stereotyped as, and start supporting practical, adult solutions.

Every child begins life throwing tantrums. And every good parent learns to ignore them, because they know that acknowledging attention-seeking behaviours validates them, and prevents their kids from outgrowing them. If we wish to stop seeing good causes ruined by bad actors, we must stop rewarding immaturity. If we wish to usher in an age of post-toddlerism, we must stop making neotoddlers famous.

It looked like a man punching a woman because, according to the International Boxing Association, Khelif is not a woman. In 2023, Khelif was disqualified from the World Boxing Championships along with Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting  — “a result of their failure to meet the eligibility criteria for participating in the women’s competition”. This decision was based, not on testosterone levels, but on “a separate and recognised test, whereby the specifics remain confidential”.

A Russian-language statement (the IBA is Russian-led) put it more bluntly: “Based on the results of DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to deceive their colleagues and pretended to be women. Based on the results of the tests, it was proven that they have XY chromosomes.” Lin did not appeal, while Khelif initiated an appeal and then withdrew it, meaning that in both cases, the judgement became legally binding.

But not binding on the Olympics, which withdrew recognition from the IBA earlier this year over multiple concerns over governance. That means the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is free to apply its own rules on sex categories in sport. IOC spokesperson Mark Adams warned against starting a “witch hunt… These are regular athletes who have competed for many years in boxing; they are entirely eligible and they are women on their passports.”

Which would be a totally acceptable way to classify sex, if the fight was between passports, rather than two bone-and-sinew bodies. Khelif is apparently not female, in a category designed for female athletes. And while the IOC has been keen to emphasise that this controversy is wholly unrelated to the contentious matter of trans women in sport, that is an impossible separation to maintain. The question of how sex should be defined — by chromosomes, by hormone levels or by legal marker on a passport — is the heart of the argument over inclusion.

What happened in the ring in Paris is a riposte to all the absurd claims that sex is immaterial to athletic performance. Witness, for example, the writers Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis, who argued in a 2012 New York Times op-ed for “letting go of the idea that the ultimate goal of a fair policy is to protect the ‘purity’ of women’s competitions”. If inclusion is the objective, “then sex-segregated competition is just one of many possible options, and in many cases it might not be the best one”.

And anyway, doesn’t the enforcement of sex categories simply re-instil bad old stereotypes about female weakness and vulnerability? That, at least, is what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) believes. “Excluding women who are trans hurts all women,” says the organisation’s self-identified factsheet on sports. “It invites gender policing that could subject any woman to invasive tests or accusations of being ‘too masculine’ or ‘too good’ at their sport to be a ‘real’ woman.” History professor Johanna Mellis even suggested in The Guardian that women’s sports categories might have been invented by men “to limit our athletic success and opportunities by reinforcing sexist notions of cisgender girls and women as the ‘weaker, slower sex’”.

From there, it’s a short distance to travel to the often-repeated claim that, as an article in LGBTQ+ magazine Them put it, sex differences should be viewed “much like the way we view Michael Phelps’s abnormal wingspan”. Athletes are, by definition, physical exceptions. A male person who has been legally recognised as female is simply another example of biological variation, and — claimed sports correspondent Jonathan Liew (now of The Guardian, but then writing in The Independent) — perhaps one to be celebrated: he claimed that, “in a way, it would be inspiring” if trans women came to dominate women’s sport.

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So far, chromosomes notwithstanding, Khelif has not dominated women’s boxing. XY chromosomes notwithstanding, Khelif lost in the quarter-final of the Tokyo Olympics to Kellie Harrington of Ireland, who went on to take the gold: BBC 5 Live boxing analyst Steve Bunce pointed out that Khelif is “not a devastating puncher” and has ever only achieved five stoppages. The implication, perhaps, is that Carini could have fought on, and maybe even beaten Khelif if she’d been good enough. Maybe so.

But genetically male athletes do not only become a problem in women’s sport when they’re successful. Every XY athlete “included” means an XX athlete pushed out. In combat or collision sports, they also imperil the female athletes they compete against. According to the organisation Women in Sport, male athletes have (on average) 40-50% greater upper limb strength and 12kg more skeletal muscle mass when compared to age-matched female athletes at any given body weight.

A technically accomplished woman might win a fight against a man, but the risk of injury she takes in the process is immense. So Casini had every right to weigh her own safety. After the bout, she said: “It could have been the match of a lifetime, but I had to preserve my life as well in that moment.” Boxing is inherently dangerous — but there is a very different level of exposure in agreeing to be punched by another woman, and agreeing to be punched by a man.

This is the difference that proponents of eliminating sex categories in sport cannot acknowledge. Some, like Liew, may tacitly accept it while being fundamentally unconcerned about what that would mean in practice for women in sport — perhaps because they consider women’s sport to be fundamentally unserious. (“Sometimes we forget that there are bigger things than sport,” wrote Liew in his Independent piece, which is not an observation he ever appears to have made about men’s sport.)

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But for others, particularly for women, and perhaps most particularly for women who are not actively involved in physical pursuits, there is a kind of hope in this denialism. They would like to believe that women’s physical disadvantage compared to men really is a purely, or at least largely, social phenomenon. They recognise women’s inferior status, and they understand that this is tied to the body; but they believe that the body is the cause of the inferiority, and so the body becomes politically inconvenient. They choose instead a tactful fiction of physiological equality — if not in the here and now, then in the inclusive Jerusalem to come.

The female body can, certainly, do more than the male authorities who run sports have historically liked to believe: there is a long and weird tradition of claiming that exercise will cause a woman’s uterus to fall out. Given fair access to training and competition (something which is still very far from assured), women do become faster, stronger, more aggressive. I know this from personal experience. I started powerlifting in my late thirties, and in my forties can pull weights I once thought cartoonishly huge. But I also know that the same weights pulled by a man would be much less impressive, which is why comparing myself to men tells me nothing at all about my progression.

Mixed-sex sports simply lead to exceptional women being forced out by mediocre men: brute strength besting accomplishment. The Olympics’ failure to protect women’s sport is a tragedy for female athletes, but it also makes a travesty of the competition overall. What should be a celebration of excellence becomes, through the IOC’s contempt for fairness and safety in women’s sport, the elevation of the mediocre. After decades of obfuscation and inanity over gender and sport, the truth of it all became clear in an entirely unnecessary meeting: between an apparently male fist and a female face.

The daft incongruity of this answer works — at least for me — because the one thing everybody knows about Freud is how seriously he took sex. According to the canonical interpretation, lascivious urges and impulses buried deep in the unconscious are responsible for large chunks of our behaviour, and indirectly for much of the content of culture generally. If you’ve ever bitten your fingernails at a moment of tension, felt strangely aroused looking at a skyscraper, or wanted to kill your father over a competitive round of minigolf, Freud has an explanation for you. It may not be empirically falsifiable, but you can’t fault it for local colour.

Freud’s foundational insight, that human minds have unconscious aspects, has since proved invaluable — not least as a corrective to Enlightenment fantasies of perfectly rational interactions between participants, each transparently aware of his own beliefs and motivations. When it comes to the self and its patterns of decision-making — perhaps a bit like the government of the United States at the moment — we don’t always know who or what is in charge. Though the real-life Jung took this point and ran with it in his own work, he eventually fell out with Freud, judging the latter’s obsession with sex too dogmatic and itself in need of psychoanalysis. In the memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he recalled: “There was no mistaking the fact that Freud was emotionally involved in his sexual theory to an extraordinary degree. When he spoke of it, his tone became urgent, almost anxious, and all signs of his normally critical and sceptical manner vanished.”

But the recent republication of one of Freud’s most famous works seems to have put the monomania of its author in some doubt. As reported in The Observer last week, in a commentary upon a new edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, analyst and neuropsychiatrist Professor Mark Solms argues that Freud was using the term “sexual” throughout his oeuvre in a way that differed from ordinary usage. Instead, his intended object was “any activity that was pleasure-seeking in its own right — anything that one does for the purposes of pleasure alone, as opposed to practical purposes”. It seems clear that this might well include activities only tangentially connected to the nether regions, if at all: enjoyably attending to music, food, art or sport, for instance. Indeed, Freud apparently described a child kicking a football or swinging on a swing as “sexual’ in this vastly extended sense. And far from being the sort of cultural radical beloved of the avant-garde, Solms underlines that Freud was “a rather conservative gentleman and shared none of their revolutionary social inclinations”.

If this textual interpretation is right, then it too is funny: for it appears bathetically to undercut a century’s worth of edgy academic posturing about the supposed centrality of polymorphous perversity to the human condition. Perhaps poor Bertha Mason, stuck in Rochester’s attic, isn’t Jane Eyre’s sexual alter ego after all. Perhaps Hamlet’s interest in his mother is perfectly healthy. Perhaps Rosebud really is just the name for a sledge.

But there is a serious side to this too. One unfortunate aspect of modern (mis)readings of Freud is the way they have set up shop for the hideous idea of “childhood sexuality”, implicitly justifying perfect relaxation at the sight of young girls twerking in crop tops to Meghan Thee Stallion or cavorting with drag queens at Olympic opening ceremonies. If a reconsideration of what Freud actually meant prompted a reset, it would certainly be welcome.

On the face of it, Solm’s thesis seems to resemble one put forward by the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, commenting in an illuminating book about Freud on his notion of an “erotogenic zone”. In early infancy — as all through life — we seek pleasure as a calming release from tension, pain, and agitation. The baby sucks at the breast or bottle and experiences gratification. Later, it is moved to find substitute objects that simulate or expand upon the original pleasure, investing them with motivational affect instead. As Lear puts Freud’s point: “In infancy we suck at breasts and plastic nipples, then we suck thumbs and blankets, then we suck on ice cream and candies and other delicious foods, then we kiss, and later we again get to suck on breasts and genitals.”

But clearly, this is not to say that children have anything like the sexual desires of adults: they haven’t the concepts, emotional capacities or physical apparatus, for a start. It is only to make the benign point that such feelings are at the very beginning of a developmental continuum which will, if all goes well, result in mature adult erotic experiences much later on. Just as we wouldn’t say a baby making protolinguistic burbling sounds had the capacity to write sonnets, nor is it appropriate to think of children as “sexual” simply because, like the young of many other species, they too seek out basic forms of pleasure to soothe themselves.

One unfortunate aspect of modern (mis)readings of Freud is the way they have set up shop for the hideous idea of “childhood sexuality”

Equally, Freud may have referred to “masturbation” as the “primal addiction”, but a child’s unfocused and exploratory touching is significantly different from what a grown adult knowingly does when clicking on PornHub. And when he talks about Oedipal feelings in infants — whether or not this is a plausible hypothesis, which it probably isn’t — he surely means extremely primitive affects, not yet brought into the realm of language, rather than fully-fledged emotions structured with subjects and objects. Many of us can look back at our former young selves and remember vague stirrings and nascent crushes; but as Freud also points out, memory is frequently unreliable about the meaning of things at the time.

Despite the obviousness of such points on reflection, they seem lost on those hundreds of academics now hellbent on “queering” childhood, complaining about the supposedly egregious social construction of early youth as a non-sexual “innocent” time as if this was the latest civil rights frontier. As one recently published, fairly representative article puts it — in the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law no less —  “the taboo surrounding child sexuality and gender variance can make childhood especially traumatic for queer children whose desires and expression are forcibly suppressed”. In other words, kids are presented as suffering horribly for having to bottle up their sexual urges. This metaphor barely works for adults and is completely inappropriate for children. Like settlers moving further West during the gold rush, researchers desperate to uncover a new and profitable victim class are imposing adult frameworks upon younger groups, and reaping the professional spoils of grants and research outputs accordingly.

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One serious issue here — albeit one that dare not speak its name in academia, for fear of looking embarrassingly déclassé — is that this framing of children as mini-sexual beings works rather conveniently for those adults with illicit designs upon them. But another less dramatic but still reasonable worry is that the constant cultural focus upon youthful “sexuality” may well be changing later adult trajectories. For, as is also highlighted by Lear in his book and by Freud before him, unlike with the sexual behaviours of other species, human sexuality is highly plastic.

Freud observed that what he called “the sexual aim” in humans — roughly, what we want to do — can come apart from “the sexual object” — who or what we want to do it with, or to — partly due to the influence of personal imagination, and partly due to developmental circumstances. In some cases, the aim can get stuck on fetish objects: practically no object, inanimate or animate, seems to be ruled out in advance. And a developing sexuality is also culturally permeable, as the fact of changing erotic proclivities over different historical periods attests. (If you care to be up to the minute, the latest trends apparently include orgasm hypnosis, Japanese rope bondage, and “dipping”. Do keep up.)

Uniquely among animals, humans have the ability to reflect on their own behaviours generally and third-personally, but then to incorporate findings into first-personal narratives about the self: who I am, exactly, and what my life therefore means. It is plausible, then, that the Freudians’ dragging of human sexuality from its formerly tenebrous gloom into a technicolour, over-theorised daylight has significantly changed the significance of sex for post-pubescent brains along the way, giving it disproportionate discursive importance for the ego, at the expense of making it something the id feels like it might be fun to try.

When we look at the falling rates of sexual experimentation in adolescence, coupled with the large numbers of people apparently making some particular sexuality or gender presentation part of their “identity”, the connection looks more than suggestive. Perhaps if we stopped thinking of sex as the root of all interesting human behaviour, we eventually might start having more of it. In the meantime though, we should at least take a different psychological tip from Freud, and avoid using children as the canvas for the projection of contemporary adult dramas.

I’d also discovered, on the past occasions when I’d kept a notebook by my bed and recorded my dreams, that the books on dream interpretation I’d found made zero sense out of them. Maybe I’m just weird — unsurprisingly that suggestion has been made tolerably often — but my dreams didn’t seem to fit into any of the usual patterns. I read Freud, of course, and Jung, and also some of the literature on dreams that came into fashion in the late 20th century. But I ended up wondering whether I was dreaming in Martian or something. So, I temporarily filed the whole thing away.

Recently, though, since the passing of my wife Sara, I’ve had more time to fill than usual. After a series of vivid dreams, I decided to give dreamwork another try. So I put a notepad and a pen on the nightstand, and started collecting my dreams. But they were just as odd as before, and the dream books just as unhelpful. Then — ah, then! — came a dream I could actually interpret.

No, it wasn’t one of those big life-changing dreams that Jungian theorists like to write about. I was sitting at a table with three women, two of them older and one young. They were talking about craft projects. One of the older women explained to the younger one that, if she wanted her project to succeed, she would have to be ready to give presentations to audiences on the ninth day of each month. The young woman replied that this meant she would have to start collecting information right away. The older woman smiled and said, yes, exactly.

That was the dream. The context was that, the day before, I’d agreed to give a presentation towards the end of June about Masonic history to a local group of Freemasons, who, one must add, like to refer to their organisation as “the Craft”. I realised as I reflected on the dream that it was offering specific advice about my project: I needed to have my presentation finished by the ninth of June, and that I’d better get busy collecting information for it.

That is to say, it was making a prediction. That was when doors started swinging open, because until the late 19th century dreams were understood as omens, predictions, and warnings. Whilst most cultures acknowledged that dreams sometimes gave false predictions (in Homer’s Iliad, Zeus deliberately sent the Greek king Agamemnon a “lying dream” to help the Trojans), oneiromancy, or divination through dreams, was shared by nearly all the world’s cultures, from Mesopotamia to mediaeval Japan. When the Egyptian pharaoh had a dream about seven plump and seven scrawny cows, Joseph didn’t interpret it psychologically as a reflection of the pharaoh’s relationship with his mother, or an effusion from the collective unconscious. He read it as a prediction — and, at least according to Genesis, he was right.

Yet in late 19th-century Europe, among the educated classes, opinion on dream interpretation started swinging away from those familiar positions and towards new theories of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud’s the most important figure here, though there were influential writers before him who laid the foundations for his work, and plenty of others after him that took his basic insight and ran with it, as often as not in directions that horrified him. Freud’s central claim was that dreams offered privileged access to the dreamer’s unconscious thoughts and feelings, and thus to the psyche with all its quirks and foibles. Most dreamwork has gone in that direction since: it’s about personality, not prediction.

Let’s change tracks here for a moment. It so happens that one of the other things I’ve been doing with my unwanted supply of spare time brought me face to face with a parallel shift, this time in the field of astrology. While I have a second career as a political astrologer, reading ingress and eclipse charts for entire nations, I’m also interested in natal astrology, the astrology of individual horoscopes. And one of the things I’ve been doing lately is studying the seven hefty volumes of astrological instruction written by Alan Leo, a pen name which referenced the author’s astrological sun sign at a time when astrology was still illegal in Britain. Leo’s series of books, with their focus on personality rather than prediction, can be taken as the starting point for most of modern astrology. The long history of astrology underlines how drastic this shift was. The entire science of astrology, born in Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, had prediction at the very heart of its whole enterprise — but it sought to answer political, not individual, questions.

What happened on earth the last time something happened in the skies? That was the empirical question that intrigued those early astrologers. Over several millennia of careful recordkeeping, tentative hypotheses, failures, and successes, astrology as we know it came into being out of that research project. Personal horoscopes were only a side effect of that programme — the discovery that a king’s birth chart might offer some guidance about his behaviour and his impact on his kingdom helped to birth what we call natal astrology, but it was only until Alan Leo that a discernible shift can be observed.

While Leo set the movement in motion, his successors, Dane Rudhyar and Marc Edmund Jones, went even further, redefining astrology as a study of personality and downplaying the entire tradition of astrological prediction. This attitude spread into other methods of divination. I’m old enough that I can recall the angry denunciations of “fortune telling” flung by tarot readers who focused on personality at the older generation of readers who focused on prediction. I also recall well, and profited from, the first ebbing of that particular tide. Early in my writing career, I used to go to various Neopagan events to make presentations and try to interest readers in my books; I didn’t have a lot of money in those days, and so I helped pay my way by doing geomancy readings for other attendees.

Geomancy, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is more or less a Western equivalent of the I Ching, using randomly generated four-digit binary numbers where the I Ching uses six-digits. What sets geomancy apart from most other ways of divination is precisely that it’s a method of prediction. You ask it a question and it gives you the answer, and by and large it’s right.

So I would settle at a table in the divination room and do readings. My rule was that I’d cast and interpret the readings and then the clients would pay me whatever they thought it was worth. I cautioned everyone who sat down for a reading that they shouldn’t ask a question if they didn’t want to know the answer, because geomancy doesn’t provide wiggle room; if you ask it “Will I achieve my fondest dream?” it’s perfectly capable of answering “No”. Of course there were people who didn’t believe me, asked questions like that, tried to get me to take back a negative answer, and ended up flinging a handful of loose change in my face and stalking away in a rage.

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While I remember such encounters, they weren’t the ones I found interesting. I was drawn to the people who wanted a straight answer even if it was negative. One woman in particular comes to mind. She sat down at the table, listened to my spiel, and asked about a grandiose and not very marketable business project. I cast the chart and it was a very strongly negative one. The woman burst into tears and thanked me, because she’d had a bad feeling about it all along, but she couldn’t get anyone — not her friends, her advisers, nor the other diviners she’d asked — to give her any response other than some mindless cheerleading. She then opened her purse, got out some bills with noticeably large numbers on them, and handed them to me, before getting up and letting the next person sit down for a reading.

My political astrology these days follows the same principle. I’m in the business of offering the most accurate predictions I can. While I’m certainly not infallible, my predictions are reliably better than, say, those of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. (Admittedly this is shooting fish in a barrel; if an economist tells you the sky is blue, go look.) As a result, I make a decent share of my income from the subscriptions I ask for in return.

My point here, however, is not to preen myself on my far from unmixed success as a prophet. It’s to point out that there’s a market niche for something that most astrologers aren’t providing: predictions, as accurate as possible, instead of personality-obsessed navel-gazing. The flight from prediction that gripped dream interpretation and astrology alike in the late 19th century has deprived a great many people of a resource they want.

That, I’ve come to think, points at the heart of the flight from prediction. The years that Leo was turning away from astrological prediction, and Freud was redefining dreams as a means of psychological introspection rather than advice about the future, were also the years when Jules Verne was inventing science fiction, and technological change was first becoming a steady process rather than a matter of occasional fits and starts. Furthermore, it was also the zenith of Europe’s rise to global empire.

It was during these years that the modern mythology of progress was invented. Victorian futuristic novels such as Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) and John Ames Mitchell’s The Last American (1889) took it for granted that Western civilisation would suffer the usual fate. By contrast, Leo was among the early adopters of a very different view: the notion that the world stood poised on the brink of a new golden age in which all the miseries of the past would be laid to rest forever.

While that belief had been in circulation in its original religious form for a very long time, what distinguished the myth of progress was how it decked out the Christian belief of the Second Coming in secular drag, proclaiming the imminent arrival of the Millennium without any supernatural justification. Much of the intellectual history of the Western world over the long 20th century was shaped by the transformation of this secondhand mythology from a belief of fringe groups to the cultural mainstream Much of the intellectual history of the Western world since 1990, in turn, has been shaped by the gradual unravelling of the failed progressivist faith.

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What gives all this a bitter irony is that the world of the late 19th century was not on the doorstep of Utopia. Rather, it stood poised on the brink of utter horror. Imagine for a moment that Leo had been interested in prediction rather than personality, and that he’d been able to get a good clear look at the next century or so of world history. He would have had the chance to preview two horrific world wars, waves of genocide sweeping across much of Eurasia from Armenia in 1915-1920 to Cambodia in 1976-1978, the total collapse of European empires in a chaos of insurgencies and failed wars, the rise and fall of the Communist and Fascist movements, and much, much more of the same kind, with poison gas, aerial bombardment, and a couple of mushroom clouds in there just to add a little additional piquance.

As it happens, there were people who foresaw some of the horror in advance. One of the occultists of that era I find most appealing, the colourful Joséphin Péladan, proclaimed to a bemused Paris in 1891 that European civilisation had passed its peak. A leading figure of the Decadent movement which was also home to the now more famous Joris-Karl Huysmans, he predicted that eventually Chinese troops would conquer France and parade down the Champs Elysées —a prediction that seems far more likely right now than it must have done in his day. More generally, the entire point of the Decadent movement was the recognition that the West was in decline.

I suspect, for what it’s worth, that this awareness was behind the flight from prediction. Too many people saw or sensed what was coming and so fled into a fantasy of a shining future. It’s understandable that they did so: “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot noted in his interwar poem Burnt Norton. Yet there comes a point at which fleeing from the facts becomes too dangerous.

We’re arguably well past that point now. That’s why I could pay most of my travel expenses back in the day by doing geomancy readings that gave people the bad news nobody else would tell them. Outside of the airtight bubbles where our political classes spend their time many people have come to grips with the fact that the future is going to be more difficult than the past — the mirage of Utopia projected by our corporate pseudoculture will never be more than a slickly packaged daydream.

I’m not sure how long it will be before that realisation starts to affect the practice of astrology, or for that matter the interpretation of dreams. Nonetheless I’d encourage people to consider their predictive possibilities of either of these. As the long road down to the deindustrial dark ages stretches out before us, we can use all the guidance we can get.

These bizarre events are shrouded in mystery. Conspiracy theories abound. Did Trump arrange for the shooter to nick his ear with a bullet so that he could rise from the ground bloodied but unbowed? Did the Democrats blackmail Biden into ending his campaign? Who, if anyone, is in charge?

Unfortunately, Western democracies require high levels of trust to survive. It’s what distinguishes us from, say, Somalia, where warring clans settle disputes by bloodshed. But we seem to be devolving rapidly into our own warring clans. Trump’s opponents have worked for years to paint him as a racist, a bigot, an antisemite, and a Nazi. They’ve slandered and libelled his supporters, too, and the poisonous fruit of these concerted efforts is now ripe for picking. What is more, the opaque machinations of the Democrats to remove Biden from the ticket are strongly reminiscent of Shakespearean hugger-mugger, with Kamala Harris playing a wheedling Regan or Goneril to Biden’s King Lear.

Witnessing the ongoing collapse of the American polity, one tries to find words for what is happening. The catastrophic error of our time goes beyond nasty political partisanship, and is not confined to our shores. It is easily described, but almost impossible to fix. Put simply, we’ve forgotten what civilisation is, and who we are without its distinctions and proscriptions: wild and vicious animals.

Nothing captures our terrible obliviousness better than Werner Herzog’s 2005 film Grizzly Man. Timothy Treadwell, the film’s subject, spent 13 summers living among the bears of Alaska’s Katmai National Park. Treadwell is a characteristically postmodern man. His is a story of self-promotion and heartfelt, boundless imitation; as one man tells Herzog: “He tried to be a bear” An actor who took to alcohol and drugs after he lost a leading role on the sitcom Cheers, Treadwell starred in his own production while in the wilderness. In almost 100 hours of footage, he presented himself as the heroic protector of his grizzly “friends” against the (mostly imagined) threat of poachers. His sincere and passionate devotion to the bears landed him on the Discovery Channel and the Late Show with David Letterman.

So compelling was Treadwell’s long-running drama that the ending wrote itself. One wind-whipped October night in 2003, battened down at their campsite against the storm, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by an ursine stranger, a hungry interloper from the park’s interior. That bear was later shot, and his corpse was eaten by other bears. (Cannibalism is a common practice among grizzlies, who will eat their cubs when other sources of food dry up.) Having failed at comedy and achieved modest success in action-adventure, Treadwell is remembered almost entirely for his role as the tragic protagonist of Herzog’s documentary.

Treadwell, Herzog says in the course of his film, died “fighting civilisation itself” — something many people are now doing in many different ways, all of which involve transgressing what used to be cultural red lines. Their error, like his, is one of egoistic projection, in which the laziness of beautiful, self-promoting wishes substitutes for concentrated thought about hard truths. Herzog observes that Treadwell believed he and the grizzlies, apex predators that bring down moose and elk, “would bond as children of the universe”. Mistaking the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness for a paradise of natural goodness and concord, he allowed a quasi-religious fantasy to obscure a harsh reality. “[He] reached out seeking a primordial encounter,” Herzog says, “but in doing so he crossed an invisible borderline.” Others in Grizzly Man echo this assessment. A helicopter pilot who helped to recover Treadwell’s remains thinks he acted “like he was working with people wearing bear costumes”, while a curator of the Alutiiq Museum remarks that he “crossed a boundary [between man and bear] that we [the Alutiiq] have lived with for 7,000 years”.

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Herzog himself displays what it means to be civilised in filming Grizzly Man, discreetly suppressing an audio recording of the fatal attack and refusing to air Treadwell’s obscene rant against named employees of the Park Service — “a line… which we will not cross”. He blames Treadwell’s death on his “sentimentalised view that everything out there was good and the universe in balance and in harmony”. In the blank eyes of a grizzly that Treadwell captured on video just days before his death — possibly the very one that killed him and his girlfriend — Herzog sees “only the overwhelming indifference of nature”. What is more, he remarks, “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder”. Herzog seems to be describing not just nature but human nature, whose ferocious depths are easily forgotten in times of prosperity and stability.

You can’t say we weren’t warned. In the foundational mythology of the Greek poet Hesiod, all things, starting with Earth and Heaven, emerged from Chaos. But while you can take human beings out of chaos, you can’t take chaos out of human beings. Greek tragedy was from the beginning obsessed with the problem of how to keep civilisation from collapsing into the primordial disorder from which it emerged. Everything turned on the maintenance of basic distinctions that opened the space of civilisation in which human life was possible. This space was defined by a matrix of oppositions: citizen vs. foreigner, adult vs. child, man vs. woman, Greek vs. barbarian, animal vs. human being vs. god. Greek tragedy and comedy dramatically displayed the breakdown of these distinctions, with results that were either horrific and pitiable or simply ludicrous.

The earliest tragedies, from the late 6th century BC, told the story of how the cult of Dionysus, a god closely associated with nature, came from Asia to conquer the Greek cities. Euripides’s Bacchae, one of the last great tragedies, covered the same ground. In the Bacchae, Dionysus avenges himself on the rulers of his native city of Thebes, who deny his divinity. In doing so, he lives up to his reputation of being the absolute Other, a paradoxical god who scrambles all that should be separated and defies the laws of logic. An immortal who appears in the disguise of a young man, Dionysus is, in effect, a grizzly bear in human costume. He is ambiguously masculine and effeminate, Theban and foreign, Greek and barbarian, tame and wild. Present everywhere yet nowhere, he is sober, cruel, and, like nature itself, “most terrible, yet most gentle, to mankind”. By the end of the play, the complete collapse of the civilisational matrix is visible onstage, where a palace lies in ruins and the mother of young King Pentheus cradles his decapitated head.

The Bacchae exposes the darkest depths of the human psyche, where tenderness is inseparable from viciousness. For it is the Theban women, led by Pentheus’s mother, who tear him limb from limb. They do this not as Bacchants, peaceful celebrants of Dionysus who had earlier “nestled gazelles and young wolves in their arms, / suckling them” on a wild mountainside, but as Maenads (from the Greek mania): furious destroyers of human worlds. And the play’s true horror derives from the women’s instantaneous transition between these two seemingly opposed modes of being, one Edenic and pastoral, the other homicidally insane.

Grizzly Man is in essential respects a postmodern reprise of the Bacchae. In one scene, a seaplane pilot remembers the horror that awaited him when he arrived to fly Treadwell and Huguenard out of the wilderness. As a thick swarm of flies and mosquitoes buzz around him, the pilot recalls finding “what was left of Tim’s body, his head, and a little bit of backbone attached, and we found a hand, arm, wristwatch still attached”. Treadwell’s grisly end makes his very name sound like a warning. One is reminded of Pentheus’s murder, when crazed females shout in triumph while he shrieks in terror. “One tore off an arm, / another a foot still warm in its shoe.” This, Euripides suggests, is what happens when fundamental differences are erased and clear thinking gives way to labile sentiment and emotion.

Dionysus is the god of wine and intoxication. A modern-dress production of the Bacchae might make him a grungy, long-haired, androgynous hippie from the Sixties, wearing bell-bottom jeans and an army jacket with a painted peace symbol, handing out psychedelic drugs that induce pleasant highs followed by nightmares. The era of communes and “make love, not war”, after all, was also a time of murder and mayhem. Who can forget the Manson Family cult or the wide-eyed lunacy of its leader? Freed from long-standing societal constraints, raw feeling reveals itself to be a heaving sea of chaos.

Yet we are busily wiping away all the boundaries and borders of civilised life in the suicidal pursuit of some ill-defined vision of justice and equity. Gangs of criminals loot stores in major cities with impunity. Illegal immigrants are treated like citizens, and private citizens are surveilled like malicious foreigners. We no longer care to observe the difference between males and females. The new libertinism of drugs, pornography, and electronic amusements frees adults to remain in perpetual childhood, while encouraging children prematurely to abandon their innocence. The family is collapsing because there are too few men willing to protect and nurture it as husbands and fathers, and too few women insisting that they do so. Animal liberation extremists, “furry communities”, trans-, post-, and anti-humanist philosophies, and the relentless advance of AI are progressively effacing the differences between human beings, animals, and machines. Even logic and analytical precision are now attacked as instruments of oppression.

Can we really be surprised that many Americans, frightened and confused by a world turned upside down, have gone mad and are ready to tear apart the body politic? Or that many Westerners, cut adrift from civilisational moorings, support Islamist jihadis who gang-raped Israeli women and played with a breast they’d severed from a victim?

There’s an old joke about a Greek tailor who tells a man trying on trousers, if “Euripides, you buy-a-dees”. This is a humorous way of expressing the tragic wisdom of pathei mathos, “learning by suffering”. Our civilisational clothes are torn, but we lack the knowledge and the energy to mend them. Nor do we have new garments to cover our nakedness. Little wonder that so many of us are reverting to the nasty and brutish condition of nature, and are behaving like wild beasts or psychopathic gods.