In this case, AI might just have saved the day. The flaws were discovered because cybersecurity experts used AI to search for weaknesses that humans had missed. Had, say, AI-assisted Russian cybercriminals got there first, it might have been far worse. The incident gives an insight into the double-edged nature of AI, which presents clear and present dangers — but also, new tools to combat those dangers. Note, however, that we are talking about the fairly unsexy business of cybercrime  and not, for example, sentient computers spontaneously deciding to eradicate humanity or farming our living souls in some sort of Matrix nightmare. And yet it is these scenarios, dreamed up by a small set of extravagantly funded AI doomers and spread by a credulous media that have occupied the world’s attention; and have gone into overdrive since the Hugging Face hack and Jacob Coxon’s resignation from Anthropic.

For “normies”, anxiety about a new emerging technology tends to center on things like jobs, education, or the economy. Cybersecurity experts tend to worry about tangible threats to existing systems. But AI doomerism is distinct. It describes people who believe that advanced AI poses a risk of human extinction — and are, generally, prepared to put a number on it. Coxon’s former colleague Evan Hubinger set his own “p(doom)” at “above 10%”; some go as high as 25% or even 50% .

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Much has been written about the strange confluence of money, power, and quasi-theological belief systems that have given rise to this apocalyptic worldview. Still, what receives less attention is what this movement actually wants to happen in order to avert this admittedly unpleasant scenario — which is to say, the authoritarian and even totalitarian implication of the AI doomers’ policy proposals. Ideas of mass surveillance that would make Big Brother blush have almost imperceptibly crept from the fantastical thought experiments of Effective Altruists and the Rationalists and are being now turned into policy proposals by such figures as Bernie Sanders.

To understand the peculiar flavor of AI doomerism, a good place to start is a 2019 TED talk given by Oxford’s Nick Bostrom, one of the leading philosophers on existential risks, titled “How civilization could destroy itself—and 4 ways we could prevent it”. Bostrom opened his talk with a thought experiment. He asked his audience to imagine an urn containing various balls representing technological advances. There would be some white balls, representing beneficial discoveries. There would be some gray balls, representing discoveries that have some positive and some negative benefits. But there might be a few black balls: discoveries so profound, they would effectively make political life as we know it unsustainable. One example might be synthetic biology: imagine if your average supervillain really did gain the ability to create mutants! Another might be AGI.

Bostrom’s point was that once the ball is withdrawn from the urn, you can’t put it back. Therefore, the only viable technological safeguard would be to stop anyone from withdrawing any black balls in the first place. And the only real way of doing this, he mused, was: “Ubiquitous surveillance — everybody would be monitored all the time.” The interviewer’s thoughts turned immediately to dystopia: “This is Minority Report, essentially,” he said, referencing the 2002 Tom Cruise movie about a future police state that uses psychics to arrest criminals before they have a chance to commit their crimes. Bostrom duly admitted that there were “huge problems and risks” associated with the idea of mass surveillance and global governance. But perhaps, he mused, people would be more willing to wear multidirectional cameras and microphones if we called this “The ‘freedom tag’… or something like that”. Still, he suggested that “we seemed to be doomed anyway”, by which logic, extreme solutions may come to seem proportionate.

Over time, this “end justifies the means” mindset moved from thought experiment to policy proposal, with increasingly concrete ideas for controlling AI research and the people working on it. With the work of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), the case for totalizing enforcement became more explicit.

MIRI is a Berkeley-based nonprofit organization, founded more than two decades ago by the writer Eliezer Yudkowsky and backed by a remarkable concentration of money and influence. Its funders include Open Philanthropy, the philanthropic organization founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna; Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum (an open-source blockchain); and Jaan Tallinn, the Estonian programmer who helped build Skype and has since made existential risk one of the central objects of his philanthropy. Tallinn is a particularly important figure in this ecosystem: through the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which he funds alongside other philanthropists, he has helped direct hundreds of millions of dollars towards organizations concerned with AI existential risks.

MIRI’s particular obsession is artificial superintelligence (ASI) — a hypothetical scenario in which computers develop vastly superior intelligence to humans on every vector. Its position on ASI is: “Everyone dies.” Yudkowsky therefore argues that the only reasonable response is a globally coordinated and collectively enforced moratorium on the development of ASI.

This may not worry you, since you (I assume) have no intention of trying to create ASI. But the wider problem is enforcement. If governments agree to halt this kind of research, how do they know companies or individuals are obeying? In June, MIRI’s Technical Governance Team published Verifying Restrictions on Frontier AI Research, which considers how such a prohibition could actually be policed. The paper catalogs 28 possible verification mechanisms, including intelligence gathering; international search warrants and inspections (of properties, computers, and files); polygraphs; monitoring what users type into AI systems and what the model produces while it is being used; sting operations; employee-monitoring software; and AI-assisted code review, which may extend to codebases, experiment logs, and research documents. It is a proposal for giving governments unprecedented oversight of private activity. Researchers would work under permanent clouds of suspicion, never knowing which of their experiments might be deemed illicit, which conversations were incriminating, which of their colleagues was an informant.

This really is a dystopian nightmare, and, unfortunately, not the dystopia the media is covering. Journalists have spent years asking readers to imagine the dictatorship of future machines while paying far less attention to the systems of human control being proposed to prevent it.

MIRI itself acknowledged that such mechanisms could “enable authoritarianism” and cautioned that some “might be undesirable.” And yet thanks to the well-funded ecosystem of organizations surrounding MIRI, these ideas have now migrated into public policy proposals.

On 23 September, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would permanently prohibit the development and deployment of artificial superintelligence and immediately pause advanced AI development until a new federal regulator was established to enforce the bans and strict penalties. The bill would create a cabinet-level Department of Artificial Intelligence with powers to monitor frontier AI systems and oversee their destruction. Individuals who violated or circumvented the ban could face up to 20 years in prison; companies could face what the sponsors call the “corporate death penalty”. That is a remarkable amount of government power over a technology that doesn’t even exist.

“A new age of AI radicalism is upon us,” concluded Adam Thierer and Nicholas Thielman of the R Street Institute, describing the Sanders-Casar framework as one of “the most radical interventions ever proposed in any piece of proposed legislation in American history”. Their report warned that “if enacted, it would have extremely destructive and dangerous consequences for innovation, competition, economic growth, global competitiveness, national security, and freedom of speech.”

They label the proposals “AI Authoritarianism”, arguing that it represents an unprecedented expansion of government control over technology and potentially over information itself, sharply restricting what companies, scientists, and individuals are allowed to do. Even pro-compute governance groups such as GovAI have cautioned that such a regime could “also be used to infringe on civil liberties, perpetuate existing power structures, and entrench authoritarian regimes.” Indeed, it could reasonably be argued that its implications are totalitarian — since enforcement will necessarily extend into private intellectual activity itself, through the monitoring of researchers’ prompts, code, messages, and devices via a pervasive surveillance system designed to prevent even private non-compliance.

These ideas have also found an energetic British advocate in ControlAI, a non-profit founded by Andrea Miotti to campaign against the existential risk posed by superintelligent AI. Its policy proposal also includes a 20-year AI pause. Backed by figures including Tallinn, the organization has spent the past two years briefing politicians in Britain, America, and elsewhere. In September, its UK campaign achieved a milestone: Labour MP Alex Sobel introduced a bill, drafted by ControlAI, that would ban the development of superintelligent AI in Britain for 20 years and require the Government to pursue an international agreement banning it worldwide. ControlAI also drafted a separate AI “Kill-Switch” amendment, designed to grant the government emergency powers to shut down AI models and data centers. And its US arm also consulted with the offices of Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar on their Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act.

The moratorium is extremely important to the AI doomers. Writing in Time in 2023, Yudkowsky warned readers: “Be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.” Yudkowsky’s argument treats interstate military conflict, potentially involving nuclear-armed powers, as a lesser danger than his hypothetical risk of AI-induced catastrophe. In that framework, even conventional geopolitical dangers become subordinate to the threat he assigns to AI.

If it were up to Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky, we would therefore have a “Singleton” — a single, centralized, global decision-making agency with the power to monitor all computing power, an entity that would require absolute mass surveillance and the dismantling of national sovereignty.

Their ideas have roots in two overlapping subcultures: the Californian Rationalists and Oxford’s Effective Altruists, who by the early 2010s, were converging around longtermism: the idea that safeguarding humanity’s distant future should be a central moral priority. Figures such as Dustin Moskovitz, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Jaan Tallinn leverage the logic that EA had applied to philanthropy: if there was even the tiniest chance AI might one day wipe out humanity, that possibility warrants outsized funding today.

A pair of rather insular intellectual subcultures had developed something approaching a secular eschatology, turning sci-fi hypotheticals into moral imperatives. Critics and former members have described recurring problems of insularity, groupthink, and superiority complex. The true believers cast themselves as the tiny group who “get the danger” before the “ignorant masses” do. Qiaochu Yuan, a former rationalist, told Bloomberg that “Within the group, there was an unspoken sense of being the chosen people smart enough to see the truth and save the world, of being ‘cosmically significant.’”

“Why are they issuing exact probabilities of human extinction, which in fact are pulled out of thin air?” wondered Harvard’s Steven Pinker in a recent magazine article about their tendency to pronounce that there is, say, a 25% or 35% chance of us all dying by 2040. I am sorry to say this is how they talk. When you spend time in these circles, you clearly see their obsession with making up numbers and then quoting them as important facts when, essentially, they are “feelings dressed up as numbers.”

Those who actually engage with the technology, as opposed to the thought experiments, tend to find all this pretty absurd. One review of Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies memorably retitled it: “If Anyone Reads It, Everyone Laughs.” “The real work of technology is found in implementation, adoption, maintenance, repair, adaptation, debugging, negotiation, administration, and other boring but essential tasks.”

In other words, it’s buggy PHP code, a battle between defenders and bad actors. This may not get the kind of clicks that doom-friendly news outlets aim for with headlines about “THE END OF HUMANITY” (the infamous Time magazine cover with two letters in flashing lights: AI). But it’s far closer to the realities of AI.

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Nonetheless, the “AI will kill us all” camp is on media tours. They are also paying content creators to push AI existential risk messages to the public by sponsoring social media posts and partnering with influencers: influencers with tens of millions of subscribers, recruited to preach doom. The AI doomers have deep pockets  — the most recent estimate is $3 billion. The generous support of figures like Moskovitz, Tallinn, and convicted felon Sam Bankman-Fried has helped finance the ecosystem’s rapid expansion, with hundreds of organizations devoted to existential risks from AI. These billionaires have built the “AI safety” and “AI alignment” fields through grants, fellowships, research centers, training pipelines, media work, advocacy groups, and lobbying networks, as well as within frontier AI companies. Anthropic’s ties to Effective Altruism run unusually deep, spanning its funding, hires, and organizational culture. Anthropic’s policy advocacy — built around access controls, evaluation requirements, and proposals to “pace” development — could create a permission regime that large incumbents are far better equipped to navigate than smaller competitors, especially from the open-source community. Anthropic’s IPO is meanwhile expected to generate tens of billions of dollars in new philanthropic wealth for causes including AI existential risk. If so, the network built during the first AI-safety funding boom could soon have access to vastly more capital.

The danger is that this small but well-funded and influential group is claiming oversized moral and political authority over everyone else’s AI future. If AI really is as consequential as its most alarmed advocates claim, then concentrating control over it in a small number of frontier corporations, regulators, or self-appointed “experts” susceptible to the same groupthink creates its own category of risk. Broad access would give researchers, developers, businesses, and ordinary users greater opportunity to test systems, discover weaknesses, and develop competing alternatives.

What comes next does not have to be a choice between AI hype and predictions of apocalypse. A more grounded alternative is AI realism: treat AI as a powerful, fast-moving technology whose benefits and risks should be assessed through evidence rather than prophecy. The goal of AI regulation should be to target specific, concrete harms. That means distinguishing demonstrated harms from speculative scenarios, and treating the risks created by surveillance, censorship, market concentration, regulatory capture, and restrictions on scientific inquiry as part of the safety equation rather than acceptable collateral damage.

Before building an apparatus of surveillance and control to prevent a hypothetical dystopia, we should examine whether the proposed cure is becoming the dystopia itself.

Dr. Nirit Weiss-Blatt is a Communication Researcher and author of The TECHLASH and Tech Crisis Communication and the AI Panic newsletter.

He is approached by a man with a clipboard, that universal talisman of functionaries who take themselves to be deputized on behalf of order. What the functionary says is hard to make out. But then it hardly matters, does it? It is really the clipboard that conveys the message, a mute form of authority that often has no real argument to give, and can be effective only if everyone automatically defers to it.

But our stunt rider doesn’t do this. From his helmet cam, we see him riding in a slow circle around Clipboard Man on one wheel, and you can sense that he is at ease. “Does this look dangerous?” he asks, a bit incredulously. He has a point, which is easy to grasp if you have ever been nearly killed in a parking lot by some upstanding member of the PTA backing out in her Suburban.

But Wheelie Guy then takes it to the next level. He says to Clipboard Man: “You’re just confused, and it makes you feel things.” The functionary really does seem to be stumped by this interaction.

Wheelie Guy rides off. He clearly won the battle, in some important sense, but isn’t fool enough to think the police will be hip to his higher logic.

According to that logic, it is not just that Clipboard Man’s mission is gratuitous, objectively speaking: the parking lot is empty. But the fetish of rule-following becomes its own justification, and it fills him with a lust for enforcement even when there probably isn’t, in fact, any rule to cover parking lot wheelies. At the risk of seeming unpatriotic, I have the sad duty of pointing out that this seems to be a distinctly American phenomenon. As my French friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy said to me: “You are rule worshippers”, to the point we will make up rules on the fly to cover unanticipated eruptions of the human spirit. To compensate, we keep singing a song to ourselves about being “the land of the free and the home of the brave”.

This tension between clipboards and wheelies seems to perfectly represent America’s checkered struggle with urban living and the technocratic push towards the so-called smart city. The longing for order that underlies attempts to render the city as an object of rational planning is sometimes impervious to chastisement by the stubborn realities of human behavior.

How, then, would the land of the free embrace the idea of the smart city — the idea that the logic of interconnected electronic devices can be applied to the human landscape, with everything optimized and orchestrated by an “urban operating system”? The energy and sewage infrastructure, police protections, trash collection, the allocation of parking and street capacity, the orchestration of traffic lights, the timing of deliveries and all the other services that make a city work will be massaged by data science and achieve a kind of frictionlessness.

Of course, human beings tend to do things that are unpredictable, making them the bug in the system. But if people can be coaxed into driverless cars, it may become possible that our movements through the city can be monitored and coordinated from afar, bringing us closer to what the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott called “a glorious, collisionless manner of living”. He was naming the ambition of a certain modern character-type, whom he called “the rationalist”.

Transformative urban planning has long been an ambition of the high-modernist mindset. Its goals are usually public health, efficiency, beauty and something more elusive — order. Some cities that have received the full treatment over the past two centuries are wonderful places to visit despite their controversial remakings; see Paris (much of it demolished and rebuilt by Baron Haussmann under Louis Napoleon in the 19th century). Others, like Brasilia and Chandigarh (both designed from the ground up by Le Corbusier), quickly became ghost towns, full of high-modernist buildings and plazas of impressive conceptual ambition through which the wind whistled forlornly, eventually to be repurposed by squatters or stripped of building materials for use in the surrounding shanty towns where urban life carries on in defiance of the master plan. Such projects are sometimes sited in the developing world because they have no robust tradition of self-rule, and therefore offer no organized resistance to the plans of these Western visionaries. Le Corbusier offered his services as a planner to Western authoritarians — both the Vichy regime and Stalin’s USSR — before hitting upon this strategy of siting his projects in the developing world.

There is something in the technocratic visionary that is too easily tempted into a moral-intellectual space that floats free of the empirical, and has more in common with the non-falsifiable commitments of a cult. And while these grand visions are easy to criticize on these grounds, it is usually the small-bore, uncoordinated attempts to assert control that, cumulatively, can lead to a clampdown on the human spirit in urban spaces. Yet, precisely because of the petty-tyrant character of such clampdowns — the obvious fact that they are clampdowns — they may summon a response in certain bold souls that is beautiful to behold. Like Wheelie Guy.

The rapper Lupe Fiasco understands this. It’s there in his beautiful track “Kick, Push” — the story of an urban kid who comes to maturity through skateboarding, and in doing so, encounters clipboard authority.

Since the first kick flip he landed
Labeled a misfit, a bandit
His neighbors couldn’t stand it
So he was banished to the park
Started in the morning
Wouldn’t stop till after dark
Yeah when they said it’s getting late in here
So I’m sorry young man there’s no skating here

The kid meets a girl skater; she takes him to a spot in a parking lot he didn’t know about, and they grind it until “security came and said there’s no skating here”. They become part of a crew. They get chased out of office building plazas. “Just the freedom was better than breathing.”

Coming of age, fugitive love, solidarity: getting chased off by “security” plays a role in creating the dissident bond. What a shame it would be if there were no Clipboard Men to heighten the experience of freedom! Like Wheelie Guy, the protagonists of “Kick, Push” confront the forces of order personified: functionaries who are nonetheless flesh and blood, giving chase to kids on skateboards and probably relishing the chase for human reasons of their own. What becomes of this human drama — the drama of freedom — when order is rendered algorithmically? Where is the fight? It is submerged and illegible. It already happened, somewhere else, and the skaters were not party to it.

Sometimes urban spaces are designed to forestall moments like those depicted by Lupe Fiasco, making the explicit intervention of “security” unnecessary because the possibilities of use have been more rigorously constrained by the design itself. Thomas de Monchaux writes of “the taste for order” that prevails when public parks, for example, come to be funded by private interests. It is natural to suppose this is driven by liability concerns, but the taste for order tends to slip the bonds of any such calculation and become a kind of murky moralism: not something openly avowed but rather taken for granted, hard to grab hold of, and therefore hard to contest.

Monchaux writes about the High Line in New York City, a wonderful park created with private financing out of an elevated railway that had long been out of service. He gives the park its proper due, but then notes that “its defining detail is the prim arrangement of metal pins and ropes that enforce the border between paving and planting. They seem to say: Do not wander, do not play, do not fool around.”

Perhaps such features have a legitimate safety rationale to them (stepping off the deck and into the flower beds, a distance of some six inches, could cause you to twist an ankle). “Yet there is also something in this regulation that goes beyond defense against the worst possibilities, toward a discouragement of all the benign irregularities — the unruly felicities, creative improvisations, leisurely inefficiencies and insouciant eccentricities — that are the heart of urban life.”

Monchaux connects the design of public spaces to political culture:

“In our liberal democracy, any occupation of public space — even, sometimes especially, at play — is a celebration of the rights of assembly and expression. The greatest success of parks and plazas is… in the ways that, as a matter of policy and design, they encourage the taking of liberties.”

This is what skateboarders represent, and more. They take a plaza not as a mere empty space for assembly, but as a constitutive element of their activity. Its hardscape features define specific challenges; they develop a repertoire of skills that may be specific to the place. They appropriate it for purposes that were never intended but are latent in it, lying dormant as affordances to be discovered by people who roll. Their “misuse” has a revelatory quality.

Understood this way, skateboarding easily lends itself to being viewed as performance art. But this would be to risk misidentifying skateboarding with the feckless “subversive” aspiration of art people. I think it is more instructive to view urban skating as an expression of civic republicanism, if one may apply a stodgy-sounding term here. Consider Monchaux’s parenthetical remark that the best parks and plazas encourage the taking of liberties “as a matter of policy and design”. Yes and no. If the liberties in question are to be actively taken (for that is what is impressive about the skaters), rather than prescribed, the “encouraging” must have a minimal quality to it. Such is the tactful quality required of the design, and it is a quality characteristic of liberalism as originally understood: securing the minimal conditions for living together, and a bit more, but not trying to control everything.

Liberalism too easily slides into something more ambitious, and by that measure less liberal. Public spaces that feel unadministered seem to be vanishing. If the “policy and design” of parks and plazas is to be modest, deliberately under-determining of the uses that might be found for them, the designer must refrain from precisely that which is most exciting to intellectuals: a comprehensive vision. Such visions invariably clamp down on play, because play insists on making its own rules, internal to some game that is “for us” as Johan Huizinga pointed out in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. That is, for we who are right here right now. The skaters definitely have a sense of this “we”.

In assessing the smart-city vision, then, we need to keep one eye on how well the proposed order will leave room for those sources of unplanned urban delight so well named by Monchaux: “unruly felicities, creative improvisations, leisurely inefficiencies and insouciant eccentricities.” What if Clipboard Man is to be installed in an opaque, proprietary “urban operating system” that is highly determinate, an “efficient, one-to-one mapping of activities to facilities” in which parking lot wheelies do not compute? How is this clampdown likely to reverberate through society? Will it modify the liberal inheritance that we take for granted? Whose vision is this, anyway?

Writing in Tablet, Jacob Siegel points out that “democratic governments think they can hire out for the basic service they’re supposed to provide, effectively subcontracting the day to day functions of running a city and providing municipal services. Well, they’re right, they can, but of course they’ll be advertising why they’re not really necessary and in the long run putting themselves out of a job.” There is real attraction to having the tech firms of Silicon Valley take things over, given the frequent dysfunction of democratic government. Quite reasonably, Siegel writes, many of us would be willing to give up “some democracy for a bit of benign authoritarianism, if it only made the damn trains run on time. The trade-off comes in the loss of power over the institutions we have to live inside.”

The issue, then, is sovereignty. In the late 2010s, Google’s Sidewalk Labs planned to build a model city within Toronto, a sort of Bonsai version of what is possible, conceived in the spirit of other demonstration cities that were intended to sway elite opinion. The most famous of these is perhaps Potemkin’s village that so impressed Catherine the Great. Sensors would be embedded throughout the physical plant to capture the resident’s activities, then to be massaged by cutting-edge data science. The hope, clearly, is to build a deep, proprietary social science. Such a science could lead to real improvements in urban management, for example by being able to predict demand for heat and electricity, manage the allocation of street capacity based on demand, and automate waste disposal. But note that hoarding the data collected, and guarding it with military-grade secrecy, is key to the whole concept, as without that there is no business rationale. The project was canceled in 2020 due to local opposition over the matter of “data privacy”, which could just as well be named “data ownership”.

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James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, is useful given Google’s governmental aspirations. In the 1988 book, Scott traces the development of the modern state as a process of rendering the lives of its inhabitants more “legible”. The premodern state was in many respects blind; it “knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed ‘map’ of its terrain and its people”. This lack of a comprehensive view put real limits on the aspiration for centralized control; the state’s “interventions were often crude and self-defeating”. The rise of a more synoptic administrative apparatus in the 18th century made it possible to improve the delivery of services and the keeping of records, mainly for the purposes of taxation and military conscription. Enhanced legibility also led to a new way of viewing society, as a system that is intellectually graspable. As such, it becomes an attractive object to the gaze of visionaries, and invites intervention. The more rigorous the vision, and the more confidence it inspires in those who share it, the more the intervention seems to demand that a blank slate be prepared for the master strokes.

This same urge might explain the impatience of the smart city urbanist, née venture capitalist, who told The New York Times that “human beings currently live in cities that are the equivalent of flip-phones”. There’s a keen sense of waste; our sheer lack of optimization offends. Another investor-urbanist, a Mr Huh, complains: “We have not affected the fundamental building blocks of infrastructure and society.” The Times reporter writes that Mr Huh gestured to his laptop and said: “We’ve made this better. We’ve made the new things better. We haven’t made the old things better.” In a helpful gloss, the reporter points out that in thinking about how to make the old things better, “people in tech prize ‘first principles’, a concept that suggests that historical awareness and traditional expertise can get in the way of breakthrough ideas”.

Here we see the old drama of modernism playing out one more time. The urban blank slater reminds us of Thomas Hobbes’ disgust with the customary or common law, that body of precedents and practices that ordered English life, but which appeared to his impatient mind as a sediment of inherited mindlessness. For him, life needed to be governed by laws that would be excogitated from scratch (by him), according to clear principles, not by the haphazard accumulation of informal usages and understandings. Rather than seeking the reasons latent in our unthought practices, and from them trying to reverse-engineer the logic of a city, the smart city epigones of Hobbes place their trust in their own powers of a priori reason.

But governing by syllogism doesn’t work very well. For one thing, the sovereign forfeits that easy, habitual law-abidingness that custom secures. As Thomas Schrock said in his critique of Hobbes: “We follow customary laws, not out of fear, but because they are here with us, our own, part of us.”

Governing by syllogism, on the other hand, requires heavy police work. Call Security!

Sometimes, the derision is deserved; in the English-speaking world, the new “liberal” mania for political and ideological purity is causing ancient liberties to be sacrificed in the name of new “rights”. And the pursuit of liberal individualism is thought to be in conflict with ideas of community. These apparent failings of the liberal idea are leading some to gather together under the banner of “post-liberal”.

But the problem is not that liberalism has passed its sell-by date; rather, it has lost its moorings.

These can be traced back to the emergence of British Liberalism with the Glorious Revolution and the 1689 Bill of Rights — which enshrined many of the liberties that Parliament and the people had fought for during the previous century.

The Liberalism of 1689 was grounded, in particular, in the Christian (and more specifically) Protestant faith, born of the fight to produce an English translation of the Bible and to defend freedom of conscience.  There was much intolerance and more than a few beheadings along the way — William Tyndale died for the cause of publishing his translation — but the settlement of 1689 required and established a new understanding of tolerance and freedom.

In all the great struggles of the 17th century, the calls for freedom were inseparable from the deep Christian faith of the protagonists, whether we are talking about the Parliamentarians, the Levellers or Oliver Cromwell himself. John Milton, driven and defined by his faith, wrote what is probably the foundational text in defence of free speech Areopagitica at the peak of the Civil War. It contained an impassioned argument against the introduction of the new Licensing Order (1643), which required government approval for any published work. All these calls were anchored in a shared understanding of meaning, knowledge and virtue. Meaning came from God, knowledge from the Bible and virtue from following the teachings of the Old and New Testaments.

The importance of liberalism’s moorings were not lost on the American Founding Fathers, who shared the same inheritance. In First Principles, Thomas Ricks describes how dedicated they were to assessing the problem of “virtue” — of determining that their new Republic would be anchored in a shared understanding of morality so that civil society and freedom would be able to flourish. Adams and Jefferson looked as much to Ancient Rome for these virtues as they did to the Christian faith, but in practice American society was grounded overwhelmingly in the shared values of Christianity.

De Tocqueville understood this better than most. In Democracy in America, he plants the character of “Anglo-American civilisation” firmly in two elements: “the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty”. For him, religion and liberty were kindred spirits. In America, they were indeed kindred, arriving together with the pilgrims. But in England, religion was the parent of liberty rather than sibling. And in both cases, the flourishing of liberty would depend on the stability and strength of her Christian moorings.

In 19th-century Britain, Classical Liberalism carried all before it in the pursuit of great causes — widening the democratic franchise, opening the economy to free trade, educational reform, laying the foundations of the welfare state, eradicating the global slave trade. But just as it seemed to be all-conquering, its roots were being poisoned.

That poison stemmed from the Enlightenment itself. A new, anthropocentric way of thinking arrived in the 18th century, bringing with it an alternative understanding of human nature, a new theory of human knowledge and a new calculus of virtue. While Enlightenment Liberalism was aligned with the Christian worldview on certain principles of freedom, the two traditions diverge in key ways – and it is this divergence that is now proving toxic to liberalism as we know it.

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Traditional British liberalism rests on the Judaeo-Christian understanding that we are all, in moral terms, fallen creatures. The writings and speeches of the great heroes of liberty in the 16th and 17th centuries came with a deep sense of humility, of mankind’s brokenness and of the Fall.

Somewhere amid the arrogance of the Enlightenment, we lost this sense of fallenness. Ayn Rand embodies the new way of thinking with her theories of rational egoism and “the virtue of selfishness”. Encouraged, no doubt, by evidence of technological progress, she assumed moral progress would move in lockstep with technology. She has many modern disciples, wittingly or unwittingly, especially in California, with its strapline of “move fast and break things”. Her Libertarianism is very different from traditional British Liberalism, despite the tendency of many to confuse the two, because of her different assumptions about human fallibility (or lack of, in her case), and about virtue.

Allied to the Enlightenment sense of human perfectibility and rationality is the belief in Progress. The origins of this go all the way back to Thomas Macaulay and the Whig interpretation of history. But Macaulay saw progress essentially in political terms – in the extension of the franchise and other associated political freedoms such as freedom of conscience and freedom of the press. Sadly, the creed of Progress has now been pushed into every walk of life, ignoring the lessons of history and defying any biblical understanding of human nature. For Progressives, humankind’s moral progress is on a perpetual upward curve in parallel with technological progress. The history of the 20th century does not give much support to this conceit — it would be fairer to say that technology simply amplifies the expression of our moral fallibility.

Enlightenment liberals also built their own theories of morality, independent of a god, starting with Benthamite Utilitarianism, and extending all the way to John Rawls. Morality became a mathematical calculus, shorn of compassion or community, let alone repentance and forgiveness. According to Jeremy Bentham, “nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do.” No reference to morality here, just pain and pleasure. One of Bentham’s disciples, William Jevons, even went as far as to develop a “felicific calculus” whereby all pain and pleasure could be quantified.

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Enlightenment thinkers also developed their own theories of knowledge. One built on the empiricism of Hume and Adam Smith, the other built on the Rationalism of Descartes and Rousseau. The former, with its inherent modesty, is compatible with the Christian understanding of human fallibility, the latter is not.

Hayek describes the two schools of epistemology in The Constitution of Liberty. He warned that the latter, which he called the French tradition of liberty, with its “flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason” could lead to “totalitarian democracy”. His warnings were all too well-founded and it is the Rationalist version of epistemology which has taken particular hold with today’s cult of science.

Belief in the power of science has never been stronger. It has climaxed amid Covid, with politicians increasingly wrapping themselves in “the science” to justify ever more stringent intrusions on our freedom. Scientism, in the wrong hands, can become dangerous. And the worst hands are those of politicians and civil servants too easily tempted to use the authority of “experts” to infringe on our liberties.

This type of politician, Matt Hancock being the best example, fails to understand the limitations of science, fails to understand the nature of risk and uncertainty and fails to understand the difference between observable historical evidence and predictions of an uncertain and hypothetical future.

These different understandings of the theory of knowledge, of meaning and of virtue have led  to a corruption of liberalism at its source.

What we are seeing today being enacted in the name of liberalism is not liberal at all. Instead, let’s call it by the name which its proponents are prepared to use — progressivism. This is the creed which unites Tony Blair, Nick Clegg, most of the US Democratic Party, most of the British Labour Party and the New York Times. These are not traditional Liberals in any understanding of the term. They are Progressives. They believe humankind is on a permanent upward path of progress. They believe in the rule of experts and in the authority of “the science”.

So where do genuine classical liberals go, faced with the corruption of the creed? Ironically, the attacks on our most ancient freedoms such as freedom of speech, conscience and assembly, make it more important than ever to assert the foundational understanding of liberty. “Classical liberals” need to unite and stand up for their tradition. It has never been so relevant.

Meanwhile, to those who do embrace the term “post-liberal”, and believe it applies to our new era, I would just say this: be careful what you wish for.

In his new book Rationality, Pinker is adamantly opposed to telepathy and other kinds of extra-sensory perception (ESP). His position is that they do not happen because they cannot happen. He freely admits that he pre-judges the evidence by claiming that these purported phenomena are extremely improbable, assigning them an infinitesimal “prior probability”, in the language of Bayesian statistics. He acknowledges that “believing in something before you look at the evidence may seem like the epitome of irrationality”, but he justifies his refusal to look at the evidence by classifying these phenomena as “paranormal’, lumping them together with seemingly unrelated topics like homeopathy, astrology and miracles.

He then invokes an 18th-century argument against miracles by David Hume. As Hume put it, either miracles are impossible because they “violate the laws of nature” or because “no testimony is sufficient to establish” they contradict what has “frequently been observed to happen”. In Pinker’s paraphrase: “Which is more likely – that the laws of the universe as we understand them are false, or that some guy got something wrong?”

To clinch his argument, Pinker invokes physics. He is not a physicist himself, so he relies on the authority of Sean M. Carroll, a theoretical physicist who claims that the laws of physics rule out ESP. Other physicists disagree. Pinker rounds off his discussion by quoting Carl Sagan’s mantra: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

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In a recent interview in the Harvard Gazette, Pinker explains why he rejects the “primitive intuitions” that lead most people to believe in ESP. He and his fellow rationalists “unlearn these intuitions when we buy into the consensus of the scientific establishment — it’s not as if we understand the physiology or neuroscience or cosmology ourselves”.  Instead, they buy in as an act of faith.

For readers wondering how acts of faith might bias our judgements, Pinker helpfully identifies “the Myside bias” as “probably the most powerful of all the cognitive biases, namely, if something becomes an article of faith within your own coalition, and if promoting it earns you status, that is what you believe”.  This surely applies to himself.

Is Hume’s argument against miracles relevant to ESP? Hume was writing about descriptions of biblical miracles. He was right that they are not frequently observed. But is telepathy a unique miracle that is said to have happened far away and long ago? No. It is frequently observed today.

The most common type of telepathy occurs in connection with telephone calls. Research carried out in Europe and the Americas shows that most people say they have thought of someone for no apparent reason, and that person then called, or that they knew who was calling when they heard the phone, before looking at the caller ID or answering. Similar kinds of telepathy occur with text messages and emails. (I give details of these surveys and summaries of experimental tests in my book The Sense of Being Stared At).

Telepathic experiences are not an extraordinary claim, but an ordinary claim. It is Pinker who is making an extraordinary claim by asserting that telepathy cannot happen and that most people are wrong about their own experience. Where is his extraordinary evidence? He has none, and, even worse, believes he doesn’t need any.

Telepathy is frequently observed in animals. In random household surveys in the UK and the USA, roughly half of dog owners said that their dog anticipated the return of a member of the family by waiting at a door or window, in some cases more than 10 minutes in advance. About 30% of cats did the same. In many cases, people said that this happened when the person came home at a non-routine time, and by public transport or in unfamiliar vehicles such as taxis. The animals’ responses were not simply a matter of routine or hearing familiar vehicles approaching; they seemed to depend on some other kind of connection between owners and their pets.

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Sceptics will reasonably ask whether people could be mistaken in making these observations. Perhaps people know who is calling because they are familiar with that person’s habits and unconsciously anticipate when they will call. Or perhaps they think of people frequently and forget all the times those people do not call. Perhaps people dote on their pets and are victims of wishful thinking, remembering when their dog or cat was seemingly waiting for them, and forgetting when it was not. Perhaps, or perhaps not.

Fortunately, science and reason provide a way forward: the scientific method. Scientists test hypotheses. Several researchers, including myself, have carried out hundreds of experimental tests of telephone telepathy to investigate whether random guessing explains the results, or whether something else is going on. For these tests, the subjects chose four people they knew well to serve as potential callers. Then, in filmed experiments, they sat beside a landline telephone, with no caller ID. For each trial, one of the four potential callers was selected at random and asked to call the subject.

When the phone rang, the subject said to the camera who she felt it was, for example ‘Jim’. She was right or wrong. She could not have anticipated that Jim would be calling by knowing his habits, because he was selected at random. By chance, about 25% of the answers would have been right. In fact, in hundreds of trials, the average hit rate was 45%, hugely significant statistically. You can see a film of one of these experiments and the results of many randomised experiments published in peer reviewed journals here. We found similar positive effects in experiments on email and text-message telepathy.

I have also carried out more than a hundred filmed experiments with dogs that behave as if they know when their owners are coming home. The filmed evidence showed that the dogs anticipated their owners’ arrivals even when they returned at random times, unknown to them in advance, and in unfamiliar vehicles. You can see a test independently filmed by the science unit of Austrian State television (ORF) and results of numerous tests published in peer-reviewed journals here.

Pinker is not alone in his denialist stance. He is a prominent member of an advocacy organisation called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), which publishes the Skeptical Inquirer: The Magazine for Science and Reason. His CSI colleagues include Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel Dennett. CSI’s well-funded campaigns are designed to discredit “claims of the paranormal” in the serious media and the educational system. Organised skepticism is remarkably effective, and CSI has an international network of affiliated groups, as well as many local skeptic chapters and online vigilantes, ever ready to ‘debunk’ the paranormal. (In the UK, organised skeptics use the American spelling with a ‘k’ rather than the British spelling ‘sceptic’ to indicate their affiliation with the American Skeptic movement.)

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With their support, Pinker thinks he has bought into the “consensus of established science” — but this consensus is sometimes illusory. His understanding of scientific consensus is not based on empirical data, such as surveys of scientists’ opinions worldwide or on experimental research, but rather on the beliefs of his CSI colleagues. He puts his faith in a denialist coalition in which rationality is unfortunately scarce. Their echo chamber is now greatly enlarged through Wikipedia. CSI encourages groups like ‘Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia’ to train committed skeptics as editors and administrators.

Dogmatic skeptics currently control practically all the Wikipedia entries on subjects they regard as ‘paranormal’ as well as the biography pages of those who research these taboo topics, including me. The Wikipedia entry on parapsychology portrays the entire subject as ‘pseudoscience’. The entry on pseudoscience defines it as “statements, beliefs or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method”.

By this criterion, Pinker is a practitioner of pseudoscience. He makes statements that claim to be scientific and factual but which violate the scientific method by ignoring the evidence. His particular kind of pseudoscience is especially damaging. As a professor of psychology at Harvard, he models dogma and prejudice in the heart of the scientific establishment.

How different from one of his predecessors at Harvard, William James, who was refreshingly open-minded and curious about experiences that could not be readily explained. If Steven Pinker is prepared to defend his views on telepathy in a public debate, chaired by UnHerd, I would be happy to argue that it is more rational and scientific to look at the evidence than to ignore it.

I suspect such experiences are rare. It is easier to write things for people who already agree with you: to make them cheer or feel clever, or to remind them how dreadful the other lot are. It’s also more fun. 

I’m not talking about reading a column that disagrees with you. I’m sure you read them regularly, or at least the headlines: pieces get hate-shared all the time among people who disagree with them. But they are not written to persuade, and readers are not persuaded. The intention, I think, is to provoke a reaction, to elicit cheers and boos. Not, primarily, to change minds.

On Saturday, a long-awaited New York Times article was published, about the blog Slate Star Codex (SSC). To get you up to speed: SSC is a blog by Scott Alexander, a pseudonymous Californian psychiatrist, part of a community of Bay Area nerds and weirdos, widely known as the rationalists. They care about human biases, artificial intelligence and doing good with charity. (I’ve written about them in my book.)

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In June, the NYT’s tech reporter Cade Metz contacted Alexander, and said he was going to write a piece about SSC, and particularly about how remarkably good the rationalist community was at predicting the course of the Covid pandemic. I spoke to Metz, and reassured Alexander and the Rationalists to the best of my ability that I thought it would be in good faith, rather than a hit job.

But then Metz and the NYT said they would reveal Alexander’s real name in the piece. Alexander thought this would endanger his relationships with his patients, and took down his blog. He has since quit as a psychiatrist, re-ordered his life, and set up a new website. Now, half a year later, the NYT piece is out.

I don’t want to get into whether or not it is a hit-job; others have done that. I will say that it comes perilously close to outright misrepresentation. For example, Metz says that “in one post, [Alexander] aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and IQ in The Bell Curve.” But the line in which he “aligns himself” with Murray is on whether there is a genetic component to poverty (which surely there must be), not race: race is not mentioned in the post at all. It is, in essence, guilt-by-association.

What interests me, though, is that SSC, and the rationalists, are seen as gateways to hard-right thinking: to “race realism”, to men’s rights activism. And I think that persuasion is a key part of the story.

Because, on the face of it, the idea that the rationalists are secret fascists is strange. A 2019 survey of SSC’s readers found that self-described “conservatives” were outnumbered 8:1 by self-described “liberals” and “social democrats”; there were rather more “libertarians”, but still far fewer, and weirder subcultures like “alt-right” and “neoreactionary” existed only in slightly larger numbers than “Marxists”. They are far more anti-Trump than the American population. 

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But the NYT piece is far from the first article to suggest that, nonetheless, the rationalist community is an “an on-ramp to radical views” that allows “extremist views to trickle into the tech world”.

Partly, that’s because the rationalist community is explicitly a place for reasoned, polite debate, and almost any views are welcome as long as they are expressed respectfully and can be backed up with evidence or reasoning. Inevitably, that means precisely those views which cannot find expression elsewhere tend to gravitate to it. But also, I think, it’s because SSC tries to persuade people.

Read something of his, on some controversial subject. Billionaire philanthropy, for example, is not always popular: long articles have been written about why it is actually a bad thing, because it whitewashes billionaire reputations, allows them to control society, and is unaccountable to democratic institutions.

All of which is reasonable. Scott Alexander, though, thinks that on balance, billionaire philanthropy does more good than harm, and that the movement against it will hurt the world. 

It’s easy to imagine a newspaper article that attacks “billionaire-bashers”, that lists all the great things that Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos have done with their philanthropy, and makes fun of the idiots who think that stopping them doing that will improve things. Alexander, on the other hand, talks directly to people who disagree with him, who think billionaire philanthropy should be curbed: “I’m against this. I understand concern about the growing power of the very rich. But I worry the movement against billionaire charity is on track to damage charity a whole lot more than it damages billionaires.”

It seems a small thing, a single phrase, “I understand concern” — but it is not. It demonstrates that the piece is intended to change minds. It says to those anxious about billionaire philanthropy that their worries about inequality and democratic unaccountability are real — I’m on your side! — but look, there might be these other things that you’ve not thought about. Whether or not you end up agreeing with Alexander on the particular case, he’s trying to win you over.

Another example. “Free speech” has become a left-right battleground issue, and the instances we read about are always of right-wing speech being limited by left-wing activists. So, inevitably, left-wing people think it’s a partisan attack on them, or a smokescreen for people who just want to say unpleasant things (which, let’s be clear, it often is). But Alexander takes a different tack. In one post, for example, he calls attention to a woman fired for “having a Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker on her car” by her George W Bush-supporting boss. The point is, or at least the effect on me was, to drag the issue away from partisan sniping. It wasn’t firing shots in the culture war, it was talking to liberals and left-wingers, trying to persuade.

I should, nervously, admit that I was persuaded on one topic that is much more highly charged: the gender imbalance in various professions, notably tech. Alexander argues that straightforward discrimination can’t be the only factor behind the male dominance of some fields: he points out, for instance, that sexist attitudes kept almost all women out of almost all professions until relatively recently. Law, medicine, academia, journalism, you name it.

Now, though, he says, lots of professions are female-dominated: “men make up … only 25% of new psychologists, about 25% of new paediatricians, about 26% of forensic scientists, about 28% of medical managers, and 42% of new biologists.” Women make up half of new medical students, half of new law students, the large majority of new journalism students and psychology students. Most of these jobs are comparable in pay and status to computer programming. “Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.” 

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He argues convincingly that there is no detectable difference in ability in maths, or computer science, or engineering between the two sexes. But, he says, women are on average more likely to be interested in careers where you deal with people, rather than with systems or things. 

And this distinction explains why, for instance, women make up the large majority of gynaecologists, paediatricians, psychiatrists and family doctors (American GPs), while men make up the large majority of radiologists, anaesthetists and surgeons. Either we have to posit that radiologists are much more sexist than psychiatrists, or we have to say there’s some other, major, factor going on.

Alexander suggests that it’s about interests: that there are large and systematic differences in what men and women are interested in, and that translates into systematic differences in their choice of profession. And it does seem to me that anaesthetists and surgeons can treat patients as “systems” or “things” to a much greater degree than GPs or paediatricians. Of course this is just a statistical difference, and individual men and women vary widely — but, he says, it is probably part of the story at a population level. 

That piece, and others by him on the topic, persuaded me that sexist discrimination alone is not enough to explain the gender difference in tech or many other fields. (Do read the post, rather than arguing with my short synopsis of it, if you disagree.)

This is why, I think, he and the rationalists are seen as a gateway to the hard right. If you are on Team A in the big internet fight, and you want to beat Team B, then someone who comes along and talks, in Team A language, to Team A people, to make them believe things that are associated with Team B — then that person is worse than the most fire-breathing Team B zealot. He’s not a foreigner, he’s a traitor. He’s not a combatant, he’s a spy. He’s a fifth columnist. 

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Of course, Alexander would say that he’s not trying to win people over to Team B. He’s a member of Team A; he just wants to understand things! But, of course, this is exactly what a traitorous spying fifth-columnist would say. He comes here talking the language of inclusion and diversity and liberalism, but he actually tries to convince people that sexist discrimination in tech is less of a problem than you think.

And the worst thing is – it works. People do change their minds. I did; I am less sure about a lot of things than I was before I read SSC, and I think that’s what caused it. (I’ve changed my mind the other way, too, towards more stereotypically liberal positions: he has convinced me that trigger warnings are good.)

That is scary. Particularly if you’re a Team A partisan, and you see other Team A partisans losing their will to fight, as they become less certain that Team A actually has all the right answers. Or if your identity is heavily tied up with your political beliefs, and changing them would feel like changing who you are.

Maybe radicalisation is a real problem; maybe these controversial debates are fine in some tiny gated community of nerdy weirdos, but then when they come out into the wider world, they take it too far and end up in some strange corner of the internet. Rationalism is indeed a gateway to dangerous beliefs, says Scott Aaronson: “insofar as once you teach people that they can think for themselves about issues of consequence, some of them might think bad things. It’s just that many of us judge the benefit worth the risk!” 

But I don’t think that’s the real problem. I don’t think that’s really why rationalist writers are seen as dangerous. I think it’s because if you think all of this is a big fight — if debate is war, and arguments are soldiers — then someone coming along and killing your soldiers behind your lines is simply the enemy, even if they’re wearing your uniform. And at the end of the day, traitors and spies get the harshest punishments of all. 

At the time, in Noughties London, I really believed that what I was doing was radical and creative: embracing fluidity, self-construction and impermanence, against the rigid constraints of a single-sex environment and the gender binary.

I blame some of this insufferability on queer theory, whose ideas I absorbed as an undergraduate. From (among others) Judith Butler I learned that the identity categories of sex and sexuality are imposed on us by oppressive outside forces, while (confusingly) also being open to constant individual reinvention.

In this worldview ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ aren’t stable categories, and neither are ‘man’ and ‘woman’, except inasmuch as they’re imposed by un-hip Forces of Bad: the oppressive ‘cisheteropatriarchal status quo’. And the only way to stick two fingers up at this dread hegemon is to mess about with the categories. Hence feeling so pleased with myself, 15 years ago, for doing something as ground-breakingly subversive as calling myself a lesbian, moving in with a bunch of lesbians and then hooking up with a man.

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I share this not especially stellar episode not just as belated apology to my ex-housemates, but because since then queer theory has eaten culture. Everyone’s subverting identity categories now. The abbreviation ‘LGB’, which seemed more than expansive enough in the late nineties when I started university, has ballooned to ‘LGBTQQIAAP’ with activists still pushing for further inclusions. Facebook offers an ever-lengthening list of genders to put on your profile (71 at the last count). And the rainbow flag associated with the Pride marches has multiplied, with at least 24 different ones now available to wave, including a ‘Pup Pride’ one for people who like to roleplay as dogs.

Anyone boring enough to simply accept the identity assigned them by the ‘heteropatriarchy’ is marked with the (supposedly descriptive but really derogatory) epithet ‘cishet’. This is a mark of ignominy, as one Reddit user made clear, asking: “What is a ‘cishet’ and why is it bad?’. “I keep seeing the word cishet in the context of tumblr and my SJW type acquaintances,” the post explains, “usually with them saying that the cishets cause all of their problems and need to die.” One reply cuts to the chase: using cishet is “like derisively calling someone else a ‘normie’.”

In this ‘anti-normie-ism’ we hear echoes not just of the name, but also the ideas, contained in the Reformation-era Christian heresy of ‘antinomianism’. This doctrine held that salvation is available solely through faith and divine grace, and true believers are under no obligation to follow rules, laws or traditions. While antinomianism was rejected by mainstream Protestantism, it ended up having the last laugh: for today the heretics are those who resist the wholesale attack on rules, norms and traditions that characterises anti-normie-ism.

Far from being condemned as heresy, like antinomianism, anti-normie-ism is celebrated in the annual festival of Pride Month, during which millions join in a peculiarly modern ritual of simultaneously celebrating and subverting shared identity. Big brands fall over themselves to monetise the festival.

This moment, and movement, has been some time in the making. In 1793, having defeated the Ancien Régime, the victors in the French Revolution set out to sweep away all the irrational and traditionalist remnants of reactionary Catholicism in favour of a new, atheistic religion of rationality. To this end, they held a Festival of Reason in Notre Dame; where the altar had stood, a papier-mâché mountain was raised on which an actress dressed as Liberty bowed to the flame of Reason.

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In that moment, anti-normie-ism dispensed even with the polite antinomian fiction of having God on direct-dial as justification for binning the rules. The Catholic political theorist Adrian Vermeule characterises the subsequent history of our fight against normie-dom, and in favour of individual freedom and self-expression, as continuing the tradition of that 1793 Festival. The Festival of Reason is ongoing: the old must be smashed, traditions swept away, sacred items burned and the march of progress celebrated, a dynamic and relentless drive which “constantly, and at an ever-increasing tempo, disrupts deeply-cherished traditions among its subject populations”.

But over time, as once-edgy positions become mainstream, the Festival’s appetite turns cannibal. Having solidified into social norms, progressive victories become in turn targets for demolition. And this is the position in which many formerly progressive gay and lesbian people find themselves today.

The onward march of same-sex equality has been steady over the last half-century: gay sex was decriminalised in 1967, when the Conservative peer Lord Arran explained that his reason for sponsoring the Sexual Offences Act was his two life goals “to stop people buggering badgers, and to stop people badgering buggers”. The same-sex age of consent was 21 when I was a teenager in the Nineties, and is now equalised at 16 with the heterosexual one. Thanks to another Conservative, David Cameron, same-sex marriage today has the same civil standing as the heterosexual sort.

But the march of progress hasn’t stopped. The word queer, once a term of abuse, was first reclaimed by gay and lesbian people — and is now the territory of anyone, including heterosexuals, who don’t want to be shamed as cishet.

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The actor Nico Tortorella, for example, has been in what to me looks suspiciously like a heterosexual relationship for some 14 years, with the ‘lifestyle entrepreneur and LGBTQ activist’ Bethany Meyers. The couple even married in 2018. But Tortorella identifies as non-binary and prefers to be referred to as ‘they’ and ‘them’, while Meyers identifies as a lesbian. Thus despite having an (in the biological sense) entirely ordinary heterosexual relationship, Tortorella and Meyers are celebrated as a ‘queer couple’.

And their embrace of polyamory means that Tortorella and Meyer arguably are more anti-normie than of those stodgy gay people who prefer dull old monogamy. And Meyer’s re-interpretation of ‘lesbian’ is expansive enough to survive a 14-year relationship with a biological male, a fact that surely queers our understanding of sex and gender far more radically than those reactionary homos who insist on excluding people from their pool of potential partners on the grounds of anatomy.

Thus, by queering ‘queer’, the new heteroqueers have wrestled the baton of queerness from those lesbian and gay people who might once have been targeted for ‘queer-bashing’. And thanks to the ongoing Festival of Reason, the exclusively same-sex-attracted sexuality that launched the whole ‘queer rights’ enterprise has in turn come to seem conservative, if not outright bigoted.

My late great-aunt epitomised this kind of non-queer gayness. She was a staunch Tory and local councillor, wore trouser suits and kept her hair short, and lived her entire adult life with the same ‘friend’, in a relationship that was indistinguishable from any other petit-bourgeois marriage except that both of them were women. They went on cruises, finished each other’s sentences, were pillars of the local community — and didn’t have a ‘rainbow’ bone in their bodies.

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She died around the same time as I was misbehaving in houseshares, and I never discussed my own reflections on queer theory with her. I wish I had, as it would have given me much to think about. For my great-aunt was many things: a public servant, a citizen, a lesbian (though I don’t think she would have used that word) but one thing her devoted relationship absolutely wasn’t was ‘queer’.

And this in turn gives us a clue to the nature of ‘queerness’ as it’s celebrated today. “Love is love”, claims the Pride slogan, merrily sweeping aside millennia of philosophical and theological thought on the ways love may in fact differ from love. In his influential 1936 theological work Agape and Eros, for example, the Swedish bishop Anders Nygren unpicks the distinction between eros, the ego-centric, acquisitive and desire-based version of love first delineated in Plato’s Symposium, and agape, the Christian understanding of a love based in self-giving and a willingness to sacrifice self for others.

To complicate things further, the ancient Greeks had three words for love: eros, agape and philia, love for friends and family. Nygren argued that over time, even in Christian theology, agape became subordinate to eros — that is, to desire; while Nygren was criticised by other theologians for himself ignoring philia. But today, the juggernaut of Queer Theory, for all that it claims the mantle of ‘love’, ignores both philia and agape. Instead, ‘love’ in the queer theory sense is pure eros: desire.

And this is the bait-and-switch at the heart of queer theory. Decent, compassionate mainstream people hear ‘love’ and think of those same-sex couples they know whose lives embrace all three — the passionate eros, the sociable philia and selfless agape. Few in modern Britain would disagree that these can and do flourish just as well in same-sex as opposite-sex partnerships. Having won sympathy by gesturing at philia and agape, though, the juggernaut of queerness aggressively promotes only an eros increasingly impatient of any constraint.

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This means monogamists of all orientations go under the bus: for inasmuch as monogamy constrains desire, it’s by definition un-queer. We see this reflex, for example, in the brickbats flung at too-monogamous-to-be-queer Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg; or sneery terms like ‘homonormativity’. And all such jibes share the same loathing of any social structure that calls not for unchained desire but fellow-feeling (philia) or self-sacrifice (agape).

And in this way, the political campaign for gay acceptance has been colonised, cannibalised and ultimately displaced by a consumer marketing campaign for the limitless expansion of desire. It was 2004 when the Pride march in London stopped being classified as a political protest and became a ‘parade’; that change, questioned by many LGB people at the time, marks the decisive shift in balance of power from gay acceptance to anti-normie-ism. And this is a problem for gay normies.

For as Vermeule points out, the Festival’s inexorable appetite foments “unrest, animosity, and eventually political reaction and backlash”. And indeed, evidence suggests that support for LGBTQ rights has peaked and is now falling again. The marketing campaign for unchained eros is today actively undermining public acceptance of same-sex relationships.

The campaign to de-stigmatise same-sex relationships was a huge gain for human dignity. I don’t want to see that reversed by the oncoming reaction against our now established religion of anti-normie-ism. The only beneficiaries of the takeover are brands selling rainbow leisurewear in Pride Month. But the front-line casualties, when the reaction begins in earnest, will be those gay normies who only ever wanted to be left in peace.

Anyway. In my fond imaginings, when my children are old enough, we’ll watch Fight Club together. I would like to see their reactions to it. Specifically, I would like to see their reaction to the twist at the end of the second act. Then, even better, we’d watch it again, and see if the film stands up on a second viewing, when you know what the twist is. (It does.)

But, realistically, that will never happen. Because there is just no way they are going to get through the next several years of their life without someone, somewhere, spoiling the twist for them. Even if almost everyone agrees on a norm of “no spoilers”, it just takes one person to disagree with that norm, and tweet out/post on Facebook/stand in Piccadilly Circus with a megaphone shouting “Bruce Willis was dead the whole time”* to undermine the whole thing. And if there are millions of people, you can be pretty sure that someone is going to do exactly that. They don’t do this because they want to ruin films for everyone: they actually think that it’s fine to give away plot points, as long as the film is sufficiently old.

This is not going to be a piece about spoilers, although I am tempted to make it one. My own position is that now that we can all watch any film from any era at a moment’s notice, wouldn’t it be polite to try to keep plot details quiet? I still wonder what it would have been like to watch The Empire Strikes Back when it came out and not know the I-am-your-father twist. If you want to talk about the plot, do it in DMs, not in public.

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But I digress. There’s a concept, first mooted by the philosopher and AI theorist Nick Bostrom, called the “unilateralist’s curse”. It’s probably easiest to illustrate with an example, so here’s Bostrom’s own. Imagine you have a group of scientists researching a vaccine into HIV. While doing so, they accidentally discover a way to make a variant of the disease which can spread via air droplets. They could publish their findings, or keep them quiet, “knowing that it might be used to create a devastating biological weapon, but also that it could help those who hope to develop defenses against such weapons”.

Most of them think it’s a bad idea to publish, so they keep quiet. But one disagrees, and mentions the finding at a scientific conference, so the discovery spreads rapidly.

The two options are asymmetric: keeping the information quiet relies on everyone doing it, while making it public can be done unilaterally. If the dissenting scientist is wrong, and making the information public is actually a terrible idea — which, let’s face it, sounds likely — then the wrong outcome is almost inevitable, at least if there are lots of people involved.

Bostrom’s HIV example may sound somewhat far-fetched, but it’s not. In 2016, Canadian scientists revived the extinct horsepox virus, using DNA sequencing techniques. Horsepox is a close cousin of smallpox; the scientists believed that it could be used to create a better smallpox vaccine. Others pointed out that the same technique could also be used to bring back smallpox itself. In 2018 they published their findings, despite widespread concerns that the risks outweighed the benefits.

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Or consider the development of the nuclear bomb; Bostrom points out two occasions when the unilateralist’s curse has applied. In 1939, the Polish physicist Joseph Rotblat “noticed that the fission of uranium released more neutrons than used to trigger it, realising that it could produce a chain reaction leading to an explosion of unprecedented power”, Bostrom writes. Other scientists, he assumed, had had this insight too. Initially he kept it to himself, but then grew concerned about German efforts to create a bomb; so he told James Chadwick, his colleague at the University of Liverpool, and essentially started the British nuclear programme. Later he would decide this had been a bad idea, and helped start the Pugwash anti-nuclear campaign, for which he would win the 1995 Nobel peace prize.

And in the 1970s, Progressive magazine published the mechanism for the hydrogen bomb, which at the time was only known by four countries, arguing in a lawsuit ahead of publication that nuclear secrecy was a greater risk than that of other nations developing the bomb.

All these examples are of the spread of information, which has the toothpaste-like quality of being easy to squeeze out but hard to put back in the tube. But the unilateralist’s curse applies to other situations. For instance, it only takes one person to introduce a breeding colony of rats to a Galapagos island — or rabbits to Australia — to devastate an ecosystem.

Or, very soon — maybe even right now — we could take steps to geoengineer our planet to reduce the impact of climate change, perhaps by pumping aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun’s rays. It might be a good idea; it might not. But if, say, 50 countries have the technological capacity to do it, and 49 countries decide it’s too dangerous, then it will happen. (And, of course, now it’s not just nation states who can do this: Silicon Valley billionaires are discussing geoengineering methods of reducing ocean acidification. The more potential actors there are, the more likely it is that one of them will act.)

More prosaically: almost all of us agree that abusing women and people of colour on social media is not a good or helpful thing. But some small percentage disagree, and it only takes a very tiny percentage to send a huge number of abusive messages and make Twitter an unmanageable hellscape.

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Or much less prosaically: Bostrom and others, such as his fellow Oxford philosopher Toby Ord, worry about existential risks — that is, things which could wipe out humanity, or at least permanently and severely limit its future. The most pressing, they think, are bioengineered pandemics and artificial intelligence, both of which are vulnerable to the unilateralist’s curse — both at the development stage (if 99.9% of the world’s AI companies agree to keep their amazing superintelligent AI designs secret, but one single company publishes its code on Github, then it’s out in the open) and at the use stage (it only take one psychopath to release a genetically modified virus on the Tube, even if no one else thinks that’s the best idea).

These are incredibly hard problems to solve. How do you convince hundreds of people to abide by a decision not to share some information, if some number of those people are sure that sharing that information is the good and moral thing to do? How do you convince millions of people not to send horrible messages on Twitter, if some small number of those people think that those horrible messages are just what the recipients deserve? But if you don’t convince all of them — or at least almost all — then it hasn’t worked.

(And remember, this is all just assuming that everyone is acting in what they think is humanity’s best interests. If some people are selfish bastards or appalling trolls, then it all gets even worse.)

Bostrom considers a “principle of conformity”: a rule or social norm that we don’t act unilaterally even when we think doing so would be for the common good. It’s quite a small-c conservative idea — Chesterton’s Fence-like — but, as Bostrom points out, there are obvious concerns, not least that quite a lot of good has come in the past from people acting unilaterally (he gives the example of the leak of the Pentagon Papers). Plus (it seems to me) the principle of conformity itself suffers from the unilateralist’s curse — if 99% of us agree to conform to it, but 1% don’t, then a lot of unilateral decisions are still going to get taken.

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I have no clever answer for this. It seems to me a really big problem; it’s part of a wider group of problems, coordination problems, that come when you have lots of individuals making decisions.

Game theory is all about coordination problems. Take the tragedy of the commons: you have some common resource of constant size, such as a meadow. Imagine it can support 100 cattle comfortably, and there are 10 farmers. If each farmer has 10 cattle, everything works out fine. But if one farmer adds an 11th cow, then that farmer gains 100% of the benefit from that cow, but pays only 10% of the cost. And if another farmer does the same, and another. It’s in everyone’s best interest if they all stick at 10, but it’s in each individual’s best interest if they add more and more: so the resource inevitably gets degraded. And if your neighbour does it, you’d be a sucker not to do it yourself. The parallels with the climate crisis could hardly be more obvious.

Almost everything that is wrong with the world, I think, is caused not by people being bad or evil, but by coordination problems. The unilateralist’s curse shows that this doesn’t just apply when people are acting self-interestedly, but even when everyone is trying to be noble and good. And short of banning whistleblowers, ending open science and generally sliding into totalitarianism, I’m not sure what the best way to minimise the problem is.

Film spoilers are, probably, the most trivial example of this you can imagine. But they matter to me. By the time my kids are old enough to watch an 18-rated film, probably in the year 2027 or something (I won’t make them wait until they’re actually 18, obviously; I’m not Mary Whitehouse), it is functionally impossible that they won’t have seen some meme or other spoiling Fight Club for them. Someone will spoil it for them. And, by extension, some bugger is clearly going to use a lorry full of drones to release aerosolised smallpox over New York City, and there’s sod all we can do to stop it.

*Yes, this is a different film. No, I’m not giving away the twist in Fight Club in a piece pegged to the idea of not giving away the twist in Fight Club

This week, one of the few places that still let you have those conversations has shut down. I think it is a disaster. Let me explain why.

About two years ago, someone accused me of preparing to do a journalistic hatchet job. I had a book coming out, about a group of people called the rationalists, and their concerns about AI destroying humanity, but also about their approach to the world. One of them suggested that the book was going to be an attack on the rationalists: “I expect that any published piece will be hugely negative towards [the] community. Will anyone take the other side of such a bet?”

The book, for the record, wasn’t a hatchet job. But it would have been incredibly easy to do one, had I wanted. That’s why they’re paranoid; because there are people out to get them, and because they’re easy to get.

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They’re easy to get because they’re weird. They’re weird in lots of ways, but the weirdest thing about them is that they are happy listening to, and debating, arguments they disagree with, and with criticising arguments that are “on their side” in whatever greater cultural battle is going on. That’s especially true of one key rationalist blog, Slate Star Codex, written by Scott Alexander, a pseudonymous psychiatrist who lives and works in the Bay Area of California. 

I should declare an interest at this point: I’m a huge fan of SSC. I think it’s an astonishing body of work; it ranges from in-depth discussions of studies into new antidepressants, to wide-ranging philosophical thinking about how we argue and why we disagree, to childish puns and short stories about hallucinatory cactus-people. Normally, I’d link to it — normally I’d have linked to it four or five times already — but today I can’t, for reasons that will become clear.

It’s part of the SSC ethos that “if you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do”, then you should consider the possibility that that’s because you don’t understand, rather than because they’re stupid; the “principle of charity”. So that means taking ideas seriously — even ones you’re uncomfortable with. And the blog and its associated subreddit have rules of debate: that you’re not allowed to shout things down, or tell people they’re racist; you have to politely and honestly argue the facts of the issue at hand. It means that the sites are homes for lively debate, rare on the modern internet, between people who actually disagree; Left and Right, Republican and Democrat, pro-life and pro-choice, gender-critical feminists and trans-activist, MRA and feminist.

And that makes them vulnerable. Because if you’re someone who wants to do a hatchet job on them, you can easily go through the comments and find something that someone somewhere will find appalling. That’s partly a product of the disagreement and partly a function of how the internet works: there’s an old law of the internet, the “1% rule”, which says that the large majority of online comments will come from a hyperactive 1% of the community. That was true when I used to work at Telegraph Blogs — you’d get tens of thousands of readers, but you’d see the same 100 or so names cropping up every time in the comment sections.

(Those names were often things like Aelfric225 or TheUnBrainWashed, and they were usually really unhappy about immigration.)

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That’s why the rationalists are paranoid. They know that if someone from a mainstream media organisation wanted to, they could go through those comments, cherry-pick an unrepresentative few, and paint the entire community as racist and/or sexist, even though surveys of the rationalist community and SSC readership found they were much more left-wing and liberal on almost every issue than the median American or Briton. And they also knew that there were people on the internet who unambiguously want to destroy them because they think they’re white supremacists.

This has actually happened. For instance, Scott wrote a huge, long article explaining the views of the “Neoreactionaries”, a group of strange alt-right-affiliated thinkers who want to replace democracies with rule by hereditary kings. He also then wrote a huge, long “anti-Reactionary FAQ”, explaining why he thought they were wrong.

He has also written several things about how terrible Donald Trump is, but one of them suggested that he is not “openly racist”, as many people were suggesting, because Trump repeatedly said things about how much he loved Mexican people and wanted the Republican party to be “be the home in the future and forever more for African-Americans and the African-American vote”. He may or may not be racist, said Alexander, but he’s not being open about it.

And, of course, people read the explaining-the-Neoreactionaries post and decided he was a Neoreactionary; and they read the “Trump is awful but he’s not literally openly racist” post and decided he was pro-Trump.

That’s some of the background to an extraordinary row that’s broken out. A few weeks ago, a reporter at the New York Times started researching a piece about Slate Star Codex. The rationalist community became aware of it and became incredibly paranoid, for the reasons discussed above. 

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The reporter got in touch with me. He was totally reasonable and I was (and remain) convinced that he was not going to do a hit job; he had read SSC, he was impressed by the breadth and depth of the thinking on display, and he was going to write a broadly positive piece. So I spoke to him, on the record. I also encouraged other people to, if they felt comfortable doing so. Better, I thought, that the piece had some voices speaking up in favour.

But then I had an email from the reporter saying that the NYT editors wouldn’t let him write the piece without giving Scott Alexander’s real name. And, on Tuesday morning, SSC had been taken down, replaced with a single post saying: “NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog”.

(That’s why I’m not linking to any of it.)

I’m wary of “the internet makes me unsafe” arguments, because a lot of the time I think it’s overstated. Perhaps it is in this case. But Alexander has reasons to be scared. Recently, some people had taken the most extreme comments on the SSC subreddit as evidence that he was “a homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazi”. “I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat,” he wrote. “I lost distant family in the Holocaust. You can imagine how much fun this was for me.”

His pseudonym is not watertight; I once worked out his real name from clues on his blog, which I admit is a mildly creepy thing to do. Some other people did the same, but not out of passive interest: “Some people made entire accounts devoted to doxxing me in Twitter discussions whenever an opportunity came up,” he wrote. “A few people just messaged me letting me know they knew my real name and reminding me that they could do this if they wanted to.

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“Some people started messaging my real-life friends, telling them to stop being friends with me because I supported racists and sexists and Nazis. Somebody posted a monetary reward for information that could be used to discredit me.

“One person called the clinic where I worked, pretended to be a patient, and tried to get me fired.”

He ended up having a mild nervous breakdown. I totally understand his being paranoid about being publicly named.

(And, I learn today, one SSC commenter seems to have been SWATted, ie had the police called on them in an attempt to get them shot by trigger-happy American cops, although whether that’s true or connected to the blog is an open question.)

I think accusations that Alexander personally or the community at large are sexist or racist are not true, or at least are reliant on definitions of those words that 95% or more of the population would disagree with. 

As I mentioned, the NYT journalist told me that his editors wouldn’t let him write a piece about Alexander without naming him; I suspect that is a Times policy thing. A tech journalist friend agrees, saying: “The NYT is one of those organisations that thinks its internal rules have the status of constitutional law.” That may be true, but the NYT leaves sources unnamed if there’s a reason to be worried about their safety; they’ve certainly allowed other people anonymity in similar situations recently.

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What I find baffling is the idea that the public interest is served in publicly naming a blogger. If the NYT piece had been, as the rationalists feared, a hatchet job, then it would at least make sense to name him: “This psychiatrist is a RACIST, he should be fired”; I would disagree, but you could follow the reasoning. “This psychiatrist runs an excellent blog, but has many people online who want to destroy his career; here’s where they can find him, printed in the most famous newspaper in the world” is just crazy to me. (Alexander himself notes that psychiatrists in general “are kind of obsessive about preventing their patients from knowing anything about who they are outside of work”, for reasons given here.) Even the online groups who hate him most have refrained from publicly naming him in the past.

As I said, it’s hard to talk to people who disagree with you. These days, it feels even harder, and it feels as though people are even more willing to try to publicly shame people they disagree with rather than engage with them. Perhaps it was ever thus. But it felt like SSC was one of the few places that allowed this sort of serious conversation. I really, really hope the NYT sees fit to run the piece without naming Alexander, and that SSC is reinstated.

(Not least because, until that happens, about 20% of the links in all my UnHerd articles will be broken.)

By the way: the person who said my book was going to be a hatchet job offered to bet anyone who disagreed. Someone took him up on it; they agreed a $1,000 bet, proceeds going to a charity of the winner’s choice. It was Scott Alexander who bet against it, and won.

Although it has some defenders, the argument has, over the years, been slated on a number of grounds. Critics include Voltaire and Diderot, nearer to Pascal’s own time, to more recent thinkers such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb, whose book Skin in the Game was cited by Giles Fraser in a recent article. Some argue that even if it works, it doesn’t answer the question of which religion to follow. Others, like Taleb, say it encourages the wrong kind of belief – faith without commitment, with no “skin in the game”. In short, it fails to be a persuasive proof of the need for faith.

The only problem is that Pascal never meant it to be that.

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Most of its detractors (and many of its defenders) make a very common mistake. They take it as an attempt by Pascal to convince unbelievers of the benefits of faith. But it isn’t.

As with any text, the Wager needs to be understood in the context of the work as a whole, as well as the fairly long section in which it is laid out. Blaise Pascal was a mathematician and physicist working at the cutting edge of scientific questions in his own age. He was also a deeply religious thinker. The Pensées were the notes Pascal made towards a book addressed to a very particular audience – a work that was never finished due to his early death.

Many think he had in mind the sophisticated “cultured despisers of religion” in France in the 17th century. Pascal knew many such libertins, who enjoyed philosophising, drinking and gambling. When he was younger and less religious, such friends would urge him to use his mathematical genius to work out the odds on bets they were thinking of taking on. Many of them were influenced by the hugely popular philosophy of Pascal’s older contemporary, René Descartes, thoroughly convinced of the power of human reason to master the world; some had gone beyond Descartes to argue that Christianity was illogical and therefore no rational person could believe it.

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Pascal’s beef with Descartes was that he didn’t understand people. Descartes’ idea of the thinking self (“I think therefore I am”) suggested that humans were entirely rational beings, motivated by and capable of cool level-headedness, making decisions on strictly logical grounds. Pascal thought this was nonsense. For him, our anxieties and desires are more powerful than our rationality. As he puts it in one vivid image:

“Put the world’s greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be; if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.”

Our fears and emotions are more powerful than our rationality, our longings more influential than our logic.

So when it comes to the Wager, the whole piece is designed not to persuade these sophisticates to believe, but to reveal the reasons why they don’t believe. The argument really runs like this: “The wager on belief is a bet you have to make – you can’t choose not to – either God is real or he isn’t. And you say that you don’t believe on strictly rational grounds, but do you really? You like a bet, right? OK, then look at the odds on belief. If you bet on God not existing, you don’t actually risk losing much. But if you bet on God existing, you stand to gain a huge dividend.

So looking objectively and rationally at the odds on offer here, a betting man or woman would always bet on belief. But we both know that you don’t. Why? It’s not because you are being rational: it’s because belief is inconvenient; you would rather there was no God; it costs too much, and you just don’t want to believe.”

As Pascal puts it at the conclusion of this section of the Pensées: “At least get it into your head, that if you are unable to believe, it is because of your passions, since reason impels you to believe and yet you cannot do so.”

It’s not that reason has no place – in fact Pascal argues that to exclude reason altogether is as big a mistake as to think that it is only reason that dictates our decisions. Yet only when we realise how it is our desires that influence what we choose to believe can we begin to make progress.

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The Wager was never meant as a cold, logical argument for belief in God. It is, in fact, the opposite: an argument designed to show that we are not the purely logical, rational beings we sometimes think we are.

For Pascal, God cannot be known simply in our minds, as the conclusion of a cogent philosophical argument, but by the heart and soul: “It is the heart that perceives God, and not our reason.” If, then, we are caught between our logic and our desires, how do we get out of this dilemma? For Pascal it is only by making the first step – by taking the risk, not of abstract belief, but of costly commitment: as he puts it “You want to be cured of unbelief? Become like one of those who now wager all they have … They behaved just as if they did believe.” For Pascal, there is no such thing as cost-free faith. Faith means sacrifice. The way to salvation is, in fact, only found by having skin in the game.

These days, the drinking and the gambling are still as prevalent as ever (just watch any advert at half time while watching sport on TV). When it comes to philosophising about God and belief, we are more likely to be influenced by Richard Dawkins than by Descartes. Those who follow that path tend to claim on strictly rationalistic grounds that science and faith cannot live together, that reason rules out religion.

Yet Pascal and his Wager remind us not only of the compatibility of scientific exploration alongside religious faith within an extraordinarily fertile mind but also that we are more complex than the rationalists would have us believe. Pascal’s Wager does not try to prove Christianity, or indeed any religion.

What it does tell us is that when deciding on the deepest questions of life and existence, we need to be mindful not just of our logic, but of whether we are simply convincing ourselves of what we would quite like to be true. As Pascal himself says: “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”