It is precisely this exhausting culture war which staked its apotheosis — mostly after the murder of George Floyd, though also over the decade prior — on so many endless rhetorical battles over “wokeness” and everything it ostensibly represented. For moderates and liberals, this mostly meant conformity and a new regime of manners, a sacrifice many media and university elites happily made, since it guaranteed full capture of the groundswell of social justice sentiment throughout the 2010s. For genuine social justice crusaders, this meant the morphing of a once-positive term (“stay woke”) into a self-righteous moralistic movement which few could admit had become something of a parody of itself. For many conservatives, this meant the absurdity of “woke” calls for everything from prison abolition to Thanksgiving abolition; the general censoriousness of online progressivism and Twitter mobs; and a general plague of “cultural Marxist” shibboleths, encompassing everything from a conspiratorial trans takeover to the tyranny of DEI, conflating lame liberal platitudes with the entire history of Western Socialism. This, of course, led immediately into the even more parodic and censorious “anti-woke” backlash, fueling Elon Musk’s buying of Twitter and Donald Trump’s tech-billionaire-assisted accession to a second term in the Oval Office.

In reality, of course, trans people have spent the last decade as a maligned hyper-minority in Western society (a position made all the worse by the insufferableness of so many self-selected “allies”); DEI is a consulting industry worth billions of dollars, which largely exists so employers can wield even more power over their employees; and whatever “peak woke” was, it was never even close to offering up the kinds of state-socialist nightmares keeping Ron DeSantis up at night. In fact, many Leftist intellectuals and commentators were from the beginning completely at odds with the usual rhetorical trappings of “wokeness”: the vitriolic racial pessimism, the refusal to debate or discuss, the tendency to dismiss real-world working-class economic concerns by insisting instead on the need for a kind of perpetual re-education campaign. With the 2016 and 2020 defeats of Bernie Sanders, they saw the first chance in modern American history to renew the New Deal and take real steps toward Nordic-style democratic socialism derailed again and again by activists and mainstream Democrats, neither of whom ever stopped maligning Bernie for focusing on class over identitarian grievance.

Yet AOC’s statement was perfect for our moment, as if all that furor was just a vague, silly dream anyway. Which in some ways, of course, it was. As a maximally adaptive cultural signifier, “wokeness” masked, through the blustering and repositioning of its rhetorical opponents and advocates, processes that have been going on in America for centuries. America has always been a country whose Puritan elite founded their power on the enforcement of prudish WASP politesse, as well as one undergoing a perennial religious revival since at least the 1740s. The “woke era” was, if anything, the digital and televisual spectacle version of these eternal American facts. Which is why the new book by Catherine Liu — professor of media studies at UC Irvine, and one of America’s few interesting Marxist intellectuals — is such a breath of fresh air. Whatever you think of its conclusions, the only really compelling analytical approach to the culture war of the last few decades is the old-school Marxist one; and whether or not you agree with her prescriptions, Liu’s book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, is the clearest and most compact look yet into the culture war’s obscurantist machinery.

To do so, Liu seizes on one of our society’s central myths: the myth which the elite classes of America have learned so well to deploy, to protect their power; the myth which underlies all our empty, narcissistic therapy-speak; the myth which binds millions of social media users into disturbing parasocial relationships with a manipulative culture of celebrity confessional — the myth of the “trauma script”. Interestingly, Liu begins her analysis of contemporary trauma culture with a different AOC scene. This example comes from the Representative’s Instagram Live confessional, following the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, during which Ocasio-Cortez was forced to hide in an office, fearing for her life. That February, she took to social media to share an hours-long, intimate confession about the ways in which her endangerment that day evoked memories of a former sexual assault. Liu is sympathetic, describing how she herself — at that point still marooned in the midst of isolation during the Covid pandemic — was genuinely moved by the narrative of trauma, recovery, and struggle AOC so personally laid out.

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In retrospect, though, Liu is far less sympathetic. Here, after all, was an elected politician, taking to a media platform, performing a particular ritual script, and appealing for personal sympathy, much as celebrities and brand ambassadors alike are expected to do, in order to maintain an invested audience. Whatever truth there was in AOC’s confession could not possibly be separated from the ways such trauma scripts have been perfected to boost already-famous people’s apparent authenticity, nor from the simple fact that she was undermining her own responsibilities as an elected official, encouraging the people who elected her to see her not as a uniquely powerful person responsible to them — but as a wounded, healed, and ultimately virtuous everywoman.

Liu sees AOC’s stunt as the zenith of a project begun by — of all people — Oprah Winfrey. In fact, Oprah is something like the arch-villain of Traumatized, an entrepreneurial savant of media communication whose famous televised confession of her own childhood sexual abuse, on her daytime talk show in 1986, is for Liu the ultimate example of the trauma script, one which “forged an image of the ideal liberal subject for the end of history in the televisual era… a story that countersigns every aspect of the logic of our media age”. What AOC was up to on that livestream, and what so many of us are up to these days, when we talk on and on about our “trauma”, was perpetuating an easily-digestible narrative, first honed by Winfrey, in a late-20th century liberal environment that valued sentimental stories of empowerment above all else.

On political grounds alone, Liu is appalled by this “tightly choreographed, standardized script of survival and recovery”. But on her way to the final Oprah chapter — which is so thorough and eviscerating that one begins to wonder if Oprah really isn’t one of the most destructive figures in modern life — Liu winds her way through the expected kinds of historicizing that make books like Traumatized worthwhile. So, for instance, we learn that the origins of modern trauma actually stem from 19th-century railway companies’ attempts to promote the talking cure, to avoid being made liable for “railway spine”, the era’s term for the invisible signs of shock suffered by the (mostly bourgeois) victims of train accidents. We learn how “mental health” itself was only coined after the Second World War, as a measurement of the fitness of soldiers, by a military keen to research new treatments that would get them back to the front lines more quickly.

We also learn about the bitter fight over the 1980 publication of the controversial DSM-III, which forever abolished the inclusion of psychoanalytic ideas from mainstream American psychiatry, and first elevated PTSD to a real diagnosis. Under the direction of Robert Spitzer, the DSM-III eradicated Freudian terms like “neurosis” and “psychosis”, and enacted what Liu sees as “a massive redefinition of mental illness”, one that functionally “erased childhood history from diagnostic consideration as a possible origin or ‘etiology’ of disease”. The laudable desire to make psychiatry a more exact science turned the profession away from psychoanalytic ideas of inner conflict, and instead pursued diagnoses of mental illness as physical, medically-treatable diseases of the body. Liu remains suspicious of the ways in which the proliferating lists of symptoms in subsequent DSMs have opened up further chemical interventions, largely as a way of making treatment easier for insurance companies.

For Liu, the origins of this new psychology are bourgeois, through and through. In a chapter on the history of modern middle-class obsession with safety and risk during childhood, Liu draws a stark straight line from Victorian campaigns against “cruelty to children” all the way to the Satanic Panic of the Eighties. There, the era’s new theories of trauma and memory loss were deployed to outright falsify media spectacles and horrifying stories of mass child abuse at places like the McMartin Preschool. Liu reminds us that elite moral panics around childhood abuse were largely liberal, middle-class affairs, long before the advent of newer Right-wing conspiracy theories about pedophile rings in pizza parlors. The anxiety of the comfortable, wealthy professional classes is a major theme running throughout Traumatized — a key origin of what we would now call “wokeness”. Since the creation of the bourgeoisie in the 18th century, this anxiety has always manifested as “a savior complex that loves nothing more than moral panics and the spectacle of philanthropic activism”.

Yet the “personal-is-political” mantras of Second Wave Feminism are suspect, too, and Judith Herman’s 1992 book Trauma and Recovery comes under fire as the foremost example of the ways in which that feminism — in league with anti-Vietnam veteran advocates like Robert Jay Lifton — began to shape our current image of the holy victim of abuse (or war), which Liu calls “an ersatz New Age religion with Protestant characteristics”. Such at least was the ideal put forward in 1988 by Ellen Bass, in her monumentally influential self-help book The Courage to Heal — and this same vision forms the basis for the trauma script Oprah would turn into the vernacular of daytime talk shows, celebrity confessionals, and, eventually, social media.

Liu is ultimately unsparing in her condemnation of the chokehold trauma culture has on our society. Not only does it make actual mental therapy difficult, giving the client a ready-made script to perpetually avoid personal responsibility for their own suffering, trauma culture also feeds the pointless culture war. Ever the good Marxist, Liu’s real complaint is that trauma culture — like the nebulous “wokeness” which it undergirds — ultimately functions as a way of disguising elite power. “Trauma culture’s regressive class politics exposes us to the reaction of conservatives who are willing to channel working-class resentment into a politics of rage against liberal hypocrisies,” Liu writes in her conclusion. “Professional-class liberalism, especially in its pseudo-radical form, continues to foreclose the building of political organizations in which the struggle against capital and for the interests of wage workers takes precedence over fetishized forms of ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen.’”

What follows from this, unsurprisingly, is a straightforward prescription for more class politics. Liu earnestly believes in the Marxist dialectic, and insists that the pieties of the professional-managerial classes are the first real obstacle to enacting socialism. The reader is free to agree or disagree with her final prescriptions, but her analysis of the particular class character of our trauma culture seems to me inarguable. It is, by and large, a liberal, bourgeois phenomenon: sentimental, anxious, and neurotic. It obscures the material and economic causes of mass suffering, offering up only personalized narratives of trauma and triumph — narratives it can then use to filter out those marginalized people not “enlightened” enough to perform it correctly. This of course drives those people (regardless of race, gender, or religion) right into the arms of Right-wing politicians able to exploit popular anger at elite hypocrisy and censoriousness. Thus the two symbolic styles — elite prudery and proletarian rage — continue to feed into each other, just as the culture war feeds into itself, just as the endless cycles of “woke” and “anti-woke” only serve to perpetuate a meaningless spectacle.

What is most interesting, though, is something else which Liu suggests only briefly: that our current model of therapy — centered as it often is around the repetition of the trauma script and the rehearsal of a narcissistic ego — is a dead-end, leaving us the easy prey of expanding bureaucratic diagnosis and pharmacological control (though how a socialist state would avoid reinforcing such a medicalized bureaucracy, Liu never considers). One practical answer might be a partial to the psychoanalytical model — that Oedipal father whom modern psychiatry had to slay, to legitimize itself as a science. At points, Liu suggests that our obsession with particular ideals of “mental health” are doing real harm to us, since we’ve largely abandoned the idea of mental illness as an internal conflict requiring actual psychic resolution. Liu puts the issue neatly:

“In a real-life therapeutic setting, the path to recovery begins with giving up the ‘me’ that is demanding to be seen; in collaboration with a therapist who is able to resist regression into the mother/infant dyad, an ‘I’ can emerge as a subject responsible and guilty, but also capable of grasping troubling truths about an objective reality that cannot be bent to the fantasy of ‘me.’”

A society overflowing with “me” fantasies, stuck on the trauma script, has little defense against people who exploit that script for professional or economic gain — whether that’s celebrities like Oprah, politicians like AOC, or the professional managerial class itself. What Liu does so well in Traumatized is to lay out the ways media, celebrity, and contemporary psychiatry have collaborated to reinforce a vision of our own psyches that ultimately makes us ill. I myself don’t believe there’s anything like a political solution for what is essentially a tangle of persuasive and enticing symbols, which no one person has the wherewithal to untangle. But the psychoanalysts, in their naming of metaphors like the “unconscious” or “repression” or “the ego” (metaphors which we all still use on a daily basis), at least gave us ways of thinking and talking about those symbols that remain ripe for rediscovery. It’s time to see “mental health” and “trauma” for the metaphors they are, as well. Only by understanding where they come from — understanding them as recent inventions born of specific historical moments — can we begin to choose a better model for our lives.

Nos remplaçants s’il y en a, et s’il leur arrive de penser à nous dans quelques siècles, n’éprouveront ni indignation ni colère ; ils ne seront plus concernés. Ils ressentiront probablement un vague dégoût, et surtout une immense perplexité. Les plus lettrés tenteront de la réduire par l’écriture d’énormes ouvrages, dont « Histoire de la décadence et de la chute de l’empire romain » reste un exemple classique. Un résumé simplifié des thèses de Gibbon expliquant la chute de l’Empire romain par le développement du christianisme, outre qu’il est convaincant et clair, présente l’avantage de pouvoir être prolongé sans difficulté par les thèses d’Auguste Comte sur le passage de l’état théologique à l’état métaphysique, dont l’unique fonction aura été de détruire. Le déclin de l’Occident trouve ainsi son explication naturelle dans la chute du christianisme initiée par le protestantisme, accomplie par le siècle des lumières. Nietzsche dit à peu près la même chose, en y rajoutant d’amusants effets spéciaux mettant en scène des saltimbanques et des aigles. Ce qui ne colle par contre plus très bien, c’est que les choses ne vont pas mieux en Asie ; le déclin démographique, dans les pays technologiquement les plus avancés — Japon, Corée, plus récemment la Chine — y est même encore plus rapide, au point que leurs populations risquent, à un terme pas si éloigné, de disparaître. C’est bel et bien la modernité toute entière qui s’autodétruit sous nos yeux incompréhensifs.

« Les choses tombent en morceaux ; le centre ne peut plus tenir / La pure anarchie est lâchée sur le monde » écrit Yeats en 1919, pressentant que, pour l’Europe, la guerre qui vient de s’achever n’aura été que l’annonciation d’autres désastres plus considérables. La guerre a donné naissance à la guerre, le nazisme a ouvert une porte sombre qui ne s’est jamais totalement refermée, les deux guerres mondiales n’ont fait qu’accélérer la décomposition des pays qui ont commis la folie de s’y engager. Un siècle après le poème de Yeats, le centre n’a pas tenu — et cela apparaît avec une évidence particulière dans le cas du centre politique européen, Bruxelles. En Belgique l’euthanasie, ouverte aux « personnes en souffrance psychique » depuis 2002, l’est aux mineurs depuis 2014. Quelques marges tiennent encore, mais l’une après l’autre les digues cèdent, et nous sommes submergés par cette « mer noircie de sang » dont parle Yeats dans le vers suivant.

English Translation

Don't bet on an AI crash

By Michel Houellebecq

France should be the next barrier swept away by this sea; it remains possible to avoid it, but hope is dwindling. For some time now, several years already, that I have been striving to fight against euthanasia, while the conviction grows in me that I am fighting a losing battle, I feel like I have played all my cards, and even started to cheat. One last time, I do not think it useless to recommend to those whose vote will have the force of law to reflect on the few philosophers who, over the centuries, have approved of suicide — it is even quite astonishing: “progressivism” sweeps away with contempt, with a wave of the hand, not only all existing religious traditions, but almost everything previous philosophers have thought; such arrogance, I think, has never before manifested in human history. But philosophies, unlike religions, speak mainly to the intelligence of the human being, and hardly reach what is essential in him. The Catholic religion, despite apparently some recent stirrings, has long been lagging behind in Europe, and I am not at the point of preferring an Islamic society, on the grounds that secular society deviates from moral law. But I am not sure I want to belong to a society that legalizes euthanasia; defending the West is fine, provided it deserves to be defended. It is enough to examine the arguments of the supporters of euthanasia to be overwhelmed by disgust, and that by force of disgust a moral insurrection is triggered; these arguments are actually summed up in a single one, which is dignity, but this word has been used so often, and in such a perverse way, that it has become difficult to grasp its meaning. Seen by supporters of euthanasia, the desire for dignity expressed by the dying person, as testified by loved ones, is generally expressed by phrases like: “He would not have endured becoming a vegetable.” The assertion would be more convincing if they could complete it like this: “He would not have endured becoming a vegetable, he would have preferred to become a corpse.” Let us add that the vegetable metaphor reflects a painfully pragmatic view of the human being. Ideally, a human being should move, perform acts, in short, lead an active life. And if that is definitely impossible, at least he should communicate, show himself capable of interacting, at least by speech, with the rest of society. The human is reduced to his use value, that is to say his initial value diminished by a coefficient of wear. It is hard to imagine a more direct opposition to human dignity in the sense of Emmanuel Kant, with the Kantian idea that humanity, in its own person as in that of others, must always be considered as an end, and never simply as a means. A first alteration had already occurred, and unfortunately it was on the occasion of the so justified fight against animal suffering, when the “antispeciesists” undertook to lead it in the name of the dubious notion of “animal rights,” when it would have sufficed to continue to heed the modest but incandescent, eternal, voice of compassion. With euthanasia it is no longer a matter of alteration, but of a plunge into the abyss. For Kant, for the thinkers of more naive centuries, human dignity was simply linked to the fact of being a man. We no longer see things the same way. Human dignity is altered in us, our life is in itself a process of alteration, and we must at every moment be ready to justify it in our own eyes, even in those of others (insofar as that makes a difference). For nearly two centuries, the specter of nihilism has haunted Western Europe. Now that’s it, here we are; we were not expecting nihilism in this form, it is neither dark nor twilight; it is rather colorful and cheerful. To picture it, one should not think of Dostoevsky, nor of Nietzsche, but rather remember a Simons store commercial (it is a Canadian clothing store chain) that was supposed to depict a happy euthanasia. It was a dignity to scream about.
Filmé au bord de la mer, il y avait des vagues et du violoncelle, un grand repas convivial avec du cheesecake et des éclats de rire, la chose était titrée « Tout est beauté », la future morte était jeune, émouvante et sympathique, il s’agissait d’une artiste, on la voyait dessiner des formes dans le sable avec un bâton. Simons a retiré son clip, il y avait eu sur Internet trop de commentaires sarcastiques se moquant de l’utilisation des codes de l’industrie du luxe pour promouvoir l’euthanasie. En effet, on se serait cru dans une pub Chanel ou Saint-Laurent.

Let’s dig a little into this matter of dignity. Back when I was researching the Vincent Lambert case, I remember a “white paper” on the operation of EVC-EPR centers, those created by the Kouchner law, and in which Vincent Lambert should have found his place if the medical system had worked properly. One anecdote struck me, that of a woman who had been silent for years, who suddenly started talking again during an unexpected visit. While a doctor expressed his astonishment, because for years he had tried in vain to establish contact, she replied: “What you were saying wasn’t all that interesting”. A very compromised state of health can excuse certain lapses in politeness, but still, it’s a lesson worth remembering: if people don’t talk to you, sometimes it’s because they have nothing to say to you.

Anyone who has written, or even simply tried to write, knows that it is sometimes possible — it’s hard to explain, but it’s true — to express in writing realities inaccessible to speech. And anyone who has actually written knows something else, something sadder: what you’ve written will only be a faint trace of what you dreamed of writing. Even someone as monstrously productive in literature as Balzac admitted it: the books you’ve written are less beautiful than those you only dreamed of. Speech is only a fraction of writing, which itself is only a fraction of inner life. Reducing a man’s mind to his oral communication skills is simply stupid.

If you look at things from the angle of morals, to behave with dignity would be to adopt, in the face of life’s sufferings and sorrows, an attitude of calm, restraint, stoicism. Dignity would, in short, be little different from emotional modesty; which already gives reason for suspicion. If modesty is in all cases a rather shady feeling, a bit too associated with shame, emotional modesty is, of all the forms it can take, by far the most toxic. I’ve heard the “dignity” of victims of this or that tragic news story praised so much in the media that I’ve come to take a dislike to the word dignity. In the face of great suffering, the healthiest attitude is obviously to cry, to scream, to moan, to beg for pity from the deity or from other people. The stoic is basically just a theoretical puppet, devoid of all plausibility, and stoicism a philosophy best left unmentioned.

It’s not only, I realize with surprise, on the sexual level that we are the opposite of the baba cool years that marked my youth. When I was a teenager, it was fashionable to criticize the saying “boys don’t cry”, and instead to encourage boys to freely express their emotions. The significance of this saying had, moreover, been greatly overestimated: literary accounts clearly show that knights of the Middle Ages shed tears without restraint at the death of their comrades-in-arms; it was only from the beginning of the 20th century, and especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, that the injunction to modesty took hold, at the same time as the choice to hide death, and for the same reasons.

Half a century after the baba cool era, everything has changed, and it’s no longer just men who must hold back their tears; women, preferably, too. With so much dignity, with so much modesty in showing one’s emotions, others come to suppose that you hardly feel any, and that they can quietly go back to their own business. Dignity, in the end, has only one use: to legitimize the constant practice of the most perfect selfishness. It’s a considerable use.

La pudeur, version plus explicit of dignity, has other even more poisonous consequences when it no longer concerns only emotions, but attacks the physical body — and this is something much more serious, much more deadly and heavier than sexual modesty. Let dignity speak. Is it really modest and really dignified, when one is so close to being a vegetable, when one is physically so diminished, to appear in public? To show oneself, even, to anyone? Is it really modest and really dignified, ultimately, to exist?

Now that’s it, you are in the pipeline, you are ashamed of your own existence, and euthanasia awaits you around the corner. I, who have so often amused myself by mocking Nietzsche — and I couldn’t help myself this time again, he’s so funny with his mustache — I would still like to pay tribute to him by quoting these lines from the Gay Science:

“Who do you call bad? — The one who always wants to make others feel ashamed.

What do you consider most human? — To spare someone shame.”

We are, it’s painful to say, perhaps no longer quite human. After a detour of several millennia, the West seems to have returned to that ancient animal wisdom which drives, in almost all social species, the sick animal to move away from the tribe to die alone — knowing well that it has no compassion to expect from its fellows, that it is more likely to be, like the birds of Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, sent off with pecks. We had long believed ourselves to be a tribe of a higher order; we were mistaken, say the animalists, and this return to animal law, here’s the strangest thing, should be considered as a progress. What is established in any case is that progressivism functions absolutely like a ratchet mechanism. When a “societal advance” (abortion, death penalty, same-sex marriage, IVF, surrogacy, anything) has occurred, it is out of the question to go back, no one thinks of it. This assumption is antidemocratic: what one law has done, another law can undo; at least that’s the idea I have of the law; but it allows us to identify progressivism for what it really is: a destiny.

One may be right to think that it is vain to fight against destiny, and that every tragedy must go to its end. I can’t help but think that by asking for its citizens access to euthanasia, it is its own euthanasia that France is asking for. People have been surprised that I am hostile to this bill, even though I have often been labeled with a strange neologism: I would be a deprimist. Let’s admit it. It is true that I have worked to scrutinize the symptoms of Western suicide, the rise of nihilism; but I do not recall ever rejoicing in it. We are entering a world where it will be easier to die; I would have preferred a world where one could live.

This was an entirely reasonable matter to raise. After all, political thought has taken place across all human cultures, throughout history, around the globe (although by no means all of it has been written down in a way accessible to undergraduates). Nonetheless, as regards teaching, it presented a challenge.

I had made the conscious decision to combine breadth with depth. Rather than racing through the great works of 10 “canonical” thinkers, I elected instead to do two weeks on each of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx, with a bonus week on Mary Wollstonecraft squeezed in. The aim was pedagogical. For many students this would be their first and last time coming into sustained contact with some of the greatest works of political philosophy ever written. Deciding on a list of six was always going to be somewhat arbitrary. (No Plato! No Augustine! No David Hume or Adam Smith or Max Weber!) But in picking these six, I wanted to introduce undergraduates to just how powerful political thought can be when practiced by the best. Also, I felt duty bound to keep the flame alive.

Also, it seemed not inappropriate to privilege Western political thought. After all, it is a brute fact that the Western state form has come to dominate the rest of the world, being now universally encountered wherever there are states. China, Russia or India may conceive of themselves as in geopolitical opposition to the West. But their bureaucratically managed governmental organizations, displaying a monopoly over the legitimate uses of violence within their territories, are adoptions of the originally Western form of state organization. If you want to understand modern politics, not just in the West but across the whole world, then you need to understand Western political thinking. The great texts of that tradition are, therefore, a good place to start. And that remains true even if you ultimately want to oppose Western politics, perhaps because of concerns arising from the very real legacies of brutality, exploitation, and injustice that the histories of Western states are undeniably bound up with.

Looking back, I should have made this kind of case more explicitly to my students. (In fact, I did, whenever any of them bothered to ask me about it in person. But typically, the ones who bothered were not the ones driving complaints.) However it was the period of peak awokening, and I didn’t fancy a public fight. So, acting out of cowardice, I tried to fob off the complainers by simply renaming the module “The History of Western Political Thought”.

That worked about as effectively as you might imagine, and it shows how naïve I was to think it would make any difference. The complaints kept coming, increasingly under the banner of demands that we “decolonize the curriculum”. Which always struck me as odd, with its implication that the curriculum had first been colonized. By who exactly, and how? Well, a good way to answer that would be to read the most insightful people who thought and wrote about such things…

For the most part I hunkered down and tried to ignore the noise, concentrating on teaching the students who wanted to be taught. Happily, that was the vast majority of them. Indeed, one of my most satisfying moments as a teacher came when a student stopped by my office hours one year, toward the end of the course. He had initially been a vocal proponent of “decolonize the curriculum”. But he said that he had really enjoyed engaging with the module, and was increasingly skeptical about “decolonizing” reading lists. Specifically, that he appreciated how much the thinkers I had assigned disagreed with each other, in particular about the roles of class and hierarchy. As he put it, it didn’t matter if they were dead white men: what mattered was diversity of thought. (For those who care about such things, they might be interested to learn that the student was himself black.)

Still, I felt grubby having renamed the module “Western political thought”. After all, this was straightforwardly inaccurate. Indeed, it was (ironically enough) an instance of cultural appropriation. I spent the first two weeks requiring students to read Aristotle’s immensely challenging The Politics — and yet I knew damned well that claiming Aristotle for Western political thought was at the very least intellectually suspicious. Not only did the idea of “the West” simply not exist in the fourth century BCE, when Aristotle wrote, but he would have been appalled by the suggestion that he was part of any such grouping. According to Aristotle, people to the geographic west of Greece were barbarians, incapable of proper political living — hence why none of them lived in city states, a prerequisite for properly functioning political animals to achieve natural flourishing. Retrospectively claiming Aristotle for the West was to surreptitiously trade on his genius to burnish the credentials of an idea that came much later, yet which he would have wanted no part of. Not to mention the fact that Arab Muslim scholars were making extensive use of Aristotle around the time European Christians were scratching around in Dark Age mud.

Well, if I felt grubby back then, Georgios Varouxakis’ new book The West: The History of an Idea has left me feeling positively filthy (in the best possible way). This is because he brings home just how complicated the history of “the West” really is, but also how much of that history has now been forgotten, its meaning constantly changing in the wake of successive political battles. Recent salvos in the culture wars about how “we” ought properly to appraise “our” history are merely the latest installment in a long series of fights.

Varouxakis demolishes two leading narratives around “the West”. The first (typically “conservative”) proudly claims that “we” in the West can trace our heritage back, via an unbroken pedigree, to the glory of the ancient world: the Romans, and especially the Greeks, themselves originators of civilization itself, and to which we are the heirs. (This is the style of thinking underpinning, for example, Boris Johnson’s recent lecture at Liberty University on the importance of defending Western values). The second (typically “progressive”, and self-consciously opposed to the first) says something like the opposite: that “the West” was an idea invented in the 1890s to justify British imperial expansionism, and thus provide spurious legitimation for colonial domination, expropriation, and violence (and should be ditched accordingly). (This is the line put forward, for example, by Kwame Anthony Appiah in his high-profile book The Lies That Bind.)

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Both these stories are wrong. It is true that widespread use of “the West” did not emerge until the 19th century. (Prior to this, the main distinction preoccupying political thinkers was between North and South, i.e. the difference between powerful European monarchies and the apparently unrelated ancient politics of the Mediterranean.) It came, however, around 50 years earlier than the 1890s, and not because of the activities of the British, but thanks to the innovations of the French social thinker Auguste Comte, who used it to advocate something like the opposite of colonial domination, envisioning a federation of free republics committed to citizen equality.

But “the West” as opposed to what? Well, “the East”. But what was that? With the brief exception of the early 1940s, since Comte it has mostly meant Russia — the de facto leader of a “Slavic” alternative, long perceived as a threat (militarily, culturally, spiritually) to Europeans located to the geographic west.

Not that it has been a simple story of “us” versus “them”. Where did the Germans fit in? Including them as part of “the West” threatened to displace the centrality of France to this European grouping — and that was even before two World Wars in which Teutonic supremacy was attempted. Still, since about 1945, most have been happy to include them. Similarly, Japan was recruited as a “Western” Soviet antagonist until the early Nineties, when its threat to American economic dominance after the end of the Cold War meant it was pushed out of the club.

The point of tracing these (constantly contested) evolutions of the idea of “the West”, Varouxakis shows, is not to assert one “true” definition. For there is no one “true” definition of the West. The idea comes down to us through multiple generations of political disagreement, with prevailing understandings changing depending on different political, economic, military and cultural pressures.

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Will the university survive AI?

By Jacob Howland

Which is by no means to say that the idea of “the West”, is somehow empty, unreal, or meaningless. It does pick out a shared history of political forms, cultural developments, military arrangements, and much else besides. Right now, the citizens of Ukraine are understandably grateful for the continuing idea of “the West”, into which they have only recently been inducted. Similarly, the Taiwanese have good reason to hope that Western nations take an interest in supporting ideologically friendly regimes not just in the geographic west, but as far away as China’s backyard. And there is surely something important in insisting that Western values go deeper than just consumer culture and light entertainment. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may recently have brought stand-up comedy to Riyadh, but nobody is under any illusion that he is somehow also inviting in our values. Quite the opposite — as victims of Saudi torture and imprisonment might attest.

Furthermore, there is a family of political ideas that has originated in the West, and which we have good reason to try and hold on to — and that Varouxakis does not shy away from supporting. Liberal democracy comes with constitutional guarantees about what can and cannot be done to individuals and minorities. It operates according to the rule of law, and delivers (albeit imperfectly) meaningful freedom to citizens. It upholds values like meritocracy, religious toleration, freedom of sexuality, and many more besides. As Varouxakis puts it: “to my mind [these are] to be preferred, and we should defend them against alarming alternatives.” Indeed. One wonders if those decrying the evils of “the West” from within the safe cloisters of academia have fully thought through what the available alternatives entail.

Varouxakis, of course, admits that the West “may have immense failings and much to answer for”. But, he adds, “it is in terms of its own register of normative principles and values that it is found wanting in practice—not according to any impartial comparative universal standard”. More generally, what makes Western values valuable is not that they are Western, but that if applied properly and by their own logic, then they apply equally to everyone. Not because people are (or are not) “Westerners”, but because they are human beings. To be sure, the societies of the West have frequently failed, in practice, to live up to such a lofty goal. But the appropriate response is to try and make them do so in future — not to denounce the goal as somehow not worth having.

Yes, this is a Western idea. But it is a good one that we should be proud of. One place where the legacy of such an idea can be continued is in the university classroom, and in the service of which Varouxakis provides a most valuable resource. More generally, I am happy to report that the specter of the close-minded, AI-dependent, woke Gen-Z zombie is grossly exaggerated. The vast majority of my students want to learn, and are prepared to read difficult historical texts accordingly. The thinkers I assign to them are one way of introducing the complicated story of how the complex, contested ideas underpinning the West came about. It turns out that the revised module title was appropriate, after all.

Paul Kingsnorth writes vividly on the dark side of modernity, technology and progress. His new book, Against the Machine, is the culmination of decades of thinking and writing and is something of a spiritual manual for modernity’s dissidents.

Earlier this week, Kingsnorth visited the UnHerd Club for a wide-ranging interview with Freddie Sayers — the world first about this book, on the day of publication.

This is the full video and an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Much of your writing starts with a feeling: a sense of loss, of alienation, from the modern world, a yearning to get back to something that we had before. Tell us about that feeling. Has it always been with you?

Paul Kingsnorth: Yes, I think it does start with a feeling. It’s a sense that we’re living inside something that is quite inhuman and becoming more and more inhuman. It’s a system that you can feel encroaching upon you and it becomes tighter and tighter. I begin Against the Machine with “The Purse-Seine”, a poem from the Forties by the American author Robinson Jeffers. He was sitting on a cliff in Los Angeles, watching a fishing boat drawing in a “purse seine”, a type of net that’s like a draw-string. He writes about how the fish in the net can’t feel the net being tightened and drawn, but tightens up all the time until they’re in it and they’re stuck. It feels to me like that’s where we are. Something is gathering around us.

Many writers have written about “the Machine” before me. It’s not my phrase. I consider myself, hopefully, to be writing in this tradition. This is something that has been going on for hundreds of years, at least since the Industrial Revolution. I’m very struck when I come to London, because I live in the west of Ireland and every time I come here, it becomes more machine-like. Go into a café, and there’s a little QR code on the table. You have to scan it to find out what the menu is. There are cameras everywhere. You’re constantly being monitored.

It’s become more and more impossible to survive without being hooked into this technological web that’s growing around us. But what does that take away? It gives us some good things and some bad things. But what do we lose? I think most people can feel that we’re losing something or a set of things that are quite important to what it means to be human.

FS: I remember reading Real England, an earlier book of yours, that was also infused with that same negative reaction towards modernity — the carapace of technology and concrete that was covering the authentic country of England. If someone asked you: “Do you hate modernity?” What would you reply? 

PK: Well, the easy answer is yes.

FS: It’s quite remarkable that you say that out loud.

PK: Look, what is modernity? What are we talking about here? Are we talking about a historical time period that we could date, or are we talking about a way of seeing? I prefer to see modernity as a way of seeing, which I often refer to as machine modernity. Iain McGilchrist has this great theory about the hemispheres of the brain: the left hemisphere sees the parts, and the right hemisphere sees the whole. The left is supposed to be in service to the right, but we have become deeply left-brained in the sense that we’re very good at seeing the parts, very good at making things, at going to the moon, at examining the genes of fruit flies. But have we actually lost a way of seeing that’s much more significant? That’s how I see modernity. It creates lots of things that we find good and useful, obviously. But where’s it going in the long term and what’s the price that’s being paid for it?

FS: Where do you locate the moment that it all started to go wrong? Possible candidates you mention in the book include Aquinas, Duns Scotus, the Schism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of the car, and many others.

PK: You missed a bit about the Egyptian pyramids.

FS: Oh yes!

PK: Which isn’t my idea. I’m quoting Lewis Mumford, the great critic of technology, who wrote a two-volume book called The Myth of the Machine back in the late Sixties. He sees the first machine society as being Pharaonic Egypt, which he calls “the machine made of human parts”. The human parts being slaves. If you have that enormous top-down thing, you can build something incredible like a pyramid. He compares a pyramid to a space rocket. These are both technologies which, at a cost of human labour and toil, create a technology which takes the favoured few up into heaven.

You could say Egypt was a machine society. Certainly, Ancient Rome was very machine-like in its centralisation, its technocratic ability, its top-down power. What’s happened since? Let’s finger the usual suspects, and say the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution together created a revolution in human seeing in the Western world, which has since flooded out everywhere else.

This way of seeing is highly mechanistic. Through a critique of religion — which has been going on for a long time, but it really comes to the fore with the French Revolution — you create a new theology. A traditional way of understanding this is that during the modern period, we’ve moved away from religion and we’ve moved instead towards reason and science. To some degree, you can say that’s true, but what we also have is a new belief system — a thing we call progress, which is moral progress, technological progress, endless forward movement. If we look at the way that our politics is framed, if we look at the way technology is created, they are all aligned with this notion of progress with a large “P”. So we’re all progressive in that sense. It’s become the ultimate philosophy of the modern world. That’s what we do: we move forward. One of the problems we’re having in the West at the moment is that people have stopped believing in it.

FS: So is this new, or was it ever thus? Has it not always been true, throughout the ages, that there are people such as yourself who yearn for the purity of the past? Ovid was writing about the Golden Age, William Morris in News from Nowhere, and many in between. Are you simply today’s version, or do you think there is something truly specific and new about what we’re going through today?

PK: Well, I don’t mind being compared with Ovid. That’s okay.

You have to be careful: the temptation when you talk like this is to find a particular period in the past and start to romanticise that and say, well, “Everything was great then”. You won’t find a period of history in which there aren’t all the usual human problems, but they are different. In a very general sense, the modern way of seeing divorces us from things which most pre-modern ways of seeing have taken for granted.

I try to categorise this in the book in a very machine-like way. I call it “the four Ps”, which are “People”, “Place”, “Prayer”, and “the Past”. If you look at most cultures, they’re based on a combination of those four things. The modern world systematically uproots them all and replaces them with consumerism and ideologies and progressive theologies and, ultimately, technology, which is the way that we try to manifest the myth of progress. There is something revolutionary about the way we see, and it’s not normal. I think we see the world quite differently to the way most people have always seen it.

FS: We are very used to people complaining about too much screentime and the deleterious effect of apps. But you seem to see the spread of modern technology, perhaps culminating in AI, as something devilish — a kind of evil force or spirit? 

PK: If you listen to the people who are in Silicon Valley, really pushing the creation of superhuman intelligence, they all talk like prophets or priests or religious philosophers. Ray Kurzweil, who wrote a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines, is always talking about the singularity, the point at which machines become more intelligent than us and run away with themselves. He was once asked: “Does God exist?” And he answered: “Not yet.”

You have seen lots of warnings from people about how AI could become superintelligent and destroy us. Many of those warnings are coming from the people creating it. It’s not just weirdos like me. The journalist Ezra Klein went to a bunch of these people and asked why, given that they’re warning us it could destroy the world, are they creating it? And he said they couldn’t answer the question. They ended up more or less feeling that they had a responsibility to usher this new being into the world.

We’ve got superintelligent AIs being created. Nobody really knows how they work. They’re already talking to each other in ways people can’t understand. They’re already persuading teenagers to kill themselves. Something very sinister is going on. Pre-modern societies wouldn’t have had much trouble understanding it. It’s like the Book of Genesis. Why don’t you just take the fruit of knowledge of good and evil and become as the gods? If you rebel against God, you can be God. That’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to create God, make God live forever.

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Raging against the Machine

By Paul Kingsnorth

FS: But is this just the excitable rhetoric of Silicon Valley technicians, or do you actually think there’s an external force of some kind that is being made manifest? 

PK: I’m a Christian, so I do believe in external forces of evil. I don’t want to get too carried away with that because it’s very easy to predict the rise of the Antichrist every five minutes.

It’s a kind of a feeling, it’s an intuition. I’m not trying to prove anything. But I think given that all these people talk in spiritual terms about this stuff, we should see it in spiritual terms.

FS: In the book you do name it the Antichrist. You say these machines are not just machines. They are something else. A body whose mind is in the process of developing; a body beginning to come to life. 

PK: I think that’s true. I’ll stand by that.

I don’t know what the mind is. I don’t know whether the mind is the Antichrist or whether it is a man, or whether it’s something demonic, or whether it’s something that humans can create. I’m not sure we’re actually capable of creating a mind, even though we think we are, but I have the strong sense that something quite dark is happening.

I wouldn’t necessarily want to put a name to it, but let’s just see what happens over the next five years, because either AI is going to be a bubble that bursts and we’ve all made a fuss about nothing. Or we’re going to be moving into very uncharted territory.

FS: Let me take you away from the perilous topic of the Antichrist towards the easy topic of the culture wars. That will be plain sailing.

PK: It’s less interesting though.

FS: You describe your reaction to the roiling culture wars as having three distinct phases. Could you describe them for us?

When I looked at the warring teams, my first reaction was to look at the mad woke Left and want to join the team against them, because some of the stuff they say is just so crazy and offensive.

And then the second reaction is: actually, no, I really don’t want to do that. I don’t want to get involved in that. I think I’d rather go and live in a forest. Or a monastery. Because that’s actually a trap. I think it is a trap.

And then the third reaction was to look at it and say: “OK, while I really don’t like what a lot of these people are saying, I can understand why they’re saying it.”

FS: These people being?

PK: The postmodern woke Left, whatever you want to call them. The culture warriors who are trying to take the culture apart. And then rising up against them you have these defenders of the West, broadly on the Right. You know, “we must defend our traditions” and all the rest of it. And when I look at that, I’m not sure what traditions we’re defending at this point?

I’m not sure what the West is, so if you’re going to defend the West or indeed attack the West, you need to think, “well, what is it then?” And if I’m talking about the Machine, I think that is what the modern West now is. It may not be what the West was in the Middle Ages, but this thing we call the West now is really a manifestation of this modern way of seeing. I actually don’t want to defend that.

So, I find myself in this kind of bind because I come from here and I’d rather that place wasn’t dismantled. I’ve got children who’ve got to grow up in it. I want to give them some values, but while I can dislike what a lot of the radical Left is doing, I can see to some degree why they’re doing it.

I’m not convinced by the uncomplicated unquestioning defenders of the West because what they often end up defending is a kind of capitalism, or a very statist version of Christianity. A Fifties-style conservatism that actually they probably don’t really want to live in themselves.

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FS: So you are ready to let the West die. I mean, there is a chapter called “The West Must Die”. You write, “maybe we need to let the West die, let it die so that we can live.”

PK: What I’m thinking is that this thing that we call the West, which has become an idol — either because the Left want to tear it down because it’s the cis-heteronormative patriarchy, or because the Right want to defend it because the Left are trying to tear it down — has become a thing which actually doesn’t have anything to do with real culture at all.

It’s almost like a trauma response. We’ve lost all of our actual, real culture. If we go back to those “four Ps” — “People”, “Place”, “Prayer” and “the Past” — most of us aren’t living in most of those things anymore.

So if we let go of this notion of the West, whether we’re attacking it or defending it. Maybe we can concentrate on creating human scale cultures again, which is, I think the best way to create some form of friction or resistance to this Machine way of seeing.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have big arguments at all, that none of these issues matter. They do. You have to stand up for things that are true. You have to stand up against things that are wrong or evil, but actually the real stuff is going to come from trying to recreate real culture again.

FS: That is the final part of your book, really, where you conclude by offering a suggestion of how we might live inside the Machine. What you move towards is a kind of secession from the crumbling culture around us, an acceptance that it’s dying and will not survive. Will you just talk a bit about that? How would that work for people?

PK: I think it’s already crumbled. The things that we used to believe in have pretty much already gone. That gives you the freedom to start again. Not that you’re going to start with the blank slate, but you need to draw on the best of the past. The Machine rips up everything from its roots, and that’s a kind of liberation process, but it’s also a destruction process. You need to try and build from the bottom up.

This is all very doomy. We’re talking about the Antichrist and things. But for a Christian, the coming of the Antichrist is all good, because it’s all fine after that. Everything gets sorted. So we’re waiting for that day.

Even though the world looks crazy and horrible and depressing, there’s a hope to it precisely because everything’s falling down, and you can now say: “Well, how are we going to get back to actually trying to be human again?” Once you face this kind of digital Moloch that’s around us, you actually have to ask what it means to be human.

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Peter Thiel and the Antichrist

By Mattia Ferraresi

Coming back to the whole Antichrist question, I quote Eliezer Yudkowsky, a mad Silicon Valley eccentric, who’s very opposed to AI. He thinks AI systems will destroy us. And if anyone is developing AI in their countries, then you need to bomb the data centres of that country and destroy their electricity network. He’s a kind of Silicon Valley Ted Kaczynski.

FS: Yes, the bombing of the data centres. It’s in the book. You say: “bombing the data centres, this is the mindset of the raw ascetic.” I would say, although you’re not explicitly calling for it, you’re not not calling for it…

PK: You could bomb the data-centres, which — if they were developing superhuman AI — would be a good idea. But unless you’ve changed your way of seeing, someone’s going to build more of these things. They always get built again, which is the argument people use against Yudkowsky, because if we stopped building AI, someone else would build them.

FS: There’s the polite version of Paul Kingsnorth, and then not far beneath the surface there is the much more radical activist. You talk with great affection about the Luddites, who were smashing looms and rejecting the Industrial Revolution, and the Fen Tigers, who resisted the draining of the fens. 

PK: I’m very happy to call myself a Luddite. People always call me a Luddite. I embrace that because what the Luddites did was reject certain types of technology that were going to enslave them. You can see what these people [in Silicon Valley] are trying to build. And then you say: “What the hell are we going to do about that?” I started off when I was 21 as a road protester and I believe in non-violent direct action. I kind of still do.

FS: So you’ve come full circle? 

PK: The principle behind that is very Gandhian. Which is that if you need to destroy a technology, which is going to in itself destroy life, then it’s a justifiable thing to do if you’re not harming people. But I don’t how you would apply that to an interconnected global digital system because there is no heart.

There’s no central computer that you can just hit with a pickaxe and the whole thing shuts down. Which is why it feels more like an interconnected way of seeing the rise of some being, or just the rise of our own slightly warped way of seeing, turning into a kind of technological system, like a central nervous system. There isn’t really any way to shut that down other than seeing differently. So I do move between these poles. Do I think we should bomb data centres or do I think we should read Iain McGilchrist? Or do I think we should do both?

Probably both, but I don’t know.

You’ve got to draw your own lines, decide what you’re going to do, decide what you’re not going to allow to happen. I’m not going to ever use an AI. I think if you don’t draw lines, you’re just going to get sucked in.

FS: The other sensitive aspect of this book is how your ideas relate to the ascendant radical Right in politics.

We had that huge Tommy Robinson march last week, animated by protest against immigration and a desire to reassert the indigenous culture. It would be possible, I think, to read this book and be inspired to go on those kind of marches. You use the word indigenous a lot. When describing what you don’t like about the West, you single out “the insistence that African children should attend Western-style schools and be issued laptops; that India should adopt our patented pharmaceutical medicines; that Pacific Islanders should become Protestant Christians in suits and ties”.

What did you mean by that?

PK: This is the promotion of the global system of western capitalism around the world, which just razes all cultures and homogenises them. I’m very clear in the book repeatedly, actually, about what I’m talking about.

I don’t know what’s going on these marches in London. I don’t even read the news really, but this sort of manifestation of Christian Nationalism is balls. And I’ve spoken out about it quite clearly actually.

I gave a talk a couple years ago called “Against Christian Civilisation”, which was specifically about the manifestation of what’s basically idol worship, where you take Christianity, which is a spiritual path of renunciation and radicalism, and demands to reject wealth and reject the idols of nations, and you turn that somehow into a new crusade of waving pictures of people around and talking about muscular Christianity. It’s just the endless corruption of the Christian faith that’s been going on for 2,000 years, and it’s absolutely nonsense. And in terms of indigeneity, I would never talk about that in an uncomplicated way.

I’m actually very clear in the book when I do talk about that. And I’m also very clear about what I’m against, which is all this kind of stuff you are talking about. When you start talking about cultural purity or racial purity, at least on the hard Right, then you’ve been suckered. I start the book by talking about Simone Weil’s book, The Need for Roots, and Weil is certainly not any kind of Right-wing or far-Right character. But she writes this book during the Nazi occupation of Europe, and she’s French and she’s fighting for the Free French in London. And she says that everyone is uprooted in the modern world. And what the Nazis have done is they’ve taken that concern and they’ve turned it into this hideous, monstrous racial thing. How can we actually root ourselves again without getting sucked in by that?

So you have to be able to talk about this in an intelligent way and in a sensitive way, which I hope I’ve done in the book. I don’t think anyone could seriously read that and not be very clear about what I’m for and what I’m not.

But be careful of idol worship. Don’t worship the idols of nations or the idols of false versions of Christianity or religion. Anything that involves you raging against a bunch of people who are different to you. Whatever side you’re on, you’re in trouble. That doesn’t mean you can’t have the serious discussions about what it actually means to be rooted and what you should actually be doing politically, but I really see what’s happening in the West at the moment as a manifestation of that massive process of uprooting and just people on all sides of the spectrum.

FS: You end up by embracing a political label: reactionary radical. What does that mean?

PK: John Calhoun uses the phrase “reactionary radicals” when critiquing E.P. Thompson, the Marxist historian: he says, look, you can’t divide people at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution into the two simple categories of workers or capitalists, the working class and the bourgeoisie, because what the Luddites are doing in communities like them, is trying to resist the coming of the factory system, the coming of capitalism, because they can see it’s going to completely destroy them. It’s going to destroy their industry. It’s going to turn them into wage slaves, it’s gonna destroy their households. So they’re reactionary in that sense.

They’re reacting against that system, which is a good thing. But they’re radical as well because they don’t react against it because they want to go back to the past as if it was perfect. They want changes as well, right? They want things that will actually benefit them because the system currently does not benefit them.

He calls these people reactionary radicals. And I think if you look at tribal people in India resisting dams or the West Papuans, resisting logging firms in the Indonesian government, or the Fen Tigers or the Luddites throughout history, what you can see is reactionary radicals. You can see people fighting the Machine, but from a perspective of wanting a radically different way of living.

So it’s not a simple sort of reaction where you just go, “oh, everything was wonderful in the past. Let’s go back to that.” But neither is it an ideological radicalism like you would get with the Marxists, where you say: “we’ve got a grand utopian theory of everything and we’re just going to impose that now even if we have to kill everyone and put them into camps.”

It’s based on human scale culture. It reacts against the Machine. So I like that. I like that as a phrase. It’s the best description I’ve ever heard of what I think I believe in.

If we’re going to talk about politics as a way of seeing, you have to have a politics that is rooted in the past, that’s rooted in reality. Rooted in nature and eternal things, but that doesn’t idolise them. Or turn them into excuses to hate a bunch of people who aren’t the same as you, which is the problem that we’ve got at the moment, and that’s what the Right’s going to end up doing if it’s not very careful indeed.

“People”, “Place”, “Prayer” and “the Past” — however you want to formulate it. But it has to be against the Machine, literally, and it has to be very careful that whatever it does not become the worship of an idol and the excuse to project your anger and fear onto somebody else, which is why for me, my Christianity’s important.

Because if you’re going to try and be a Christian properly (and I wouldn’t claim I’m very good at it) the two great commandments are that you love God and you love your neighbour. And, by the way, Christ says: “Everyone is your neighbour.” That’s what the Good Samaritan is about.

So you actually have to try and do the thing that is possible for you to do. That is a good thing in your life at the human scale.

“Max Weber, whom we know of as a harsh melancholic realist, wrote about ‘this great and wonderful war’ and how marvelous it was to still be alive to experience it, and yet how bitter it was that his age prevented him from going to the front.”

At no point did Weber and many other war-cheerleading Germans of the time appear to consider the possibility that the war might not turn out the way they thought it would.

I see Europe in a similar position today. Like Weber, many intellectuals and politicians of our era are gung-ho about going to war with Russia. One of the biggest cheerleaders for Western military intervention is the historian Timothy Snyder, previously at Yale, now at the University of Toronto. He said in 2023: “The Russians have to be defeated, just like the Germans were defeated.”

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MAGA is coming to Europe

By Wolfgang Munchau

European politicians, too, are becoming increasingly gung-ho about fighting the Russians. One of them is Alexander Stubb, the Finnish president. I knew him from my time in Brussels, when he was a humble MEP, the embodiment of a calm, intellectual northern European. He said last week that security guarantees for Ukraine invariably mean that the guarantors are willing to fight the Russians.

I am not underplaying the security threat posed by Vladimir Putin. The intrusion of Russian fighter jets into Estonian airspace no doubt constitutes an unacceptable act of aggression. Nato has every right to shoot them down and should signal strongly that this is what will happen next time. But defending your alliance is different from fighting a proxy war in Ukraine, a country that is not part of Nato.

The Cold War was a period of relative stability not only because of balance-of-power politics, but because politicians who experienced the horrors of the Second World War wanted to secure peace. Most of that generation is no longer with us. Like Weber, today’s European elites have missed out on the opportunity to fight a glorious war. The difference is that they would prefer to let others do the fighting for them.

The likelihood of an escalation into a hot war is big enough to be taken seriously. Apart from a general war-hungry disposition, the biggest risk today is that we, like those Germans in 1914, are misjudging the enemy. Putin, too, misjudged the Western response to his invasion of Ukraine, and the resilience of the Ukrainian army. But the Western misjudgments are more persistent.

The biggest of all was that Russia’s economy was weak and would ultimately buckle under Western pressure. This misjudgment has several layers. It started off with a statistical lie — that Russia was really only a small economy. If you measure the size of the Russian economy by its annual output in US dollars, that would have indeed been the case. At the start of the war, the Russian economy was approximately the size of Spain’s if measured in US dollars. But this is not a good way to judge a country’s capacity in times of war. What matters is the spending power of their money — how many tanks their money can buy. The answer is they can buy a lot more tanks than us.

If you measure an economy on the grounds of purchasing power, a completely different picture emerges from that suggested by our complacent statistic. According to the World Bank, the world’s largest economy, by far, is China, provided the measurement is made on the basis of purchasing power parity. (Purchasing power parity accounts for goods being more affordable in some countries than in others.) Number two is the US. Then comes India, and then Russia. Germany, in sixth place, is the biggest of the European countries.

Based on this measure, the 10 countries that form part of an alliance with China and Russia, the so-called Brics, are bigger than the US, Western Europe and Japan together. We live in a truly bi-polar world. The US and China are the leaders of each side. We no longer call the shots, even if we think we do. Over time, the other side will become bigger, because they are growing faster than us.

Since the start of the war, Russia has outgrown all of the G7 economies. The British economist John Maynard Keynes would not have been surprised, because what happened was a classic Keynesian war economy effect. The UK experienced this effect during the Second World War. Putin re-organized Russia into a war economy.

I am emphasizing these economic facts because this is what will inform the reality on the ground in Ukraine going forward. It is money that buys weapons. This money for Ukraine has dried up. The US has given €115bn in total bilateral aid to Ukraine so far, which dwarfs Germany’s €21.3bn and €7.56bn from France. Without the US, there is absolutely no way that the Europeans could afford to bankroll the war themselves. For that, they have to borrow money.

Or they could raid the €210bn of frozen Russian assets that sit in Europe. Previously, Germany, France, Belgium and the European Central Bank have opposed an asset raid — for different reasons. Belgium has most of the money on its soil. The money sits in the vaults of Euroclear, a large financial depository based in Brussels. France and Germany might be on the line for any compensation claims should Russia win in commercial courts. The ECB believes that an asset raid is illegal and would irrevocably damage Europe’s reputation as a financial center. Under normal circumstances, it would be hopping mad for the EU to take such risks, but if they want to continue to support Ukraine, this is the only financial vehicle they have at their disposal. Now that the European Commission has come out with a proposal for unlocking the money, there is now a good chance that it could happen.

And then what? Leaving the complex technical and legal issues aside, the EU will run into a problem very similar to Margaret Thatcher’s caricature of socialism: eventually, they will run out of other people’s money. The misjudgment is that the €200bn will tide us over until Donald Trump leaves office, when he will be succeeded by a Democrat who will happily resume providing the lion’s share of the funding. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said recently that the war will end when Russia is economically exhausted. That’s the Western strategy.

But our sanctions have failed to cripple the Russian economy. Remember Einstein’s characterization of madness as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different outcomes. The EU has so far agreed 18 packages of sanctions against Russia. A nineteenth is now being prepared.

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Will China go to war with Trump?

By N.S. Lyons

There are indeed some signs of financial stress in the Russian economy. Russia’s central bank chief, Elvira Nabiullina, admitted earlier this year that the Russian economy managed to expand on the back of essentially free resources, labor, sequestered industrial capacity, and liquid assets from the country’s National Wealth Fund. These resources have been truly exhausted, she said. But this comment was not addressed to the West, but to Putin. Putin needs to find means to create new resources. As does the West.

But Russia has something that Ukraine has not. China is a better ally to Russia than the US is to Ukraine. The Western neocons keep on underestimating the depth of the China-Russia alliance, which is the result of inept US foreign policy over the last ten years. By placing sanctions and tariffs on both countries, the US ended up creating a strategic alliance between them. The US, meanwhile, is much more detached from Ukraine under Trump than under Biden.

The mistaken idea behind Western sanctions is that Russia and China are dependent on Western technology like semiconductor chips. Very much to the surprise of the Biden administration, China managed to build high-performance chips themselves. Last week, China turned the tables by placing a ban on the import of Nvidia chips.

The €200bn in frozen assets that we might unleash in loans to Ukraine can also easily be matched by the other side. China could give a loan to Russia, collateralized on Western assets in China, or on receipts from legal compensation that Russia may be entitled to in the future. It is an ongoing misjudgment to think that the West — the smaller part of our duopolistic world — is going to smoke out the larger one.

Misjudgment of this scale and number is what turns regional wars into world wars. Our army of tweeting, war-hungry Western intellectuals are Max Weber’s successors. They leave me in no doubt that there is substantial support for a glorious war, just as there was over 100 years ago.

The Fifth Republic is far from alone here. For Western democracy is under threat — not from “foreign adversaries”, or “far-Right populists”, but from its own elites. Whether in Britain, Germany or Ireland, censorship has become routine across Europe and beyond, even as dissent is increasingly criminalized and legal systems are weaponized to suppress opposition. In recent months, these trends have escalated into direct assaults on the basic institutions of democratic governance. In Romania, to give one example, an entire election was annulled because it delivered the wrong outcome, while other countries contemplate similar measures too.

In theory, all this is being carried out in the name of defending democracy. In truth, the purpose is clear: to help ruling elites maintain their grip on power in the face of a historic collapse of legitimacy. Whether they will succeed in doing so remains to be seen. What is clear, though, is that the stakes are enormous. If elites manage to entrench their control through increasingly authoritarian means, the West will enter a new era of managed democracy — or democracy in name only. If they fail, and in the absence of a coherent alternative, the resulting vacuum may give way to deepening instability, social unrest and systemic crisis. Either way, the outlook for the future of Western democracy is grim.

Critics have been raising alarms about this elite-driven democratic backsliding for years. As far back as 2000, political scientist Colin Crouch coined the term “post-democracy” to describe the fact that, even though Western societies boasted the trappings of freedom, they had increasingly become a meaningless facade. Elections, Crouch argued, had become tightly managed spectacles, orchestrated by professional persuaders who operated within a shared neoliberal consensus — pro-market, pro-business, pro-globalization — and offered voters little choice on fundamental political or economic questions. Citizens, for their part, played a passive role, helpless in the face of political and corporate power. Politics, Crouch said, was “slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times”.

Crouch was writing at the peak of what Francis Fukuyama famously called the end of history. In the political scientist’s telling, the Cold War’s end, and the global triumph of Western liberal democracy, marked the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”. Subsequent upheavals — especially following the 2007-8 financial crisis — shattered any illusion of history’s halt. Yet Fukuyama’s core argument wasn’t so much that the clock of history had stopped spinning, but that, from then on, there would be no essential challenge to liberal democracy and market capitalism, deemed the pinnacle of social evolution.

For a while, Fukuyama’s prediction proved correct. The historical defeat of socialism shrank the ideological space in the West, foreclosing any fundamental challenge to capitalism and enabling the emergence of a technocratic, depoliticized governance model underpinned by the “TINA” (There Is No Alternative) consensus around neoliberalism — centered on individual responsibility, market hegemony and globalization. Left-wing protests, whether against globalization or the Iraq War, failed to transition into formal politics. On the contrary, much of the post-Cold War Left, having abandoned class conflict for liberal-cosmopolitan identity politics, became a legitimizing force for an aggressive “progressive neoliberalism” — a fusion of pseudo-progressivism and neoliberal economic policies.

Geopolitically, meanwhile, US “hyperpower” status allowed it to aggressively assert global hegemony, creating a unipolar “new world order”. This was underpinned by structural economic shifts within the West: the decline of traditional manufacturing, and the Fordist-Keynesian social contract, replaced by services, labor dispersion, precarity and fragmentation. Most Western countries saw manufacturing employment decline by a third-to-half in absolute numbers. This pulverized the working class as a unified political subject — along the way wrecking trade unions and other material symbols of postwar mass politics.

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This historical trend was exacerbated by policies deliberately aimed at reducing labor’s bargaining power (anti-union laws, labor market flexibilization), and promoting privatized consumerism and apathy. Meanwhile, decision-making processes were increasingly insulated from democratic pressures, chiefly through the surrendering of national prerogatives to supranational institutions and super-state bureaucracies such as the European Union. This strategy of depoliticizing democracy birthed what some have called “post-politics”: a regime where political spectacle thrives, but where systemic alternatives to the neoliberal status quo are not just repressed but foreclosed. The American journalist Thomas Friedman aptly described the post-political neoliberal regime as one where “policy choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke” — minor variations within an unchallenged framework.

The concept of post-politics inevitably intersects with that of democracy. A minimalist view of democracy, focused only on rules and elections, suggests it survived the “end of history”, as formal institutions persisted and in some cases expanded (such as in former communist states). Yet substantive democracy — meaning citizens’ ability to actively shape government policy and the political agenda — has eroded dramatically. With no systemic alternative, politics and substantive democracy withered, resulting in declining voter turnout. One might say that the defining characteristic of post-democracy is that, despite the existence of elections, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. Instead, power and influence are concentrated in the hands of a small subset of society.

Of course, since authors like Crouch first diagnosed this hollowing out of democracy from within, things have become exponentially worse, especially in the wake of the financial crisis. The post-democratic politics of the neoliberal era were actually intensified during the 2010s, becoming increasingly repressive and authoritarian. In the EU, under the pretext of responding to the financial and euro crises, the bloc’s supranational institutions (notably the ECB and European Commission) dramatically expanded their powers, imposing budgetary rules and structural reforms on member states without democratic oversight.

Beyond these institutional shifts, meanwhile, unelected elites increasingly interfered in the democratic processes of member states. The ECB’s “monetary coup” against Berlusconi in 2011, where the central bank effectively forced the prime minister to leave office by making his ouster the precondition for further support for Italian bonds and banks, is one good example here. The financial blackmail of Greece’s Tsipras government is another. Taken together, anyway, these events led some observers to suggest that the EU was becoming a “post-democratic prototype” — one fiercely opposed to national sovereignty and democracy both.

The scorched earth left behind by the financial crisis, and the elite-imposed austerity that followed, fueled in the mid-2010s our century’s first major anti-establishment uprisings: Brexit, Trump, the Yellow Vests and growing anti-EU sentiment across Europe. This mass awakening seemingly marked the “end of the end of history”, a widespread rejection of the post-Cold War neoliberal order. Even so, these challenges ultimately failed — absorbed or neutralized by the establishment through repression and ideological counter-offensives.

In this sense, the pandemic, beyond its epidemiological nature, can be interpreted as a “deep structural event” that accelerated this authoritarian centralization of power. Governments inflated the danger of the virus to sweep aside democratic procedures, militarize societies, crack down on liberties and implement unprecedented measures of social control — in the process “freezing” democratic politics and sapping whatever energy was left from the populist movements of the late 2010s.

Similar authoritarian dynamics resurged with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, with the media-political establishment smearing, censoring and even punishing voices critical to Western hawkishness. Just over a month ago, the EU, in a shocking and utterly unprecedented decision, sanctioned three EU citizens — banning them from traveling through the EU and freezing their bank accounts — for allegedly engaging in “pro-Russian propaganda”.

At the same time, new populist threats to the established order have emerged, predominantly from the Right. But so far, these too have failed to disrupt the status quo, partly because the West’s increasingly unpopular and delegitimized elites have turned to ever more brazen forms of repression to influence electoral outcomes and suppress these challenges. The Romanian case marked a fateful escalation: elites, backed by NATO and the EU, overturned a presidential election result, barring the populist candidate via unsubstantiated claims of Russian interference.

These events signal a disturbing trend: elites no longer limit themselves to “managing” electoral outcomes through “soft” or covert means — media manipulation, censorship, lawfare, economic pressure and intelligence operations. Rather, they are increasingly willing to discard the formal structures of democracy altogether. In retrospect, the “post-democratic” era of technocratic managerialism described by Crouch appears positively benign by comparison. All this repression is carried out in the name of defending democracy from so-called internal threats (populists) and external ones (foreign adversaries). Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that its true aim is shoring up elite power.

Most anti-establishment analyses of the current “crisis of democracy”, however, rest on flawed assumptions: that the current phase deviates from a historical norm; that postwar social-democratic capitalism was truly democratic; and that a return to it is possible. These assumptions crumble under scrutiny.

Western liberal democracy, even minimally defined as representative government based on universal suffrage, is a very recent phenomenon. Full male suffrage emerged in a limited number of countries only between the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Women’s suffrage generally came after the Second World War. Effective voting rights for racial minorities, such as African Americans, arrived decades later. In short, democracy as universal adult suffrage, regardless of wealth, property, race or class, has existed for mere decades. Previously, it was the exclusive domain of propertied elites, or else based on sex or skin color.

Besides, as noted above, democracy is about something far more substantial than the mere act of voting. If it means anything, it must surely allow citizens to influence the state’s direction and shape the political agenda on fundamental issues — whether immigration, foreign policy, or the overall trajectory of social and economic policy. It’s hard to claim Western democracy is thriving on those terms. Yet that still leaves one more question: if “real democracy” is now dead, was it ever alive at all?

For a relatively short period — roughly between the Forties and the Seventies — we did witness a form of democracy that was decidedly more substantive than what exists today. Over these decades, often described as the “golden age” of capitalism, the working classes were integrated into the West’s political systems for the first time in history. This allowed them to gain a significant influence over the political agenda, leading to a substantial expansion of social, economic and political rights, in a context of growing politicization of the masses. The contrast to the post-political period is very stark indeed.

All the same, it’d be wrong to idealize the mid-century West. Even then, democracy in its substantive sense remained heavily constrained. Though the ruling classes were forced — under pressure from popular movements, the Cold War, and the threat of social unrest — to extend voting rights and acknowledge a range of political and social rights, they did not do so willingly. On the contrary, they were often driven by the fear that the masses could pose a real threat to the established social order — that workers might use democracy to overturn existing power relations.

As a result, alongside economic concessions, Western elites also constrained democratic participation in various ways. Modern constitutional systems — including nascent supranational ones like the European Court of Justice, established in 1952 — explicitly limited popular sovereignty. Elected governments were prevented from enacting certain economic or social policies, or even challenging existing international alliances. All the while, power shifted. Parliaments got weaker, and technocrats and judges grew more powerful, each in their way proving capable of overriding national laws. This was often justified as a way of protecting democracy from what elites feared could be the irrational or destabilizing demands of the masses — a longstanding argument in liberal political thought that equates too much popular participation with the risk of populism, mob rule or economic irresponsibility.

In some countries, the concept of “militant democracy” became a further means to limit the popular will. In Germany, for example, it legitimized the banning of political parties, most notably the country’s Communist Party. State authorities, supported by media and institutional elites, systematically repressed demands for deeper democratization, whether via police force, media delegitimization or institutional restructuring. Meanwhile, Western “permanent states” — the military, intelligence and security apparatuses — exercised considerable influence behind the scenes, generally under the direction of the US. That infamously included terrorist acts aimed at curbing the power of Left parties and movements, for example through Gladio. In short, from the very beginning of modern liberal democracy, the ruling classes actively worked to contain democracy within the boundaries of what they deemed acceptable politics.

All the same, for a while, the organized power of the masses was indeed able to constrain, to a greater degree than ever before, the power of capital. As noted, however, this brief period of relative substantive democracy depended on a unique confluence of factors. As these conditions crumbled from the mid-Seventies, the marriage between capitalism and democracy dissolved.

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The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the symbolic end of this era. In the decades since, we have witnessed a steady erosion of democratic norms — a process that has accelerated dramatically in recent years. Relevant, here, is Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception”, whereby constitutional safeguards are suspended to impose decisions unachievable via normal democratic channels. Yet as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben emphasized over 20 years ago, the state of exception has now become a permanent condition in Western states.

This, of course, is a paradox: if it is permanent, then, by definition, it is no longer a state of exception. It becomes the rule. But is this permanent state of exception unique to the “post-democratic” era? An analysis of the postwar era suggests not. Rather, it is a fundamental characteristic of the state itself, even in its liberal-democratic guise. This challenges common conceptions of the state: across the Western world, we are accustomed to identifying the state with the executive and with parliament, assuming that these institutions act in accordance with constitutions and the rule of law.

But this is a misunderstanding: the state doesn’t coincide with the institutions of representative democracy. Rather, the two belong to entirely distinct spheres of politics. On the one hand, there is the politics of the state. On the other, there is what we might call popular politics, embodying popular sovereignty and typified by political parties, trade unions, social movements and civil society. The state operates with a significant degree of autonomy from the latter, meaning it is not only largely independent of civil society, but also of parliaments and even governments themselves.

In theory, after all, state bureaucracies act as neutral executors of government policy. In reality, they often act independently of, or even in opposition to, elected parliaments and governments, particularly when it comes to protecting institutional continuity, legal norms or elite interests. Supreme and constitutional courts, for example, frequently rule against government policies — especially when it comes to controversial issues like immigration. The way in which the Bank of England derailed Liz Truss’s infamous mini-budget is another example here. This phenomenon is obviously much more pronounced when national governments are subordinated to supranational institutions, as in the European Union. And then, of course, you have the military and intelligence bureaucracies, which today arguably exercise more influence than ever before (see, for instance, the Russiagate hoax).

The state thus emerges as a social organism endowed with its own internal logic and continuity, capable of pursuing goals and directions often independent of those declared or pursued by the political leadership of the day. This has always been true — even if, depending on the relative balance of class forces within society, the state may at times be forced to make concessions to the forces of popular politics. In other words, then, today’s crisis doesn’t represent democracy’s sudden collapse, but instead the unveiling of how power truly works. The contemporary crisis of Western democracy exposes the limits of formal democratic institutions, bringing the logic of state power into blindingly sharp relief.

The future, unfortunately, seems bleak. The conditions enabling the brief period of substantive democracy are gone, and unlikely to return soon. In a real sense, substantive democracy is dead. Even so, the unraveling geopolitical order underpinning Western dominance — challenged by the emergence of a multipolar order underpinned by the rise of powers like China — marks a profound political and economic shift. The erosion of Western hegemony is weakening its elites, whose dominance has long relied on both internal suppression and power projection abroad. Declining influence overseas exacerbates domestic discontent, especially when fueled by rising and systemic inequality.

This unraveling exposes the structural weaknesses of the Western system. Without the geopolitical stability and economic dominance that once masked its internal contradictions, elites are growing more vulnerable. Crucially, this decline also paves the way for a potential new order — not just a geopolitical reconfiguration, but a potential reimagining of political and economic systems. As Western elites grapple with their waning power, there are vast opportunities for alternative visions of governance and democracy.

What lies ahead is not merely a question of whether democracy can be “restored”, but whether a new political project can emerge to replace the exhausted model of elite-managed liberalism. The old order is collapsing, but the new has yet to be born. In this vacuum, anything can happen.

Spengler argued that the dominant civilization in the West was on the inexorable downward part of its cycle, and heading for dissolution. I doubt he would have thanked me for punning so egregiously on his magnum opus — and yet, this week, I found myself remembering that work in the context of the contemporary decline, of a different West: Kanye.

West, whose recent torrent of barely-coherent livestream and interview rants attests to an increasingly erratic public persona and possible mental health issues, prompted shock and disgust when he released a new song titled “Heil Hitler”. Launched to coincide with VE Day, it was promptly denounced across the political spectrum as “classic 1930s style antisemitism”, “fascist art”, and “a crude, adolescent chant of racial slurs and fascist glorification masquerading as music”.

So what would Spengler make of this musical work? Would he be Heil Hitlering with Kanye? Some historians draw a line from Romanticism, through Spengler, to the Nazis, notably via the idea that ethnocultural groups share the kind of mystical national consciousness George Mosse called “Völkish moods”. And it’s true that Spengler has since reappeared at intervals, as a touchstone for the Right.

But despite his Romantic literary roots, Spengler himself thought Hitler was “an idiot”, and called the Nazis an “organization of the unemployed by the workshy”. So I doubt he would have seen much of moral or political worth in a hip-hop tune with the chorus line “Nigga, heil Hitler”. And yet his analysis is useful when considering Kanye — offering both short-term reassurance as to what it represents, and also, as you might expect, a longer-term prognosis that is far from happy.

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Spengler died in 1936, but much of his contemporary success and subsequent influence rested on predicting the decline into “Caesarism” that, he thought, would accompany this end-stage “Winter” phase he believed Western civilization to have entered. When the publication of Decline was followed, in short order, by the era of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, Spengler was hailed as a prophet — only to fall out of fashion again as the 20th century wore on and the forces of liberal democracy re-asserted themselves.

Interest in his work tends to revive in periods of turmoil and economic downturn, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the end of the End of History has been accompanied by something of a Spengler revival. But if there’s a sense in which Spengler helps us understand Kanye’s musical development, it’s less in diagnosing his latest single as ominous harbinger of incipient fascism in America. He did predict that “Caesarism” would come in waves, and would doubtless have expected the authoritarians of the early twentieth century to be only the first of these. But even so, Spengler helps us here mainly by revealing that “Heil Hitler” doesn’t have much directly to do with authoritarianism at all. Rather, it sets Kanye’s work in the context of two cultural currents, in both of which Spengler is implicated: first, a Romantic tradition of anti-modernist, usually masculine-coded rebellion; and second the endemic path towards general brutalization that Spengler saw as inherent in end-stage civilization: a brutalization he thought would, in time, give way to a “new primitivism”.

Modernity, in his view, was not the perfection of Western civilization, but the beginning of its “Winter” and herald of its inexorable collapse. The Romantic tradition from which he wrote has been with us more or less since the beginning of this era, in reaction to its character. It’s less a coherent programme than a sensibility: a revolt against everything cold, clean, procedural, and rationalistic that comes with the secular, technological, disenchanting modern worldview.

At its core, though, Romanticism always seeks what is deeper, higher, and more soulful, emphasizing the role of feeling. Goethe’s 1774 The Sorrows of Young Werther offers an early instance of such intense emotionality; on publication the book triggered copycat suicides. Half a century later, the same reckless and sometimes self-destructive intensity made Romantic poet Lord Byron “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, and — another century on — prompted Julius Evola, a Romantic contemporary of Spengler’s and father of the modern esoteric far Right, to call for “revolt against the modern world”.

Today this kind of revolt has, itself, become commodified by the modern world against which it rebelled — and nowhere is this more apparent than in the music industry. Most forms of transgression are mere grist to its mill of transgression-as-product: audiences seem only mildly titillated by (for example) Satanic metal bands or drill artists who boast in music of murders, drug deals and other criminal activities.

In this jaded environment, it’s remarkable in a narrow sense that West has managed to find a way to be genuinely shocking. Jewish groups and allies are rightly furious and distressed. And yet the song itself is more driven by inchoate fury than Nazism as such. West says so in the song: “I got so much anger in me, got no way to take it out”. This is, he says, the fault of a vague “they”, who have taken his kids off him and closed his bank account: “With all of the money and fame I still don’t get to see my children”.

So now he wants people to understand his depth of emotion: “Niggas see my Twitter but they don’t see how I be feeling.” And the only way to express his fury is through the only remaining taboo with real shock power. “I became a Nazi, yeah, bitch, I’m the villain.” In context, then, “Heil Hitler” is less coherent ideology than ultimate swear-word: the adult equivalent of a pre-schooler saying “pee pee poo poo”, to get a reaction from his mum.

In other words, the song is pure, distilled essence of male rebellion, in direct continuity with a centuries-old Romantic tradition but today most palpably felt in the noisome underbelly of the internet. Here, especially since GamerGate, a “dissident Right” subculture (aided by a side order of Nietzsche, Evola, and Spengler among others) helped propel Donald Trump into power. “Heil Hitler” is this subculture in musical form, voicing a masculinist backlash whose ripples spread well beyond West’s individual circumstances.

And there’s also a second sense in which the song invites a Spenglerian reading. Writing a century ago, Spengler forecast a future of drab, universal uniformity, in which national differences are largely abolished and life concentrated into “megalopolis” world-cities. In this brutalizing environment, competing peoples would spend their days in repetitive tasks, assuaged by vulgar diversions — until a new primitivism emerged that would eventually drive the collapse of this dying civilization. In Spengler’s vivid formulation: “Money is overthrown and abolished by blood.”

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Spengler envisaged an end-point where, “The sword is victorious over the money, the master-will subdues again the plunderer-will”. It’s reasonable to surmise that those cheering on the Trumpian backlash from the depths of the “dissident” internet would understand themselves as aligned with the re-assertion of a martial over a managerial spirit. But what if the internet Nazism as an expression of rage does not, in fact, signal the return of martial spirit? What if it’s just another spasm of brutalization and dissolution, en route to the bottom of the cycle?

If this were so, it would be reasonable to expect any political victory applauded by a dissident caucus not to be followed by much in the way of substantial policy change. And indeed, since Trump’s victory, the so-called “dissident Right” has grown increasingly marginal within the emerging government coalition. The anti-DEI activist Chris Rufo explained why, distinguishing between those effective as critics and gadflies, and those with the temperament for building and cooperation in an institutional environment. “In my opinion”, Rufo said, “we are lacking some of this capacity.” When he made this point on X, one of the first responses promptly illustrated it for him, replying: “I’m kind of like fuck your institutional environment”. It’s a sentiment very much in keeping with “Nigga, heil Hitler”: one of pure opposition.

The clear inference is that what we’re looking at is not some notional revival of institutional Right-wing martial spirit, fascist or otherwise. On the contrary, it’s another iteration of Young Wertheresque emotionality, largely devoid of any clear object or organizational capacity. Kanye West has ironically reversed Hitler’s cultural achievement: not appropriating Romantic tropes for Nazism, so much as appropriating Nazi ones for Romanticism.

The result isn’t a philosophical ideology. It’s undirected rage. The good news, then, is that “Nigga, heil Hitler” probably isn’t an omen of approaching military authoritarianism. The bad news is that the longer-term prognosis this suggests is not much better: just one lurch after another, down the path of moral ugliness and brutalization that Spengler saw as characteristic of civilizational “Winter”.

Spengler might also point out that none of this is to rule out another spate of Caesarism. It’s just to say those singing along to Kanye’s tune are unlikely to be the first to enlist in his army. Put simply: they’re too ornery. “I felt crushed by the system, so I became an online Nazi” has been one of the internet’s drumbeats at least since GamerGate. It took the decline of Ye West to set it to music.

Hundreds of thousands of PLA troops are about to make landfall in the largest amphibious operation since D-Day. The long-anticipated invasion of Taiwan has begun.

In Washington, the President is presented with an urgent and daunting decision. Extensive wargames have repeatedly indicated that Taiwan’s only hope for survival is for US military forces to intervene immediately and decisively, blasting much of the PLA invasion force out of the water while they are still exposed and vulnerable. Hesitation, they have learned, always leads to a grinding war of attrition that Taiwan is destined to lose. Indo-Pacific Command urges the President to unleash its “Hellscape” plan: using swarms of drones, anti-ship missiles, and attack submarines to temporarily turn the Taiwan Strait into a watery no man’s land, buying time for American reinforcements to arrive. But there is no way around the obvious reality: this will mean war between the world’s two largest nuclear-armed superpowers.

Moreover, the commanders of US air and space forces insist they be authorized to immediately attack China’s “kill chain”, the network of satellites, sensors, and command, communication, and control centers that allow long-range weapons to find and accurately hit targets. Both sides have a huge incentive to strike first, before the other does: leaving them effectively blinded. American military satellites, in particular, are invaluable, irreplaceable, and sitting ducks. The President knows his counterpart in Beijing is weighing up the same decision. But there’s a big problem: not only are many of these systems on the Chinese mainland, they’re often the same ones used to target nuclear weapons; destroying them could be interpreted as the prelude to nuclear attack — in which case the incentive becomes to “launch ‘em or lose ‘em”. The situation is already escalating out of control.

Meanwhile, China’s leader has already hesitated: he has declined to open his gambit with a Pearl Harbor-like attack on vulnerable US bases and carrier groups around the Pacific, hoping Washington may yet back down and surrender Taiwan without a fight. But he has resolved that if the US does intervene, he will immediately sign off on massive strikes against not only American forces but also the allied Japanese, South Korean, and Philippine ones as well. Russia and North Korea are awaiting a green light to play roles of their own. Suddenly, the world teeters on the edge of World War III.

***

Though this scenario is fiction, for now, the chance of a major conflict over Taiwan in the not-so-distant future is real, and growing. Xi Jinping has declared in no uncertain terms that the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China is not only essential but the very “essence” of the leader’s epochal vision for the “great rejuvenation” — making China great again by reestablishing it as the world’s number one superpower. For Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, the island democracy of 24 million people is already their territory, separated from them only by Western imperial meddling. Its return to their control is non-negotiable. As Xi thundered in a major speech in 2022, “The wheels of history are rolling on toward China’s reunification and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Complete reunification of our country must be realized, and it can, without doubt, be realized.”

Xi has assigned specific dates to this goal. He has declared that reunification must be achieved no later than 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic of China, but has also named 2035 as the date when China’s rejuvenation should be “basically realized”. Given that in 2035 Xi will likely still be in power, albeit aged 82, and that retaking Taiwan would be the nationalistic triumph to cement his political legacy in China, this appears to be his real deadline. That makes him a man in a hurry, and so he has ordered China’s military to complete its modernization program and be ready to “fight and win” a major war over Taiwan with a peer competitor (like the United States) by 2027.

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Still, Xi would clearly much prefer to take Taiwan without fighting, if at all possible. China faces numerous internal challenges — including a slowing economy, a demographic crisis, widespread corruption, and social instability. And Xi seems to have prioritized these issues over external threats (to limited success). More important, though, is the fact that war is always an inherently unpredictable and risky business, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated for analysts in Beijing. An invasion of Taiwan would be a risk of far greater magnitude, with the penalty for failure likely to be, at a minimum, the economic devastation of China, the political delegitimization of the CCP regime, and the end of Xi Jinping.

There is another reason for Beijing’s hesitation. It has long believed that the United States and the broader West is in terminal decline, that time is thus on China’s side, and that it can simply wait until American power collapses of its own accord. As a recent Heritage Foundation report details, “observation and assessment of Western civilizational strength or decline helps to shape almost every aspect of China’s policies, both foreign and domestic”. And it has paid close attention to the West’s “culture war” in particular. Viewing progressive “Left-liberal ideas as profoundly corrosive and destabilizing”, the CCP has concluded that “the West’s will and ability to put up a fight are degrading over time”, and that “if it remains on its present course, the West could even withdraw from the world stage, collapse, or split apart”. As long as China believes this, it has no logical reason to ever bother fighting the United States over Taiwan at all.

Yet this conclusion is precisely why we may now be entering a period of particular danger. Should Beijing assess that, under the Trump administration, America is successfully reversing its decline and entering an era of cultural, economic, technological, and military revitalization, then its strategic calculus is liable to flip. Like Imperial Japan, which before Pearl Harbor became obsessed by the motto “if the sun is not rising, it is setting”, China might conclude that its window of opportunity could be lost. In that case, China’s incentives would suddenly invert: it would seem advantageous to attack sooner rather than later, before its relative strength vis-à-vis the United States declined.

This danger is accentuated by the fact that China currently has a number of significant advantages in a war over Taiwan. In fact, the United States has “had its ass handed to it for years” in most wargames, as David Ochmanek, a senior RAND Corporation analyst and former deputy assistant secretary of defense, memorably put it. In particular, China possesses huge material advantages, including massive stockpiles of anti-ship missiles that can strike US surface ships from long range. Meanwhile America would run out of critical munitions within an estimated three to seven days and be unable to replace them, given that it currently takes its manufacturers nearly two years to produce a single cruise missile.

In general, a lack of domestic manufacturing capacity is the West’s most damning weakness when it comes to modern warfare. Even after three years of war in Ukraine, the United States and Europe combined still cannot match the capacity of Russia to manufacture basic munitions like artillery shells. Russia currently produces some three million shells per year, compared with 1.2 million by the US and EU together.

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China's plan to defeat the West

By George Magnus

Unlike during the Second World War, today the United States is no arsenal of democracy. As it stands, were it to find itself in an extended war of attrition with China, an industrial titan which manufactures a full 29% of the world’s goods, the US appears likely to find itself at a shocking disadvantage. For one thing, China maintains an astonishing 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US, as a leaked slide from an Office of Naval Intelligence briefing starkly exposed in 2023. China already possesses the world’s largest navy, with more than 370 vessels, compared with the US Navy’s 296.

All of which is to say that, if the CCP comes to believe that the Trump administration will succeed in its stated goal of revitalizing America’s fortunes, then it may see the near future as the best time to challenge it over Taiwan. Although that is likely to begin with a series of intermediate steps designed to test US resolve, such as a blockade of the island, rather than a full-scale invasion, intentional or unintentional escalation is not out of the question.

The situation is not hopeless, however. The United States and Taiwan don’t need to be able to dominate China militarily to prevent a war; they merely need to make an attack on the island appear so exceptionally costly to China that it never dares pull the trigger. This is what Elbridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, calls a “strategy of denial”, and it can be accomplished by focusing squarely on mass-producing and deploying asymmetric weapons such as drones, missiles, and sea mines to turn Taiwan into a veritable porcupine.

This plan is sensibly straightforward, yet still somehow manages to rankle much of Washington, including people within the conservative coalition. On the one hand, it offends the hawkish neoconservative remnant of the Republican Party, because, as Colby has explained, taking Taiwan’s defense seriously — along with the reality of China’s strength and America’s limits — will necessarily mean prioritizing Asia, requiring allies in Europe and the Middle East to provide more for their own defense instead of attempting to police the entire world ourselves.

Moreover, a focused strategy of asymmetric denial would mean reorienting billions of defense dollars currently being wastefully spent on those items most beloved by defense contractors and lobbyists: flashy big-ticket machines, such as aircraft carriers — which also happen to already be militarily obsolete. Like the battleships of old, these weapons are relics of a more ostentatious age, kept alive by Congressional pork politics, not military necessity. Finally, the strategy flies in the face of the Republican old guard’s neoliberal free-trade and free-market pieties, given that it will require a concerted, state-backed industrial and trade policy designed to quickly maximize American domestic manufacturing and rein in insecure globe-spanning supply chains.

On the other hand, the idea of defending Taiwan also causes a portion of the more non-interventionist MAGA base to bristle. Why, they ask, should America ever waste its blood and treasure to fight for an island on the other side of the world? This is a good question, but it has a good answer.

The stakes of a conflict over Taiwan are of an entirely different category than any of the wars of choice the United States has involved itself in this century. Although little Taiwan is a democracy facing down an authoritarian great power, defending an abstract ideal like democracy is not the real reason for the United States to intervene over Taiwan. Rather, the blunt truth is that if the United States fails to protect Taiwan (as it has done since 1949), this would, more than any other geopolitical catastrophe, demolish our credibility as a security provider, conclusively mark the decisive moment China achieved hegemony as the world’s new dominant superpower, and lead to the rapid collapse of the web of alliances and institutions charitably known as the “liberal international order” and less charitably as the American Empire.

And while many on the populist Right, myself included, are deeply skeptical of America’s sprawling empire and the vast costs of maintaining it, its sudden collapse would have swift and devastating consequences for the American nation at home. For one thing, our economy today is utterly dependent on running both a massive trade deficit of imports and gargantuan federal debts. The former depends on the latter, and both are completely dependent on the US Dollar maintaining its “exorbitant privilege” as the world’s reserve currency — a status it retains essentially only because the United States is the world’s top dog. A clear victory by China over Taiwan would end that privilege, with the world quickly reordering itself for a Chinese century. In the defeated United States, the result would be a simultaneous debt, financial, and economic crisis of a magnitude that would make the Great Depression seem mild. Americans’ standard of living might never recover.

The case for defending Taiwan is, therefore, firmly a matter of America’s national interest, not idealism. And to do so would be to maintain peace through strength — to avoid war through deterrence — not to seek forever wars abroad. The Trump administration should be prepared to make that case. Moreover, in so doing it can point out that all the steps necessary (bringing industry home, disciplining defense procurement, restoring military competence, and pushing allies to do more for their own defense) are fully in line with a broader America First agenda. This rearmament would be a campaign of nation-building at home, not abroad.

Still, even if political unity on the issue can be achieved, the Taiwan problem promises to be among the most pressing and consequential challenges President Trump faces throughout his second term. Taiwan lies at the center of the emerging new cold war between China and the United States, and the intensifying risk of that clash going hot is already reshaping the world. The looming specter of war over the island marks the end of one era — decades of naïve “end of history” idealism, unthinking globalization, and heedless military adventurism — and the beginning of a new age of renewed realism among nations. To deal with the next decade of acute peril, the United States will need to develop a new foreign policy to match, one that combines realism and resolve in equal measure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More from this author

Our Godless era is dead

By Paul Kingsnorth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Britain's future is Pagan

By Tom Roswell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What Pagans can learn from Christianity

By John Michael Greer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

He needn’t worry, of course, since there’s no such thing as British values. No country has a monopoly on justice, tolerance, integrity and compassion. It’s true that some nations are better known for certain values than others: the Arabs and Irish for hospitality, the Americans for freedom, the British for decency and fair play and so on. But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any inhospitable Arabs, just as there aren’t many Swedes or Nigerians who believe in indecency and foul play. Cultural differences of this kind shouldn’t distract us from the fact that the most fundamental moral values are universal. Indonesian peasants or Jamaican motor mechanics want much the same for their children as English stockbrokers. They’re no more likely to be lusting for blood or genetically inclined to robbing banks than Fiona Bruce.

Those who doubt this should take a look at world literature. Having spent much of my life reading the stuff, I know of hardly any significant piece of poetry or fiction from anywhere in the world which advocates rape, torture or genocide. This is such a remarkable fact that it passes largely unnoticed. The mythical law of averages would dictate that buried in the millions of novels, poems and plays churned out from every corner of the globe, you would find quite a few pernicious moral agendas. With the odd exception like the Marquis de Sade, however, this simply isn’t true. There are no great fascist novels.

Perhaps this is because the Huns and Vandals were too busy sacking and pillaging to write poetry. It’s also true that there’s a rift between the largely civilised values of Virgil or Horace and the atrocities perpetrated by the empire they served. In the modern era, however, with the gradual spread of humanitarianism from the 18th century onwards, it’s hard to find many people eager to defend crucifixion or mass murder. You might claim that these things are regrettably unavoidable from time to time, but not that they’re inherently good or morally indifferent. This is one way in which the age of Gladstone differs from the era of Caligula. We may not be ethically superior to the ancient Romans, but at least we feel bad about it. We are aware that there can be a discrepancy between what we value and our actual behaviour, a gap which most of us are conscientious enough to regret.

A good deal of political life involves what philosophers call a performative contradiction, where what you say is at odds with what you do. This is more bluntly known as hypocrisy or lying through your teeth; but it’s actually more complex than that, because people can believe that they believe something without actually doing so. (They can also believe something while not knowing they do.) To determine what someone in this situation really thinks, it’s advisable to examine the beliefs implicit in their behaviour rather than rely simply on what they say. If I profess to love white mice but spend all my free time dissecting them without anaesthetic, then it isn’t true that I love white mice, whatever my protestations. Compassion is a matter of what you do, not what you feel. It doesn’t diminish the value of handing a coin to a beggar that you don’t feel a warm glow as you do so.

There is, then, a surprising degree of global consensus about what constitutes sound moral values. As far as I’m aware, there are no political parties anywhere in the world fighting for inequality, injustice and a callous indifference to the suffering of others. Plenty of political organisations promote these values in reality, but we haven’t yet reached the point where they inscribe them proudly on their banners. We have yet to witness the emergence of the Screw the Poor party or Put All Women On the Moon campaign, though this could still happen. There may come a time when the desirability of genocide is once again touted, as it was with the Nazis. In the meanwhile, however, vice pays homage to virtue by denying its own nature and masquerading as a form of righteousness, or at least as an unfortunate necessity.

Surely, though, there are regimes, perhaps autocratic Islamic states in particular, which flagrantly flout much of what we in the West hold dear? There are indeed such set-ups, but we should recall that one of the most regular offenders against so-called Western values has been the West. What of the atrocities committed by the British in Kenya, the Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam? The list could be extended indefinitely. Some Islamic countries preach intolerance, but those who abhor this bigotry should try being a communist in some parts of the US or a Muslim in some areas of France (one might soon have to add: a Catholic in Ireland).

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Keir Starmer and the triumph of the middle class

By Terry Eagleton

Tolerance is a rightly limited commodity: Britain doesn’t tolerate those who practise hate speech, or those who blow up children for ideological reasons. In any case, the values of authoritarian regimes are largely rejected by the people forced to live under them, which is why we witness regular outbreaks of rebellion in such places. They are a sign that these men and women are just as devoted to justice and freedom as the citizens of the West, and that many of them, like Alexei Navalny, are ready to give their lives for them. When there is no dissent, it doesn’t mean that men and women are delighted to be locked up and beaten but that they are fearful of voicing their own views.

It isn’t that some people think that mass beheadings are a splendid idea while others don’t, still less that these groups correspond respectively to the West and the Rest. The United States may not celebrate mass beheadings, but it certainly believes in mass electrocutions. The true difference lies in how we justify our values. Almost everyone objects to rape and murder, not just flag-waving British patriots from Hampshire or Sussex, but we can’t agree on why we agree on this. And this is a genuinely novel historical situation, one which would have struck a citizen of ancient Athens or 14th century Florence as bizarre in the extreme. The modern age is the first in history which must acknowledge that we disagree on the most fundamental of questions; that we shall probably never achieve a consensus on these matters; that we consequently have to find ways of peacefully coexisting while radically dissenting from each other’s most cherished convictions; and that this is known as liberalism. Ethics isn’t a list of decrees but an endless argument. Oscar Wilde valued lying, indolence, insincerity, superficiality, extravagance, hyperbole and saying the most outrageous things purely for theatrical effect. The Sussex flag-wavers may find this scandalous, but so-called British values demand that it be given house room.

Farage’s targeting of the young is unsurprising, given that Right-wingers like himself have a disreputable history of picking on that particular cohort. The young, and not just those of Muslim persuasion, are more likely to question the conventional mores of the time than the middle-aged, which is why they make a lot of conservatives uneasy.

Maybe national service will get them to shape up. This is really quite a smart idea from a Tory standpoint, since many of the values which young people in Britain are wary of are military in origin. Like hospitality in Arabs, they are cultural traits rather than basic moral values. Loyalty, team-spirit, toughness, honour, character, valour, austerity, self-discipline, leadership, physical prowess: the nation divides between those like the present monarch who consider these values utterly vital, and those who think they have their origin in a tiny, unrepresentative sector of society (the officer class, public schools, Boy Scouts and so on), and stem ultimately from Britain’s repressive colonial history. Why should you conceal your emotions, sometimes with psychologically devastating results? Because if you don’t, you may betray weakness in the eyes of your colonials, and in doing so risk even more devastating consequences.

Finally, there is a curious phenomenon known as family values, which are particularly popular in the US. Families centre on children, and children aren’t supposed to know about sex, so family values really means “no sex”. If children can’t talk about it or be interested in it, neither should we. Family values means a way of life permanently arrested before the 9pm watershed.

America is, of course, an intensely Christian nation, unlike Godless Britain, which makes its love of the family rather puzzling. The New Testament is consistently hostile to this institution, a fact which seems not to have been noted in Delaware or Wichita Falls. It begins with a sexual transgression on the part of God himself, who enters the womb of a Palestinian virgin. The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is a parody of a regular domestic unit. Jesus answers his parents sharply after he is lost in the temple, and gives a similarly abrupt response to Mary when she asks him to perform a miracle at Cana. When he is told that some of his family are waiting to speak to him, he tells them brusquely to wait. A woman who cries out that his mother should be blessed also gets the rough edge of his tongue. He has come, he declares, to set one family member against the other, pitting son against father and mother against daughter. It doesn’t sound at all like the kind of thing that would go down well at a Trump rally — let alone a party organised by Nigel Farage.

Anyone who knows anything about actual firefights involving professional soldiers will know that this isn’t what happens. (First-timers in combat, sure, but Stormtroopers are supposed to be competent.) In other words, Stormtroopers aren’t there to do anything useful. They’re there to provide the illusion of deadly peril so that the fake heroics of the protagonists look a little less unconvincing to movie audiences. 

There’s a reason for this kind of absurdity, of course. Popular entertainment in Western industrial nations today is as thickly larded with moral posturing of this sort as anything Victorian parents inflicted on their children. In most popular genres, the basic premise is that the Good People always win, and the Bad People always lose.

That colossus of the modern imagination, J.R.R. Tolkien, has some responsibility for all this. In his programmatic essay “On Fairy-Stories”, he discussed one of the central plot schemes of fairy tales, which he called “eucatastrophe”: in plainer English, a sudden improbable turn for the better that saves the day when all is lost. As you’d expect from a devout conservative Christian like Tolkien, this theme is ultimately religious in nature — he described the resurrection of Jesus as the ultimate eucatastrophe — and it provided the frame for his two gargantuan fairy tales, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

To give him due credit, Tolkien went out of his way to make his eucatastrophes as plausible as he could. Most of the ninth-rate Tolkien imitators whose fetid output bathes the brains of today’s mass-media consumers stopped worrying about such petty concerns a long time ago. It doesn’t matter how much stronger and smarter and better armed the Bad People are; they have to lose because they’re the Bad People. Nor does it matter how idiotic the plan the Good People decide on, the Bad People are required to make the mistakes that will enable it to succeed. When the chips are down, you know that Harry Potter will always manage to drop the One Ring from his X-wing into the cooling port of Mount Doom.

This sort of silliness makes for dreary storytelling, but I’m convinced that it can also cause serious cognitive disabilities. Children who are raised on a steady diet of this kind of schlock are apt to end up thinking that this is how the world works. If they get out into the real world and bloody their noses a few times, they generally learn better, but if they live in a society that doesn’t let them fail, they may well reach adulthood without ever encountering that salutary lesson. Instead, they are seduced by Stormtrooper Syndrome: the conviction that no matter what, you’ll inevitably win because you think you’re morally superior to your enemies.

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There’s no shortage of examples of Stormtrooper Syndrome these days, but I’m going to focus on the most important of the lot, the one that bids fair to transform the world’s political and economic landscape in the years immediately ahead. Yes, we need to talk about Ukraine. Now, this emphatically does not mean that we need to talk about who gets to claim the roles of Good People and Bad People. The unwelcome truth is that the outcome of this war does not depend on which side is morally better than the other. In the real world, in terms of military victory and defeat, who’s right and who’s wrong don’t matter once the cannon start to roar. 

The roots of the Russo-Ukrainian war go back a very long time, but for present purposes we can begin in 2014 — when a coup overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian government and replaced it with a pro-Nato one. With the new regime in place, and following the Russian military incursion into eastern Ukraine, the US and its allies began funding a build-up that gave Ukraine the second-largest army in Europe. That army was armed and trained with an eye toward a massive shift in military affairs that was then underway.

In 2006, the Israelis launched one of their periodic incursions into Lebanon. To the surprise of many, the Hezbollah militia dealt the Israelis a bloody nose and forced them to withdraw with their main goals unachieved. The Israelis, like every other modern army at that time, used the tactics that had been pioneered by the Wehrmacht in 1939 and 1940, and perfected by Soviet and US militaries in the years immediately following: massive assaults by tanks and mobile infantry supported by air superiority, driving deep into enemy territory to get behind the defenders’ lines. 

What Hezbollah demonstrated is that those tactics had passed their sell-by date. Having built a network of underground shelters and urban strongholds, they lay low while the Israeli vanguard moved past, then popped up and started clobbering Israeli units with sudden ambushes using state-of-the-art weapons. A decade later, the Ukrainian military imitated these tactics, building a massive network of defensive works just west of the Russian-held areas of the Donbas.

These defences were useful when the full-scale invasion came, denying Russia a swift victory and tying them into a gruelling stalemate. As strategies go, this was fairly good, but it had two serious weak points. The first was that it needed to be twinned with an economic sanctions package from the West that would succeed in breaking Russia’s domestic economy and forcing them to withdraw. The second was that it assumed the Russians would stick to pre-2006 military doctrine no matter how badly things went. That’s where Stormtrooper Syndrome first showed up. The decision-makers in Washington, Brussels, and Kyiv had convinced themselves that those weak points didn’t matter because the Ukrainians were the Good People and the Russians were the Bad People.

Then, last February, war broke out. At first, events seemed to play into the West’s hands. The Russians launched a classic Blitzkrieg operation, driving deep into Ukrainian territory, only to find that the Ukrainians fell back on prepared defences and urban strongholds. Some Russian units suffered embarrassing defeats; others found themselves overextended in hostile territory and retreated. Meanwhile, the US and the EU slapped sanctions on the Russian economy. 

But that’s when the plan ran straight off the rails. The first difficulty was that most of the world’s nations didn’t cooperate with the sanctions. Some, such as Iran and China, that are hostile to the US saw the situation as an opportunity to extend a middle finger to their enemies. Others, such as India and Brazil that are non-aligned powers, saw the situation as a chance to demonstrate their independence. Still other nations wanted Russian oil and grain and weren’t willing to forgo them, so they acted in accordance with their interests rather than ours.

Yet there was another difficulty with the sanctions’ efficacy. Do you remember all those big corporations that loudly announced that they were leaving the Russian market? They couldn’t take their outlets and infrastructure with them, and so the Russians simply rebranded those and kept going. A soft-drink bottling company partially owned by Coca-Cola, for example, now produces something called Dobry-Cola in Russia. It tastes very similar to Coca-Cola, and it’s in a very slightly different red can. The crucial point is that the profits from sales of Dobry-Cola and similar products and services aren’t flowing out to stockholders in the US, they’re staying in Russia, where they’ve given a timely boost to the Russian economy. This presumably wasn’t what US and Nato elites had in mind.

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But the worst news for Nato came from the battlefields. What happened there has an odd personal dimension for me. Some years ago I wrote an essay, “Asymmetric tactical shock: a first reconnaissance”, about what happens when an army becomes too dependent on complex technologies and its enemies figure out how to monkey-wrench those. The example I used came from the end of the Bronze Age, but the lesson applies more broadly: the monkey-wrenched army faces total disaster unless it does something most people these days can’t even conceive of doing. My essay circulated quietly among people interested in such things, and I have no reason to think that anybody in the Russian General Staff pays the least attention to obscure American fringe intellectuals like me. Yet the fact remains that when the Ukrainians monkey-wrenched the Russian version of Blitzkrieg, the Russians did exactly what I suggested an army in that situation should do: they fell back on an older form of warfare that wasn’t vulnerable to the monkey-wrenching tactics.

This is why the Russians abandoned their deep thrusts into Ukrainian territory, retreated from vulnerable areas around Kharkiv and Kherson, launched a mass-mobilisation of troops and a major expansion of their already large munitions industry, and got to work building entrenched defensive lines to guard the territory they had seized. Meanwhile, the Russian government strengthened ties with Iran and North Korea — two nations that have large munitions industries autonomous from Western technology and capital. 

That is to say, since the new Ukrainian tactics made it impossible for the Russians to refight the Second World War, the Russians switched to First World War tactics. The defensive lines and urban strongholds on which the Ukrainians relied to defeat Russian tank columns didn’t provide anything like the same defence against massed Russian artillery bombardment. While the Russian Army was retooling for the new (or rather old) mode of war, mercenary units — Wagner PMC most famously, but there were others — took over the brunt of the fighting, tested out First World War tactics against entrenched Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut, and won.

This put Ukraine and its Nato backers into a very difficult position. In First World War-style combat, the winner is the side with the largest munitions industry and the biggest pool of recruits to draw on. Russia has a huge advantage on both counts. First, Nato countries no longer have a political consensus supporting mass military conscription, while Russia does. Second, while the US and its allies dismantled most of their munitions factories at the end of the Cold War, Russia did not, and it also has those good friends in Tehran and Pyongyang. All these give the Russians an edge the Nato nations can’t match in the near term.

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This wasn’t a message that Nato was willing to hear. To a very real extent, it was a message they weren’t capable of hearing. It’s been 70 years — since the end of the Korean War — since the United States and its allies last fought a land war against a major power. The entire Nato officer corps got its training and experience in an era when they had overwhelming superiority over their enemies, and they have no idea how to fight without it. (Even then — Afghanistan comes to mind — they aren’t too good at winning.) That’s when Stormtrooper Syndrome really came into play, because it never occurred to Nato that Ukraine could lose — defined as they were as the war’s Good People.

And so the elites in Washington, Brussels, and Kyiv convinced themselves that the Russians couldn’t possibly ramp up their munitions industry to a pitch that would permit them to carry on trench warfare for years at a time. (Remember all those confident reports that insisted the Russians were about to run out of shells and rockets?) They told themselves that the Russians were using mercenaries because their army was too demoralised and brittle to stand up to the rigours of combat. They drew up plans for a grand Ukrainian offensive to turn the tide of the war, and funnelled more arms to Ukraine..

The counteroffensive began on 4 June. Two months on, it is clear that it has failed. A successful assault against fortified positions in modern war requires a three-to-one advantage in soldiers on that region of the battlefield, a large advantage in artillery, and air superiority. Ukraine has none of these things, and somehow or other no eucatastrophe showed up to save the day. 

The Russo-Ukraine war isn’t over yet, and the fortunes of war may yet favour the Ukrainian side — though this looks very improbable just now. Meanwhile, history is not waiting around for the details to be settled. Towards the end of last month, the heads of state of 40 African nations gathered in St. Petersburg to sign agreements giving Russia a leading position in the economic and military affairs of the world’s second largest continent, while Russia’s defence minister was in North Korea negotiating further arms deals. It seems the Russians know better than to wait for miracles to save them from the consequences of their own actions.

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None of this is to say that the mess in Ukraine is the only way that Stormtrooper Syndrome has shaped recent history; it’s just the most obvious example right now. It was because of Stormtrooper Syndrome, for instance, that so many people suffered nervous breakdowns when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, their reaction amounting to: “He’s a Bad Person, he’s not supposed to win!”. Afterwards, the same factor also kept them from wondering why so many disillusioned voters were willing to settle for Trump, of all people, as an alternative. Nor, to be fair, is Stormtrooper Syndrome in short supply on the Right, where shrill moral dualism is far more common than thoughtful discussion about how to deal constructively with the cascading crises overwhelming America today.

Really, it’s hard to name anything in contemporary Western life that hasn’t been twisted bizarrely out of shape by the efforts of our privileged classes to pretend to be the heroes of their own Star Wars sequels. Yet the lesson being whispered by the winds from Ukraine is that nobody and nothing else is required to play along. That lesson may end up costing a great many people bitterly in the not too distant future.

In some ways, this picture is accurate: a geopolitical competition really is in the process of boiling over into open confrontation. But it’s also fundamentally shallow and misleading. When it comes to the most fundamental political questions, China and the United States are not diverging but becoming more alike, with both superpowers converging on the same not-yet-fully-realised system of technocratic-managerial governance.

This system, described by James Burnham and George Orwell as “managerialism”, is the product of a new class of professional managers bound together by a shared self-interest in the expansion of technical and mass organisations, the further proliferation of managers, and the drawing of society into the meddling embrace of managerial expertise. At its heart is a conviction that all things — even the complexity of society and Man himself — can be understood, managed and controlled like a machine with sufficient scientific technique.

It was managerialism that emerged as the true winner of the 20th century’s ideological battles. As Orwell prophesied in 1945: “Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic.” China is just a bit further down the path towards this same totalitarian future. The West is following.

To get a sense of but one aspect of this ongoing convergence, we should travel back to Fengqiao (“Maple Bridge”), once a picturesque little township in China’s Zhejiang province. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his officials like to muse wistfully about the pleasures of the “Fengqiao experience” (枫桥经验), but I’m afraid it is not a tourism package. Rather, in the Sixties, Fengqiao distinguished itself as a model town in the eyes of Mao Zedong. While usually Communist Party thugs had to go around identifying and rounding up “reactionary elements”, in Fengqiao the people handled it themselves: “Not one person [had to be] rounded up, and still the vast majority of enemies were dealt with,” as a report from the town informed Mao.

Here at last was a true example of the “dictatorship of the masses” that Mao hoped to establish. Mao encouraged the party to learn from the experience of Fengqiao, and in doing so planted a seed that would take root in the hard soil of the CCP imagination: a dream of a population so thoroughly conditioned by Chinese socialism that someday it would practically manage itself.

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Today, Xi has revitalised and modernised this idea by marrying it to newly available tools: those of the digital revolution. Traditional methods of Fengqiao-style social mass monitoring and control, also known as “social governance”, have been combined with internet-wide mobilisation and a vast digital surveillance apparatus.

The jewel in the crown of this approach is intended to be China’s blossoming social-credit system. The system intends to assign each person, company or organisation a unique aggregated “social credit” score. This is much like a financial credit score: based on observed behaviour and other “risk factors”, the score can be adjusted up or down to designate an individual or business as more or less “trustworthy” or “untrustworthy”. Those with higher scores are rewarded with escalating perks, such as priority access to travel, loans, housing, higher education or even healthcare. Those with lower scores face escalating punishments, such as losing access to the financial system, being prohibited from buying luxury goods or real estate, or having their children denied admission to certain schools and universities.

Importantly, the system is deliberately social in nature. Those with low scores are publicly listed and shamed online or on public billboards; even some dating apps have trialled incorporating social-credit scores. Most significantly, since having too many relationships with low-scoring people risks lowering one’s own ranking, people avoid associating with the “discredited” at all, accelerating their progressive unpersoning by society. The goal of this gamification of the mind is to create a “New Man” to fit into its managerial machine; this is always and everywhere the inexorable object of managerialism’s obsession with control.

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Such social engineering has already been effective. I vividly recall, for example, how, when I visited China as late as the 2000s or mid-2010s, everyone used to jaywalk to cross the street. It was simply a fact of life, a cultural constant seemingly ingrained by who knew how many centuries of the Chinese peasantry’s wonderfully incorrigible pragmatism. Today, nobody jaywalks (at least in the city), because if you do, your identity is captured by a facial recognition camera, your face, name and ID number are plastered on a billboard of shame next to the intersection, and a fine is sent to your bank. All those centuries of evolved cultural attitudes have been successfully overwritten by only a few years of conditioning by the machine.

This is not a million miles away from what is happening in so-called Western liberal democracies. In June, the British bank Coutts closed the account of Nigel Farage without explanation. Farage was subsequently refused service by 10 other banks. Internal “reputational risk” documents obtained by Farage soon after showed Coutts’s reasoning for “exiting” him from his account: he had been found to no longer be “compatible with Coutts, given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”. The terrible sins listed on Farage’s rap sheet included: being friends with Donald Trump and unvaccinated tennis champion Novak Djokovic; campaigning for Brexit; being “anti-Net Zero”; being “seen as xenophobic and racist”; and having been a “fascist” when he was a schoolboy, according to some second-hand rumours.

In this case, caught red-handed “debanking” a prominent and savvy politician for political reasons, the bank was forced to apologise and some of its top officials to resign. Such consequences are an exception to the rule, however. Debanking has in recent years become increasingly routine practice across the West; in the US, mere days after the Farage scandal, JP Morgan Chase shuttered the accounts of anti-vaccine proponent Dr Joseph Mercola, as well as his business’s CEO, CFO, their spouses and all of their children. Farage says he has begun assembling a “very large database” of potentially thousands of similar cases from the UK alone.

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Much debanking is politically motivated. Most memorably, Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts and seize the assets of the truckers protesting his destructive vaccine mandates and demagoguery. Yet banks are not the only ones involved; online payment platforms have joined in too. GoFundMe, for instance, seized money donated to the truckers through its platform. PayPal, meanwhile, in one of the more symbolic instances of its prolific debanking habit, cut off the Free Speech Union for promoting “intolerance”. PayPal also attempted to slip language into its user agreement allowing it to confiscate $2,500 from users each time they spread “misinformation” or said or did anything “harmful” or “objectionable” (all defined at PayPal’s “sole discretion”).

Why is this happening? Why would private banks and other businesses force out paying customers like this? Because it is in their interest to do so if they want to survive and thrive, and indeed they have little choice. These banks are not really fully “private actors” — they are part of the managerial economy in a budding managerial party-state much like China’s, where an oligarchic elite class seeks to preserve its rule. Critically, there can be no neutral institutions in a party-state. The party-state’s enemies are the institution’s enemies, or the institution is an enemy of the party-state (which is not a profitable position to be in). This is what “reputational risk” really means: the risk of appearing to be on the wrong side of the party line.

In a society as digitised as ours, control over digital transactions means surveillance and control over nearly everything. When someone is debanked — and then inevitably blacklisted from all other banks — they are cut off from participation in almost every aspect of modern life. They will have no easy way to receive pay from a job; they cannot buy property and may not even be able to rent. They will be unable to purchase almost any digital service and, increasingly, will be prevented from buying everyday goods offline as well. Once the ongoing war on cash is won, they will be well and truly screwed. Debanking therefore serves as an extremely effective means to isolate and silence a targeted person or group, quickly breaking any presence and influence they may have once had within society. Which is, of course, the point.

This appears to be a lesson taken directly from the Chinese method of dealing with dissidents. Indeed, the West’s managerial elite seem to have concluded that they now have the tools and latitude to begin implementing a Chinese-style social credit system here. Although not yet anywhere near as comprehensive, this nascent system shares the same fundamental characteristics: using public-private coordination and “social governance” to collapse any distinction between public and private life, thereby greatly raising the risks for public non-conformity and dissent from the narrative. Utopia is doubtless just around the corner.

In fact, we can see transparent steps towards the construction of something like a social credit system in the now widespread use of such innovations as ESG (environmental, social, and governance) scores. Major financial institutions wield them to vocally conform to specific social and ideological practices required to access capital. Similar NGO-led scoring schemes such as the Corporate Equality Index and UK-based Diversity Champions programme also threaten those businesses that fail to conform with “reputational risk” blackmail and de-platforming.

How far might this all go? While the powerful realm of financial flows is today’s focus, there is no reason to think that, on the current trajectory, the same dynamics won’t eventually be applied to every other sector of our economy and society. We shouldn’t be surprised if someday soon apartment leases come with ideological morality clauses, airlines unite to ban customers with the wrong beliefs from travelling, or people find themselves evicted from their insurance policies for speaking out of turn online. This will simply be the behaviour of a hardening managerialism seeking stability through mechanistic control over all the details of life.

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New technologies such as AI and, especially, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will only continue to make this kind of granular control easier. A few months ago, an American man found himself completely shut out of his digitally controlled “smart home” by Amazon after a delivery driver accused his doorbell of saying something racist. Why would Amazon bother to do this? Because they can; and so, under a managerial regime, they must. As our managers find that every day it feels easier and easier to “solve” problematic people with the click of a button, they will not be able to resist hitting that button, hard and often.

Such is the very Weltanschauung — the whole way of seeing and believing — of the managerial mind. As more and more powerful technology comes within the grasp of the managerial machine, its grip will only continue to tighten. For, as C.S. Lewis understood, “each new power won by man is a power over man as well”.

Today, as Orwell predicted, the great super-states struggle for possession of the earth. But for all past speculation that the 21st century would be defined by a “clash of civilisations”, there is now only one, smothering form of modern civilisation that has stretched itself across the face of the globe, its multiple personalities vying for imperial supremacy. In the West, progressive managerialism softly strangled democracy to death over a century of manipulation, hollowed it out, and now wears its skin. In the East, the imported virus of communist managerialism wiped out a once-great civilisation in a river of blood, then crystalised into the cold, hard machine that now rules the lands of China.

This is the truth behind why China and the West, for all their proclaimed differences, share the same managerial hubris, are tempted by the same growing technological powers, and are sheltering the same elite insecurities and delusions. Even as they roil and clash, they are converging on the same destiny: the same socially engineered submission of everything human, real and free to technocratic nihilism and the false reality of an all-encompassing machine-government — to a total techno-state.

***

This essay is an extract from a longer piece on The Upheaval.

This week, Holland came to the UnHerd club to talk about Roman sex lives, Christian morality, and the rise and fall of empires. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Freddie Sayers: Let’s kick off with the very first year in your book.

Tom Holland: It opens in AD 68, which is the year that Nero committed suicide: a key moment in Roman history, and a very, very obvious crisis point. Nero is the last living descendant of Augustus, and Augustus is a god. To be descended from Augustus is to have his divine blood in your veins. And there is a feeling among the Roman people that this is what qualifies you to rule as a Caesar, to rule as an emperor. And so the question that then hangs over Rome in the wake of Nero’s death is: what do we do now? We no longer have a descendant of the divine Augustus treading this mortal earth of ours. How is Rome, how is its empire, going to cohere?

FS: It seemed to me, when I was reading Pax, that there was a recurring theme: a movement between what’s considered decadence, and then a reassertion of either a more manly, martial atmosphere, or a return to how things used to be — to the good old days. With each new emperor in this amazing narrative, it often feels like there’s that same kind of mood, which is: things have gotten a bit soft. We’re going to return to proper Rome. 

TH: It’s absolutely a dynamic that runs throughout this period. And it reflects a moral anxiety on the part of the Romans that has been characteristic of them, really, from the time that they start conquering massively wealthy cities in the East — the cities in Asia Minor or Syria or, most of all, Egypt. There’s this anxiety that this wealth is feminising them, that it’s making them weak, it’s making them soft — even as it is felt that the spectacular array of seafood, the gold, the splendid marble with which Rome can be beautified, is what Romans should have, because they are the rulers of the world.

That incredible tension is heightened by class anxieties. There’s no snob like a senatorial snob. They want to distinguish themselves from the masses. But at the same time, there’s the anxiety that if they do this in too Greek a way, in too effeminate a way, then are they really Romans? And so the whole way through this period, the issue of how you can enjoy your wealth, if you are a wealthy Roman, without seeming ‘unRoman’, is an endearing tension. And of course, there is no figure in the empire who has to wrestle with that tension more significantly than Caesar himself.

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FS: The 100-odd years that you’re covering in this volume is a period of great peace and prosperity and power, and yet at each juncture, it feels like there’s this anxiety. That’s what surprised me as a reader. There’s this sense of the precariousness of the empire — maybe it’s become softer, maybe it’s decadent, or maybe it needs to rediscover how it used to be.

TH: And, you see, this is the significance of AD 69, “the Year of the Four Emperors”, because the question is, are the cycles of civil war expressive of faults? Of a kind of dry rot in the fabric of the Empire that is terminal? Of the anger of the gods? And whether, therefore, the Romans need to find a way to appease the gods so that the whole Empire doesn’t collapse. This is an anxiety that lingers for several decades. It looks to us like this is the heyday of the Empire. They’re building the Colosseum, they’re building great temples everywhere. But they’re worrying: “Have the gods turned against us?”

And of course, there is a very famous incident, 10 years after the Year of the Four Emperors, which is the explosion of Vesuvius. And this is definitely seen as another warning from the gods, because it coincides with a terrible plague in Rome, and it coincides with the incineration (for the second time in a decade) of the most significant temple in Rome — the great temple to Jupiter on the Capitol, the most sacred of the seven hills of Rome.

Romans offer sacrifice to the gods or you pay dues to the gods rather in the way that we take out an insurance policy. And if the gods are busy burying famous towns on the Bay of Naples beneath pyroclastic flows, or sending plagues, or burning down temples, then this, to most, is evidence that the Roman people have not been paying their dues. So a lot of what is going on — certainly in the imperial centre — in this period, is an attempt to try and get the Roman Empire back on a stable moral footing.

FS: The question of gender and sex crops up a lot in your book. It did strike me that pretty much all of the extremely masculine generals in your book — many of whom go on to become emperors — are having sex with young men. 

TH: Well, it wasn’t just young men, but we’ll come to that. There is always a temptation to emphasise the way in which the Romans are like us, a mirror held up to our own civilisation. But what is far more interesting is the way in which they are nothing like us, because it gives you a sense of how various human cultures can be. You assume that ideas of sex and gender are pretty stable, and yet the Roman understanding of these concepts was very, very different to ours. For us, I think, it does revolve around gender — the idea that there are men and there are women — and, obviously, that can be contested, as is happening at the moment. But the fundamental idea is that you are defined by your gender. Are you heterosexual or homosexual? That’s probably the great binary today.

For the Romans, this is not a binary. There’s a description in Suetonius’s imperial biography of Claudius: “He only ever slept with women.” And this is seen as an interesting foible in the way that you might say of someone, he only ever slept with blondes. I mean, it’s kind of interesting, but it doesn’t define him sexually. Similarly, he says of Galba, an upright embodiment of ancient republican values: “He only ever slept with males.” And again, this is seen as an eccentricity, but it doesn’t absolutely define him. What does define a Roman in the opinion of Roman moralists is basically whether you are — and I apologise for the language I’m now going to use — using your penis as a kind of sword, to dominate, penetrate and subdue. And the people who were there to receive your terrifying, thrusting, Roman penis were, of course, women and slaves: anyone who is not a citizen, essentially. So the binary is between Roman citizens, who are all by definition men, and everybody else.

A Roman woman, if she’s of citizen status, can’t be used willy-nilly — but pretty much anyone else can. That means that if you’re a Roman householder, your family is not just your blood relatives: it’s everybody in your household. It’s your dependents; your slaves. You can use your slaves any way you want. And if you’re not doing it, then there’s something wrong with you. The Romans had the same word for “urinate” and “ejaculate”, so the orifices of slaves — and they could be men, women, boys or girls — were seen as the equivalent of urinals for Roman men. Of course, this is very hard for us to get our heads around today.

The most humiliating thing that could happen to a Roman male citizen was to be treated like a woman — even if it was involuntary. For them, the idea that being trans is something to be celebrated would seem the most depraved, lunatic thing that you could possibly argue. Vitellius, who ended up an emperor, was known his whole life as “sphincter”, because it was said that as a young man he had been used like a girl by Tiberius on Capri. It was a mark of shame that he could never get rid of. There was an assumption that the mere rumour of being treated in this way would stain you for life; and if you enjoy it, then you are absolutely the lowest of the low.

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FS: And yet, there are love stories in this period. In your book, you describe Trajan as having “such a passion for boys that an Assyrian king looking to win the emperor’s favour had secured it by getting his son to perform some barbaric dance”. So that’s the kind of decadent type that you’ve been talking about. But then the book ends with the love affair between the Emperor Hadrian and Antinous, which feels very emotional and very different.

TH: Of course, sexual moral standards impose enormous strains on people. Not everyone’s sexuality is suited to cohering to a governing moral code. And for people who enjoyed being a passive partner, who gained emotional sustenance from it, it must have been excruciating.

The great erotic ideal for Roman men in this period is less girls than boys who look like girls. It’s all very Blur: “Boys who like girls, who like…” These boys, known as delicati, would wear make-up, have their hair done in feminine styles and dress as girls. The more feminine they looked, the more of a status symbol they were, and so senators were willing to lavish fortunes on them. As always, it was Nero who took it the furthest. It was said that he kicked his beloved wife, Poppaea Sabina, to death because she’d nagged him for being out late at the chariots. It’s probably not true because he adored her. But after her death, he went looking for someone who resembled her. He found a boy, castrated him and, from that point onwards, this poor boy, Sporus, had to live as Poppaea Sabina.

FS: You say in your book that “an immense reward was offered to anyone capable of implanting a uterus into the eunuch”. He’s literally trying to turn Sporus into a woman.

TH: Of course, he can’t do that. But when Nero dies, this poor boy becomes a trophy of war. First, Otho takes him, and then Vitellius has an idea that he thinks will make him popular with the Roman people: he will order Sporus to dress up as Persephone, and then have him gang-raped to death by gladiators dressed as Hades in the arena. He thinks this is tremendous entertainment — kind of like the World Cup — and that everyone will love it. Of course, Sporus kills himself. I mean, as you would, faced with that. It’s horrible, horrible stuff. But while this scale of exploitation is to our way of thinking unspeakable, it was morally justified to the Romans.

FS: What about the story of Hadrian and Antinous?

TH: Antinous is a stunningly handsome boy who Hadrian seems to have met on his great journey around the Empire. At this time, between Nero’s reign and Hadrian’s, the making of eunuchs had been made illegal. So I think there was a sense that Antinous has the beauty of a eunuch, which makes him incredibly precious. Hadrian sends him back to Rome to be given the cultural upbringing that a partner of Caesar should have. And then, I guess when he’s aged around 15, he comes under Hadrian’s wing.

Now, to our way of thinking, that would be grooming, pure and simple. But that’s not how the Romans saw it. It’s not how the Greeks saw it, either, because they recognised that Hadrian was behaving like a Greek. He wears a beard, like a Greek philosopher. He was known as a young man as Graeculus, the little Greek. There’s a sense in which Hadrian’s adoption of a beautiful Greek boy is like Zeus sweeping up Ganymede to be his cup bearer — or like Hercules and Hylas.

FS: Would you say he had a special licence?

TH: Yes, as the Greeks felt it was flattering to them. But the question that is unknowable is how Antinous felt about it. I personally cannot imagine he would have been anything other than, on one level, very grateful to have been raised up from a provincial backwater. However, it’s also possible that it inflicts untold psychic damage on him, because Antinous ends up dead under very mysterious circumstances in Egypt, at exactly the time when he is starting to sprout a beard and to bulk up. There were many different theories circling around: did he kill himself? Was he murdered? Was he offered up in sacrifice to the gods? Another theory, which I have some sympathy with, is the idea that he faked his own death and ran away. But we just don’t know.

FS: What’s going on in your head when you are researching these characters? Does it make you think differently about our own morality today? 

TH: The Roman historian Livy says of his people: “We are known across the world as having the justest punishments.” This is a society that flings people to the lions, sponsors gladiatorial combat and stages crucifixions. But the Romans don’t think what they’re doing is in any way morally depraved; they think it’s absolutely justified.

This is what inspired me to write my previous book, Dominion, which argues that our moral standards, our ways of seeing the world, are rooted in the great Christian revolution. The reason it is so difficult for us to see the world through the eyes of Romans is because our gaze is smeared over with Christian assumptions. My ambition in this new book is to write a kind of anti-Dominion, which looks at the world entirely through Roman eyes. The Christians in this narrative, who feature in a couple of paragraphs, are like Mesozoic shrews in an ecosystem dominated by dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are crashing around, bellowing and generally being Roman, while the Christians are so tiny you barely see them. But of course, as with the mammals, it’s the Christians who in the long run will inherit the world.

FS: Is there anything you think the Romans were right about that we’ve lost in the Christian era?

TH: The question that haunts me, whenever I write about the Romans, is why am I so fascinated by them? When I went to Sunday school, and saw pictures of Jesus in front of Pontius Pilate, I was always on the side of Pontius Pilate. He was kind of glamorous: he had eagles, he had purple robes. By contrast, Jesus was a massive scruff. I much preferred the Romans, and I think that this speaks to something that is kind of inherent. There is a certain admiration, and a dread, and an appeal in power.

It’s hard for us to acknowledge this, partly because we are so influenced by the weathering effect of centuries and millennia of Jewish and Christian thinking. It’s also because we exist in the shadow of the Fascists. And the Fascists were the first group of people in the history of Christian Europe who consciously repudiated not so much the institutions of Christianity — as the French or the Russian revolutionaries did — but the core morality of Christianity. They absolutely rejected the idea that the last should be first, that the strong and the rich have a duty of care to the weak and the poor. And that’s why I think we see the Nazis as the embodiment of evil. I think we’ve internalised the fear that identifying with the Romans is to risk becoming Fascists.

FS: Do you think that the incredible success of the Roman Empire was due to the fact that so much power was concentrated in one person? 

TH: [Edward] Gibbon famously said that mankind was at its “most happy and prosperous” in the period following the rule of Vespasian and his two sons. Listening to me talk about this period, you might think, “well, that’s insane, it sounds horrible”. And of course, for lots of people, it was horrible. Yet, by and large — with the exception of the Year of the Four Emperors and the occasional revolt — vast stretches of the world that had previously been convulsed by conflict were stable. The whole of the Mediterranean was bound together under a unitary power; the Romans call it mare nostra, “our sea”. And that’s the only time this has ever happened in recorded history. The result was an equivalent of globalised trade; different areas of the Empire start specialising in aspects of economic activity that they’re particularly suited to, confident that there is a single framework of law, that there are shipping lanes that will be patrolled, that they won’t be attacked by pirates. This is, by relative standards, a golden economic period.

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FS: In your book, you quote Pliny saying: “Who would deny, now that the greatness of Rome’s Empire enables opposite ends of the globe to communicate with one another, that life is improved by the interchange of commodities, by a partnership in the blessings of peace and by the general availability of things.” This does sound a bit like today’s semi-globalised free market.

TH: In the introduction, I quote a Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who argues that the Roman Empire in the second century, under Trajan and Hadrian, had the wealthiest economy prior to the emergence of modern capitalism in the Netherlands and England in the 17th century. I’m not remotely qualified to say whether or not this is true, but it is clearly the case that this is a spectacularly wealthy period. And people like Pliny absolutely do celebrate it.

There are, however, people who see this wealth as evidence of Rome’s monstrosity. The greatest, most influential anti-imperial text ever written is the Book of Revelation, with its vision of the whore of Babylon. Babylon — which is Rome — is described as a city that is glutted on the wealth of the world, and its downfall is precipitated by the cutting of trade links that bring wealth into the city. So it’s very clear-eyed about the fact that the metropole is dependent on the links that it has with the outer provinces.

There are Romans who are extremely anxious about this, the most influential of whom is Tacitus, the great historian. Tacitus writes the biography of his father-in-law, Agricola, the governor of Britain. He describes how Agricola fostered the art of civilisation on the island: getting the natives to wear togas, to enjoy fine dining, to have baths. He says that the natives mistook these things as the marks of civilisation, when they were actually marks of their servitude. He is not writing this as a lecture in post-colonial studies. He’s not saying, “Oh, it’s terrible that we’ve conquered the Britons”. What he’s saying is that Britons are being seduced into the moral decrepitude that has already paralysed the Romans.

In Tacitus’s eyes, the greatness of the Empire is destroying everything that originally made the Romans great. That’s why he thinks Trajan is the best of emperors, because he’s embarking on all these brilliant conquests. He conquers the Dasians, then the Mesopotamians. But it all goes horribly wrong when Trajan, like so many others in Western history, invades Iraq. He pushes it too far. He has to pull the legions back out of Mesopotamia. It is then that he decides that Roman power has a natural limit after all, because the people beyond it don’t deserve the gifts of Roman civilisation.

This is why Hadrian builds frontier systems along the Empire, of which Hadrian’s Wall is the most famous. It’s not in any way an admission of defeat. It’s the equivalent of that enormous fence that they built around Glastonbury during the festival. It’s saying: “People on the inside, you can have a good time, hear Elton John and go glamping. But all you proles outside, you can’t come in.” That’s basically what Hadrian’s Wall is.

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FS: Today a lot of people worry that we are somehow rather like the Roman Empire in its declining phases. There’s the sense that this world that seemed totally everlasting is crumbling and breaking. I was filled with hope reading your book because it starts with what feels like the end of the world — the chaotic Year of Four Emperors — and is followed by 100 years of peace. So maybe, we are in a moment more like AD 69 than the actual end of the Roman Empire. Does it feel to you like we’re on the downslope of a civilisation?

TH: I think we are going through a process of moral change that is more analogous to the Reformation than anything you get in Roman history. But I think that Rome provides us with a model: we are shadowed by the sense that if you have a moment in the sun, if you have greatness, then you are doomed as an empire to decline and fall. And I think the contrast is with China, an equally great empire in this period, getting very rich. Of course, over the centuries, China, as Rome does, will succumb to barbarians. The Chinese Empire will disintegrate, be reconstituted, disintegrate, be reconstituted, and yet, in a sense, always remain China. An entity called China endures.

We do not, in the modern world, have a sense of there being a land of the Romans, because that has long gone. And so I think that for us, probably far more than for people in China, there is the sense that golden ages are illusory, and that the greatest empire is merely a provocation, and that it will succumb and be destroyed. The lessons from the Book of Revelation and Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire have fused to create a sense that you can’t be great in the long run. That is why the Roman imperial architecture of Washington, say, provides such scope for apocalyptic visions, because you just have to look at the Lincoln monument to think: “Oooh, your fall is coming, you’re doomed.” That is also, of course, what made the [January 6, 2021] Capitol riot so emotionally satisfying for so many people, particularly the shaman with his horns. It is hardwired into our minds that this is what happens to places that call themselves the Capitol. Barbarians do come, and the order collapses.

FS: I think now is a great moment to take questions.

*          *          *

Question One: How much credit can you give the emperors for Pax Romana? And how much was it just good timing and circumstance?

TH: That is a great question. Because of course, the emperors are the focus of most histories. And when you’re writing, it is quite difficult to get perspectives that are not centred on the imperial capital. I think that there are very few emperors who qualitatively affect the running of the Empire, and the course of events. Hadrian is one of them. So is Augustus. Augustus, I think, is the greatest political genius, certainly in the history of the West, and perhaps of all time. Reconstituting the imploding Republic; setting Rome and her Empire back on firm foundations; and doing so to such effect that, with the exception of the Civil War of AD 69, peace endures for essentially two centuries, and Rome as a world empire endures right the way up to the 15th century: that is a stunning, stunning achievement. No other emperor over the sweep of Roman history can rival that.

Hadrian is a significant figure — an emperor who stabilises the Empire by constructing what in effect is a frontier, although it’s not cast as that; by acknowledging the natural limits of the Empire; and, above all, by integrating the Greek world into the fabric of Roman imperial culture, so that in time we can talk of Greco-Roman culture. I think the next significant player is Diocletian, for his achievement in stabilising the Empire when it looks as though it might completely disintegrate at the end of the third century. And then, of course, there’s Constantine, his licensing of Christianity. So I would say that, between Augustus and the final collapse of the empire in the West, there are really only three significant emperors.

Question Two: There are centuries in between those figures. Who’s running the Empire then? Is it the deep state of Rome that’s in charge? 

TH: The truth is that it’s the legions that are keeping it going. Without the legions, there is no peace. We tend to think of peace — Pax, the title of the book — as a slightly passive noun. But for the Romans, it’s very active. Pax is something that you impose at the point of the sword. It is maintained by the presence of legions, along the frontiers. These legions have to be paid for. And there’s a case for saying that the whole Roman Empire is an army with a piggy bank attached to it, the whole Empire essentially exists to provide the legions with the money that then enables the Empire to exist. “Legio” originally meant a levee. Every city in the ancient world, every tribal entity, had a levee of those men who were able to fight. A legion ends up something very different: a professional army, stationed where it has to be stationed. This is such an odd thing to have. And again, it’s the genius of Augustus that enables these to be set up. Without the legions, there is no Empire.

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Question Three: Did women figure in the Roman Empire at all? Was there a woman behind the throne? Or were they really all very subservient in this period?

TH: Roman men have a kind of ambivalent attitude towards women in their families. Because, on the one hand, it is the role of a man to keep his subordinates in order, and women rank as subordinates. A paterfamilias has power of life and death over all his family. There’s no matriarchy in Rome. But having said that, historically, women have important roles to play in dynastic politics, that is the way that the Republic functioned. It depended on women going out and marrying other people, and then, if needs be, leaving them and marrying someone else. Their role, basically, is to stick up for their father and brothers; their husbands, by and large, are less significant.

Then, in the reign leading up to Nero, women become incredibly powerful, because if a man can have the blood of Augustus in his veins, then so do women, and that gives them a massive, divinely sanctioned authority. By and large, the men who are writing the histories are terrified by this. Think of the role that Livia has in I, Claudius, reconstituted in The Sopranos as the most terrifying mother perhaps in any drama. Messalina’s very name is a byword for sexual depravity. There’s Agrippina, the mother of Nero. These woman are portrayed in the histories as kind of terrifying predatory viragos. And that is a kind of tribute to the power that they have, in the wake of the extinction of the family of Augustus. (That power is obviously cut off and women again, certainly in the sources, start to play a more subordinate role.) I mean, you do not offend a powerful woman.

If you are lower down the scale, I think your life is pretty terrible. If you’re a slave girl, you are there to be raped. The Roman legal and sexual dynamics licenses pretty much perpetual rape if you are subordinate in a powerful household. I mean, the same is true for boys, but women are likely to be sexually abused throughout their life. And that is why Christianity is so radical, because Paul, when he’s writing to, say, the Romans of Corinth (Corinth is a Roman colony, so they’re culturally Roman to the Romans in Rome), he is saying to the male householder: “You are playing the role of Christ, your wife is playing the role of the church, therefore. That’s why you must have a monogamous, enduring relationship. Christ doesn’t go around raping the scullery maid. You mustn’t.” And that is the transformation that Christianity brings to sexual ethics.

Question Four: You talked a lot about the radical break that Christianity represented — the contrast with the extremely ruthless, pre-Christian, Roman world. Do you think there’s a case to be made, as I seem to recall Gibbon did, that Christianity was the ultimate example of the Romans getting soft?

That is what Gibbon says. And it’s also what Nietzsche says. Nietzsche says Christianity is a slave morality. I think actually the opposite. I think that the thing that enables people in the long run to continue feeling Roman, even when the sinews of government have been cut, and the imperial hold has gone, is that they retain a shared identity as Roman which has come to be fused with Christianity. And the reason that Christianity is so successful — the reason, if you’re looking at it in Darwinian terms, why it’s adopted — is that, in this period that Pax covers, this is a world that is full of different cultural centres. You can go and pay sacrifice to someone in northern Britain, or in Syria, and these are all gods. But in the long run, the heft of these cultural centres depends on them being local. I mean, as with the temple in Jerusalem, it’s the fact that they are local that matters. Christianity changes that.

The Christian people have no metropolis. This is what seems so odd to the Romans in the early years of Christianity. They are a kind of universal people — that ultimately makes Christianity so suited to an empire that is universal in scope: you can have churches, anywhere, and they’re all consecrated to the same God. So it doesn’t matter if it’s in Egypt or in East Anglia. And that enables a sense of being Roman to endure for as long as it does. So I think that actually Gibbon gets it the wrong way around. With Pax Romana, you get this extreme world, extreme development, a concentration of wealth, inequality increasing.

FS: The Gini coefficient.

TH: I have no idea what that is. Do I need to know what that is?

FS: A lot of people obsess about this — the gap between the very richest and the very poorest.

TH: The Romans didn’t care about that. In fact, if you were at the top end, they were all in favour of it. Roman society was founded on the principle that you defined yourself against the people who were below you socially. Right from the beginning, the Romans had an obsession with identifying where they stood in the social spectrum. They had a censor. A censor wasn’t someone who went around cancelling people or closing down newspapers; a censor was someone who, every few years, would go around, working out how much money each individual citizen had, and also his moral worth. And then kind of calibrating, and assigning them to a social class.

You could go up and you could go down. This really concentrated the mind.

You can see its shadow in every Western country, from the US and Canada to Ireland and Australia, as well as in every multinational organisation, from the EU to the UN. Rising levels of hate speech and misinformation, we are told, make it more urgent than ever for governments, corporations and multilateral organisations to adopt stronger measures to protect vulnerable populations online.

It is for this reason that Biden’s Department of Homeland Security recently created a “Disinformation Governance Board”, the European Commission crafted a new Digital Services Act and Code of Practice on Disinformation, and the UN is proposing a “Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms”. All of these initiatives are allegedly the product of good intentions; all of them, however, are rooted in the same fallacy: there is little evidence to suggest that hate speech and misinformation are on the rise. On the contrary, Western countries are more tolerant of racial, religious and sexual minorities than ever before. To take one example, the percentage of Americans who approve of marriages between white and black Americans has risen from 4% in 1958 to 87% in 2013 to 94% in 2021.

There are, of course, plenty of examples of misinformation and hatred online, and Twitter and Facebook are right to reduce their spread — but often the threat is exaggerated. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), for instance, recently published a study that concluded that antisemitism was increasing on Twitter. But there is no definitive evidence of rising hate online. The ISD study counted tweets criticising George Soros which didn’t mention his Judaism as antisemitic. Elsewhere, “hate speech” includes the reluctance of some people online to use female pronouns when referring to transwomen — even though one might oppose using female pronouns for natal males and harbour no animus toward transwomen.

Here we can see that what people label as “hatred” and “misinformation” is often merely an opinion they don’t like or which they fear will encourage bad behaviour. In both the UK and the US, this led to government officials demanding that social media platforms censor “often-true” content, including about Covid vaccine side effects, out of fear that such stories would result in vaccine hesitancy.

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What’s more, Facebook and Twitter have also started deleting a significant amount of true content. Between 2020 to 2021, for example, Facebook censored claims that the coronavirus came from a Chinese lab, even though that was always as likely, if not more so, than the natural-origin hypothesis. Twitter also censored an accurate New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop while allowing supporters of his father, Joe Biden, to falsely claim it was a result of “Russian disinformation”.

The global campaign to censor disfavoured views on Twitter and Facebook is therefore rather curious. If there is no evidence that hatred and misinformation are increasing, and ample evidence of inappropriate censorship of true and accurate information, why are politicians across the West calling for greater power to censor?

Some of the demand certainly appears to be grassroots. Since 2016, an increasing number of psychologists have started to document the rise of “concept creep”, the dramatic expansion of what people in Western societies consider to be “harmful”. It used to be that one would have to show physical or financial harm from speech for it to be restricted: often, one would have to commit fraud, incite violence or ruin a person’s career. Today, by contrast, a growing number of people consider petty offences, such as calling a transwoman “he” or denouncing Soros as a “globalist,” to be the cause of “real-world harm”.

Yet this support cannot be taken in isolation; more often than not, it is the result of funding from governments. It was, after all, Renee DiResta, a former CIA Fellow at Stanford University, who proposed that DHS create a “Disinformation Governance Board”; in Brazil, meanwhile, a Supreme Court judge is leading calls for greater censorship; in Canada, it is Justin Trudeau who has sought a crackdown on wrongspeech; and in the UK, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue is funded by the UK government and the US Department of Defense.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that these efforts all share an elitist, anti-populist strain. Many of the government agencies, contractors and NGOs that are advocating for greater censorship have ties to the military, intelligence and security organisations, spawning what I term the “Censorship Industrial Complex”. How this is manifested is relatively straightforward: fearing that a wave of populist political victories would undermine Nato, the EU and the Western Alliance, government intelligence, military and security officials engaged in disinformation campaigns, such as the one claiming Trump was a Russian asset and that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, while demanding censorship of populist and anti-war voices.

Together, these measures constitute nothing short of a world war on free speech. After all, the intention of the UN and the EU is to censor disfavoured speech at a global level, specifically by insisting that Twitter and Facebook obey their dictates or face massive fines and nationwide restrictions.

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So far, one of the greatest obstacles to these censorious ambitions is Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, who has publicly stated that he refuses to comply with EU rules. But Musk is also under enormous pressure from advertisers, many of whom stand with the censorship advocates and heads of state. Under pressure from the Turkish government, for instance, Musk was forced to censor disfavoured Turkish journalists or face Twitter being cut off in the country entirely.

Even if this were not the case, free speech has never been a gift that can be secured by one person. Rather, for it to survive, it is up to the citizens of the world to insist that governments stop demanding, directly or indirectly through the NGOs they fund, that social media platforms censor disfavoured views. And to the extent that content moderation by social media companies is inevitable, they must be transparent about what content they are restricting, how they are restricting it, and why.

Nor is any of this outside the realms of possibility. It was encouraging, for instance, to see the Department of Homeland Security shut down its “Disinformation Governance Board” three weeks after introducing it, following an online backlash. In Europe, too, resistance is growing to the Digital Services Act. And, on Twitter, we have seen rowdy and rousing opposition to the UN’s proposed “Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms”, as well as new censorship proposals in Ireland, Brazil, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand.

Most of all, we need to change how we perceive ostensibly earnest calls for reducing “hate speech” and “misinformation”. We need to train our ears to hear such language as pretexts for government censorship. We need to remind our fellow citizens of the enormous progress we have made against hatred and discrimination over the decades and centuries. And, perhaps most of all, we should feel insulted, patronised and threatened by those elites who are trying to undermine that precious thing we have been fighting for since society was born: our right to express ourselves, however much it might offend them.

Aurat March is set to take place on International Women’s Day, March 8th, across the country — for the sixth year running. It has been riven with controversy ever since its first iteration in 2018, when slogans like “Mera Jism, Meri Marzi” (“My body, my choice”) caused public outcry, the event being deemed un-Islamic. It’s common to hear Aurat March and the ideology it supports described as “foreign funded”, to advance “Western interests” in Pakistan. Over the years, there have been many accusations that the organisation only represents the first-world problems of the country’s bourgeois class, while offering lip service to the issues of poverty, illiteracy, and domestic abuse suffered by millions of working- and middle-class Pakistani women. Aurat March claims that this is misinformation to discredit the movement. 

While it’s not the most sophisticated way of framing the issue, there is a grain of truth in the “foreign funded” claim. Aurat March, and its sister movement Aurat Azadi (Women’s Freedom) March, are progressive Left organisations dominated by Western-educated women who skew heavily upper- and middle-class. Many of these women completed their post-secondary education in the UK or the US, majoring in gender studies, South Asian studies, and political science. Armed with Fulbright and Rhodes scholarships, these “resistance feminists” pick up the rhetoric of anti-capitalist and, ironically, anti-imperialist activism and transport it wholesale to Pakistan. It is these Western progressive orthodoxies fuelling the Aurat March movement. It’s hardly surprising that trans rights — the fad du jour in American colleges — would show up in Aurat March’s communication channels, couched in the language of intersectionality and Critical Theory.

Why bend over backwards to champion the rights of Pakistan’s transgender community (a mere 0.24% of the population), instead of trying to extend an olive branch to the majority of the country’s 220 million citizens, men and women, in language they can understand? In her 2017 book, The New Pakistani Middle Class, Ammara Maqsood argues that, since the Nineties, “progress” in Pakistan has been defined by connections to the outside world. It is only when “an imagined audience, an outsider that needs to be addressed and convinced” believes that Pakistan is modern that Pakistanis will see themselves as modern, she writes. Concerned about how they’re portrayed on the global stage, elite Pakistani feminists want to signal to their comrades in the West: Look, we’re not the backwards and uncivilised country that we seem to be, we believe trans women are women. This tactic seems to be working, looking at the glowing coverage Aurat March gets from mainstream news media in the West, which frames the movement as an “Us versus Them”, zero sum game for which Pakistani feminists are risking their lives. But who exactly is “them”?

The Aurat March would have it that “they” are “radical, Right-wing Islamists”. But the truth is, “they” are the millions of women who — having ascended to middle-class life since the Nineties — reject the idea that modernity in Pakistan must operate in lockstep with the West. These women instead embrace “Islamic feminism” and aspire to be part of the global Muslim community, turning to countries like Turkey for inspiration. They advocate for women’s rights within an Islamic framework, encouraging women to interpret the Quran and highlight the teachings of equality in the religion. 

These members of the “new” Pakistani middle class — in contrast to the “old” middle class that came into its own during the sixties and seventies — don’t relate to Aurat March’s narrative about living in an “oppressed, patriarchal” society, because they believe their emancipation lies in applying the wisdom of the Quran to their daily lives. They do not respond kindly to the idea that they need privileged elites to free them from the obligations of caring for their children and in-laws. The “dismantle the family” feminism of Aurat March goes against everything the new middle-class women seek out for themselves: they take pride in being supportive wives, for instance, or attending female-only religious study circles (dars).

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Whether Pakistani women turning to the Quran to understand their rights is a good thing is up for debate. But the fact remains that large swathes of educated Pakistani women do not feel that Aurat March represents them or their values, and the March’s leadership has done diddly-squat to change this perception. Instead, the established middle class, whose beliefs Aurat March champions, has been actively hostile towards such women, lumping them in with Taliban-sympathisers, and painting religious-minded critics as being brainwashed by Saudi-style Wahhabism. Accusing those who you claim to speak for of internalised sexism and stripping them of agency is hardly a winning strategy.

Nor is practically ignoring the working-class, rural population of Pakistan. 75% of women and girls are employed in the nation’s unregulated agriculture sector. But in the inter-middle-class battle of Pakistani feminism, working-class issues hardly get any airtime. These are the women who don’t have access to medical care. Hundreds of thousands die during maternity labour every year. Others are subjected to superstitious wedlock, underage marriage, and denied education. Aurat March has little to say about how to help any of these vulnerable women. Slogans to “dismantle the patriarchy” and “decolonise gender” don’t do much to affect real change.

But if Aurat March were to abandon this language, and incorporate terminology and manifesto demands more in line with the growing Islamic feminist movement in the country, its international brand would be irreparably damaged. Fighting for environmental justice, demanding to defund the police, and putting transgender politics at the centre of one’s activism — all part of Aurat March’s 2022 manifesto — is much more palatable to readers of the New York Times than engaging in “backward” practices like debating what rights women have in Islam. If Pakistan’s elites dared do such a thing, the West would write off the nation as another “shithole country” overrun by Islamists. Feminism’s status as a “luxury belief” would fall away — and so too would the Pakistani elite’s sense of itself.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

As Maqsood writes in her book, it is from “a global stage which recognises only the language of development… that the progressiveness of the established groups becomes imbued with a moral purpose that distinguishes them from other classes”. In the absence of economic factors separating the old middle class from the new, their own sense of moral superiority is all that Pakistan’s elites can cling to. It’s why Aurat March only wants volunteers who will list their pronouns in their bios, and have no qualms about excluding millions of women from their vision of feminism. By this point, it doesn’t even matter what their 2023 manifesto demands are (I wouldn’t be surprised if self-ID is a prominent topic) — Aurat March has alienated most of the population, and seems uninterested in winning them back. As one representative tweet argues: “So many amazing feminist organisers I know have distanced themselves from Aurat March, which is fair, but also alarming. The march organisers need to be able to take criticism, esp if its coming from those who’ve supported them from the beginning.”

Judging from their volunteer form and most recent social media activity, Aurat March is comfortable with its solid position on the “lifestyle Left”. It promotes questions of identity, consumption, and moral attitudes over tradition and community. The annual event has become nothing more than an exercise in intellectual gatekeeping: a reminder to the upwardly mobile masses that the definition of modernity in Pakistan is a way for the established elite to preserve their dominant position in society. There is no room for either the new and growing middle class, or concern for the working-class women who can’t even read — let alone win a Rhodes scholarship.

The first modern revolution was neither French nor American, but English. Long before Louis XVI went to the Guillotine, or Washington crossed the Delaware, the country which later became renowned for stiff upper lips and proper tea went to war with itself, killed its king, replaced its monarchy with a republican government and unleashed a religious revolution which sought to scorch away the old world in God’s purifying fire.

Nearly four centuries on, England and the wider West is again being turned upside down. Again, we are living in the aftermath of a system that is dying or dead: then, the last gasp of medieval monarchy; now the Anglo-American Empire — and perhaps modernity itself. Again, we are living in a period of radical technological change: then, the printing press and the end of censorship, which allowed the distribution of radical pamphlets on an unprecedented scale; now, the internet’s enabling of global dissent and chaos. Again, we are living in a period in which the cultural mores of previous centuries are being upended: then, feudal assumptions governing everything from landownership to the meaning of marriage; now, the endless ructions of a tedious and unending “culture war”.

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Patriotism, Christianity, cultural conservatism, sexual modesty, even a mild nostalgia for a vanished rural England or a love of once-canonical novels: all are more or less verboten, and the attitude towards them is rapidly hardening. Until recently simply giggled at or patronised, these kinds of views in the 2020s may see you labelled a “white supremacist”, or the more general but still-lethal “hater”. The old world is again running up like parchment in the fire, and nobody who wants to be part of the new one can be seen to defend it.

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The Anti-Christ now rules us all

By Paul Kingsnorth

The poet and storyteller Robert Bly, who died last year, had his own name for the culture we now inhabit, in the West and increasingly elsewhere too. He called it a “sibling society”. In his book of the same name, published a quarter of a century ago, Bly took a prescient scalpel to the failures of the post-war West and identified what he believed to be a foundational problem: we had forgotten how to produce adults.

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The liberal order is already dead

By Paul Kingsnorth

A kind of corrupted cultural Levelling had taken hold, and the result was our culture of inversion, in which rebellion against all and any forms was seen as the only inherent good. And in the desert created by late 20th-century American capitalism, which had decimated communities and households, stripped the meaning from the lives of young generations and replaced it with shopping, little seemed worth preserving anyway. As a result, adults had remained perpetual adolescents: uninitiated, afraid to grow up, slouching towards Bethlehem quoting Marlon Brando in a kind of eternal 1954. ‘Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?’ ‘Whaddya got?’

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

“Our society has been damaged not only by acquisitive capitalism, but also by an idiotic distrust of all ideas, religions and literature handed down to us by elders and ancestors. Many siblings are convinced that they have received nothing of value from anyone. The older truth is that every man and woman is indebted to all other persons, living or dead, and is indebted as well to animals, plants and the gods.”

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It is indeed, and even more so. Our cultural elite’s ongoing “deconstruction” of all we once were has deteriorated into a kind of incoherent rage, a culture of inversion on steroids, and it has now elicited its own rising counter-revolution. Nobody knows where any of this will lead, but the primary emotion it is all channelling, on Right and Left, among radical and reactionary, is rage. In our perpetual sibling society — sick with consumerism, eye-glazed with screen burn, confused, rudderless, godless — we have forgotten how to behave like adults, or what adults even look like. The result is that we squabble like children, fighting over toys in the mud.

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This may sound like the words of a liberal internationalist. But they come from Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the anti-immigration, Right-wing populist party, the Sweden Democrats. In the past he has equivocated when asked whether he preferred Putin to Emmanuel Macron or Joe Biden. But four days after the onset of Russia’s invasion, speaking to Sweden’s parliament, his tone was unflinching.

Many Right-wing leaders have shifted their rhetoric since the start of the war. Marine Le Pen first downplayed Russia’s threat to Europe and described Putin as a force for good, only to then call Russia’s invasion “condemnable”. In Italy, Lega Party leader, Matteo Salvini, supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea, opposed retaliatory EU sanctions, and praised Russia’s government for “working for its people’s interests”. But he eventually condemned Putin and “Russian aggression”.

The shifts in rhetoric offer insight into their values, as well as the challenges facing their loudest opponents. Indeed, as the far-Right distances itself from Putin in varying degrees of about-face, centrist commentators are pouncing. The Times of Israel claimed Russia’s invasion “plunged far-Right movements across Europe into an identity crisis, as they struggle to square their loyalty to Vladimir Putin with the public’s overwhelming solidarity with Kyiv”, leaving the far-Right in a “pickle”. The Japan Times and the Times of India ran the same report calling it a “quagmire”, while the New York Times said Europe’s nationalists were “squirming”.

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Commentators such as prominent Russian-American journalist Julia Ioffe were more prescriptive than descriptive in their characterisations. As she wrote for an American audience: “To the people who think… that trans people are made up, that ‘cancel culture’ has gone too far, that ‘men should be men and women should women’ — congratulations, you agree with Putin. You are his ideological ally.” CNN columnist Frida Ghitis went further in theorising coherence and consistency between Russia’s invasion and the agendas of Western rightists, linking Putin with Marine Le Pen’s reach for the French presidency and even Elon Musk’s attempt to purchase and transform Twitter. “We’re all witnessing the great challenge of our times play out around us,” she concludes.

Two agendas seem to drive much of this commentary. The first, revealed in comments such as Ioffe’s, is strategic opportunism: to use public opinion about foreign policy to advance a domestic political effort. Link local cultural conservatives to the unpopular Putin via alleged ideological commonalities, and you make conservatism less appealing.

The second is more psychological. It has to do with convincing yourself that the people you oppose in one context are also your enemies in all others: to declare the universality of your ideological map, and to extinguish all suspicion that You and They might look at a single consequential political development and feel the same way about it. It may be an outgrowth of the Left’s enduring insistence that its visions and campaigns (minority rights, environmentalism, anti-Imperialism, etc.) will all smoothly integrate in a political universe suited to mass management, where ideological consistency and coherence reign.

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Ukraine has split the far-Right

By Charlotte McDonald-Gibson

Ideological consistency is elusive among the far-Right — a fact the Left likes to point out, without understanding its implications. But it’s worth understanding the nuances of the far-Right’s worldviews and values, which vary and are at times mutually irreconcilable. If we were to divide Europe’s ultra-nationalists into two camps, we would see, on the one side, more moderate reformers who tend to endorse cultural nationalism, philosemitism, and pro-democratic liberal chauvinism opposite hardline idealists lurching toward ethnonationalism, anti-Semitism, cultural conservatism, explicit anti-liberalism, and authoritarianism.

However, perhaps counterintuitively, “liberal” nationalists have produced some of the more tepid criticisms of Russia’s invasion. One example is that blond bombast Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom, who has long claimed that liberalism, rather than conservatism, motivates his opposition to immigration on the grounds that Muslims threaten feminism, gay rights, and democracy. And yet that ostensible commitment to core liberal values has seldom inspired opposition toward anti-liberal Putin. Even in the weeks following the invasion, Wilders’s previously qualified endorsement of the Russian leader has mostly gone quiet as he opposes sanctions and spreads talking points of the Russian state in his media channels.

On the other hand, there is no shortage of far-Right parties in Eastern Europe who embrace ultraconservatism while opposing Putin. The Alliance for the Union of Romanians and Latvia’s National Alliance, which have both always been hyper-conservative and anti-Russian — this has accelerated since February 24, with the National Alliance, for instance, proposing to deny residency to Russian citizens in Latvia. Meanwhile, the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia — once mildly supportive of Putin — not only switched its tone but has been supporting proposed energy embargoes. And the European country with one of the most robust records of action in support for Ukraine, its neighbour Poland, is led by Andrzej Duda, an ultraconservative sprung from the Law and Justice party, who pursued dramatic curtailing of abortions, gay rights, and immigration.

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Political sympathy toward Russia, in other words, is not tracking with far-Right parties’ attitudes toward liberalism. Their reactions, instead, appear plainly related to whether they feel directly threatened by Russian military expansion. When facing an existential crisis (Poland), or seeing historic antagonisms revived (Sweden, Finland), they care little for talk of ideology.

So while centrists see strategic and idealistic reasons to criticise the far-Right now, their attacks may be short-sighted. With Western economic and military coalitions being tested — and with calls from some on the Left for Ukraine to surrender, uttered with an aloofness resembling liturgy more than political analysis — far-Right parties may provide vital reinforcement. This is true even beyond Baltic states and Poland. In Sweden, for instance, the Sweden Democrats not only voted in favour of sending arms to Ukraine, but also altered their stance on Nato membership early in response to Russia’s invasion, bolstering the cause and with it the likelihood that Russia ends this conflict geopolitically weakened. Matteo Salvini, meanwhile, pledged early support for Ukrainian refugees — a move that observers speculated might have been a tactic to outflank a political threat from the Right ahead of elections next year, from the ascendent Brothers of Italy party, who are vocally pro-Ukraine.

But a deeper challenge beckons, that of resigning ourselves to the possibility that certain circumstances might align us with our political opposites. Grievances often levied against the far-Right in the West — about its anti-democratic sentiment; disinformation; a coarsened political discourse; fetishes for state violence — take a different shape today. Confrontation with Russia calls us to question whether the internal fights we have in Western politics really do span the ideological spectrum as we like to think, or whether we curse each other while huddled in the corner of a vaster terrain. When presented with actual violence instead of symbolic violence, and war crimes instead of word crimes, we may find we have less time for things like ideology.

The covers of the Flashman series are cultural artefacts in themselves: the image of the smirking anti-hero, sabre in hand, dressed up in his mid-Victorian cavalry finery or Oriental costume, an exotic conquest entwined around his legs, is firmly set against the cultural mood of the moment. The bullying villain of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, terror of the Rugby fags until his expulsion, Flashman’s unintentionally swashbuckling career can be understood as an earlier attempt to reckon with Britain’s imperial legacy. 

From his first appearance in 1966, Fraser’s Flashman was a product of the same ironic Sixties craze for Victoriana as the Sergeant Pepper cover, or The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), with which he overlaps in narrative and tone. The empire then was not as distant as it seems now: the brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Kenya and Malaya were closer in time then than the Iraq War is to us, and the Aden insurgency was still ongoing. Fraser himself had fought the Japanese in Burma, and was commissioned as an officer in the Indian army less than 20 years before the first Flashman novel, one of the very last of generations of young British men to have done so. 

A provincial grammar school boy, born in Carlisle to Scottish parents, Fraser’s family history was as intertwined with the fortunes of the empire as that of his creation, he would later note. “Well, the men will be going away again”, Fraser recalls his grandmother observing on the outbreak of war in 1939, adding that “her uncle had served in the Crimea, her brother had died in the Second Afghan, two of my aunts had lost sweethearts in the Great War, my father had been wounded in East Africa, and two uncles had been in the trenches; probably it was a not untypical record for a British family over a century”. Indeed, Fraser wore his dead great-uncle’s ring — “he’s buried somewhere in Afghanistan”, he notes — during his own active service in Burma.

“We saw the end of Empire, the very last of Kipling’s India”, Fraser would later write in his memoirs:

“The cool whitewashed interiors of the two-man rooms, one of which I shared with a Punjabi princeling, the soft-footed bearers fetching and carrying, the twinkling lance-points of the Mysore Lancers, gorgeous in their blue and gold and long-tailed puggarees as they rode from their barracks next door … It was the end of an old and glorious song, and I was lucky to be part of it.” 

As for Enoch Powell, whose views on mass immigration he also shared, for Fraser the loss of India was as tragic a historical catastrophe as that of the Soviet Union is to Putin: the fading of a great imperial story, and the painful lived “experience of a country which passes in less than a lifetime from being the mightiest empire in history, governing a quarter of mankind, to being a feeble little offshore island whose so-called leaders have lost the will and the courage, indeed the ability, to govern at all”.

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And yet the imperial story revealed in the Flashman Papers is far more ambivalent than the old writer’s final reminiscences would make it seem, so much so that it read on first publication as part of the great Sixties satire boom, undercutting the old British certainties with its taste for the hypocritical and sordid. In Flashman, the first novel of the series, the central character reveals himself as a bully, a coward and a rapist, who nevertheless finds himself lauded, following a series of picaresque misadventures, as the brave hero of Britain’s disastrous First Afghan War. 

“Old Flashy, the bully and poltroon, cad and turncoat, lecher and toady” has little time for the moralism of his Victorian contemporaries, “who praise God on Sundays and sneak off to child-brothels during the week”, and whose self-denying imperial heroes are presented uniformly as a collection of fools, hypocrites and God-botherers. The empire’s red-coated defenders are merely “whoremongering, drunken clowns”, while Flashman’s own interest in the empire is purely limited to what he can extract from it. In a passage that could be lifted directly from some modern-day anti-colonial Guardian-fodder, he observes that:

“In India there was power — the power of the white man over the black — and power is a fine thing to have. Then there was ease, and time for any amount of sport, and good company, and none of the restrictions of home. You could live as you pleased, and lord it among the niggers … and there were as many women as you could wish for. There was money to be had, too, if you were lucky in your campaigns and knew how to look for it. In my whole service I never made half as much in pay as I got from India in loot — but that is another story.”

How do we reconcile the two: the caddish anti-hero who exposes the extractive brutality of imperial rule and the writer himself, an unreconstructed imperialist in love with the glory, colour and romance of Britain’s Eastern possessions? Reading Fraser’s two volumes of memoirs together with the Flashman series, the overlap between the fictional creation and the writer himself is instructive. 

The Flashman universe is a clear working through of Fraser’s own wartime experiences, those of a provincial teenager suddenly thrust into a violent, romantic, alien world: “it is disconcerting to find yourself soldiering in an exotic Oriental country which is medieval in outlook, against a barbarian enemy given to burying prisoners up to the neck or hanging them by the heels for bayonet practice”.

Fraser’s own wartime memories — of bloody night-time battles in a Burmese forest, the execution of prisoners of war, the killing of a wounded Japanese soldier, all the fear and discomfort and confusion — are reworked in Flashman’s experiences of the Indian Mutiny and the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the great disaster at Kabul. All the experiences of battle, real and fictional, are written in the same disordered, impressionistic way, in dreamlike passages of literary high Modernism where sudden death and incongruous, hallucinatory scenes swim together in an old man’s fading memory.

The essential literary conceit of the Flashman novels is the unreliability of memory: vivid scenes are seared into the narrator’s memory (“I can still see before me” or “I will never forget” are phrases which run through both the novels and memoirs) even as the details pass into oblivion. The Flashman novels are, in essence, the disordered, heart-racing flashbacks of Britain’s own imperial memory.

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And yet, behind the horror and the fear, the romance of adventure remains. The 40-year-old Fraser wrote the first Flashman novel while Deputy Editor of the Glasgow Herald, one of many from the wartime generation who, trapped behind a desk in middle age, would “throw aside his pencil and stare at the window and exclaim: ‘Oh, God, I wish the war was still on!’” Indeed, the inspiration for Flashman came to Fraser after a rare two-week embed with the Army fighting insurgents in Malaya and Borneo during the waning days of empire, where he had “got the smell of the Orient and soldiering again” and found the prospect of a return to office life too depressing to bear. “They have their hazards, but once you’ve trodden the wild ways you never quite get them out of your system.”

It worked: the Flashman series was a great success, removing Fraser from the newsroom and thrusting him into a world of literary success, and the financial comfort and foreign travel that came with Hollywood screenwriting. Writer of the Octopussy screenplay, Fraser effectively adapted the Bond formula to a Victorian imperial context, conjuring up a world of terrifying, eccentric villains who handily outline their dastardly plans to their trussed-up captive hero; of exotic beauties who give up their bodies in their hundreds for the lustful narrator’s use; of high adventure in romantic locales. Like Bond, the Flashman series is a product of the Sixties, a consoling myth of national derring-do at a period of catastrophic decline.

It is ironic, then, that the elderly Fraser would write so scornfully of “the children of the swinging Sixties” who created a society where “mis-called ‘Victorian values’ are derided, and the permissive society has turned a scornful back on so many things that my generation respected and even venerated”. As he noted sadly: “The tragedy is that when the floodgates are opened only slightly, and possibly with the best of intentions, it’s only a matter of time before they’re torn off their hinges by the torrent.”

Was there any self-awareness in Fraser’s jibe at “the diverting spectacle of those ultra-liberals who rejoiced at the Chatterley decision, pursing their lips and wondering if things haven’t gone a bit too far”? Perhaps, as with Sixties satirists such as John Cleese, the older writer looked back with loss at the passing world he had lampooned, and with guilty disgust at the world he had helped bring into being. 

There seems a great disjunct, after all, between the ageing writer’s contempt for the “the interminable explicit sex scenes” of 2000s television and the actual contents of his published body of work. There is far more sex and violence in a Flashman novel than in even the most vulgar output of modern television, though it must be noted that Flashman’s sex life, all “getting my wench buckled to” and “rattling her six ways from Sunday” as “I romped her up and down” and “bulling away like fury” in a manner “like wrestling with a sergeant of dragoons” is far too cartoonish and strangely sexless to be erotic, like a higher-class version of Carry On Up the Khyber. The older Fraser gets, the more cartoonish the sex becomes, until by the time of 1994’s Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, when our anti-hero lies “collapsed supine beneath that ponderous mass of ebony flesh”, “rogering this prime piece of dusky blubber” and “belaboured by balloons of black jelly”, we find ourselves adrift in a world far beyond the erotic.

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Reading Flashman today, his world — in which the easy libertinism of the Regency era was being replaced by thin-lipped, Victorian puritanism — seems oddly current. With an awareness of the horrors of war born from his own military service, and the cynicism of a senior journalist all too aware of how the sausage gets made, through Flashman Fraser expressed his contempt for the occasional bouts of war fever that excitable journalism awakens in the British public, with “the press promising swift and condign punishment for the Muscovite tyrant, and street-corner orators raving about how British steel would strike oppression down”.

As a downstream result of Fleet Street’s exertions, Fraser’s hero survives the Charge of the Light Brigade and finds himself chased by Russian soldiers on the road to Mariupol, observing that “the Russians fought as badly and stupidly as they nearly always do”, because “the Russian army was a useless thing, as we’d seen in the Crimea. You can’t make soldiers out of slaves”.

In the run-up to the American Civil War, Flashman finds himself forced to work with the idealistic abolitionist John Brown, who had “fuelled the passions of the wildest elements on both sides, and convinced even sensible and moderate people that the only answer was disunion and war”. In a country torn between two political factions who hated each other with visceral fury, divided on the politics of race, “he put gunsmoke on the breeze, and the whole of America breathed it in — and didn’t find the odour displeasing”.

Of Afghanistan, he observes, like many an editorial last summer, that “possibly there has been a greater shambles in the history of warfare than our withdrawal from Kabul; probably there has not. Even now, after a lifetime of consideration, I am at a loss for words to describe the superhuman stupidity, the truly monumental incompetence, and the bland blindness to reason” of Britain’s ignominious retreat, product of a Victorian bubble where “those who studied the country only from the cantonment at Kabul knew no more about it than you would learn about a strange house if you stayed in one room of it all the time”. Flashman’s world is not, after all, so very distant from our own.

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Over time, the Flashman novels became a means for Fraser to process his own experiences of war, and loss and change, and to express his political and moral feelings with a complexity and ambiguity he was incapable of achieving in his memoirs: perhaps not intentionally, but simply because any writer, forced to churn out content regularly enough, ends up revealing more of himself than he intends. A craftsman rather than an artist, his successful formula is still very fine and entertaining handiwork, and the increasing sophistication of the historical footnotes Fraser appended to the novels emerges as the greatest joy of the series. 

It is odd that the 2000s world of his memoirs seems further from us today than Flashman’s world did to him — many of his observations, commonplace then, would now be considered hate speech — and yet Flashman’s world of imperial misadventure still seems resonant, and strangely current. Like Flashman and his creator, we are trapped as unwilling protagonists in history, whose endless rhymes and recurrences cannot be escaped.

Despite their distance in time and space, not to mention qualitative differences of magnitude and geopolitical significance, the conflicts in Ukraine and Bosnia nonetheless remain entangled. Fundamental questions that have surfaced over the past month — over European strategic autonomy, Germany’s status as a great power, multipolarity and the role of Nato expansion — all emerged with the war in Bosnia.

The German recognition of the secession of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia in 1991 — in express defiance of the US secretary of state at the time, James Baker — spurred the collapse of the Yugoslav federation, leading to Bosnia’s bid for secession and its slide into civil war. At the time, German defiance of the US was taken to signal the revival of German power in the wake of the country’s reunification in 1990. Yet its fumbling for foreign policy independence was eventually ended by Washington, which reasserted its strategic domination on the continent with a Nato bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb forces that helped bring the war to an end in 1995. Followed by war in Kosovo in 1999, the wars of Yugoslav secession only ended in 2001 with a Nato deployment to end a conflict brewing in North Macedonia.

Although Western military intervention in another multi-national, multi-ethnic ex-communist federation spurred fears in the Kremlin that the West would reprise such adventures in the ex-Soviet Union during the Nineties, the collapse of the Russian state and the low price of oil meant that there was little Russia could do to stymie Nato expansion in the region. Russian weakness helped foster the mirage of a continent that had transcended great power rivalries, which would in turn smooth the path for Nato’s reckless policy expansion eastwards. Nonetheless, there were occasional portents of future conflict, such as when British Lieutenant-general Sir Mike Jackson refused the orders of his Nato commanding officer to fire on a Russian column attempting to seize Pristina airport in Kosovo.

The war in Bosnia and the brutality that defined it shattered the Long Peace that had prevailed in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Today, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a similarly shattering effect on a public that seems to have forgotten the wars in former Yugoslavia. Such collective amnesia — which also omits the bloody Greek Civil War that ended in 1949 — evinces a peculiar Eurocentrism, which treats European territory as if it were holy soil consecrated for perpetual peace by European blood, and as if Europe’s bloody history of internecine war makes war less rather than more likely.

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The Nato-led international intervention that brought the wars of Yugoslav secession to an end were seen as restoring the peace of Europe. In reality, however, the diplomatic, military and humanitarian tools developed in the Balkans would become instruments for extending war outside of Europe. All the elements of the international intervention in the Bosnian war would be globalised in subsequent decades across conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. Arms embargoes, sanctions against “rogue regimes”, No-Fly Zones that escalated into bombing campaigns conducted alongside proxy forces and favoured ethnic militias, the deployments of large and militarised United Nations peacekeeping operations, the establishment of protectorates and international criminal courts — all these became the political and military instruments of a new global humanitarian order. Bosnia remains a de facto protectorate of the European Union to this day, hosting international forces and even sporting a blue and yellow flag expressly modelled on that of the EU.

The implications of humanitarian intervention in the Balkans were understood in Moscow even if not in Brussels or Washington. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly cited the precedent of Nato’s 1999 Kosovo War as a legal and political justification for his dismemberment of Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which was modelled on how Nato oversaw the detachment and independence of the former Serbian province in 2008. So we find ourselves in a situation where Russia claims to be retaliating against Nato encroachment in its sphere of influence in Ukraine, while in the Balkans it is Nato and the EU that decry Russian interference in stoking support for Serb secessionism in Bosnia.

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This geopolitical tangle of imperial hypocrisy shows that we are fully returned to a baleful era of great power spheres of influence, depriving smaller powers in Europe of the political space for their sovereignty and independence. The Balkans have been returned to their nineteenth century status, as what was formerly a single sovereign state has been reduced to a clutch of small, dependent states enmeshed in mutual hostility and rivalry as they jostle for great power patronage.

Given the war in Ukraine and renewed geopolitical rivalries in the Balkans, what are the prospects for Europe’s middle and smaller powers to emerge from tutelage? During the First World War, the British journalist H.H. Munro published The Purple of the Balkan Kings, a short story during the First Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, which had laid the ground for the Great War itself. The story recounts the discomfiture of his absurdly named protagonist Luitpold Wolkenstein, a “financier and diplomat on a small, obtrusive, self-important scale” who, while sitting in his favourite Viennese café, is astounded to read of the military victories of the Balkan League in rolling back the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Munro recounts how vital the subordination of the Balkan states was to Wolkenstein’s mental tranquility:

“His judgment had been one of unsparing contempt for small-scale efforts, of unquestioning respect for the big battalions and full purses. Over the whole scene of the Balkan territories and their troubled histories had loomed the commanding magic of the words ‘the Great Powers’…”

Filled with dread at the prospect that the Balkan states might redraw the map of Europe independently of the Great Powers, and that they might even roll their military victories over into a “project of fiscal unity, extending over the entire Balkan lands, and further of a constitutional union”, Munro has his “plump-bodied café oracle” retire from his café in a depressive mood.

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Today, latter-day Wolkensteins are firmly back in charge in Europe, not only in Vienna but also especially in Brussels, with their own equivalents in Moscow. Social media provides them with a hubbub that would easily outdo an early twentieth century Viennese café for its complacent febrility and bourgeois extremism. Thinking of the two Eastern European wars that now frame the rise and fall of the era of liberal hegemony — Bosnia and Ukraine respectively — will Europe’s smaller states ever be able to assert their independence against imperial domination?

There is a real risk that a peace settlement for Ukraine reproduces the problems that have plagued post-war Bosnia, which has been carved up into separate, ethnically homogenous statelets with no meaningful central government able to exert sovereignty over the territory as a whole. Ukraine would also carry the further risk of being torn between West and East, with the two halves of the country divided between Brussels and Moscow respectively.

Describing Russian war crimes as “genocide” risks overshadowing the political questions at the core of the conflict. If Ukraine is to safeguard the independence it is fighting for, it must not only repel the Russian invasion but also avoid becoming a Western protectorate, dependent on Nato arms and EU aid to survive. Neutrality offers Ukraine the best hope of preserving its sovereignty. In due course, a neutral Ukraine may even offer an example of how smaller and weaker European states may escape Balkanisation in the years to come.

The most controversial aspect of the new sanctions regime is without a doubt the freezing of Russia’s offshore gold and foreign-exchange reserves — about half of its overall reserves — but even this is not unprecedented: last year, the US froze foreign reserves held by Afghanistan’s central bank in order to prevent the Taliban from accessing its funds; the US has also previously frozen the foreign-exchange reserves of Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.

So, taken individually, these measures are not as exceptional as they’ve been portrayed. However, never before have so many sanctions been deployed at once: there are already 6,000 various Western sanctions imposed on Russia, which is more than those in existence against Iran, Syria and North Korea put together. Even more importantly, none of the previous targets of sanctions were remotely as powerful as Russia — a member of the G20, and the world’s largest nuclear power.

Likewise, none of the 63 central banks that are members of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel — known as the central bank of central banks — has ever been the target of financial sanctions. The BIS itself has even joined in on the sanctions in order to prevent Russia’s access to its offshore reserves. This really is unprecedented: since its establishment in 1931, the BIS had never taken such a measure, not even during World War II.

So what should we expect from the sanctions? Western pundits and commentators have little doubt: the sanctions will hamstring the Russian economy, sow discontent among the Russian people and elites alike, and possibly even cause the downfall of the Putin regime. At the very least, we’re told, they will hinder Russia’s war efforts. But history suggests otherwise: see Iraq, or more recently Iran. Far more likely is that this turns out to be the latest Western strategic miscalculation in a long list of strategic blunders, of which the United States’ inglorious withdrawal from Afghanistan is just the most recent example.

After all, Russia has been preparing for this moment for quite some time. Following the first wave of Western sanctions, in 2014, and partly in retaliation against them, Putin embarked on what analysts have dubbed a “Fortress Russia” strategy, building up the country’s international reserves and diversifying them away from US dollars and British pounds, reducing its foreign exposure, boosting its economic cooperation with China, and pursuing import substitution strategies in several industries, including food, medicine and technology, in an effort to insulate Russia as much as possible from external shocks.

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True, Putin made the mistake of leaving around half of those reserves parked in foreign central banks, resulting in these now being confiscated. But nonetheless Russia still has access to more than $300 billion in gold and foreign-exchange reserves — more than most countries in the world and more than enough to cushion any short-term fall in exports, or prop up the rouble (for a while).

Moreover, the Russian central bank reacted to the sanctions by stopping capital flows out of Russia and nationalising the foreign exchange earnings of major exporters, requiring Russian firms to convert 80% of their dollar and euro earnings into roubles. It also raised interest rates to 20% in an effort to attract foreign capital. These measures are aimed at bolstering the rouble’s value and providing a flow of foreign exchange into the country. They appear to be working: while the rouble is around 40% of its value since the start of the conflict, the Russian currency’s free-fall seems to have come to a halt for now, even registering an uptick over the past two weeks. For the time being, Russia’s financial account — the difference between the money flowing in and out of the country — is far from disastrous.

Let’s not forget that the main source of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves — oil and gas exports — has been excluded from the sanctions, for obvious reasons: for most European countries, Russia accounts for a huge part of their oil and gas imports (and other staple commodities), and there’s simply no way of replacing those energy sources from one day to the next.

In short, Russia runs no risk, in the short term, of running out of reserves and not being able to pay for its imports. But even assuming that the West decided to put a stop to all its imports from Russia overnight, there’s no reason to believe that this would bring the Russian military machine to a halt. The notion that “we are financing Russia’s war by purchasing gas and oil”, as the Finnish prime minister recently stated, is fundamentally misplaced.

As the economist Dirk Ehnts has observed, the Russian military machine, for the most part, doesn’t rely on imports (if anything, Russia is an arms exporter). It is sourced domestically and, like the salaries of its soldiers, is paid for in roubles, which the Russian central bank can create in an unlimited quantity, just as the Bank of England does when it comes to pounds.

Equally unfounded are rumours of an impending Russian default. In recent years, the Russian government has taken steps to reduce its foreign liabilities: its foreign currency-denominated debt amounts today to about $40 billion — a tiny amount compared with the size of Russia’s yearly exports of more than $200 billion in oil and gas. Any decision to default would be entirely political. We mustn’t forget that the very creditors expecting to be paid back in dollars are the same that have just confiscated a good part of Russia’s dollars — if the latter were to default on their payments, it would be an even bigger problem for their Western creditors. As with Russia’s oil exports, hurting Russia inevitably means hurting ourselves as well.

Moreover, thanks to the Russian government’s successful efforts at boosting domestic agricultural production, domestic food production now accounts for more than 80% of retail sales, up from 60% in 2014. This means Russia is largely self-sufficient food-wise. So even if its export revenues were to plummet (which is unlikely), the country wouldn’t go hungry — unlike the rest of the world — and would most likely be able to continue to finance its war efforts.

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Might a selective ban on exports of specific high-tech Western components, some of which are bound to be used in Russia’s defence industry, prove more effective? Possibly. But Russia has been reducing the dependence of its military-industrial apparatus on foreign components and technologies for years. More importantly, both hypotheses — that Russia’s economy and military can be brought to their knees through export and/or import bans — rest on the flawed assumption that the whole world is on board with the sanctions. But that is far from the case.

While most of the world’s nations — 143 out of 193 — voted for a resolution in the UN’s General Assembly condemning Russia, the 35 countries that abstained include China, India, Pakistan and South Africa, as well as several African and Latin American states. These and many more countries — including several that voted in favour of the resolution, such as Brazil — have strongly criticised the sanctions against Russia and can be expected to continue trading with Putin. It’s frankly very hard to call Russia isolated when some of the world’s largest economies have refused to support the West’s sanctions regime.

China, in particular, has been very vocal in its support of Russia. Beijing is already the Kremlin’s main trading partner, and it alone can absorb huge quantities of Russian energy and commodities, as well as provide Russia with basically any industrial and consumer goods that the latter currently imports from the West. China also operates an alternative to the Western-managed SWIFT system called CIPS to manage cross-border transactions in yuan, which could allow Russia to partially circumvent the West’s financial blockade. Even though the yuan still makes up a small percentage of international transactions, its role is bound to grow rapidly in the coming years (consider the news that Saudi Arabia may start pricing its oil sales to China in the latter’s currency). All this helps explain why even Western financial analysts, such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, predict a year-on-year contraction for the Russian economy of about 7% — bad, but hardly catastrophic (Covid caused a much larger drop in GDP for most countries).

However, much will depend on the policy response of the Russian government. Obviously, the withdrawal of many foreign firms and decline in foreign investments will increase unemployment. But the Russian government can cushion the blow by resorting to a “Keynesian” expansionary fiscal policy aimed at boosting domestic investment and supporting incomes. If ever there were a time for Russia to abandon its historically ultra-tight fiscal policy, as several Russian economists have been arguing for some time, it is now.

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America has won Europe's war

By Thomas Fazi

Two weeks ago, I suggested that, in the short term at least, the US will benefit from the conflict in Ukraine. In the long term, however, it is slowly becoming clear that US-led global Western order will suffer. The West’s imposition of sanctions — involving not only governments, but also private companies and even allegedly apolitical organisations such as central banks — has sent a clear message to the countries of the world: the West will stop at nothing to punish countries that step out of line. If this can happen to Russia, a major power, it can happen to anyone. “We will [never again] be under the slightest illusion that the West could be a reliable partner,” the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said. “We will do everything so as never, in any way, to be dependent on the West in those areas of our life which have a decisive significance for our people.”

Those words are bound to reverberate across the world, with dramatic implications for the West. As Wolfgang Münchau has warned: “For a central bank to freeze the accounts of another central bank is a really big deal… As a direct result of these decisions, we have turned the dollar and the euro, and everything that is denominated in those currencies, into de facto risky assets”. At the very least, it will inevitably push countries to diversify their reserves and increase their yuan holdings, in order to loosen the West’s grip on their economies and bolster their economic resilience and self-sufficiency. Even if it doesn’t push countries straight into Beijing’s arms, as is already happening with Russia, it will likely lead to the emergence of two increasingly insulated blocs: a US-dominated Western bloc and a China-dominated East-Eurasian one.

In this new pseudo-Cold War, “non-aligned” countries could find that they are in a better position to assert their sovereignty than they were under the American global empire. Forget “the collapse of the Russian economy” — this could be the result of the West’s new economic war.

Bombs are not raining down on our cities; instead, what we are experiencing is the psychological weaponisation of war — and its exploitation as a tool of indoctrination and statecraft in the hands of the establishment.

The Ukraine crisis is undoubtedly a tragedy, but it is merely the latest in a series of geopolitical events stretching back at least 20 years in which the media coverage has been biased, one-sided, and ideological. All of these instances — Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the Afghanistan Withdrawal — were riddled with “structural information traps” that we ignored at our peril.

With each of these conflicts, the coverage gets worse, and the traps become ever more luring and incendiary. In each case, a narrative is constructed and transposed over the reporting, reinforced by sensationalist imagery that could rationalise an intervention and perhaps military action. But none compares to Ukraine. Here, we have witnessed the media of the Free World disseminating dishonest or otherwise uncritical coverage, fake news, Ukrainian disinformation, and propaganda aimed at conditioning the public to internalise the establishment’s Manichean narrative of a deranged madman’s random war of aggression.

Not only has the Ukraine coverage been highly charged, morally self-righteous, and plainly political, it actively demands a collective suspension of disbelief as it cultivates and redirects a natural reaction of sympathy felt by all into a moral outrage that insists on certain retaliation. Some, such as the former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, have irresponsibly vilified the entire Russian population. Others, such as The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, have begun to senselessly demonise prescient realist American academics for daring to shed light on Russia’s basic national security interests and the possibility of a confrontation if they go unrecognised.

So far as the Western legacy media is concerned, we really do live in the post-historical age Francis Fukuyama triumphantly proclaimed in 1989, with liberal internationalism the only acceptable paradigm through which to understand the world. Alternative views are now tantamount to championing tyranny. In each instance, the dictator comes to personify internationally Hegel’s thymotic, if savage, primitive man — the inhumane antithesis of the “last man” —  fighting maniacally against liberal democracy, the march of modernity, and progress itself. Assad, Ghaddafi, the Taliban, and Vladimir Putin all fit this archetype as reactionary actors par excellence necessitating a holy alliance to confront and civilise.

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Such a melioristic framing of international politics justifies and indeed privileges a Manichean narrative of good and evil. In this context, rationality itself is bound to the good, defined as effective conformity with liberal hegemony.

This is how the permanent members of the ruling class view the world. The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, has made the enlightening observation that the years-brewing war in Ukraine was a result of Putin simply becoming “unhinged”, suggesting he might be suffering from neurological problems. Not to be outdone, Condoleezza Rice, one of the architects of the Iraq War and the ill-advised 2008 Bucharest declaration (which affirmed Nato’s “open door” towards Ukraine and therefore helped to spark this most recent conflict), bemoaned Putin’s “delusional rendering of history” and “erratic” behaviour.

Perhaps, given the profound crisis of meaning in the West and the gap in solidarity and social cohesion, we should not be surprised. Living under the conditions of rootlessness, spiritual emptiness, and angst, every crisis is an opportunity for mythopoesis. Tragedy is reborn, and we are easily enthralled by the periodic cycles of worship and hero-making. Our faith in the cult of expertise, meanwhile, blinds and lulls us to the potential dangers of such black and white thinking.

As good Straussians, American neoconservatives were among the first to intuit this fact: that owing to disenchantment and the dissolution of our “sacred canopy”, the myth — or the Platonic “noble lie” — can be used to strengthen the Regime. Through their co-option, they would ensure the inherent power of the “noble lie” would be harnessed to regularly generate casus belli for global liberal imperialism. After all, what better unifying force than the “grand American project” of war to energise one’s desire for national greatness and the need for the regimentation of life in a disordered, chaotic Zeitgeist. Led by America, the grand mission of the Anglosphere would therefore have to be “to advance civilisation itself”. Not to mention, heroes also need villains, and it does help that in the Ukrainian archetype, ‘evil’ is not an intangible virus but can be personified onto an ‘other’ — in this case, Vladimir Putin.

This is the fake, performative, and internationalist nationalism of the American elite class: they use emotional triggers to rally the people behind the flag of the state in the name of lofty humanitarian causes which mask their own self-importance and narcissistic greatness. In fact, the systematic and periodic milking of tragedy to sow mass hysteria and manufacture support for the liberal imperium and its rulers has become the modus operandi in Washington. The consequence is not only further empowerment of the martial state, but also the enabling and even the ennobling of America’s war machine.

But so what? So what if our information ecosystem in the West is substantively flawed and prejudiced? Is this kind of systemic information bias, unbalanced coverage, and outright favouritism not endemic to all culture-complexes, prevalent also across state-run media in China, Iran, and Russia? The answer is certainly yes, but with an important qualification: the latter are not liberal democracies.

Some might say the foreign policy hawks have not learned from their catastrophic regime-change wars in the Middle East. But they have. They learned the importance of narrative control and information warfare targeting domestic audiences: consolidating the media, tightening their hold on information, marginalising the few investigative journalists that remain, and nullifying scepticism as examples of appeasement or Putinism. Undoubtedly, the situation seriously endangers civil liberties and freedom of thought in the Anglosphere, undermining the very foundation of Western democracy.

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But wedded to a disturbing, yet ascendant, neo-McCarthyism, the homogenisation of the Western media environment could ultimately prove more ominous than simple government censorship à la North Korea or Iran. At its core, the phenomenon aims to condition public opinion into “correct” acceptable speech patterns in the service of the “noble lie” — using the good heart of most ordinary citizens and their repulsion at human suffering as bait.

This noxious development, unless fully defanged and neutralised, could yet tear the very fabric of Western society, unleashing the dystopia of internalised totalitarianism, wherein the public-private boundaries disappear and citizens — even informed ones — can hardly distinguish between planted or socially-reinforced information and their own views. In such a world, the only choice is to virtue signal and self-censor.

Gone unchecked, it could amount to mass indoctrination around key national security questions and spell the end of democracy — in spirit if not procedurally. This is the ultimate fog of war.

Despite their litany of failures, the lesson drawn by the foreign policy establishment from their calamitous interventionism under the banner of democracy and freedom (“democratism“) was not to abandon their evangelical crusades for empire and to affirm restraint, moderation, and prudence. It was, instead, a desire not to be caught in the lie, as they were with their patently false claim about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). To achieve this, the military-industrial-congressional complex and the professional-managerial class that runs it had to dominate a new battlespace: information. Not for foreign audiences, in which Western intelligence has had a long track record, but to domesticate, intellectually sterilise, and effectively neutralise their own citizens.

To guarantee the continuation of its globalist misadventurism, the establishment had to control and limit the political discourse at home. It has done so largely in two ways. The first was to claim monopoly over ‘truth’, and to discredit anyone who might not go along with the endorsed narrative by doubting their patriotism and brandishing them as appeasers, apologists, and/or outright traitors. The second was to ensure a total consolidation of national security narratives — so that even when instances of falsehood and misinformation are discovered, this would not receive much exposure but be shunned to the darkest corners of the internet.

Any war is a tragedy. We should work to de-escalate and see it end in Ukraine. But there are always at least two sides to a conflict: two agendas, not counting the designs of external actors. War does not occur in a vacuum. It often betrays (and is the culmination of) a long history of grievances and distrust.

Having claimed over 14,000 lives since 2014, the conflict in Ukraine is not about Vladimir Putin and his character but realpolitik, national interest, and great power rivalry. Countries have genuine security interests, some of them existential. They have real red lines.

“No Russian leader could stand idly by,” Putin told William Burns, now the director of the CIA, and accept Nato membership for Ukraine, Georgia, or Belarus, or allow Western weapons systems into these countries. As one of American greatest strategists and the architect of “containment” against the Soviet Union, George Kennan’s reaction to the Clinton administration’s insistence on Nato’s enlargement is particularly telling: “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

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Almost 25 years on, such sober-minded analysis is increasingly rare. And this sidelining of neutral, dispassionate scrutiny in the Russo-Ukrainian War is particularly alarming because this is not America’s war. The North Atlantic has little vital geostrategic interest in Ukraine other than in trying to avoid a refugee or energy crisis. Yet many in Washington, London, or Brussels have goaded and encouraged, and are now revelling in, the conflict — convinced as they are that an extended quagmire there could become the kind of vulnerability for Russia that Afghanistan was for the Soviet Union, a malignant tumour metastasising to the whole of the Russian body politic and instigating regime change.

While diehards may desire a West-East clash packaged under the tired rubric of Democracy versus Autocracy to prove their machismo, the situation in Ukraine is boiling over — and it is still early days. Things are about to get far more dreadful. Ukraine is a small state neighbouring a great power, a historical buffer and bridge between Russia and the West. “To Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country,” wrote Henry Kissinger in 2014. “Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus,”. The sooner we heed and accept this fact, the sooner we can sensibly gauge the situation as is and review our commitment critically.

Statesmanship is the art of not letting emotions drive policy. Sentimentality is the enemy of reason, all sense of proportion, and limits: in short, it kills realism and breeds wishful thinking. Such utopianism is senseless and dangerous: it will prolong the conflict and get lots of innocent civilians needlessly killed. Meanwhile, fomenting false hope in the public domain could further fan the flames of war, entangling Europe and the US in a confrontation with nuclear Russia — an Armageddon the tale of which we will likely not live to tell.

War is not sports-betting, where one can feel good about siding with the underdog from the comfort of a couch or a bar. It is geopolitics in its most visceral, existential form: wagers have real costs involving human lives, and they are settled only with power and political will.

The point is that this tragedy was entirely predictable and avoidable. We invited (if not compelled) conflict with our politics of intrigue and meddling in Eastern Europe, our disregard for Moscow’s security interests, and our moral grandstanding over items like Nato’s eastward expansion, Ukrainian neutrality, and demilitarisation. Any seasoned diplomat of the Cold War would be left utterly mystified. This was and remains political and strategic malpractice.

The question now is whether we want to put millions of Ukrainian lives in jeopardy simply to keep it as a Western Bulwark on Russia’s frontier and a dagger at Moscow’s throat. The Russo-Ukrainian War must be condemned and brought to an end using diplomacy, but the West must accept a degree of culpability for leading the Ukrainians “down the primrose path” and egging on their showdown with their giant neighbour to the east. Any attempt to escalate and prolong this conflict by giving false hope to the Ukrainian people with tough rhetoric, moralistic bluster, lethal arms, and economic sanctions, the brunt of which will be felt by civilians on both sides, is irresponsible and callous. It would only ensure more death and suffering.

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As former US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor contended in a recent television interview: “I see no reason why we should fight with the Russians over something that they have been talking about for years, [and] we simply chose to ignore… We will not send our forces to fight, but we are urging Ukrainians to die pointlessly in a fight they can’t win. We’re going to create a far greater humanitarian crisis than anything you’ve ever seen if it doesn’t stop.” Only this time, our liberal conceit and messianic delusion could potentially spiral a regional conflict into a global maelstrom that would exterminate humanity in a nuclear apocalypse.

The road to hell, as the wise aphorism has it, is paved with good intentions. Unless we course-correct now, we could soon find ourselves in a Huxleyan Brave New World that exploits the illusion of freedom while normalising the sophistic manipulation of public discourse to manufacture consent around the establishment’s liberal internationalist foreign policy.

When all roads lead to interventionism and war, pause, think, and consider how we got to where we are. Ask yourself who designed this dystopian city of lies and to what purpose — before it is too late.

Last week, I wrote that the idea of an all-out invasion of Ukraine and a march on Kyiv, touted so often by Joe Biden, made no sense. As it stood, the world hung on Putin’s every move: Russia had cemented its superpower status — and all this was achieved without the need to fire a single shot. Putin had won gold; he had leverage without cost. That would change with a full invasion — and what would be the point of that?

But I did caveat all this: “It may well be that after 20 years of acting like a Tsar, he has gone mad, like so many before him, and something crazy is coming.”

Judging by his speech on Monday, he may well have gone mad, and the crazy may well be coming. It was as if Putin was finally able to say what he’d been thinking for 20 years. What most concerned me, beyond the content, was the tone. It was a combination of self-pity with a sense of utter superiority; a toxic mix which always, always leads to violence. “You didn’t want us to be friends,” he told the West, “but you didn’t have to make an enemy of us.”

Three things became clear from his controlled and detailed rant. Firstly, that he is obsessed with the idea that the West is determined to “Keep Russia Down”; and secondly, that he does not even accept the idea of Ukraine. He claimed, falsely, that it had never really been an independent state; he also said it was “madness” that republics were allowed to leave the Russian Empire. Thirdly, and perhaps most disturbingly, it became clear that this is no longer just about Ukraine (if indeed it ever was). Every former Soviet state is, by implication, now in the firing line.

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This was the performance of a man who has been the Tsar of Russia for two decades. A man surrounded only by flatterers and “yes men”, who now seems to use even his inner circle as little more than a rubber stamp for his delusions. But it was also the performance of a man who had weathered the pandemic locked away from other humans, with his head buried in dodgy Soviet books on Ukraine history.

The climax of the speech was, of course, the decision — accompanied by an official signing of the relevant documents, no less — to recognise the “separatist republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, the two areas of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine that Russia de facto carved out in 2014 when it sent troops across the border to aid a nominally spontaneous separatist uprising that emerged in response to the Maidan Revolution.

I was there on the ground as pro-Russian separatists aided by the Russian military seized municipal buildings and took control of key cities. There was very little that was spontaneous about it all, and it was clear even then that they were taking orders from Moscow. Soon the Russian hardware began to roll across the border. The Ukrainians duly rolled out an anti-terror operation in response, and the fighting began. A peace of sorts was eventually signed in Minsk and an uneasy stasis held for almost eight years.

But on Monday, Putin blew all that up. The regions will now be recognised as autonomous states. Ukraine has been officially sundered. Now Russia plans to send troops across the border for “peacekeeping” purposes, though Putin clarified yesterday that they would not necessarily go in “right now”.

The morning after the night before is fraught. I spent Monday night speaking to friends in Ukraine. “Tired,” said Viktoria when I asked her how she felt. “Just tired of this never-ending stress.” She continued: “I don’t want to think about the economic crisis that will follow, my possible death, my destroyed country… But I don’t want to run away in panic because it’s my land. Few of the people I know here are frightened. We are irate — you can feel a sense of unity everywhere.”

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My friend, Dmitri, is less sanguine. “I was sceptical about talk of an invasion,” he told me. “But after hearing about the annexation in Donbas, I started to panic. I read Putin’s tweets. He is a high functioning psychopath. Any scenario now is bad, isn’t it? We might be trapped.” And yet it’s not just my many Ukrainian friends I now fear for. I also fear for my Russian ones. Russia is going to become an even darker and more repressive place. And they will pay, as surely as Ukrainians will, for Putin’s creeping madness.

So, what next? Well, Putin has telegraphed his next move; now we must, too. Already the talk from the EU and Washington is of sanctions. Yesterday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson came out and announced a new package: he has sanctioned five banks and three Russian oligarchs with ties to Putin. Germany, meanwhile, has said Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline on which so much of Russia’s energy leverage over Europe relies, is to be put on hold. All of which sounds like it could be a game-changer, but don’t be fooled. I’ll believe it when I see it. I’d wager the Kremlin feels the same.

Of course, it’s a start — and amid the chaos we must remain calm. Right now, it’s important to remember that nothing has changed on the ground. Even in Donetsk, the centre of global attention, the influx of more soldiers does not actually alter the status quo. It may prove to be the launching point for something larger, but right now what was in Russian control remains so. Yes, it looks like that’s going to change — perhaps irretrievably. And like everyone who cares about geopolitics and, more immediately, who cares about Ukraine, I am angry. But for now, we must eschew hysteria.

For no matter how repulsed we are by his behaviour, if Putin wants a war we must do whatever we can not to give it to him. On Monday, I watched him look into the camera and say of the Ukrainians that he could “break their bones”, and I knew he meant it. He could and he would. That man would shell cities, would send a million to camps — and he would do it without hesitation and without pity.

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We must not push him into it. Instead, we should do what we should have done years ago: we enable Putin’s kleptocracy and it’s time to stop being Russia’s butler. This means no more London laundromat, no more friendly banks, no more cosying up from Eton; no more nice lawyers and art galleries and big houses. Enough is enough. We were told that we left the EU for reasons of national sovereignty. Well, if that were really the case then there has never been a better time to take back control — from Russia.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that all this and more could have been achieved years ago. We could have stopped him in Georgia. We could have stopped him in Syria. We could have stopped him in Crimea. We could have stopped him in Eastern Ukraine. But we did nothing. And here we are.

I suspect that Putin is all of these things. But none of that matters to the Ukrainians who find themselves living on Europe’s new Eastern Front because, more than anything, the Russian President is simply… “lucky”.

He’s lucky: lucky that the current leaders of the Western world are plagued by ineptitude, lucky that they can’t formulate a coherent response to his menacing of Ukraine, and lucky that none of this will change anytime soon. If ever there were a good time to carry out aggressive mischief like invading — or just destabilising — Ukraine, it is surely now.

Ultimately, this is a tale of division, one that starts with voters at home and concludes with the collapse of Nato. The Trump administration had already raised the alarm about the way key European countries — in particular Germany — do not contribute enough to their own defence. And in the years since, Western attempts to foster military unity have been marked by chaos. “Stab in the back!”, was the verdict of one national newspaper after Australia decided to renege on a submarine deal signed in 2016 with France, in favour of buying nuclear-power subs from the US.

An embittered EU responded with talk of creating a European army, hailing the “strategic autonomy” it would provide. But this is fantasy. Brussels is hardly the geopolitical powerhouse it thinks it is: the EU can scarcely maintain its own border force — let alone deploy a fully equipped fighting force. And looking at America and Britain’s shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan, it’s hard not to conclude the same about every Western country. Their people were left behind; their leaders left fumbling to explain the almighty mess.

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Yet for Putin, perhaps the obvious division within the West — the one that really allows him to act with impunity — relates to energy and the environment. No doubt climate change is a real and pressing problem. The rational approach to coping with it is through long-term investments designed to improve existing technologies such as nuclear fission and to develop new ones such as nuclear fusion. In the meantime, there are encouraging ways to make our use of fossil fuels more efficient and less polluting.

However, this is not the approach favoured by today’s leaders in the West, who have all but embraced Greta Thunberg’s worldview. Fracking is pretty much impossible in Europe. Nuclear power has been shut down in Germany. And the European Commission has set out a variety of measures to raise the cost of carbon. What happened next was entirely predictable: a manufactured energy crisis, a cost-of-living emergency, and the threat of social unrest. And for Putin, there was a bonus: the increased reliance on Russian natural gas through projects such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Yet there is another, less obvious source of division within the West that has fuelled the Ukrainian crisis: Covid-19. No Western democracy has managed to minimise excess mortality without significant restrictions on individual liberty. At least in some cases — such as Australia and New Zealand — the restrictions kept mortality down. But in Britain and North America, people have had to endure the worst of both worlds: high mortality and heavy restrictions.

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Only now, just as these countries should be putting on a united front, are the longer-term repercussions coming into view. In the UK, voters remain incensed to learn that lockdown rules against parties were repeatedly broken. In Canada, a protest against a rule that requires cross-border truckers to be vaccinated against Covid has thrown the supposedly liberal government into a spasm of illiberalism.

Given the unrest springing up across the West, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the approval ratings of its political leaders have been sliding over the past year. Consider the leaders of the “Five Eyes” group of Anglophone countries that not only share classified intelligence but are also widely regarded as its core. Their most recent approval numbers are remarkable — not least because the hapless Joe Biden comes top: Joe Biden, 41%; Justin Trudeau, 40%; Scott Morrison, 39%; Jacinda Ardern, 35%; Boris Johnson, 25%.

Of course, today’s Western leaders are unpopular for a host of reasons. Plagued by weakness, they have alienated large sections of their electorate — both by yielding to progressive policies and flirting with increasingly draconian policies. And as we are now seeing, this weakness has been magnified onto the global stage.

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Will California ever be safe?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Yes, the Anglosphere and eurozone may give the impression of a united front — not a day goes past without some politician warning that Putin will face the harshest sanctions ever seen if he invades Ukraine. But all these threats ring hollow. Nothing our leaders say will dispel the sense that we are being led by a group of King Lears: “I will have such revenges that all the world shall… I will do such things… What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be the terrors of the earth.” Their words are empty — and that is precisely why they seem destined to fail as a deterrent.

So we can still hope that Putin will relent and spare the people of Ukraine the scourge of war. We can also hope that the Chinese and Iranian governments will not follow Putin’s example in the coming months and years. But we should also hope, just as fervently, that the next time we get the opportunity, we elect more capable leaders than these weaklings.

I was 18 years old, interrailing around Europe with a friend to see what the world looked like beyond our provincial English town, and I had accidentally wandered into a pivot point in history. In the divided German capital, less than a year before, World War Two had finally come to an end, with no shots fired.

The joy was palpable everywhere. By the time my friend and I got to the Brandenburg Gate, half of the wall had already been chipped into bite-sized pieces, which were being sold to tourists by enterprising locals, along with suddenly useless Soviet army uniforms, military passbooks and the helmets of East German border guards. Marxism hadn’t been dead a year, and the market economy was already booming. The world, or the little part of it that I knew, had suddenly changed shape entirely.

Everyone of my generation grew up with the Cold War hanging over them. The possibility of nuclear armageddon was as ever-present for teenagers then as climate change is today: we didn’t think about it much, but it was the background hum of our lives. Nobody thought the Russians would invade, really, but there didn’t seem much chance of them going away either. There was always a chance of their tanks rolling across some border somewhere, or so the Americans kept telling us. Plus ça change.

This was just the way the world was: the free West and the unfree East. If you didn’t believe that story, then one look at the wall, the barbed wire, the machine gun towers and the fate of those who tried to cross the “death strip” from East to West would make you think again.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

And then, just like that, communism fell. This system that was supposed to free the people from exploitation and oppression, but had quickly become a monster itself. We didn’t know what was coming next. But from today’s perspective we can see that the fall of the East ushered in a new era.

After the wall would come a unipolar world, dominated by finance capital, overseen by the United States of America, the last empire standing. Its architects told us we were entering a long age of benign “globalisation”, in which “free markets”, human rights and democracy would spread around the world as naturally as the sun rose in the morning. The future would be free, open, liberal, prosperous and, well, American.

30 years later, we live in a world in which most Russians have a positive view of Stalin, and their current leader is mustering the biggest army since Soviet times on the border of a neighbouring state. The once-free-ish West is boiling in a stew of hate speech laws, vaccine mandates and ever-accelerating censorship and intolerance. “Populists” continue to barrack and harass its leaders, who still have no idea what to do about it: witness Justin Trudeau running away from the big scary men in their lorries. The last global empire is led by a confused octogenarian, and within a few years the biggest economy in the world will be a communist dictatorship. We didn’t see that one coming back in 1990.

Remembering the rubble strewn across Potsdamer Platz, it’s hard not to miss the End of History. In those halcyon days, I thought I lived in something called “the free world”. The liberal West was supposed to be the point on which the arc of history converged. We wanted it to be true, that story, but history has a habit of rolling on, and people don’t change, not really. I’m just grateful to have been there.

Looking back, we can see that what happened when the wall fell was not the triumph of freedom over oppression so much as the defeat of one Western ideology by another. The one that came through was the oldest, subtlest and longest-lasting, one which disguised itself so well that we didn’t know it was an ideology at all: liberalism.

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This was the thesis of Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, written before the populist wave of 2016, and perhaps the most reliable guide to the world we live in now. In his telling, liberalism was one of three ideologies that dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other two — communism and fascism — were shorter lived, and died in the West in the twentieth century. Liberalism — the elder brother — is only dying now. One reason for its comparatively long life is that it piggybacked on older stories, presenting itself as the inheritor of established traditions of liberty when in fact it was something quite different.

The ideology of liberalism has, since it emerged from the Enlightenment, claimed to liberate the individual from oppression. In practice it has manifested as the process of breaking all borders, limits and structures: of bringing down walls. The societies we have built around this way of seeing claim freedom for the individual from society itself, and proffer a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted in time and place, liberalism offered a new conception: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans were now “rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.”

What is crucial to understand — and this is what makes liberalism an ideology — is that in order for the liberal world to come into being, it needed to be created. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the traditional family, the church and private land ownership so that communism could materialise, so liberalism did not naturally “evolve” from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the “sovereign individual” from new cloth.

After the trauma of the Reformation, the Western nation-state took over the functions of the ailing Church, colonising for itself the sense of sacredness and obedience once demanded by religion. In this “migration of the holy” our religious sensibility was redirected from its proper focus towards worldly political constructions, and this in turn laid the ground for the revolutions of the modern age.

Each of these upheavals, whether in Jacobin France, Marxist Russia or Nazi Germany, failed to create the promised utopias. But they did have the effect of clearing away the traditional structures of the pre-modern era. And into the void rushed industrial capitalism — the system which G. K. Chesterton called the “monster that grows in deserts” — with its sensibility of control, measurement, utility and profit. Liberalism was, and remains, its nursemaid and press officer.

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Liberalism, like its competitor ideologies, is in this way totalitarian: ruthless and all-encompassing. But it outlasted its rivals because it promised not tyranny and order, but the messiness of a certain kind of freedom. At the height of the liberal age, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, individual human freedom was indeed possible in the West as it had never been before. Humans, or some of them, could detach themselves from their backgrounds and origins and seek something new, and plenty of us did. Openly tyrannical government became harder to sustain, oligarchies were required to subject themselves to regular plebiscites to sustain their power, previously ignored groups in society clamoured for access to its heartlands, the rule of law protected the poor as well as the rich, and capitalism’s Luciferic power created previously unheard of levels of wealth, as well as grinding poverty.

But in liberalism’s very success lay the seeds of its failure. The project of liberating the individual from his or her networks of loyalty, locality, family and culture, and the unleashing of the vast destabilising engine of capitalism, created a social instability which could only be controlled or directed by the last institution standing: the State.

An ideology premised on protecting and promoting the freedom of the individual led to the era of unprecedented state power we live in today. Governments now claim the right to direct our speech patterns, regulate our lives and businesses to increasingly radical degrees, shut down whole societies in the name of “public health”, and even legislate for acceptable and unacceptable attitudes and opinions.

The cultural ructions of today’s West — the cancellations and contradictions, the screaming matches over race, gender, history and identity — all of this is the manifestation not of liberalism’s failure but of its success. The “progressives” who are aggressively cramming identity politics into every crevice of society have met with resistance from many self-professed liberals. These woke radicals, they cry, are destroying our culture with their fanaticism! We need to return to “classical liberalism”! But culture wars happen when no real culture remains; and 200 years of “classical liberalism”, manifested in the economic and the cultural spheres, have seen to that.

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This is the legacy of an ideology which has been championed for centuries by both “Left” and “Right”. We have all become islands of self-definition, and we see now where that leads. A society premised on freedom becomes daily more fearful and closed. A society which boasts of its “diversity” becomes daily more homogenous. We can invent our own gender at will, and yet genuine individuals are in short supply, old-fashioned eccentricity is positively persecuted and originality has become career-ending. The Internet has enabled self-expression on a previously unimagined scale, and the result has been violent groupthink. The self, it turns out, mostly doesn’t have much to say.

But there’s more. Liberal ideology, as well as redesigning culture, must also redesign nature. In all the discussions of liberalism and its discontents that we’ve seen in the last few years, few seriously consider the power source that allowed the liberal age to conquer all before it: fossil fuels.

Without steamships, cars, planes, factories, supermarkets, modern roads, the Internet, the smartphone, the project of liberation would have been much less far-reaching. Fossil-fuelled liberalism allowed people to abandon place-based community, and to create for themselves an individual identity in an isolated but free kingdom of the self. But as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, “the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use”. Everything from mass democracy to feminism to multiculturalism to human rights floats on a vast bubble of fossil energy: . Nothing about the modern West could exist at all without vast concentrations of fossil energy: a fact of which Mr Putin is well aware.

Liberalism, like modernity itself, requires a war against nature; but it is a war that can never be won. As the climate shifts in response, the excesses of liberalism, and the project of self-creation it enabled, will not be possible. We will no longer be able to outsource our muscles or our minds to technology. We will need each other again — whether we like it or not.

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The West has lost its roots

By Paul Kingsnorth

So what comes after liberalism? The question has filled plenty of column inches in recent years, but the Covid years have brought into sharp relief the likely future we face. In Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen predicts that two post-liberal worlds are on offer: “a future of self-limitation”, in which people choose to practice “self-governance in local communities”, or “a future in which extreme licence coexists with extreme oppression”.

I know which I’d prefer, but I also know which looks most likely. As extreme individualism deepens, and an all-powerful state intervenes ever more deeply and widely to manage the resulting fragmentation, Western democracies show every sign of transforming openly into authoritarian oligarchies in which dissent — especially dissent aimed at liberalism itself — is ruthlessly suppressed by politicians who claim to represent “the people”. The vast bulks of those stationary Canadian trucks are currently the perfect symbol of this process.

The immediate future looks to me like the grinding down of what previous norms remain, and the parallel expansion of the State-corporate leviathan to both mop up the resulting mess and profit from it. That in turn will generate more “populist” (i.e. anti-liberal) reaction from both “Left” and “Right” and neither, and a consequent deepening of repression and propaganda from the besieged minority defending the remains of the liberal order. All of this will take place in the context of a planet with nearly ten billion people on it, hitting economic and ecological limits on all sides.

It seems likely to me that the liberal era will end much as the communist one did: flailing and corrupt, hiding behind walls of its own making, its leaders in denial but its people increasingly open-eyed. Perhaps the Russians won’t roll into Ukraine and spell the end of the vaunted “liberal order”, but its end seems to have been baked in from the beginning. All ideologies are based on a view of human nature that looks better on paper than in the confusing mess of the world, and the one we grew up with was no exception. No man, as John Donne had it, is an island. Now we see how right he was.

A version of this essay was first published at The Abbey of Misrule.

What the British government couldn’t accept then, and won’t acknowledge now, is that the most powerful leaders in Europe have long been Putin’s enablers. Of course, today the continent’s leaders are engaged in a flurry of diplomatic activity, in an attempt to stop Russia invading Ukraine. But those close to the Russian Front are less than impressed. Commenting on Boris Johnson’s recent trip to Warsaw, Poland’s prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki suggested that Western Europeans need to shed the belief that they will live in a 21st century “free of armed confrontation”. Russia’s Ukraine policy, he argues, is “for all its madness… painfully rational”. Putin is “effectively exploiting European weaknesses”.

And it’s not just that Europe had lulled itself into believing war in its neighbourhood is impossible. It has also, through its own hypocrisy, given Russia the perfect justification for waging it. Back when Western nations held all the cards, they didn’t always follow the international rules they imposed on others. Warnings to Putin about the fundamental evils of war may resonate with Western audiences, but they can ring hollow elsewhere, once leaders recall the US and UK-led 2003 invasion of Iraq, or the 2011 Nato-led military intervention in Libya — both of which had disastrous consequences for millions of people. The illegal former invasion, in particular, set a dangerous moral precedent — one warmongers worldwide will continue to exploit in the crucial battle of narratives.

Putin doesn’t need to convince Brits he’s right — especially as Britain has said it will not be sending troops to Ukraine in the event of an invasion. Still, he will be keeping a close eye on European opinion polls. A January survey in seven European nations showed a clear majority, 62%, believe Nato should defend Ukraine if it is invaded by Russia. That is a solid sign of European solidarity, considering Ukraine is not even a Nato member. But in a crisis, the true test of solidarity is always in how much pressure it can withstand.

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When presented with risk factors, European appetites for a direct confrontation with Russia reduce significantly. Among Germans, Fins, the French, Italians, Poles, Romanians and Swedes, only in Poland were most respondents willing to accept the risks of economic downturn, higher energy prices, cyber-attacks, a refugee crisis and Russian military aggression. Nowhere else was a majority willing to accept them. “People mainly seem to support sanctions that will hurt Russia but will not hurt them”, the report noted. This is crucial, for, as the survey’s authors pointed out: “today, geopolitical strength is determined not just by military and economic power but also by the capacity to endure pain”.

And after decades of enjoying safety and prosperity that’s virtually unmatched anywhere else in the world, the West’s pain threshold is low. Some may feel tempted to blame “generation snowflake” for this weakness. But, while young Fins, for instance, are indeed significantly less likely than older Fins to be willing to suffer to defend Ukraine, younger French and German citizens are more willing to make such sacrifices than older generations. This is no straightforward generational divide.

For Putin and his circle, who will be following such surveys (as will European governments), they are evidence of the weakness of modern-day Western societies who generally just want to be left alone to continue enjoying their high standards of living. Knowing that true democracies have to be governed by public opinion, Putin will likely see this risk aversion as encouragement to invade.

Still, it’s public opinion at home he’ll be most worried about. In raising the stakes so high, Putin has forced himself into a corner particularly dangerous for dictators. If he doesn’t see any of his major demands met and then doesn’t go through with any military action, Russians may start wondering what all the fuss was about. Did our tsar blink first and chicken out of a confrontation with the West? What exactly did Mother Russia get from all this? These are questions Putin can’t afford to have too many Russians asking. It will be difficult for him to explain away all the events of recent weeks — the troop movements and drills — as nothing more than Western “hysteria”, which is Russia’s current official line.

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Moreover, as he has now unambiguously displayed his intentions towards Ukraine, he will know that if he withdraws his troops now, Western nations — wary of making the same mistake twice — will likely invest significant resources into shoring up Ukraine’s defences. That would make the country more difficult to threaten in the future, let alone successfully invade. It’s no secret that Putin wants a 21st century, multi-ethnic empire, in which Ukrainians and Russians, who he describes as “one people”, will live side by side. Even if he was bluffing a month ago, and had no intention of actually invading, Putin might end up deciding that it’s now or never.

Of course, an attempt to conquer all of Ukraine would border on lunacy. It is the second-largest country in Europe — more than twice the size of the UK — and Putin’s antics have only galvanised Ukrainian nationalism. So trying to seize the whole territory would indeed be a “bloody business”, as Boris Johnson has suggested, especially as Ukraine has a history of effective guerrilla warfare dating back to the Second World War.

The prospect of a long conflict, costly in terms of both lives and money, is more likely to deter Putin than any attempt at appeasement. Yet even if Putin is dissuaded, Russia is not the only global power that could take advantage of the West’s weakness. The centre of economic gravity is shifting eastward. The seven largest emerging economies today — Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Turkey — are projected to overtake the G7 in economic size during the 2030s. These countries want a much bigger say in how the world is run than they have today. Why wouldn’t they, one may ask.

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The only real question is how they will opt to expand their influence. Some will likely focus on peaceful means, but others will be tempted to use their increasing military power to shift the status quo in their favour. China, for one, is closely observing events in Ukraine. It came out in support of Russia, by saying it, too, opposes Nato expansion. And it will draw lessons from whatever happens on how to handle its own inevitable attempt to achieve Taiwanese “reunification” with China this century. Meanwhile, Nato member Turkey is on the side of the West in this particular conflict, supplying Ukraine its long-range armed drones, much to Russia’s displeasure. But it has shown on several occasions that it will go its own way militarily when it deems fit.

The Ukraine crisis, then, is not an anomalous conflict, but the beginning of a future for which Europe appears utterly unprepared. The continent has had it so good for so long, it has come to take everything it has for granted, including its security — which is gravely threatened by that very complacency. This century will test the West in ways it hasn’t been tested in a long time. It can only survive with the kind of fight it seems resolutely determined to avoid.

Almost a century later, America is still not confined to Washington, the Manhattan upper classes, or Silicon Valley oligarchs. America is still the American people — and that is a cause for some hope.

Yes, America is deeply divided and most Americans, with reason, fear the country is decaying both politically and economically. But overall, Americans are far more patriotic about their country’s virtues than in any European country. If the fight over the future of liberalism against China and Russia — a fight that now threatens to turn a cold war into a hotter one — is going to be won, it is here.

America’s cognitive elites may seem enamoured with China’s state-controlled political system, but for much of the country, this remains the land of Jefferson and Lincoln, not the Yellow Emperor. Despite the pandemic, new business formations rose from roughly 3.5 million in 2019 to 4.4 million last year. Self-employment, pummelled at first, has recovered more rapidly than conventional salary jobs; more than 500,000 Americans reinvented themselves as entrepreneurs.

Arguably the greatest test for American renewal lies in manufacturing, precisely the place China has based its ascendancy. Here Trump’s “America First” mantra is echoed in the demands of Biden’s progressive agenda: in just the past three months, Congress has passed The BuyAmerican.gov Act, The Make PPE in America Act, as well as recent legislation banning the import of good produced using slave labor in Xinjiang.

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This is not only good policy but good politics; Americans, at least theoretically, are willing to pay higher prices for domestically produced goods; an overwhelming majority, according to one recent survey, would even fork out 20% more for products produced at home. No doubt this desire to reshore production reflects the pain associated with the mounting deficit on trade goods, which has enriched many of our leading manufacturing companies — notably Apple — but has also cost an estimated 3.4 million job losses since 2001.

That also goes some way to explaining why America’s industrial revival is occurring largely outside coastal affluent ‘mini-Europes’. Between 2017 and 2020, five states — Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Nevada — accounted for 30% of all manufacturing job growth. Perhaps more important is the fact that, along with reviving Midwest states like Ohio, Iowa and Indiana, these states tend to have lower taxes, housing costs and less regulation than their coastal counterparts.

And this formula is being rewarded. Almost all the new electric vehicle and battery facilities, demanded most by Democrat politicians, are being built east of the Sierra and Cascades. Meanwhile, multi-billion dollar facilities from Intel, Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor are popping up in growth states such as Arizona, Texas and, most recently, outside Columbus, Ohio. The impact of such growth cannot be underestimated: thanks to these new technologies, American companies are able to produce better and often cheaper products, crafting parts that, in many cases, have been largely sourced in China and other countries.

This industrial renaissance is critical if the West is to address its ruinous dependence on China — made all too evident during the pandemic and the current supply chain crisis. And yet it is also likely to elicit opposition from our own largely pro-China elites, who seem more willing to appease rather than confront Beijing.

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This is epitomised by Apple’s astounding $275 billion deal with Xi’s regime, an agreement that grants China continued control of production while also selling off advanced technology to the autocratic regime. Meanwhile, Wall Street figures such as Michael Bloomberg, Ray Dalio, Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan and even Blackrock’s Larry Fink seem to spot no contradiction between their craven progressive outpourings at home and China’s brutal repression in Xinjiang, Taiwan or Hong Kong — not to mention the Middle Kingdom’s greenhouse gas output, which totals more than the rest of the developed world combined.

At the same time, many of the same pro-China oligarchs also support draconian energy prices that undermine efforts to bring industry back home. Many have adopted the notion of “de-growth”, essentially a policy that seeks to reduce consumption and lower middle-class living standards to “save the planet”. Such campaigns — both corporate and within the clerisy — make little sense if companies end up shifting ever more production to high-carbon supply chains in China.

What makes this even more galling is the fact that now is a time of strategic opportunity for the US, particularly in terms of rising energy prices. Yet President Biden, obsessively seeking to please his green zealot supporters, insists on assaulting US production of natural gas and other fossil fuels. This seems particularly ill-conceived, given the US is the largest producer and China the biggest consumer. There is a competitive edge to be exploited here, not thrown away by begging for cheap oil from Russia or the Gulf states.

Perhaps even more important is another window of opportunity: now is the perfect time for America to attract foreign business. The increased threat of CCP government interference and higher operating costs are causing companies such as Sharp, Sony and Nintendo to begin move out of China — part of an exodus of more than 1,700 companies who upped sticks last year alone. Softbank, the giant Japanese based venture firm, has seen its revenues plummet as its Chinese investments fell due to government clampdowns and has suspended future investments there. A number of American entrepreneurs who came for the Sinic gold rush have pulled out as well, no longer seeing China as at the economic vanguard.

So it is not too late to constrain China and its global string of motley allies, including Putin. But this necessitates accentuating our differences; it means creating better conditions for smaller tech firms, and constraining the oligopolies who benefit from China’s squashing opposition and seek to create their own dominion at home.

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For this is about more than America. Elsewhere in the West, its allies now seem hopelessly passive in the face of bureaucratic control at home, and with many of them willing to accede to authoritarians abroad. Predictions of inevitable American decline have been popular, particularly in Europe, since at least the early Seventies. Yet here we are a half century later, and the US remains the world’s hegemonic economic, technological, and military power.

As Europe is now discovering, no country on the continent, including Germany, has the wherewithal, mentally or physically, to stand up to Putin’s Ukraine gambit — much less Xi’s more menacing attempts to repress Taiwan and Hong Kong. Germany’s boneheaded energy strategy has now effectively turned it into a satrap of the Sino-Russian “neo-Eurasianism” – an arc of autocracy.

Germans and other Europeans may not much like our recent Presidents — nor do I — but is that an excuse to coddle long-time autocrats like Putin and Xi? Whether they like it or not, when searching for the best hope to resist the rising autocratic tide, the West will find only one viable alternative to China’s domination: the United States.

Sounds like bad news, right? Perhaps. But it has always been this way. Historian Arthur Herman’s 1997 book The Idea of Decline in Western History describes declinism from its nineteenth-century origins in concepts of racial and intellectual degeneration to its late twentieth-century manifestations in the eco-pessimism of Al Gore and Ted Kacyznski. Herman’s major point — that theories of decline evolve in a dialectical fashion both with theories of progress and with competing theories of decline — is about as unexciting a perspective as any author can offer, so it should hardly come as a surprise that his work failed to stem the tide of warmed-over apocalyptic literature.

As a historian, I always regard with bemusement the various attempts at laying down universal “laws of history”, much less writing the history of the future. The former, even in the hands of individuals such as Peter Turchin or biophysicist Jared Diamond, seems too close to writing an adversarial legal memorandum: first you state the laws, then you fit the facts, which at any rate are always disputed. The latter is closer to fiction than to history, more interesting for what it tells us about an author than for the validity of its claims.

“The collapse of the world is a young man’s game,” Peter Karsten, my dissertation advisor, used to tell me, citing both the history of English property law — which historians F.W. Maitland and Frederick Pollock framed as a perpetual conflict between parents seeking to protect their estates and children interested in selling them to experience fleeting material pleasures — and his own experience as a young officer on a destroyer during the Cuban missile crisis. His point was: no matter how apocalyptic the times, life goes on, much as it always has, for good and (mostly) for ill.

Scattered along the stages of life’s way are, of course, a handful of catastrophic events, born of weather or war or whatever other time and tide-tossed horrors mankind must face. More common are tiny tragedies such as the closing of a family business, the diminution of a hometown, the untimely death of a breadwinner — all collapses of a sort, setting lives on downward trajectories, and sometimes difficult for even the sharpest minds to distinguish from broader trends that might actually imply planetary extinction or the “passing of a great race”, whatever those concepts would entail.

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The discourse of decline and collapse, then, plays out primarily on this personal level. For example, Peter Turchin first theorised “elite overproduction” as the source of societal collapse in his 2016 book Ages of Discord. But the idea that there were too many would-be elites floating around was at the front of my mind five years earlier, when I was applying for tenure-track history positions. And even after I secured one of these coveted jobs, the effort left me scarred; I came to regard the humanities as a dying field enthralled by mumbo-jumbo, an ember near extinction that served as a microcosm for the world itself.

Beyond the realm of the personal, at the level described by Herman, decline and collapse represent a topic with perennial appeal for public intellectuals and their publishers. Books on the subject are always among the best-selling releases in any given year: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Earth in the Balance, The Twilight of Democracy, The Democracy Trap, Democracy on Trial, Giving Up on Democracy, The Frozen Republic, The Selling of America, The Bankrupting of America, The Endangered American Dream, and Who Will Tell the People all appeared within a ten-year span between 1985 and 1995, during which time the United States continued to hold peaceful federal and state elections while my own household priorities were related to bare-minimum subsistence and survival.

It is simple enough to explain the public’s thirst for this material — personal setbacks of any sort can make a person feel as if the whole world is coming to an end. For public intellectuals, the incentives to produce it are irresistible. Predictions and forecasts are some of the easiest pieces to write, particularly if their reckoning is far enough in the future that their author can change directions if the winds begin to shift. And as Pierre Bourdieu noted in his essay “The Metamorphosis of Tastes”, intellectual work constitutes a field where supply — increased as colleges and universities graduate more would-be public intellectuals — creates its own demand. Elite overproduction of this sort might not serve as a bellwether for social unrest, as Turchin argues, but it represents a useful shortcut when determining how much writing will be published relating to the relationship between social unrest and elite overproduction.

After all, the prophets of decline rely heavily on the work that came before them. One of the most obvious genealogies runs from Friedrich Nietzsche, whose pioneering work in its expurgated, pro-German form prompted Oswald Spengler to write his own historical analysis of concepts like “race”, “blood”, and cultural creation in the West. Spengler in turn inspired Arnold Toynbee to produce an even longer series of works, which borrowed Spengler’s concept but welcomed the West’s gradual decline. All the while, everyone else was reading them in order to respond to their work, with a 1928 Time review of the second volume of Spengler’s The Decline of the West noting that “it was imperative to read Spengler, to sympathise or revolt”.

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When one views declinism at a far remove from its truth or falsity, its professional function becomes apparent: it is a fun and easy thing for intellectuals to argue about. These ideas become mere pieces on a chessboard, with the moves of the authors improved and refined over the course of their careers. This is not necessarily good or bad, but rather the nature of the marketplace of ideas.

However, this work, when consumed carelessly and in bulk, can exact a significant toll on members of an already-atomised society. Even sophisticated readers of decline and collapse literature find themselves reacting to it on the personal level — more personal than ever before in a society of extremely siloed “selves” and “identities” four decades past the “culture of narcissism” examined by Christopher Lasch. In such a world, even people far removed from poverty struggle to imagine their posterity. Millenarian fantasies of death and hellfire sell well when the people building society cease to imagine a future. The idea of the world ending in one’s lifetime certainly offers a romantic prospect for some melancholy souls.

But the world, even the world of recorded history, will likely outlast these naive notions. The Annales School of historical writing’s concept of the “longue durée”, with its emphasis on the impact of slow-changing factors such as geography and climate, offers a mature counterpoint to “histoire événementielle”, the event-driven historical approach that popular historians struggle to avoid, given the ease with which every minor political scandal or protest march can be laden with significance and transformed into a portent of the end times.

My own perspective on the matter aligns most closely with G.K. Chesterton’s, as articulated in his short essay “A Much-Repeated Repetition”. There, Chesterton noted that “although the life of man is a terrible thing at many times and in many places” and “he has much to put up with in any case”, he “has not to put with the horror of history repeating itself”. The future outcome of human history remained a mystery to him, but he was sure that tyrants laid to rest did not rise from the ground again like blades of grass. “In history a thing recurs,” he wrote, “but it never recurs quite exactly.” The story of mankind remained “literally a story: that is, a thing in which one does not know what is to happen next”, and thus a narrative in which one still has an active role to play throughout their lifetime.

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By Douglas Coupland

A heavy dose of declinism can ease an anxious mind by providing a compelling justification for passivity and quiescence, but this is also its most invidious side effect. Under its influence, one might sneer at small things you can do right now, focused interventions that can turn the tide of this or that event.

But we are never quite as powerless as we assume. For example, the campaign against critical race theory in education was largely the work of one man, Christopher Rufo. His efforts, love them or hate them, appear to have played a part in the outcomes of several 2021 American elections.

Mind you, victory or defeat in a process as mundane as an off-year election hardly means the end of world. But this, thank heavens, is precisely the point.

In days that seem unprecedented, we cling to the familiar. I do, anyway, and Christmas has been familiar to me all my life. The excitement and the anticipation that I felt as a boy is felt now by my young son, and I can live vicariously through him: the lack of sleep, the mince pies for the reindeer, the presents waiting, if he’s lucky, under the tree. Christmas has its rituals, and we don’t have many shared rituals left in the modern West.

But the rituals disguise the radical strangeness of the claim that Christmas makes, and the radical strangeness of the religion that makes it. That God took human form, that he was born into persecution and poverty, that he came to put the world back into its right shape. That this God does not demand burnt offerings, but will instead sacrifice himself to correct our errors. That He shows us a path both straight and narrow and leaves it to us to decide whether to follow it. A virgin birth in a cave, a risen corpse and an empty tomb: there is no sense in any of this. None of it is normal, even by religious standards. It is some kind of revolution.

But here we are, celebrating it with turkey and crackers, and yet not really celebrating it, because — well, because this is now, and that was then. We all know that Christmas has become a commercial horror show: complaining about this is another part of the ritual. We all know that most of us will barely genuflect towards the Christ whose mass this once was: hearing bishops lamenting this is also as traditional as watching the Queen’s Christmas message, or refusing to watch it and reading the Guardian in the corner instead.

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The West has lost its roots

By Paul Kingsnorth

The world has been upended these past two years, and it feels to me as if the ructions, which are far from over, are not merely temporal. It feels like we are being shaken out of some slumber; as if the spirit is on the move. Perhaps I feel this way because of the unexpected turn my life has taken, coincidentally or not, during the corona era. Just over a year ago, much to my own surprise (and initial resistance) I became a Christian. Some people might call it a “conversion”, which always sounds a bit shiny-eyed to me, but I didn’t really feel like I’d converted to anything. I felt like I’d come home. I can’t explain it, though I keep wanting to.

It is always ridiculous to write about religion. When I say “ridiculous,” I mean “dangerous”, I think: dangerous in the West, anyway, which is the only part of the world in which the rejection of religion and the denial of God has ever really taken off. This does not seem to be working out well for us, but try talking about that in public. Since I became a Christian, and as the daily practice of the faith has deepened my understanding of it, I have found it harder and harder to relate the Christian worldview to the worldview I used to have, and which the culture around me encourages in us daily. This is not just a Christian problem: everyone I know who follows a faith seems to understand it. It might just be a manifestation of how new I am to this, and how inadequate my understanding is. Still, the gap between the world and the Way — as the early Christians called the path of Christ — seems more and more like a widening gulf.

This will be my first Christmas in the church. The Orthodox church, into which I was baptised just under a year ago, has a deep and old and demanding practice around this festival of light. For the last forty days, we have been fasting: today the fast is broken. A child is born, and everything has changed. The birth of Christ marked the beginning of a new age. The Orthodox church talks of Jesus of Nazareth as the “second Adam”. The first human messed up by rejecting God — by choosing control over communion, and falling into self-love. The incarnation of God in human form corrects the error: we get a second chance to turn from ourselves and look to the greater whole.

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The myth of 'pagan' Christmas

By Tom Holland

It is, as I say, a strange story: frightening, glorious, thrilling, radical, impossible, repulsive to some. Jesus remains the most controversial man in history, and his followers have always been looked at, like him, through narrowed eyes. Here in the West we are still emerging, both psychologically and structurally, from a period in which Christianity was associated with authority: with power and Popes and state churches and holy wars. Now that this authority has been overthrown, Christians are increasingly regarded again as they were for the first four centuries of their existence: with suspicion, if not open hostility.

Some Christians regret this, and long for the return of a West in which church and state again hold sway in tandem: a world of faith, in which the people live, at least in theory, by the way of the cross. I understand this: it’s an enticing vision. I would like to live, I think, among the symbolic splendour of the high medieval Christian world. Certainly I’ve never felt comfortable in this one. But for better or worse, that world is not coming back, and it seems right that a faith built on sacrifice and renunciation should again require some of its followers. Throw down your nets and follow me. If the world hates you, know that it hated me first. The Way was never supposed to be comfortable. Christ and power don’t mix.

This is how it seems to me, but I am still new. One thing I have learned though — or had brought home to me, because I knew it before I became Christian — is the necessity of ritual in a human life. One reason I joined the Orthodox church, despite being an Englishman who lives in Ireland, was because of its deep understanding and practice of this. We reject ritual in the modern West. We don’t see why we should submit to any authority or respect any tradition. We believe that every one of us can invent the world anew. We are wrong about this, as we are about much else.

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The sad loss of our common rituals

By Eleanor Parker

The rituals of the Orthodox church are sometimes florid and always long, and like Christianity itself they can look strange or off-putting from the outside. But the first time I attended a divine liturgy, I knew where I belonged. Something had happened to me that I couldn’t put my finger on. This service, largely unchanged for 1600 years, has a spiritual and psychological impact that can’t be outlined in essays or explained in words at all.

Church rituals, like those of all religions, fit into a wider pattern — that of the ritual year. As a Christian celebrating my first real Christmas, I have come late to the realisation of how much this matters. I think this is why many Western Christians hanker for the Christendom that is gone: not because they desire power, but because of the container, the guiding light, that the ritual year offers, and because they see what we have lost by abandoning it. Christmas, Lent, Easter, Whitsun — we still know the names, but we are long detached from the symbolic pattern they provided, and the understanding of our place in the universe that they formalised in daily life. What comes together in the bread and the wine, changed into the flesh and the blood — this can never be replaced with turkey and sherry.

Something is missing here, and not just for Christians. I have come to believe that humans are above all religious animals. If we do not have a religion, we will make one for ourselves, or substitute politics or ideology for it, to assuage our need for ritual, worship and meaning. But ideology or self-help can’t fill the gap, because what is missing is the thing we are all fleeing from, like the fire it is. The real meaning of Christmas, I think, and maybe the real meaning of all faith, is simply: look up. Raise your gaze. When we lose the religion that made us, and the rituals that contained it, however imperfect those things were, we lose our understanding of the heart of the matter, the thing we turn from and scorn and then are returned to because nothing else will fit into the empty space in our hearts: God.

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O come, all ye faithless

By Boyd Tonkin

Good, say the atheists, about time. I disagree. I think that understanding that there is something higher than us — that we are part of a greater pattern, that a higher intelligence is at work, that we are not in charge and that this is good. I think that without this understanding we find ourselves back in the garden, tasting the apple all over again, every day of our lives. We choose self over other, control over communion, power over sacrifice. Of course we do: we all do. We want to walk that way. But I think we can see now where it is leading us.

Like I say, it is ridiculous to write about religion. Ridiculous for me, anyway. But there is nothing else I can say today. It is deep winter, but some light is rising. It has been rising for a long time. Everybody should celebrate today, whatever they choose to raise a glass to. It has been a hard year. I will try to turn my scattered mind, before the feast and after, to the words that made us, and which still linger in the air, waiting to settle on the holy and the profane, the weak and the strong, the willing and the broken and the unsuspecting:

 Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.

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

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

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

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

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The sexual revolution killed feminism

By Mary Harrington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Senay Boztas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What our leaders don't see

By Mary Harrington

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

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

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

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

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

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Would you sell a kidney to be famous?

By Mary Harrington

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

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

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

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

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

Whether we like it or not — and I certainly don’t — the Taliban now preside over a country devastated by decades of conflict: its new government cannot rely on the structures in place, which have been crippled by the abrupt departure of so many educated and trained managers and professionals.

Public safety, always hazardous in the tumultuous days after a major transition, needs intense policing and patrolling. Isis remains a huge threat, while the new regime’s young Taliban foot soldiers — born in remote villages, raised on nothing but combat and now amazed to find themselves in the shining metropolis of Kabul — have to be closely monitored.

Meanwhile, the disruption to trade is causing massive inflation and price increases for basic goods. A long drought has led to a poor harvest. Covid is still rampant. Winter is coming and the poor — 72% of the population, according to the UN — will look to the Government to provide them with firewood and food.

But good news: Afghanistan has money! The country has $9 billion in financial assets, of which $7 billion are in US banks and $2 billion are deposited in Europe. This is because Afghan banks traditionally keep the bulk of their funds in foreign financial institutions, drawing on them monthly for ongoing liquidity. Then there is the aid money already set aside for Afghanistan. The World Bank administers a Trust Fund for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which was supposed to pay $800 million this year, while the IMF has around $400 million designated for Afghanistan.

There’s just one problem: on the orders of the US government, all this cash has been frozen.

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The truth about Afghan women

By Cheryl Benard

And that’s not all. So much money has been ferried out of the country in recent years by corrupt officials that there is now a cash shortage. People can only withdraw a small portion of their savings. The country can’t print new bills to replace what was stolen, because the country’s currency is printed by a European company that also falls under US sanctions. It’s economic strangulation.

America likes to give names to its overseas efforts. The Afghan venture was called Operation Enduring Freedom until 2015, and Freedom’s Sentinel thereafter. What shall we call this new phase? Operation Enduring Anger, perhaps. That, after all, is what US military officers, and many in the policy community, are: very angry. It’s a blow for a superpower to have to acknowledge that it could not gain mastery over 90,000 unshaved, minimally equipped fighters, and wasted $2 trillion dollars in the process. It’s embarrassing.

But we should save our empathy for the Afghan people. Their country has been in unrelenting continuous war for more than 40 years. With 70% of its population under the age of 25, most people alive in Afghanistan have never experienced peace. We may not like their new government. But their last leaders were awful in a different way: more educated, yes, and savvier — but they used those attributes to pad their bank accounts in the UAE.

The Taliban government prior to that made women wear burqas and beat men if their beard was too short and executed adulterers in the sports stadium. Before that was a civil war and before that a proxy superpower conflict between the Soviet Union and the US. If the Taliban refrain from their previous behaviour – which so far they have largely been careful to do – and if they honour their promises to reopen girls schools, clamp down on terrorism and not persecute their former enemies, they could turn out to be Best in Show.

Granted, the return of the Taliban is not the solution the US had hoped for: to create a beautiful, free and democratic Afghanistan that would be rich on the basis of its mineral wealth. Yet that project stalled. The Taliban reappeared, won recruits, took territory, inch by inch, year by year. Until 2021, when, at long last, the US faced the facts. They pulled out their military and their diplomats and their contractors, closed the embassy and departed, taking with them nearly 200,000 local staff and supporters and accidental stowaways in a sloppy and casualty-riddled evacuation.

For punctuation, they launched one last faulty drone strike that killed three completely uninvolved non-combatant adults and seven children. The US Inspector General investigated the “incident” and described it as an “honest mistake”. The Costs of War Project estimates a total of 71,000 civilian casualties from direct military action during our little interlude. That’s a lot of mistakes.

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Where are the good war reporters?

By Justin Webb

But now that we’re out, and winter has arrived, Afghanistan is braced for things to get worse. Last week, David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, told the BBC’s John Simpson that the situation “is as bad as you possibly can imagine: 95% of the people don’t have enough food, and now we’re looking at 23m people marching towards starvation. The next six months are going to be catastrophic. It is going to be hell on Earth.”

For his part, Simpson, a veteran reporter who has reported from 120 countries and 30 war zones, broke down on BBC Radio 4’s Today program as he described the plight of an Afghan mother-of-seven facing famine. “I came across a woman whose name is Fatima and she’s a widow. She’s got seven kids – five girls and two boys – and they’re grindingly poor already,” he said. “She used to make money by weeding the area for a local farmer. He can’t pay her now because he’s not able to grow the crop that he was growing. She’s got no money – she’s having to beg for fuel to make a fire and beg for flour which used to be delivered under the old government before the Taliban came in.”

Widows. Little girls. Hell on earth. Afghanistan is clearly in trouble. But let’s step back for just one moment. This woman used to work for a farmer, who used to farm, but now she doesn’t because he can’t — and it’s not because the Taliban “ascended” to power. It’s because we are sitting on their country’s money and won’t let go. It’s because we, in our determination to starve the Taliban, are starving this widow and her seven children. And 40 million others like them. Operation Mind-blowing Hypocrisy.

Now we think we have the solution: sure, we just left, but now we’re going right back in. To prevent the looming humanitarian crisis. That we made.

So money can now go into Afghanistan — as long as it is administered and dispensed by international organisations, companies and agencies. That means international staff with their Western salaries and entourage of drivers and guards and fixers and translators. That means rented houses and offices surrounded by hired security, and fleets of armoured cars and international conferences that add up to an overhead that consumes 60% or more of the total funds.

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Biden's most heartless betrayal

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

And this will never end, because humanitarian aid does not relate to economic development. Afghanistan, in effect, is being positioned as a permanent welfare state. Perhaps, then, this is not about hungry Afghan children after all. Perhaps this about us — our contractors and the huge aid and development machinery that thrived in the country and now sees a way back in.

But we have to let go. We left. That was our decision. Now let’s leave them in peace. Give them their money. It’s all very well to tell them we won’t trade with them, and their government won’t be recognised, if they violate international law and prevailing international standards of human and women’s rights. And yes, it is regrettable that there are no women in their cabinet. But the same is true in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Brunei, Papua New Guinea, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Vietnam and Yemen. No one is freezing their assets, and they are all comfortably seated in the UN.

For Afghanistan to prosper, we need to stop telling them what to do and how to do it. They are not on our continent or in our cultural sphere. They have not gone through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Revolutions, or any of the other transformative steps that made the modern West. But they shouldn’t be punished for that. As we did, they too must find their path. And, in the meantime, we shouldn’t put boulders in their way.