I couldn’t believe it. It’s one thing to talk with disdain about your political opponents, but how striking that she genuinely couldn’t fathom that Trump supporters are real, or at least that any would find themselves in distant relation with her. This political species making up about a half of the American electorate (not to mention his international admirers), it is at best irrational to impute such an unlikelihood to this kind of discovery. But given our desperate need (in the service of everybody calming down a bit) for proactive efforts at understanding each other a little better, the development of this sentiment may well be a kind of vice.

Forget for a moment any moralising about charity in politics and think strategically. Perhaps your only concern is, understandably, keeping him out of office. Fine. But to defeat something, you must understand it. And treating this quite plausible political threat as a kind of strange alien which does not so much befriend as contaminate our loved ones, and which can have no other explanation than as a manifestation of our most base intolerance and bigotry, probably isn’t quite “steel-manning” the opposition.

Political hatred is nothing new, of course, and there will always be more and less antagonistic periods in the US’s continual development (remember that the vice president used to be whoever came second in the election, an entertaining policy to imagine active in the last few presidential cycles), but something does seem decidedly more openly nasty about modern US politics; gone are the days of clandestine bitterness — now even the pretence of propriety has been dropped in favour of common name-calling.

There are probably two reasons for this. The first is that Trump is a genuine anomaly. He swears. He insults. He asks Theo Von what cocaine is like. He attempts to prevent democratic elections. He is a convicted felon. Worse still, he appears to bring out the worst in otherwise generally professional politicians. (The recent dick joke made by the spotlessly charismatic 44th president at the DNC can hardly be blamed on Trump, but it is difficult to imagine him doing the same at the expense of John McCain or Mitt Romney.)

Suggested reading

The speech Kamala owes America

By Lee Siegel

Why has such child’s play become so politically mainstream? The answer perhaps lies in the second reason: social media. Politicians are the nervous hostages of voters, who at present are the nervous hostages of malicious algorithms designed to cultivate self-assurance and righteousness with artistic precision.

We often hear that social media is something of a “new public square” where ideas are efficiently trialled and debated, while providing a decidedly meritocratic possibility for basically anybody’s response to appear right underneath a tweet by the President himself. But I see it as a sort of no-man’s land. Step into it, and your life immediately gets worse. You may blow something up. You may blow yourself up. You may find another country’s government is suddenly attacking you.

Really, though, social media is best described as a utopian paradise. I mean in the etymological sense: utopia from ou topos, “no place”. Paradise from paradeisos, “enclosed park”. A place that is not real, and at the same time a walled garden. Less a public square, whose contents are contingent and out of your control, and more a private estate designed from the ground up to keep out anything which may disillusion you of the space.

Ingeniously, the conviction is encouraged that we are its architects, furnishing the plot with autonomous follows and subscriptions, and with an array of painless mechanisms for muting or blocking the vexatious topics and people. But anyone paying attention knows that we are instead helpless addicts to an algorithmic generation beyond our comprehension. It is not your stated preferences but the unconscious microseconds of difference between how long you spend here or there which determine what kind of material you are fed (remember it is called a feed).

In 2012, a story began circulating about an enraged father storming into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to see the manager. His daughter, still in high school, had received coupons from the company advertising cribs and maternity clothes, which he believed was inappropriate. Days later, that same father apologised to that same manager, having found out that his daughter was due in August.

Statistician Andrew Pole, reported the New York Times, had created a “pregnancy-prediction model” which analysed the purchasing habits of Target’s female customers, assigning a probability based on correlative spending decisions. The daughter’s behaviours were picked up by the system, and thus is explained how Target figured out that a girl was pregnant before her own father did.

This story is perhaps dubious, but the fact that it is so believable proves that we already know how recommended content is really produced. We have all heard stories of people who swear that they only needed to mention dog food in audial range of their (sometimes inactive) computer for it to begin advertising pet food to them. True or not, the paranoia it invokes proves at least one thing: many of us are fearful that we do not even know when and how we are being monitored.

And not monitored by some despotic government (though why not that too!), but by advertisers, who want not to quell political dissent but to simply curate content, figuring out what you will buy, and watch, and read, and selling it to you for the low cost of your zombified attention.

Not you and me, though. Because we know all of this, and we are enterprising in our efforts to defy it. We follow people intentionally whom we disagree with. We engage in conversations and debates online. Our feeds are an impressive and virtuous balance of Left and Right.

Do not fall for this trap: it is smarter than you think. It is smarter than you. Remember that disagreements can be enjoyable, and entertaining or winnable disputes are allowed in your garden. After all, what is more rewarding than “interacting” with the “other side” by publicly exposing their ignorance and stupidity?

When was the last time you had your mind significantly changed as a result of such an interaction? The unfortunate reality is that the extent to which you enjoy disagreeing with someone (including revelling in righteous anger, and being congratulated for it) on social media is inversely proportional to the seriousness of the threat they pose to your worldview. This is why online arguments gravitate around either smarminess in flawless victory, or dull rage at how unthinkable a position is, and tragically evade the productive space in-between.

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The mythical masculinity of Donald Trump

By Frederick Kaufman

The thing about a town square is that you don’t get to choose who’s there. You don’t get to amplify voices based on your interests. You certainly don’t get the murky town council doing this for you without you even realising based on a painstaking surveillance project.

Whatever it is, we spend a lot of time there. And in comprehensively regulating what kind of people we politically interact with, social media at the same time dictates our very understanding of the terms of the debate.

I believe a significant number of political arguments are at base about language. Disputed definitions are often the foundation of political disagreement. But our vocabulary can only ever be a result of how those we are surrounded by use and understand terms, and if people spend enough time separated by selective algorithms during the evolution of our political semantics, linguistic speciation will inevitably ensue. Our words begin drifting from their original referents, and we end up developing a different vocabulary from our opponents without realising it.

Thus the time wasted feuding over labels that simply represent different concepts depending on who speaks them: “democratic”, “woke”, “racist”, “woman”. Bafflement arises as a result of encountering contradictory concepts, so when our definitions begin to vary, confronting a person who negates our view of the world is not just upsetting, but confusing. It is as though we have been met with a contradiction. The empathetic friend who is not a feminist. The rational neighbour who is not a capitalist. The cousin I love who is a Trump supporter.

Yes, social media is a utopian paradise. It should be avoided at all costs.

It is difficult to critique this comment. Not just because he is correct, but because it is unclear precisely what he is correct about. Is it the tedious process of each member having to individually express their loyalty to the Crown? Is it the incongruity of members swearing on this book and that book, to this god and that god, or no god at all? Is it the insistence on continuing to pretend that an MP’s allegiance is most fundamentally to an unelected monarch, to the extent that Clive Lewis had to retake his oath for omitting reference to Charles’s “heirs and successors”?

Perhaps all of the above. How many MPs, especially in this parliament, believe this is where their loyalty lies? How many are genuinely willing to preemptively submit to any future head of state so long as they come from the loins of the former?

I am not anti-monarchy in principle. But I am anti-pretence. A monarch with real power, and commanding real loyalty, is not an automatic embarrassment. But the continued ceremonial propping up of the King as a sort of royal taxidermy of what sovereignty once was is hardly a respectable exercise.

The problem is that the farce is two-tiered. The celebrated paradox of our sovereign parliament affirming its allegiance to the sovereign might be understandable — even enjoyable — if it was approached with a due irony. But our elected officials are supposed to act as if their solemn oath bears genuine resemblance to their political ambitions, complete with a reaffirmation under duress of His Majesty’s, well, majesty.

Who believes this? I doubt the King himself could have such a confused ego. One can only wonder how he felt this week during the state opening of parliament, carrying the 12-foot train attached to his gown through his special entrance into parliament and towards his special golden throne. Perhaps he secretly recognises the clunky absurdity of it all, but then “sacred tradition” has such a chokehold on our government that nobody has likely summoned the confidence to inform him that the emperor is wearing silly clothes.

The loyalty is, I am told, less to the King, and more to the venerable English tradition which expressing loyalty to the King represents. This is no defence. It is in fewer words what I am trying to say. Even those who defend this ludicrous extravagance do so not with allegiance to the truth of the oath, but to its utility. They do not actually believe any of it is real, but think that by forcing our politicians to partake in a humiliating ritual of undisguised make-believe we somehow protect something “ineffable” whose upkeep requires it.

Some dissidents, I should recognise, had the respectable gall to protest: SDLP leader Colum Eastwood, called upon to be sworn in, sandwiched the affirmation between “I’ll read out this empty formula in order to represent my constituents, but it’s under protest,” and, “My true allegiance is to the people of Derry and the people of Ireland”. “Thank you very much,” said His Majesty’s clerk.

Clive Lewis, Labour MP for Norwich South, committed to full-scale treason in saying: “I take this oath under protest, and in the hope that one day my fellow citizens will democratically decide to live in a republic. Until that time, I do solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, according to law.”

In sincerely declaring loyalty to the King he wishes to see dethroned, Lewis demonstrates before our very eyes the “emptiness” of the formula described by Eastwood. It is, frankly, a joke. If it were taken seriously at all, even by those who administer the requirement, this oath would have been immediately ruled invalid, and Lewis made to renounce his republican ideals or refused his seat in parliament. This would, of course, be an unthinkable political scandal, but such is the unthinking superficiality of the entire pantomime.

Imagine a groom vowing to take a bride as his lawfully-wedded wife, till death do them part, before saying, “Of course, one day I plan to get divorced.” What could we even make of such a contradictory affirmation? It would make a mockery of the entire ceremony, or at least invalidate the oath. On the small matter of electing our parliamentary representatives, however, anything goes, it seems, as long as one goes through the motions.

Not all traditions are worth maintaining. Until 1998, a member wishing to raise a point of order in the lower chamber was required to wear a hat in order to do so: two opera hats were kept on standby for this reason, until a select committee advised abolishing the regulation, saying: “This particular practice has almost certainly brought the House into greater ridicule than almost any other, particularly since the advent of television.”

Well, the advent of television has also thrust the divine mystery of anointed royalty onto our screens. We can now all see from our living rooms what has for centuries been going on inside the perpendicular Gothic palace, and many of us find it impossible to take seriously.

I may be called an iconoclast. Perhaps an arrogant one, too. But I am not the iconoclast. As C.S. Lewis wrote, it is reality which is the greatest of iconoclasts, constantly rubbing up against and thereby shattering our ideals. The monarch is supposed to serve as an apolitical figurehead, transcending vicious politics and providing a unifying ideal for all Britons to identify with. Yet viewership of these pompous ordeals, not to mention our being privy to the family politics of “Megxit” and the pastimes of a certain Duke of York, among other scandals, now makes it difficult to situate this institution above even the vicious, let alone the controversial.

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Britain needs King Charles the Weird

By Aris Roussinos

The King’s Speech, wrote the BBC on Wednesday, “is written by the Government, and the monarch delivers it in a neutral tone, to avoid any appearance of political support”. This, I suppose, in contrast to his usual enthusiasm and fiery rhetorical flair. The incessant neutrality of our sovereign strikes today less as refreshing and more as limp, and may be both a cause of and response to the fact that now only 62% of the UK population support his continuation as our head of state.

My principal observation on the monarchy has always been this: when I complain about what I see as the illegitimate influence of hereditary authority over what is supposed to be a democratic government — especially when it takes such an expensive and flamboyant form — I am politely informed that the monarchy doesn’t really have any power to speak of anyway, so I shouldn’t be concerned. When I suggest that therefore we should just do away with the whole charade, I am told that the monarchy is somehow integral to the upkeep of British government.

Quite how it is integral, then, eludes me. But perhaps that is the nature of our compromising (patchwork) and ethereal (unwritten) constitution. Maybe it is an archetypal Chesterton’s fence, and those publicly imagining the abolition of the monarchy (which is still illegal, by the way) are making a grave error. If so, then I think a conservative case can be made for “toning down” the extravagance, at least to its politically important elements; retaining them only serves to overdetermine the inevitability of a future United Republic.

Was Corbyn wrong to condemn these bizarre parliamentary procedures? Once asked by BBC Newsnight about those criticising his “scruffy” sartorial standards in the House of Commons, he replied, “It’s not a fashion parade, it’s not a gentlemen’s club, it’s not a bankers institute; it’s a place where the people are represented.” If we wish to believe that this is true, perhaps it’s time to retire at least the golden throne, even if we can’t quite bring ourselves to retire the man who sits on it.

These so-called “cultural Christians” are appearing in droves: Douglas Murray, Tom Holland (not that one), Konstantin Kisin, Jordan Peterson (depending on what you mean by “Christian” and “cultural” and “and”); even Richard Dawkins — the archetypal modern atheist who has done more to confront organised religion than perhaps any other identifiable person in a generation — happily adopts this paradoxical moniker for himself.

Paradoxical because, of course, Christianity is more than just an affinity for evensong, disappointment with secular architecture, and suspicion of Islam. St Paul wrote in no uncertain terms to the Corinthians that “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith”, and the vague, à la carte approach to the religion displayed by the “cultural Christian” which doesn’t seem to care about, much less affirm, the historicity of the extraordinary events of Easter Sunday is the kind of attitude that would see you condemned as heretical by the founders of the orthodox church.

Yet Christianity is experiencing a popular makeover, from an affirmative doctrine of truth-claims to a sort of protective garment to be worn as a practical measure against the equal and opposite destabilising forces of radical political religiosity and cynical nihilism which continue to claw away at the souls of those without a firm spiritual conviction.

This metamorphosis of the Christian religion in is many ways indebted to Tom Holland — not the actor, though perhaps an actor, in that he seems content to live as if Christianity were true — whose “Dominion” thesis has convinced a not insignificant number of intellectuals that the bulk of our celebrated Western ethics is ultimately the product of Christianity, an ideology which has so successfully embedded itself in our culture that we do not even notice it anymore.

This leads our cultural Christians, often those with a special interest in safeguarding Western civilisation, to cozy up to an ideology that they can’t quite adopt without qualification due to their rather inconvenient conviction that it isn’t true.

Enter Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Re-enter, I should say, as this brave apostate from Islam won successful prominence as an atheist writer and speaker for many years since the early 2000s, before recently announcing that she had embraced Christianity. Indeed, she had originally been scheduled to participate in that famed discussion in Washington D.C. in 2007 which gave birth to the “four horsemen” of new atheism — Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. So news of the “almost fifth’s” conversion was met with widespread surprise, joy, and speculation.

Perhaps the most widely read response came from Dawkins, in an open letter whose first sentence contained a rather less than charitable: “Seriously, Ayaan? You, a Christian? You are no more Christian than I am.”

Why? Because Hirsi Ali’s article, while passionate and detailed, suffered from the exclusion of anything resembling an argument for the existence of God, or for the theological supremacy of the Christian religion over others (or even over atheism). Instead, it is a political treatise: it begins with her experiences as a Muslim, touching on 9/11, the Muslim Brotherhood, and antisemitism, before asking: “So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?”

She answers: “Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces,” which she identifies as Russian/Chinese authoritarianism, Islamism, and wokeism. All of which are distinctly political considerations and so hardly serve as a theological defence of Christianity. Then, referring to Tom Holland, she tells us that the “story of the West” is a civilisation built on the “Judeo-Christian tradition”. That is to say, She is ticking all the boxes of a merely cultural Christian.

Yet she later writes, as if anticipating this objection, “I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes.” It’s a promising interjection, which seems to ready us for an apolitical testimony that might justify her exclusion of the “cultural” in labelling her new Christian identity.

Here, Hirsi Ali begins to describe her personal struggles as an atheist. “I have…  found life without any spiritual solace unendurable,” she writes, claiming that the “God hole” left behind after her deconversion was not filled with reason and intelligent humanism, as atheists like Betrand Russell had predicted, but instead left painfully vacant.

“In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational,” she continues. “We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do.” In explaining, then, her reasons for becoming Christian apart from her desire to defeat her political foes, she tells us that she was struggling with a nihilistic vacuum that was… insufficient for defeating her political foes. Once again, the motivation seems political.

Thus Richard Dawkins and his assessment, “you are no more a Christian than I am”. The funny thing is, Ayaan Hirsi Ali endorses this sentiment. Dawkins has, of late, been airing his misgivings about gender theorists and Islamists, and constantly reaffirms his admiration for Christian art, architecture and music. These political and aesthetic preferences inspired her to refer to Dawkins at one point as one of “the most Christian” people that she knows. Strangely, then, they could find initial agreement on one point: their being just as Christian as each other.

This uneasy equilibrium provided the mise en scène for an eagerly awaited conversation between the two, which took place in Brooklyn last month. Dawkins tells us at one point that he showed up fully prepared to explain to Hirsi Ali why she is not a Christian: “The idea,” he says, “that the Universe has lurking beneath it an intelligence a supernatural intelligence that invented the laws of physics it invented mathematics […] is a stupendous idea (if it’s true) and to me that simply dwarfs all talk of nobility and morality and comfort and that sort of thing.”

He was, therefore, taken quite unawares, as were many of us, when he asked (or rather told) her, “You don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead, surely?” and she confidently replied, “I choose to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. And that is a matter of choice.” This, for Dawkins (as for me), changes the game. While throughout the event she had no hesitation in repeating her political grievances, in New York, she finally addressed the truth claims of Christianity, and appeared to confess a belief in them. “I came here prepared to persuade you, Ayaan, you’re not a Christian,” Dawkins told her, before correcting himself: “I think you are a Christian,” and — being Richard Dawkins — he added, “and I think Christianity is nonsense.”

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Why I am now a Christian

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

This extraordinary event began with Hirsi Ali recounting her conversion: “I lived for about a decade with intense depression and anxiety self-loathing. I hit rock bottom. I went to a place where I actually didn’t want to live anymore but wasn’t brave enough to take my own life.” Through prayer, she managed to escape that hole. “My zest for life is back,” she declared to a healthy applause, indicative of the one thing that everyone can agree on: it is wonderful to hear that Ayaan is happy again.

After finishing this personal narrative, she could only look at Dawkins and shrug slightly. The audience laughed, in anticipation of something of a shift in tone. I did think there was something comical about following such a moving story of escape from depression and anxiety with, “But do you really think Jesus was born of a virgin?” Dawkins’s decision to do so, however, can hardly be blamed: as touching as his former colleague’s story may be, if he is right that God’s existence is a scientific question, then we should remember that bringing personal narrative into the laboratory is as inappropriate an approach as bringing a microscope into a poetry seminar. It should be no more an insult to say that Hirsi Ali’s emotional struggles are irrelevant to the question of God’s existence than it would be to say to say that scientific observations are irrelevant to the study of Keats.

As Dawkins himself put it, responding to Hirsi Ali’s fear that an atheistic universe doesn’t offer us any way to connect with each other and the cosmos: “Suppose it were true that atheism doesn’t offer anything. So what? why should it offer anything?” Further applause.

“Faith offers you something, obviously. That’s very very very clear,” he says at one point. “But it doesn’t make it true. It doesn’t make the existence claims of Christianity true.” More clapping. Given that such a claim is hardly extraordinary or controversial, this reception seemed to be less in support of the point, and more of Dawkins’s willingness to make it plain.

Yet it is worth remembering that believing something for non-rational reasons is not unusual. Our beliefs are quite often formed by our surrounding environment, rather than some kind of perfect logic and analysis of abstract syllogisms. Most people know this. Hirsi Ali is happy to admit it. You may think it imperfect, but it is not unique to her.

This means that any surge in Christian interest we may notice among our public intellectuals is unlikely to be due to a renewed interest in Biblical scholarship or the figure of the crucified Nazarene. It is instead likely a product of their environment. Cultural Christianity, then, is in many ways a political movement disguised as a religious one, reacting not to arguments for God’s existence, but concerns about the practical shortcomings of atheism and alternative religions. The kind of Christianity adopted by Hirsi Ali goes further in asserting its truth, but not very much further in its justification.

Therefore, those celebrating some alleged resurgence of Christianity ought be cautious: it would certainly be a happy day for them if their favourite intellectuals began discovering a relationship with Jesus, but if they begin converting to Christianity principally as an ideological bulwark, we may witness the return not of a meek and mild community of believers, but of a more strong-armed, aggressive Christianity that has historically been a touch more controversial.

But Ayaan does seem genuinely transformed by her new faith: she looks happy, speaks humbly, and seems genuinely uninterested in point-scoring or winning any arguments. It troubles me not at all to admit that I found myself applauding her more than Richard Dawkins. It transpired in Brooklyn that her conversion, which at first appeared mostly political, was more a result of her personal battle with nihilism. This is hardly going to convince anybody else to become Christian, but such personal experience isn’t ever supposed to.

Atheists are often told that they are plagued with a “God-shaped hole”. Hirsi Ali appears to have developed for herself a hole-shaped God. But despite the probability of at least an element of motivated reasoning in this conversion, I’m genuinely happy for her. We should keep in mind, too, as her story evolves, that our ideas are the most unclear to us when they are new, and Ayaan is a new Christian. While we are all trying to work out what she really believes, she is probably trying to work out the same thing. She, however, has the unusual courage to do it out loud.