Now compare the experience of Linda van Zandt. In 2016, on the day of her aunt’s assisted suicide in California, an Uber arrived bearing thousands of dollars worth of lethal medication. That included 100 capsules which had to be crushed, dissolved and swallowed within the hour. Wearing latex gloves and wielding toothpicks, the family frantically scraped the white powder from the capsules, combining it with a sugar syrup to make a bitter sludge so “vile” that van Zandt broke down in tears. Afterwards, she sat at her kitchen table wondering: “Who wrote this law?”

That, to be clear, isn’t everyone’s experience — but then nor is the romanticised picture presented by assisted-suicide advocates. The vision of people like Pratchett “is not the clinical reality”, says Mark Taubert, palliative care consultant and professor of medicine at Cardiff University. Claud Regnard, a retired consultant, points out that only two studies have compared “quality of death” by assisted suicide and by nature taking its course. Both studies, one in Oregon, one in the Netherlands, concluded that they were as good, or bad, as each other.

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Assisted suicide relies on lethal drugs. But how reliable are the medications themselves? An article in a leading medical law journal remarks: “The pervasive belief that these, or any, noxious drugs are guaranteed to provide for a peaceful and painless death must be dispelled; modern medicine cannot yet achieve this.” On every point — the supply chain, the means of administration, the risk of complications — the reality is far from straightforward. But that reality is about to hit Britain as the Leadbeater Bill on assisted dying is being debated by MPs on 29 November.

Take Mehdi Alavi’s Dream Pharma — which operated out of the Elgone Driving Academy in Acton. In 2011, this one-man firm was suddenly placed under the spotlight of an international human rights story, as it emerged that it was supplying Arizona’s death penalty system with deadly chemicals.

Why did Arizona have to rely on a man at a driving school in Acton? Welcome to the strange world of lethal drugs, a shadow world largely unmonitored by health authorities, where supply chains can suddenly disappear, where new experimental mixtures come and go, and where best practice remains decidedly unclear.

When it comes to the physical stuff doctors depend on, assisted suicide and the death penalty are entwined. In the early 2010s, European companies launched tough new restrictions on the export of certain drugs to the US because the drugs were being used for capital punishment. That explains the emergence of individual suppliers such as Mehdi Alavi. But these small-scale alternatives were soon banned by American courts too. US pharma companies also stopped making the drugs used in assisted suicide — possibly because there are few other medical uses for them.

The shortage caused problems for penitentiaries and assisted-suicide clinics alike. One chemical, until then a popular choice in assisted-suicide states, practically disappeared from the market. Assisted-suicide doctors’ groups scoured America looking for the drug, but to no avail. Next they turned to another chemical which was supplied by a company called Valeant. The company was plagued by scandal and investigated for price gouging; the price of the drug rose from around $400 to almost $3,000 per lethal dose between 2010 and 2016.

In the end, American assisted-suicide doctors had to come up with their own solutions. But the blend of toxic substances caused “severe pain” , so physicians tried out other combinations, tweaking the formula half-a-dozen times. Across the globe, meanwhile, there are countless variations: more than 30 chemicals are used in the different forms of oral or intravenous assisted suicide.

As with death penalty procedures, then, there is no gold standard, but rather a great variety of options, none of which has established itself as the most appropriate. According to an article in The Lancet, complication rates with assisted suicide may be even more frequent than those with the death penalty.

How serious are those complications? The data is extremely patchy, but some have attempted statistical estimates. With oral methods, a third of assisted suicides take between 90 minutes and 30 hours. Up to 9% have trouble swallowing the dose; up to 10% vomit it up; up to 2% re-emerge from their coma. There are also horror stories, such as the Dutch woman with Alzheimer’s who recovered consciousness and was held down by her daughter and husband while a doctor finally euthanised her.

Then there are the unknowns. Baroness Finlay, a palliative care specialist, told the parliamentary committee on assisted suicide last year that during executions by lethal injection, “four-fifths probably regained a degree of consciousness”. Finlay said that though there is an obvious need for more research on consciousness in euthanasia and assisted suicide, nobody has ever done a proper study.

Not everyone is so sceptical. As Silvan Luley of Dignitas has claimed: “There has been not one case that did not work, in the sense of the person not reaching the goal in a dignified way.” Dr Lonny Shavelson, of Bay Area End of Life Options, has made similar claims. “These,” he says, “are lovely deaths.”

But every claim and counterclaim should be qualified by the fundamental point: the evidence base is inadequate. No drug regulatory authority anywhere has approved any drugs for use in assisted suicide. The 2019 protocol from the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers acknowledged that there had been “little to no research” on their recommended combinations, and “no peer-reviewed literature to guide best practice”.

In the British context, meanwhile, supporters of assisted suicide seem conscious of the need for more research. Dignity in Dying told me in a statement that assisted-suicide drugs “are under constant review amongst clinicians and that best practice is constantly developing”, and that the UK procedure would depend on “engagement with healthcare bodies and regulators”, drawing on other jurisdictions “where they are confident that the drugs used are safe, effective and provide dying people with a dignified death”.

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Which drugs might a future UK assisted suicide programme adopt? The Leadbeater Bill mentions none specifically, simply stating that the “Secretary of State must, by regulations, specify one or more drugs or other substances”. Leadbeater has not given any view on the subject; her chief of staff Lance Price tells me that it would be a matter for NICE and other regulators. NICE didn’t respond to a request for comment. For their part, UK doctors themselves seem unaware of the challenges. As a 2016 report by the British Medical Association found, some physicians were “surprised” to learn that assisted suicide could come with complications.

Dr Regnard, who is not against assisted dying per se, told me that the introduction of such unevidenced drug combinations would be completely unprecedented. “I think it puts us back 100 years to when there was no regulation, basically people could do pretty well what they wanted.”

In the end, the assisted suicide debate will hinge less on these questions, though, and more on the familiar trade-offs between personal autonomy and threats to the vulnerable. Yet that shadow world of lethal drugs suggests a broader point: that taking life is, at the very least, an awkward fit with healthcare — and that when these cocktails are introduced into a medical system, the system itself inevitably changes. You can call Kim Leadbeater’s proposal brave or reckless. But it would surely be the biggest experiment ever conducted on the NHS.

You can call Samaritans for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.

This tension came to a head when, having built a company worth more than £20m, he had to decide on its future. Selling it to venture capitalists who would maximise short-term profits would feel “like selling one of my children into prostitution,” he said. So he handed the company over to its 650 workers. Singh-Watson retains a 26% stake; the rest of the shares are held in a trust, and the profits go to the staff — or co-owners.

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These sorts of models have become increasingly common in recent years: according to the most recent figures, there are now 470 similar businesses, up 28% on the previous year. Research suggests employee ownership can boost productivity and profits as well as staff morale — and earnings.

“Covid, I’m slightly embarrassed to say, has enabled us to make profits that we’ve never experienced before,” says Singh-Watson. “Some of them will be shared with the co-owners, but they’re very keen that we invest large sums of money in improving our environmental credentials.” It’s the workers who get to decide how to spend it.

If anti-capitalism has become fashionable, it’s partly because the modern workplace often makes people feel disempowered. Joe Atkins, who works in the marketing department of Riverford draws a political analogy. “In a dictatorship, your voice is suppressed. And clearly that happens in so many businesses and sectors, and it’s why so many of us hate our jobs: we don’t feel like we’re contributing, we don’t feel like we’re listened to.” Riverford, he says, works like a functioning democracy.

At the moment, Atkins says, there’s a lively company-wide discussion about the pros and cons of working from home, and how to manage the post-pandemic return to office life. “I would imagine most businesses would have a little tick-box for consultation and might include a couple of stakeholders, and you’d get a tiny opportunity to give your feedback.” Being co-owners, Atkins says, influences how co-workers interact. And sharing directly in the profits is an extra motivation.

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The rise of employee ownership suggests a widespread desire for a different sort of economy: one less concerned with short-term profit, more with empowering people and communities. So does the continuing strength of co-operatives — and the growth of community businesses, where locals people take control of an institution which matters to them. Bramley Baths in Leeds is a textbook example: a council-run Edwardian bathhouse and fitness centre which, though much loved, was consistently losing money. In 2013 it was threatened with closure — until a group called the Friends of Bramley Baths offered to run it instead. The council agreed, and today the bathhouse turns a profit, while employing 41 staff on the living wage.

Bramley Baths was helped by a grant from the charitable trust Power to Change. “What’s interesting,” says PTC’s chief executive Vidhya Alakeson, “is that community businesses manage to make business models work that the private sector and the public sector don’t”. They really understand what their community wants and needs and will therefore participate in or pay for. Community businesses benefit from strong customer loyalty, and often from volunteers working alongside paid employees. It’s a model that works in everything “from gin distilleries to ferry boats, to farms to shops to leisure centres”, says Alakeson. Shuttered pubs have become a familiar sight around Britain, but where communities have stepped in to save their local, they have often become successful enterprises.

As well as being uplifting in themselves, these stories hint that a different kind of politics might be possible. Even though it ended in failure, there was a truth at the heart of David Cameron’s Big Society: if given the right tools, people can transform their areas, without needing to be ordered around by the state. It’s easy to assume that community businesses are the preserve of affluent areas full of well-connected retirees and comfortably-off stay-at-home parents. But Alakeson points out that the model can work anywhere: “67% or so of our funding goes to the 30% most disadvantaged parts of the country.”

Community businesses — the sector has more than doubled since 2014, and there are now more than 11,000 — and the rise of models like Riverford’s employee ownership are all different ways of shifting power, says Alakeson, “away from an economy where very few people hold power… towards an economy where power is much more broadly held, and many more people have a stake.”

Perhaps a democratic economy sounds like a nice but rather dreamy idea; a new book, Sara Horowitz’s Mutualism, argues that nothing could be more politically urgent. The mutualist impulse, says Horowitz, is simple: “If neither government nor market forces are solving a problem that you and the people in your community share, why not solve it yourself?” The American social safety net was born, in the 20th century, not just of state intervention, but also of unions, mutual aid societies, religious communities and co-operatives. Today, as the state either can’t or won’t maintain that safety net, these organisations are more necessary than ever. Horowitz herself founded the Freelancers Union, which has successfully campaigned for laws protecting freelancers. Crucially, it also has a sustainable business model, since it provides services such as health insurance in return for its members’ dues.

In Britain, there are hints that the Government is sympathetic to a more democratic economy. Last year Boris Johnson commissioned a report from Danny Kruger MP, “Levelling Up Our Communities”, which brought together dozens of ideas for empowering individuals and local bodies. Rishi Sunak’s budget launched a “Community Ownership Fund” for rescuing local assets along the lines of Bramley Baths. Is that a sign of a changing political culture?

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Vidhya Alakeson is sceptical. “The potential of the social economy isn’t that well understood in government currently,” she says. The sector has a lot of momentum, but where the government is happy to offer incentives, tax breaks and subsidies to favoured industries, community businesses tend to be overlooked.

Britain’s political conversation seems hopelessly stuck in an argument about the size of the state: you’re either on the Left and want the government to intervene more and spend more; or you’re on the Right, and want it to do less. The possibility that politics is also about empowering people and local institutions is largely ignored.

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Will Tanner, director of the think tank Onward — which can claim credit for the Community Ownership Fund policy — is slightly more upbeat. “Most of the relevant cabinet ministers — Rishi Sunak, Robert Jenrick, Oliver Dowden — they’re instinctively interested” in policies that support collective local action, he says. Onward is hoping that the government will take up other ideas — such as more support for community land trusts, and a “right to regenerate” which would make it easier for communities to take over empty retail spaces.

But, he adds, the language of common local endeavour struggles to resonate with politicians: “It doesn’t fit into an existing set of policies or an existing philosophical agenda.” So policies supporting community power tend to be “an afterthought. It’s often more about tweaking existing systems rather than decentralising and devolving power, which is anathema to the mindset of a technocratic state.” Tanner, who has worked for the Home Office and No 10, says it can be hard to jolt the state out of its bureaucratic, top-down habits.

“Ordinary people,” he observes, “have a lexicon of words to describe this: they might talk about the family, the group, about collective action. Often it’s old Anglo-Saxon words. But there’s a disconnect between the language of ordinary people and the language of politicians.” You have to start with the people, he says. “As soon as you start creating technocratic tools, you lose the magic.”

Before the 1979 general election, in a celebrated moment of fatalism, the Labour leader James Callaghan remarked to an aide that, “there are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea change in politics… I suspect there is now such a sea change and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”

Those of us who aren’t Thatcherites have long hoped for a sea-change in the opposite direction, towards a less ruthlessly competitive Britain. Is it possible that the next transformation could bring about a more democratic society? If so, then it will begin at the grassroots, with the spontaneous growth of new models, new experiments in working together for a shared purpose. And the politicians might be the last people to notice it.

Even before lockdown, the conflation of work and home was well-established. Companies call themselves “families”. Cubicles have been replaced by the supposedly more relaxed open-plan office. The suit, symbol of the 9-5 day, is on the way out. “Knowledge workers” curl up on their sofas.

Work has also supplanted the home in more fundamental ways. In the mid-18th century Samuel Johnson reckoned that the ultimate human ambition was “to be happy at home.” For many, it’s now the workplace that promises meaning and fulfilment. Even Amazon warehouse labourers look up to see signs reading “We love coming to work and miss it when we’re not here!”

Choose a job you feel passionate about — so a thousand gurus have advised us — and you’ll never work a day in your life. But as people are starting to notice, the language of “following your passion” is also a convenient way for employers to change the subject from, say, decent pay and conditions. Nobody is easier to exploit than someone working for love. If you want to build a prison without anyone noticing, make it look like a playground.

The homeliness of work, then, turns out to have a more sinister aspect. Home is a place of self-sacrifice; so it makes sense that gig platforms like Fiverr openly seek workers for whom “Sleep Deprivation Is Your Drug Of Choice.” At home, you expect to be known and seen; naturally, then, employers take ever more invasive steps to survey their employees, tracking each mouse-click or making workers’ health-insurance rates dependent on how much exercise their Fitbits record.

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The two faces of modern work — one cheerful, one ruthless — are the subject of a couple of new books, Jamie K McCallum’s Worked Over and Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back. They tell similar stories, of stressed and burnt-out workers ruing the broken promises of the “Follow your passion” economy. Wealth, of course, has flowed upwards: in the last 30 years, according to the policy analyst Matt Bruenig, the US’s top 1% has increased its net worth by $21 trillion, while the bottom half has lost $900 billion and, once you factor in debt, literally owns less than nothing.

And power has flowed in the same direction. Welfare programmes force the destitute to choose work over childcare; low-wage employees are subject to algorithms which deprive them of predictable schedules, with severe consequences for mental health and family life. Even the most “flexible” workers have to meet tough standards: to maintain good status on the handyman platform TaskRabbit, for instance, you have to say yes to 85% of requests.

McCallum’s book is lucid and tightly argued, but Jaffe’s is in some ways more intriguing: it shows how the madness of modern work has opened the mainstream to radical thinking. In Jaffe’s case the radicalism has a Marxist flavour. Work Won’t Love You Back, which has been applauded everywhere from Marie Claire to the Financial Times, makes an unfashionably dogmatic argument. Wage labour under capitalism just is exploitation, Jaffe tells us. Your boss may seem like a decent person, but in the end “financial concerns will come first for them.” Jaffe doesn’t “believe in bosses”; or, for that matter, in the family, which has “developed as a mechanism of controlling and directing labour … The only option, as theorist Jordy Rosenberg wrote, is to ride ‘the supernova of the family’s destruction’ through to something new.” Jaffe doesn’t believe in charitable works, either (“a relationship of power”). Only some kind of revolution, she believes, can restore us to our true selves.

Anyone baffled by the enduring appeal of Marxism should read Jaffe’s final chapter, with its plaintive note of spiritual yearning. “It is true,” Jaffe concedes, “that there is no outside to capitalism, but it is also true that there are moments in our lives where we can see, briefly, beyond it.” Our nameless desires, she writes, come closest to making sense on a strike or protest march. “Solidarity doesn’t mean you have to like every person you’re fighting alongside. But in those moments where you stand shoulder to shoulder, you do love one another.” Here the reader catches the last glimmerings of the revolutionary dream, that hope which throughout the 20th century animated so many courageous and intelligent people — as well as quite a lot of psychopaths and moral monsters — to give their lives to it.

Besides, it isn’t just radical socialists who are rethinking work from the ground up. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein recently toyed with the idea that “there’s no natural dignity in work.” Prophets of a robot takeover, like the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, argue that we should reshape the welfare state to serve a mostly wageless society. The post-work movement actively hopes that the machines can be given our jobs while we find something better to do; proponents of “fully automated luxury communism” agree, only adding that the robots should be collectively owned.

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These groups are right that too much time is currently spent on mindless wage-slavery instead of friendship, creativity and truth-seeking. But there are a couple of problems — even apart from the much-disputed question of whether a robot job apocalypse is really on the cards. The first is that, despite it all, many people (including the most eloquent critics of contemporary work culture) really do like or even love their jobs. Work can be demeaning, but it can sometimes be deeply fulfilling, whereas a utopia of round-the-clock poetry readings and community bake sales might at some point start to pall. The other problem with “post-work” is that it assumes a future which “we” as a society are all going to shape. But right now, there is hardly a functional “we” — there are workers and there are owners, and the owners have all the power.

Jamie McCallum’s book is especially acute on this point. He tells the story of Disneyland’s underground laundry service, where employees arrived one day “to find giant screens affixed around the workplace, with their names colour-coded like traffic lights blinking on and off.” If they failed to meet productivity targets, their names switched from green to amber and then red. Hidden away in an upstairs room, managers tweaked the system for maximum efficiency; anyone who understands power dynamics will not be surprised to learn that, before long, the injury rate rose, the break room and bathroom were deserted, morale plummeted and the workers began to turn on each other. Until, thanks to one determined leader, they banded together and came up with a pact to all work at a reasonable pace. It is the kind of collective action which unions once organised. But today, the worker often stands alone against a giant employer.

All of which gives extra significance to this month’s vote in Bessemer, Alabama, where Amazon warehouse workers could become the first in the United States to form a union. The almost unbelievable tactics used to thwart them — reprogramming traffic lights, bombarding employees with anti-union messages — show that Amazon fears the tide is turning. After years of telling its workers what to think (“We love coming to work and miss it when we’re not here!”), the company seems appalled at the possibility of those workers speaking with their own collective voice. Is it any wonder that capitalism is going out of favour, when an astronomically wealthy corporation which employs 1.3 million people worldwide can’t abide the thought of negotiating with them? You don’t have to be sentimental about “solidarity” to hope fervently that, this month in Alabama, the workers win.

It isn’t just the ease of international travel that makes Eat, Pray, Love seem like a document from another era. It’s also the book’s unselfconsciousness about economic inequality — about the fact that you can only have this sort of adventure when you happen to have received, say, a $200,000 book advance. And if the book was “a voyage of self-discovery” (a phrase Gilbert used with hardly a trace of irony), it was also an ode to consumerism: the dream held out by travel agents — sunshine, hedonism and enlightenment rolled into one — has rarely found a more persuasive salesperson.

And yet for all that, Eat, Pray, Love possessed a kind of absurd magnificence. At the start of the book, Gilbert’s marriage is in crisis, and as she collapses onto her bathroom floor at 3am, sobbing uncontrollably, something wholly unexpected happens, like “one of those crazy astronomical super-events when a planet flips over in outer space for no reason whatsoever, and its molten core shifts”. For the first time in her life, she finds herself crying out, in fear, in desperation, in hope, to the creator of the universe.

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What happens next isn’t quite Augustine’s Confessions. But there was an appealing sense in Eat, Pray, Love — a sense never quite lost even as Gilbert moved relentlessly onwards through the world’s finest gelaterias, yoga studios and beach bars, distributing her publisher’s vast wads of cash — that life itself is a stupendous gift. You have a body, so feast! You have a soul, so how could you possibly spend less than four months on trying to unlock the mystery of prayer? You have the capacity to love, so why not travel halfway around the planet for it?

Fiffeen years on, self-help has become a far more sensible affair. Or rather, it has been supplanted by “self-care” — those miniature, fine-tuned adjustments to soothe you through a demanding day. Instead of going on a voyage of self-discovery, people download mindfulness apps called things like “Ten Per Cent Happier”. Whereas Elizabeth Gilbert searched for a God who is “an experience of supreme love”, we have Marie Kondo telling us to throw more stuff away and Sarah Knight offering The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F***. The new mood was anticipated by the ironic subtitle of Oliver Burkeman’s 2011 post-self-help book Help!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done.

To the generation which has acquired its disposable income since Eat, Pray, Love appeared, Gilbert’s scheme must appear pretty dubious. Eat? No thanks — I’m fine with this kale juice. Love? Not likely: according to a recent survey, 20- and 30-something travellers “would rather improve mental health (30%), learn a new skill (29%) or get fit (24%) than find love (12%).” Pray? Well, in the next few weeks a book will be published which is in certain ways the opposite of Eat, Pray, Love.

True, Sarah Sands’ The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons from Monastic Life would also cost a fair amount to emulate: flights to Japan aren’t cheap, and nor, one imagines, is a stay at a Buddhist monastery in Koyasan. For Sands’ other nine lessons she visits religious houses of various, mostly Christian traditions in Italy, Spain, Egypt, Bhutan, France, Germany and Greece — and, as lockdown restrictions start to bite during the writing of the book, in Britain too. Even so, Interior Silence is less an extravagant journey in pursuit of sublime knowledge, more an accumulation of useful habits to help stay afloat.

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From the harmony of the Japanese monastery, Sands concludes that tidying her handbag could be the key to a more ordered life. At the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque, she discovers that giving up caffeine and alcohol “brings a quietness of mind”. Sands’ monks and nuns teach her to ignore the news cycle, to practise patience, to enjoy simplicity. These are the small, familiar steps of self-care — and it’s not entirely clear how much Sands’ newfound tranquillity is the result of drinking deep from the wells of ancient knowledge, and how much it is just the usual effect of a really nice holiday.

Nevertheless, the book is gripping, both because of Sands’ witty, sometimes poignant prose, and as a fable of our times. In the 21st-century meritocracy, whose greatest prize is to have a fun, well-paid job which impresses strangers at social events, Sands is unquestionably one of the winners. As editor of the Evening Standard from 2012-17, she spends “every evening in theatres or restaurants or at parties” — some of them at the proprietor Evgeny Lebedev’s Umbrian castle:

It was my job as editor of the London newspaper to deliver Boris Johnson to these weekends. The preparations were elaborate, and our welcoming party would breathe more deeply when our cars finally accelerated up the avenue of cypresses, taking in the jasmine air, and preparing for a weekend of medieval splendour: feasting, dancing, boar hunting. I have a memory of a dishevelled Johnson chasing Evgeny’s wolf, also named Boris, because it had eaten his computer dongle.

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Then, as editor of the Today Programme, Sands covers the edge-of-your-seat drama of post-Brexit politics, rising at 4.30 to “a frenzy of news wires and Twitter”, only returning home in the evening to catch up on emails. And how does it feel, this thrilling life at the centre of glamorous invite-only occasions and world-shaking political stories? Terrible, of course. The news becomes a numbing addiction. Sands’ mind fills with “noise, chaos and anxiety” to the point where she struggles to sleep. And then, among monks and nuns, she realises that with their lack of ambition, their small needs and simple lives, these people seem to have found happiness.

At moments, Sands hints that monastic living may have more to teach us than just some novel approaches to self-care. The book circles around the possibility of divine revelation, without quite deciding what to make of it. Sands quotes a phrase from St Thomas Aquinas, “the light of faith”, but doesn’t mention that he tends to use it in a fairly blunt way: by that light, he comments, “the human mind is directed to assent to such things as are becoming to a right faith, and not to assent to others.” Sands adopts a very different tone, as she looks out onto the old convent wall at the bottom of her garden:

I think of what St Thomas once called “the light of faith”. If there is a divine truth beyond knowledge and reason, then my wall, bright behind the silhouette of the yew tree and the big dark sky, seems a testament to it.

Like Eat, Pray, Love, Interior Silence is haunted by the possibility of finding God. But here the possibility fades away into a beautiful image, just as in the earlier book it dissolved into a consumerist paradise. Perhaps there are some questions which the self-help genre just isn’t designed to answer.

Isn’t it boring? No wonder people prefer to watch bogus videos about voter fraud, or join their local Black Trans Lives Matter protest, when the alternative is this kind of technocratic tedium. Yes, we need 143-page think-tank reports and ingenious policy wonkery and “cross-government data architecture” and all that. But eventually you want something which inspires, something which treats socio-economic questions with the beauty, drama, tragedy and pathos they deserve. You want something like the historian RH Tawney’s 1926 cult classic Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

We hear a lot at the moment about the prospect of a more communitarian society, which acknowledges that we have responsibilities as well as rights. In Tawney’s book this is not just a theory, but a vision. For the medieval mind, he writes,

The property of the feudal lord, the labour of the peasant or the craftsman, even the ferocity of the warrior, were not dismissed as hostile or indifferent to the life of the spirit. Touched by the spear of Ithuriel, they were to be sublimated into service, vocation, and chivalry, and the ritual which surrounded them was designed to emphasise that they had undergone a rededication at the hands of religion. Baptised by the Church, privilege and power became office and duty.

I too had to Google it: Ithuriel is an angel in Paradise Lost whose spear instantly uncovers the reality behind a disguise – “for no falsehood can endure / Touch of celestial temper”. For Tawney, the medieval order revealed the truth of social relations. The rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, are shown to be part of one human society, in which we owe each other justice and love.

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Maybe this makes him sound like one of those sentimentalists who imagine the Middle Ages as an era of cheerful peasants, dignified craft guilds, virtuous monks and splendid cathedrals. Not so. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism describes the feudal system as “exploitation in its most naked and shameless form”. Guilds, Tawney writes, were monopolistic schemes, often corrupt, and the vast majority of workers weren’t members in any case. Catholics who want to praise the glories of Christendom will have to reckon with the fact that the pinnacle of financial immorality was the Vatican. As for the cathedrals, Tawney quotes St Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps the greatest spiritual master of the time: “The Church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold, and leaves her sons naked.”

And yet… there was, Tawney argues, “a certain tarnished splendour” to the Middle Ages. The Church, as its central institution, stood for “the ideal, at least, of social solidarity,” and upheld two fundamental points: “that economic interests are subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct upon which, as on other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding.”

Tawney admits that these lofty notions were endlessly flouted. But not always. Church law levelled heavy penalties, including excommunication, against usurers who exploited the vulnerable. Institutions like the Mounts of Piety enabled the poor to borrow money and goods without incurring ruinous debts. Social stigma and the law often worked on the side of economic justice: businessmen who formed cartels or drove up prices might easily find themselves in the courts — or in the stocks.

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“At every turn,” Tawney writes, there were “limits, restrictions, warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs.” Of course, there are “limits, restrictions, warnings” that set the boundaries of economic life in 2020. But they hardly derive from a coherent moral framework. The World Economic Foundation, home of the “Great Reset”, may believe that neoliberalism should be abandoned, but it is also keen to assure us that “The Great Reset … is not a revolution or a shift to some new ideology.” (The horror — imagine, a new worldview!) “Rather, it should be seen as a pragmatic step toward a more resilient, cohesive, and sustainable world.” Not much moral, let alone spiritual, idealism here. For the WEF economic reform is just another way to “meet systemic global challenges,” to quote the soul-crushing bureaucratese.

The word “reset”, often used this year by both Left and Right, itself makes society sound like an electronic device, not a living, breathing community of people torn between passionate virtues and vices. Like so much political language, it colours the world in grey. Parts of Liz Truss’s speech on inequality the other day were quite sensible. But it was hardly inspiring. The government is committed, apparently, to “delivering fairness through modernisation, increased choice and openness”. Fairness is not an urgent moral demand or a dream of solidarity, but yet another solution to be “delivered” via the most useful apps.

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A different idea of fairness appears in a prayer for landlords, quoted by Tawney, which was included in a prayer book issued by King Edward VI in 1553: “We heartily pray thee to send thy holy Spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and incomes after the manner of covetous worldlings; but so let them out to others, that the inhabitants thereof may… be able truly to pay the rents.”

A political question — housing inequality — is here treated both on practical terms, and as part of a cosmos illuminated by spiritual realities.

There are some hints at a moral and spiritual awakening today: in the urgent rhetoric of the new socialists, in the rise of quasi-spiritual leaders like Jordan Peterson, in parts of the environmental movement, in the increasingly blurred lines between religion and politics, even in the furious exchanges of the culture wars. But they are only hints. It’s been rightly said that the big question of politics today is Who are we? Another question lurks around the corner: What kind of universe do we live in?

But of course, the media, the tech companies and the rest of the political elite which Obama describes as “we” are not trusted in the first place. And looking at their recent record — Russiagate, the Cambridge Analytica non-story, the suppression of inconvenient reports about the Biden campaign — you can see why. So perhaps it’s better to start with the other question: how can the mainstream media regain the public’s trust?

The simple answer to that is that it needs more people like John Hersey, and more institutions like the New Yorker of 1946.

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Hersey, a journalist and novelist who died in 1993, is the hero of Lesley Blume’s absorbing new book Fallout. As Blume shows, the US government did a remarkably efficient job of covering up the effects of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reporters were first banned, then allowed in on condition that they toed the line. At one point, the Pentagon invited reporters from outlets including the Associated Press, United Press, the New York Times, NBC, CBS and ABC to join a supervised trip to the two cities. The results were exemplified by a piece in the New York Times assuring readers that, “horrible as the bomb undoubtedly is, the Japanese are exaggerating its effects … in an effort to win sympathy for themselves in an attempt to make the American people forget the long record of cold-blooded Japanese bestiality.”

There were a couple of more truthful journalists; one found that his report was lost in the post, while the other had his camera stolen and was kicked out of the country. Both spoke contemptuously of the “housetrained reporters” who were, in effect, relaying government propaganda. It’s the kind of thing which encourages conspiracy theories: a major atrocity, a huge historical event, concealed from the public — and not despite the media but with its help.

What eventually rescued the credibility of the press was Hersey’s New Yorker report from Hiroshima, which described, in 30,000 vivid and precise words, what had happened on the day the bomb fell. The horrifying facts Hersey had uncovered, and the novelistic skill with which he presented them, caused a sensation. The article reached hundreds of thousands of readers — among them Albert Einstein, who ordered a thousand copies for him to distribute to leading scientists, and President Truman, who publicly pretended he “never read” the New Yorker while launching a damage-limitation PR campaign.

Hersey himself was named as one of Celebrity Bulletin’s top 10 celebrities of 1946 alongside Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman. After his article, celebrations of scientific progress, or of World War II as a great moral crusade, would never ring quite as true again. And it’s partly thanks to Hersey that the atom bomb has not been used since.

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What was Hersey’s, and the New Yorker’s, secret? Partly it was luck: he arrived several months after the first wave of journalists, by which point the authorities had relaxed their grip. But partly it was Hersey’s — and his editors’ — very particular virtues. At the time, anti-Japanese feeling was running high in the US: polls found that almost one in four Americans wished there could have been “many more” atom bombs dropped. Hersey remembered an atmosphere of “rage and hysteria”, and having read about Japanese wartime atrocities, he had at first shared those emotions. But over the course of the war, his own attitude changed. If “civilization was to mean anything,” Hersey decided, “we had to acknowledge the humanity of even our misled and murderous enemies.”

The deputy editor of the New Yorker, William Shawn, was an ideal colleague in this respect. As the writer Lillian Ross recalled, Shawn believed “every human being [was] as valuable as every other human being … every life was sacred.” Ross once pushed Shawn on this: “Even Hitler?” “Even Hitler,” Shawn replied.

The New Yorker sent Hersey to Japan not to judge, but to listen. First he found a Hiroshima priest who could introduce him to locals and act as a translator. Then he simply sat down with the survivors and humbly, attentively, heard them out. One Japanese interviewee said it was like talking to an old friend.

That respect for survivors’ stories made Hersey’s report extraordinarily vivid. Instead of writing in a tone of outrage or forced empathy, he focused on the human side — the banal, even comic, details of the day the bomb fell. A doctor, rushing to help survivors, discovers that his own glasses have been lost in the explosion, and snatches a pair off the face of a wounded nurse. (He ends up wearing them for a month.) Two survivors find a dead carp in a pond and discuss whether it is safe to eat. (Probably not, they conclude.) A priest, falling asleep in a temporary camp, is sadistically woken by his housekeeper who feels like a chat. It was against this backdrop that Hersey set his tale of death, destruction and disease — and those who read it understood: These people are like me.

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All of which suggests a moral. If the mainstream media is distrusted, it’s partly because it seems to ignore or look down on large parts of society. Journalists like Jon Ronson, who sympathetically interviews social outcasts, or Chris Arnade, who listens to the stories of poor Americans, have to put up with a lot of mockery and criticism. But they are doing what Hersey did: going to the people on the margins, and hearing what they have to say.

The other thing about Hersey was his love of truth. He had left a previous job at Time because the editors were taking the controversial bits out of his articles. (Echoes of Suzanne Moore and The Guardian.) The New Yorker was a better fit: the editor Harold Ross, and Shawn, his deputy, had what Blume’s book calls “a near mania for accuracy” — not just about facts but about linguistic precision. In an early draft, Hersey described a bicycle as being left “lopsided” by the blast. Ross was kept awake at night worrying about this single adjective. Could a bicycle, in a sense a two-dimensional object, be lopsided? So he put Hersey and Shawn to work, and they settled on the right word: crumpled. That kind of care over language is closely related to truthfulness: it’s no accident that where you find lazy, jargon-filled, clichéd prose, you will also find distortions of reality.

If the mainstream media ever regains the public’s trust, it will be because of journalists like Hersey who genuinely seek the truth wherever it is to be found, and institutions run by editors who, like Harold Ross, aim to “present the truth and the whole truth without fear.” Everyone, of course, claims to be doing that. But as the poet George Crabbe put it 200 years ago:

Truth! for whose beauty all their love profess;
And yet how many think it ugliness!

That line doesn’t feature in Andrew H Miller’s new work of literary criticism, On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives, though “To My Wife” is quoted in full, as is “I Remember, I Remember”, a detailed reminiscence of all the things Larkin didn’t get up to in his childhood. Larkin’s most ruthlessly unsentimental poem on this subject, however, is “Dockery and Son”, which meditates on the difference between one life path and another before concluding that, actually, it doesn’t really matter, because our choices are determined by deep-lying psychological habits and in any case we’ll all be dead before long:

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

Faced with Larkin’s nihilism, Miller politely suggests that it maybe isn’t the whole picture. While Larkin writes as though “we’re defined by loss,” Miller tells us, “I’d like to think that something is sometimes gained.” He also manages to look on the bright side of Virginia Woolf, concentrating on the “happy, even delicious” moments in her prose rather than the intimations of mental illness and despair. Although the book, very sensibly, does not try to live up to its self-help-y jacket blurb — “On Not Being Someone Else offers the balm that when we confront our imaginary selves, we discover who we are” — it is written in a gently soothing tone, and for the most part Miller finds poets and novelists to be consoling, helpful company rather than stunningly original or dazzlingly subversive.

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Whatever happened to the polymath?

By Dan Hitchens

The preface to this concise and thoughtful book is a study in self-deprecation: Miller warns us that he doesn’t “really argue for many theses”, he just wants to point out a distinctive theme of modern literature: the exploration of the road not taken – to cite the most famous example, and perhaps the best-known American poem of the 20^th century. It is, Miller persuasively argues, a constant preoccupation of the last 200 years, from David Copperfield’s disappointed brooding to the acronyms which have recently entered the language. “Ah – YOLO plus FOMO,” says one of Miller’s colleagues when told about the book.

But Miller has another argument to make, and an ambitious one: that contemplating the lives we didn’t lead can help us “to find meaning”. Or at least, help us feel that way: poems and stories, he writes, “create with special power the experience of verging on meaning: something important is being said, but what isn’t clear.”

A possible rejoinder is that if you don’t know what’s being said, then you can hardly know whether it’s important or a complete waste of time. All the same, there is a kind of communication which is beyond language: as Felix Mendelssohn once remarked, the emotions expressed by music are not too vague for words, but too precise. Words themselves, as Miller’s many well-chosen examples show, can point towards the unsayable. Virginia Woolf, on his reading, balances the beauty of the present moment with the restless yearning for something more.

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In his search for “meaning” in literary texts, Miller follows in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, who predicted in 1880 that poetry would replace religion. Arnold supported such a change, on the grounds that poetry had some of the practical functions of Christianity — “to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us” — but none of the supposed disadvantages, like dogmas which might have to be defended against criticism from scientists and historians. The drawback to Arnold’s scheme, and perhaps the reason that his prediction has not come to pass, is that dogmas actually respond to a need: they are answers to unavoidable questions. Poetry, by contrast, offers few if any answers – it cannot even deal with Larkin’s question of what the point of it all is.

Miller’s book may be overly idealistic about poetry, but he does not have his head in the clouds. If recent centuries have seen a growing fascination with unled lives, he observes, the main reason is market capitalism, “an economic system that isolates us and urges us to calculate opportunities and maximize their effects.” Although Miller does not explicitly link liberal capitalism with liberal social policy, he does note that many recent changes, from the legalisation of abortion to what he chooses to call “the increased visibility of transgender people”, have also reinforced the sense that life consists in a series of choices.

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Much has been written since 2016 about Western liberalism and the high price we have paid for it as a society in the breakdown of communities and traditions. Less often discussed are its effects on the individual imagination. Liberalism has freed the self to create its own identity: as a justice of the US Supreme Court once declared, “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” But unless you happen to be G. W. F. Hegel this is an impossibly heavy burden, and we have had to displace it by making up ersatz identities — hence the popularity of video games, social media and vicarious living through celebrities.

Cinema also deals in fantasy, but has sometimes found ways of deflating it. The dominant theme of mid-period Woody Allen films is that the characters who try to break into a world of wealth, celebrity and romantic drama end up as hollow men, while the real heroes turn out to be those who take life as it comes and do their best to help the people around them. An earlier example is It’s A Wonderful Life, to which Miller devotes a short chapter. It is a film of lost possibilities: George Bailey watches his friends escape to lives of excitement and adventure while he remains stuck in his small town. And yet, the film suggests in its unforgettable last half-hour, it is Bailey’s life which was the true adventure, if we could only see it.

Art and literature can help reconcile us to only having one life to live, but they cannot provide the meaning of that life. One sign of this is how easily even the profoundest works of art get turned into brands. Frost’s “Road Not Taken” has become quite a money-spinner, being used in advertisements for cars, insurance, chewing gum and the jobs website Monster.com (“Find The Job You Deserve”). Transcendence, one feels, should be a little harder to sell.

Today the barriers to such a career are formidable. Learning has retreated to the universities, which demand specialisation. It’s hard to imagine a contemporary chemistry professor informing his employer (as Michael Polanyi did at Manchester in 1948) that he would like to switch to philosophy. And of course, any serious intellectual work requires the increasingly rare skill of not looking at your phone every ten minutes. As Peter Burke writes ominously in his timely new book The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag, present-day polymaths (Jared Diamond, Raymond Tallis) tend to be “scholars who were already middle-aged before the digital revolution occurred.”

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Who cares, you may ask. It may be very impressive to be able to design a bridge in 27 languages, but is it any more useful to the world than juggling flaming torches on a unicycle? And given that one man’s polymath is another man’s charlatan, should we really be alarmed if the species is endangered? Burke’s book makes a strong case that we should be.

He does this by including not just the obvious superminds like Athanasius Kircher (a ludicrously wide-ranging scientific researcher who also wrote an encyclopedia of China and kickstarted the study of Egyptology) but also “polymaths of the second rank”. That means humanistic scholars such as René Girard, who applied his theory of desire first to literature, then to anthropology and eventually to religious history; geniuses with an extra string to their bow, like Nabokov with his dabblings in the study of butterflies; and even popular writers like Macaulay and Voltaire, just because they had such diverse interests.

This does broaden the meaning of the word almost to the point of meaninglessness. But it also reminds us that first-rate polymaths are not a separate species. Their strengths — curiosity, a capacity for hard work, a good memory, the ability to focus — are not unique, they just have more of them than everyone else. Few of us will have occasion to ask ourselves, as Joseph Needham did in the opening line of his autobiography, “How did it happen that a biochemist turned into a historian and sinologist?” But if we lived for a thousand years, we might have a similar story to tell.

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The decline of polymathy, then, suggests a broader crisis. For Burke, it is a crisis of too much information. The seventeenth century was a “golden age of polymaths”, as explorers found new regions, the scientific method flourished, and the postal service and the proliferation of journals allowed scholars to trade ideas. But those same forces led to “information overload”.

Over the next 200 years, the intellectual world divided between the specialists who knew a lot about their little area, and popularisers who knew a little about a lot. Institutions, as well as individuals, had to go their separate ways: in the 1880s the Natural History Museum split off from the British Museum, and the Science Museum from what is now the V&A. The twentieth century saw some conscious efforts to foster “interdisciplinarity”, but the fragmentation of knowledge only accelerated — even before the internet came along.

This is Burke’s version of events, and it is obviously a large part of the story. But there is surely another reason for the decline of the polymath: namely, the intellectual revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when as John Donne put it in 1611, “new philosophy calls all in doubt.”

That new philosophy claimed, like today’s political leaders, that it was merely following the science: instead of theorising about the celestial spheres, just look through a telescope! But there was a sinister undercurrent, as Donne realised: the new philosophers sometimes seemed to imply that, if you did follow the science, you might well find a cold, dead universe in which our beliefs about the beauty, harmony and meaning of the world around us would be exposed as delusions.

When Dante gazed at the night sky, he saw “the love which moves the sun and other stars”; 350 years later, Pascal looked at the same thing and recorded that “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” The contemplation of the world, it appeared, might not lead us to sublime truths, but to disenchantment.

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Before this revolution, as Burke observes of the Middle Ages, “Wide-ranging curiosity was normal … and might even be described as the default setting.” I suspect that pre-modern all-rounders — Aristotle, Shen Gua, Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen — took for granted that all their different studies had an essential unity. Combinations which we think of as quirky — such as Roger Bacon’s moving between astronomy, theology, optics and linguistics — came naturally. Polymaths could assume that very different kinds of intellectual work were all approaches to the truth.

But over the last 400 years, we have had to deal with an underlying anxiety: what if only one kind of study — measuring things and making mathematical laws from the results — really gets you to rock-bottom reality? If that’s correct, then a beautiful piece of music, ultimately, is just sound waves hitting your ears. Love, truth and goodness are just your neurons firing. As for philosophy — well, according to Stephen Hawking, “philosophy is dead”, and as Richard Dawkins once memorably asked, “What did Plato say that was actually right?”

This nagging anxiety threatens polymaths more than anyone: if the scientific method, and only the scientific method, reveals the ultimate truth of things, then philosophy, art, music, history, philology and so on are, at best, interesting digressions from the real work. As George Steiner – who died in February, just a few weeks before his fellow polymath Roger Scruton – put it: “Many of the traditional humanistic disciplines have shown a deep malaise, a nervous, complex recognition of the exactions and triumphs of mathematics and the natural sciences.” Steiner’s response was to defend language, “the word”, as something which can also reveal the truth.

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Over the last century, other polymaths have tried to show that the scientific method isn’t everything. Michael Polanyi, himself a distinguished scientist, defended “tacit knowledge” — those things we know even if they can’t be written down as laws. Raymond Tallis, a clinical neuroscientist among many other things, has written incisively about why neuroscience isn’t enough. Scruton wrestled with the same question, though he often sounded rather glum about it.

In bridging the gap between science and everything else, our best hope is a school of philosophy which has gained momentum in recent years. It suggests that many of the old philosophical assumptions, the ones which were overturned four centuries ago, are actually the only sure foundation for modern science. And the key, according to this new school, is a return to Aristotle. So if the twenty-first century sees the rebirth of the polymath, we may be able to thank the father of the whole tribe.