There is more than a touch of fetishism here, as the Chancellor raises his battered little case and exhibits it first in one direction and then another, as a priest displays the sacred host in the monstrance. Fetishism means endowing an inanimate object with an uncanny power, whether we’re speaking of the Budget box or a pair of tight leather trousers. The opposite of fetishism is reification, since to reify is to turn something animate into a thing. It’s the way Charles Dickens’s novels see people in general, as bizarre assemblages of bits and pieces. The Chancellor’s little case does both at once: it has a pseudo-sacred aura about it that every press photographer in the business wants to capture, but at the same time it turns something animate — the life and labor of millions of men and women — into a lifeless object.

This red box isn’t in the least beautiful. If Donald Trump were Chancellor it would be made of burnished gold and the photographers would have to wear shades. But the fact that it isn’t is the point. It’s a tarnished, much knocked-about little container that proclaims the word “tradition” in its every dent and blemish. Tradition, roughly speaking, means doing the same kind of thing your ancestors did. But the Americans tend to value innovation over continuity. Trump’s ancestors might well have engaged in much the same cruel and inhuman activities as he does himself, but he would probably consider this a drawback. I once showed an American friend around Oxford University, only for him to comment: “It’s very old.” It wasn’t meant to be a compliment. It wasn’t meant to be banally self-evident either.

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AI: a very human tragedy

By Terry Eagleton

There is a strange race of people called Laputans in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels who carry bags on their backs, which contain Language. They’re experimenting with a new kind of speech in which they dispense with words and instead take from the bag the objects they might need to converse about, holding them up mutely to each other. This might be alright for “toothbrush” and “coconut” but there are problems with “maybe” or “vertiginous”. The Laputans’ bags must be bottomless, given the number of things in the world one can talk about, but this, alas, is not so with the Chancellor. The economy may be extensive, but running and repairing it is confined to a highly limited range of tools, rather as driving an enormous truck depends on a surprisingly restricted number of instruments. This, however, is appropriate enough for the ritual nature of the event. In fact, it’s a wonder that John Healey doesn’t wear body-paint on the steps of No. 11. Tribal rituals resemble nothing as much as neurotic acts of repetition, as one seeks for the umpteenth time to exorcise demons, placate the gods or beseech them to bestow great riches upon you. The Chancellor, rather similarly, needs to drive out the demons of inflation and unemployment, placate the back benches and save a ton of money. Most tribal rituals are unsuccessful, which is one reason why they must be repeated, and the same goes for most Budgets, not least when it comes to the bestowal of great riches.

The curious thing about the Budget is that it is a theater, a spectacle, a public exhibition, yet one performed for grimly utilitarian reasons. In his classic work The English Constitution, the Victorian thinker Walter Bagehot famously distinguishes between the practical and ceremonial aspects of social life, and the Budget neatly combines the two. The English have only to look at a routine human activity to turn it into a theatrical rite. Instead of saying “Hey, have you locked up yet?” the Yeomen at the Tower of London bellow “Who Goes There?” “The Keys.” “Whose Keys?” “King Charles’s Keys.” Don’t try this at home. You’ll just end up carried away by the rhetoric, forget to lock the front door and have your washing machine removed by the neighbors.

Not all rituals resemble the Budget in having a purpose. Some of them are performed simply for their own sake. This used to be true of sport, before the capitalists got their hands on it. It’s still true of kicking a football around a school playground. Apart from feeding the hungry and caring for the sick, all the finest human activities are done just for the hell of it. Pointlessness is next to godliness. There’s no rationale for joking, falling in love or staging a Christmas panto in your community center. This is why the arts are exemplary of the good life. Simply by what they are, not necessarily by what they say, they offer a degree of resistance to the crudely instrumental form of reason which dominates our kind of civilization. They represent what Marx calls the flourishing of human powers as an end in itself, which was his definition of communism.

The more a society devotes itself to the functional and pragmatic, the less it knows what to do with what one might call the symbolic realm, other than to harness it to the business of making a profit. Traditionally, that realm has had three major constituents: the religious, the sexual and the artistic. The split between this and the business of acquisition and accumulation — the business, in a word, of the Budget — runs right down the human body. The more the body is reduced to a laboring or profit-making machine, the more the energies which might stymie these pursuits must be siphoned off elsewhere, to an insulated arena generally known as culture. This is certainly the case with religion. There used to be a saying that once religion begins to interfere with your everyday life, it’s time to give it up. This appears to mistake religion for alcohol, and doesn’t seem quite what Jesus had in mind when he preached that you are saved by helping the injured and visiting the imprisoned, not by some set of esoteric rites.

What religion, sexuality and art have in common in the modern age is that they are all privatized. Privatizing religion is known as Protestantism, which in its more radical manifestations views the whole affair of salvation as a private negotiation between oneself and God. Sexuality, too, becomes essentially a matter of what goes on in the bedroom, at least until the point when feminists and other sexual dissidents insist on its relevance to social and political existence in general. This, incidentally, had been the whole point of the churches seeing marriage as a sacrament. A sacrament is a sign or foretaste of a fulfilled human future beyond the frontier of history. It’s a matter of pointing to certain realities in the present, such as the enduring love between two people, and declaring that the so-called kingdom of heaven will be a bit like that. Whether the people in question are formally married, or of different genders, isn’t the point. The point is that such love cuts against the grain of a degraded present, and thus points in a shadowy way beyond it.

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On plagiarism

By Terry Eagleton

As for the arts, there was a time when they faithfully served various social functions. There were jobs for painters, writers and composers in those days. They could sing the military victories of the tribe, ritually recount its triumphant history, praise God, flatter a monarch or aristocratic patron, entertain the king at court, help to form a community of public-minded bourgeois, or (as in the Victorian era) play a key role in edifying and consoling a nation wracked by dire poverty, the fear of social revolution, the death of God and humanity’s newly discovered kinship with the ape. It’s true that having a function came at a high price. It meant that the arts were generally speaking a medium of political authority, and had to dance to the tune of sovereign power. When they ceased to have much of a social function, however, they were at least able to act as a critique of other social institutions. This was the moment we know as modernism.

Besides, from Romanticism to aestheticism, the utter pointlessness of works of art could be seen as exactly their point. Their function was to be functionless — to remind us that there’s a life beyond waste disposal, the accumulation of capital and Nigel Farage. Figures like Oscar Wilde could be politically relevant simply by being outrageously themselves (though Wilde was also a devout Irish Republican, which a lot of the British prefer to forget). To turn yourself into a work of art meant not to stand in the corner of the drawing room in a suitably alluring posture but to realize your creative powers as ends in themselves. Samuel Beckett was another Irish writer whose art is superficially unpolitical, though he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his part in the French Resistance. Even so, his drama is all about failure, brokenness and defeat, thus acting as an oblique critique of the values of a Trump. Or, indeed, of Britain in its imperialist heyday. When Beckett was asked by a French journalist whether he was British, he replied: “Au contraire.”

Our own period has witnessed a reassertion of the political value of the symbolic realm. Art, religion and sexuality have been gradually recognizing their complex responsibilities to society as a whole. Just as some forms of art have become more politically sensitive, however, so politics has become more aestheticized. Much of it is now a matter of spectacle and “optics”, media and public relations, the grooming of stars and the assiduous polishing of images. The aesthetic has penetrated to the heart of modern political life, and in all the wrong ways. The quaint little ceremony we know as the Budget is by no means just for the hell of it. There is a lot in social life that can’t afford to be. But we mustn’t forget that if there is bread, there are also circuses.

Or maybe not. Perhaps capitalism will continue to act antisocially if it’s profitable for it to do so. A respect for humanity doesn’t seem to have restrained it much so far. It’s not a question of changing the minds of its leaders, as our deluded monarch seems to imagine. A few moral platitudes from Charles won’t prove enough to avert Doomsday. The economic system we have is as geared to promote profit over people as a tiger is geared to sink its teeth into your neck. If we’re all going to perish together, a plausible answer to why it might happen is organized greed. It’s unlikely that such unseemly words passed the monarch’s lips.

The word “Doomsday” suggests a punctual event, whereas one of the problems with alerting the public to the urgency of climate change is that it’s a gradual process. And we don’t tend to think of catastrophes as gradual. AI, however, is a different affair. There may come a world-shaking moment when a squad of terrifyingly brainy robots actually takes over, swarming our garden paths and emitting lethal rays, just as there may come a point in time when weapons of mass destruction are unleashed. Well, actually slightly more than a moment. It’s been estimated that such warfare could wipe out humanity in 17 minutes, time enough to try on a number of tweed suits, take the dog for a disappointingly brief walk or tell the boss what a contemptible little creep he is. The Apocalypse has traditionally been thought of as a dramatic event, an irruption of the timeless into time; in fact, some years ago, an American evangelical TV station drew up plans to broadcast Christ’s Second Coming, with cameras placed strategically at the poles and the Equator. It’s hard to know who would have taken out ads.

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The cult of AI armageddon

By Kathleen Stock

What the literature of Apocalypse never really took account of, however, was that we ourselves might be responsible for winding up our own history — that the disaster might constitute mass suicide rather than an outrage inflicted upon us by the Antichrist, an exasperated Almighty or a bunch of well-aimed asteroids. Diffident creatures that we are, it never struck us that we might pull off the end of the world all by ourselves, without a helping hand from the powers of darkness or a deity at the end of his tether. In accumulating the power to destroy itself altogether, humanity has finally come of age. There’s something grimly amusing about the idea of an animal that is scuppered by its own sovereignty — one which is wiped from the evolutionary record by its own eminently civilized achievements. Power becomes weakness, and progress a stealthy self-unmaking. As Freud was aware, the very forces that make life are secretly in love with death.

Like Sophocles’s Oedipus, and with just the same stiff-necked self-blindness, we bring our fate down on our own heads while priding ourselves on our sovereignty and intelligence. It never occurred to either Oedipus or us that intelligence was not just part of the answer but a major part of the problem. Our reason is unbinding itself from our bodies and confronting us as an autonomous, potentially hostile force. This is one reason why reason alone won’t save us. For a thinker like Thomas Aquinas, reason ultimately involves a kind of love — an intensely focused attention to the object we want to understand which is open to its peculiar form of being. One doesn’t hear such talk in the boardroom of Anthropic.

There have been many calls in history for humanity to unite, or to see itself as a unified whole. Such appeals are no longer necessary. We become one species the moment we reach the point where we’re capable of mass self-extinction, a point which arrived long before AI. What we share most deeply is our common killability. Not everyone has the ability to play Mozart’s clarinet concerto, but the most inconspicuous citizen has the capacity to be annihilated. We can find solidarity in death, the greatest form of democracy yet discovered, if in little else.

It’s hard to strangle someone with your bare hands. The mechanisms which inhibit intra-specific killing would probably kick in and we would simply be violently sick. Being violently sick is unpleasant, but it’s preferable to being strangled. Because we’re linguistic creatures, however, which is to say conceptual ones, we can invent ways of killing each other at long range which circumvent these bodily inhibitions. You can put up with torturing someone as long as you don’t have to listen to the screams. Language allows us to abstract ourselves from our bodies, but also to create the kind of technology to which our bodies are vulnerable. Spiders don’t have this problem, and neither would cherubs, but the human animal, being capable of complex labor through the power of concepts, is contradiction incarnate, caught on the hop between body and mind. Creatures like this, who are made up of mutually contradictory elements, were known to the ancient world as monsters. The Sphinx in Oedipus Rex is an example.

The whole of civilization is an elaborate extension of our bodies, but these prostheses constantly threaten to slip from the control of our senses and lead a life of their own. They don’t just waltz off, however, but return to plague us. The more power we invest in them, the more our flesh and blood come under their tyrannical sway. In the economic sphere, this is what Marx calls the fetishism of commodities, in which the fruits of our labor detach themselves from our flesh and blood and come to conduct an existence of their own. We become the creatures of our own products. The relations they set up among themselves determine the material conditions of human life. It’s the market which decides who shall grow sleek and who shall starve. In this sense, superintelligence is nothing new. Bankers and stockbrokers deal with it every day. We inhabit an economy which lies within nobody’s control but which determines whether we flourish or fail. The market has a mind of its own, and like AI its intentions are by no means always admirable. It would be rash to assume that either set-up is spontaneously on our side.

There’s a long history of myths and fables which concern servants or apprentices rebelling against their masters, taking advantage of their absence in order to sport, riot and smash the dinner plates. The Shakespearian Fool wants to do this but can’t, so he contents himself with creating verbal havoc instead, running linguistic rings around the monarch and his courtiers. Ariel in The Tempest is always just about to get out of hand but just reined in by his irascible master.

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Who owns Meghan Markle?

By Terry Eagleton

We can’t, however, root out our power to manufacture cruise missiles without at the same time eradicating our capacity to feed the hungry and heal the sick, which also require complex extensions of our bodies like aid agencies, hospitals and so on. And this is our tragedy, one of which spiders and cherubs are blithely unaware. For the ancient Greeks, it was tragedy in the most literal of senses, one represented on a stage. One of the most common causes of ruin in Greek tragic art is hubris — the process by which we aspire, overreach ourselves and bring ourselves to nothing. Humankind is its own most perilous adversary. It’s in danger of evolving too fast, breeding new tools and capabilities before it has time to work out how to regulate their most negative effects. Before history began, evolution did this for us, implanting certain instincts and constraints in our bodies. Moral prohibitions can be strong, but they aren’t always as strong as the impulse to be violently sick. Now we can override these instincts, we live in constant danger, which means that our lives are more exciting than those of slugs but a lot more precarious too.

In this sense, the current alarm about AI is symptomatic of a much deeper dilemma. “To be able to overpower the monstrous progeny of our own intelligence,” writes the philosopher Malcolm Bull, “has always been the condition of human survival.” Our problem lies in being potentially infinite in creativity yet finite and fragile in our bodies. For the mind to shake itself free of the senses is a form of madness, as Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift both understood. King Lear begins by thinking his powers to be infinite and ends up acknowledging that he is not “ague-proof”. He must see and think “feelingly”, and part of what he learns to feel in his bones is the anguish of others, not least of the poor and homeless. The play contains a magnificent passage in favor of communism. To live well for Shakespeare, one must live within the sensuous confines of the body; the only problem, as he appreciates, is that we are so built as to transgress those confines all the time, and if we didn’t we couldn’t have fire engines and penicillin along with patriarchy and poisonous gas.

There’s a popular mistake that Frankenstein is the name of the monster, not the scientist who created it. The error is a significant one. Monsters are always other people. It’s a way of avoiding the fact that as Oedipus discovers, the real monster isn’t the Sphinx but his incestuous self, and in him humanity as a whole.

Going back to acting would be Meghan’s latest self-reinvention, but then self-reinvention is what actors do all the time. It’s also a distinctively American practice, which like many things in the States has its origins in Puritanism. The greatest self-reinvention of all is the crisis of spiritual conversion, after which you aren’t the same person as you were before. You turn from a sinful world to a regenerated one, and there seems no reason why this remaking shouldn’t become a perpetual way of life. When it does, it’s commonly known as postmodernism. The self is plastic, protean stuff, clay in your hands to be molded this way or that depending on how you happen to be feeling. Does Madonna even remember being part of the English squirearchy in a previous incarnation, riding her horse in the Cotswolds? The only force which binds together your various identities is the will to succeed. If that means making jam or dressing up in a giraffe costume, so be it.

In the 19th century, the world was seen as in constant flux, but there was a stable point in the midst of this mutability: the self. It was a kind of substance, rather like the body but invisible. In our own time, flux has invaded the inner sanctum of the self and scooped it out. As Oscar Wilde remarked, truth is one’s present mood. This is all very different from the traditional bourgeois idea of selfhood. One of the great revolutionary breakthroughs of the European middle classes was the notion of self-determination. You were no longer instructed what to think and do by feudalist, monarchical, autocratic regimes. Instead, you decided for yourself. You wrote your own history, rather than playing a humble role in a pre-scripted narrative. The creed of liberalism was born. It was advances of this kind which caused Marx to admire the middle classes so much, a fact of which most of them seem nowadays to be oblivious. To be free meant not just to be unshackled, but to construct your own destiny without the interference of others. What was important wasn’t simply what you did, but the fact that you did it. To that extent, it was an adolescent kind of ethics. Yet it had world-shaking political implications, not least when the idea of self-determination was applied to nations as well as individuals. The result of that was the unleashing of one of the most transformative political forces the modern world has witnessed: revolutionary nationalism.

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Why corpses shouldn’t be sacred

By Terry Eagleton

There’s a difference, however, between self-determination and self-invention. To shape your own identity suggested that you had such a thing already. The problem was that someone else — the state, the church, the nobility — was forbidding you to be your own master. It wasn’t a matter of plucking your selfhood from thin air, but of being allowed to realize a self which was in some sense already given. Self-invention, however, is a different affair, because now the self becomes nothing more than the story of its endless refashioning, like the life-history of David Bowie. If who you are is somehow given, then this restricts what you might do, and is thus an obstacle to complete freedom. For total freedom, you need to abandon all ideas of a set identity and simply make yourself up as you go along. The result of this, however, is a freedom which is purely empty. It’s what you get when you push laissez-faire to an absolute limit.

Negative freedom of this kind wants to cut itself loose from all external determinants. Like God, it is purely self-creating. Aggressively independent of Nature, history, heredity and environment, it relies on nothing outside itself in order to be itself. This isn’t true of a lily or a can of beans. Nor is it true of an animal like a badger or a zebra, which is completely shaped by the species to which it belongs. And despite the liberals, it isn’t true of human beings either. Freedom doesn’t mean being unconditioned. It means being conditioned in a way which allows you to transform what conditions you. Take language, for example. Language molds our consciousness to its roots, but we’re not just passive effects of it. On the contrary, to be brought up in a language is to learn how to use it creatively, producing utterances we have never heard or spoken before. We start off with the alphabet and end up writing Paradise Lost. To some extent, then, we can determine whatever it is that determines us. And this is what we call freedom. It isn’t true on any significant scale for badgers or zebras. Badgers and zebras don’t have any history of their own (though they may occasionally play a role in ours) because they aren’t built to be able to reconfigure what makes them what they are. They can only be what they are, so that their life is safer than ours but probably more tedious too.

The contrast with humanity is clear. “I can be anything I want!” is one of the most mindless of postmodern mantras, not least in the United States. The problem with this vision, as the Romantics discovered a long time beforehand, is that any actual achievement or identity is automatically diminished. To act is to limit a self which is pure, infinite possibility. For this reason, true freedom would be not to act at all, and so would be purely negative. What Meghan discovered to her dismay was that even the role of princess was imprisoning — that what looked like liberty was more like a privileged form of incarceration. In a notable paradox, those at the very top of the tree, and thus (one might have thought) most free of restriction, may turn out to be the most rigorously scripted of all.

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Harry and Meghan cannot escape their fate

By Simon Critchley

As an actor, Meghan was able to choose her parts and could always shift from one to the other. She also got to choose her role as Duchess of Sussex. The Duke of Sussex, however, had no such privilege, as he has made a point of complaining. Like most of us, large chunks of his narrative were written for him by others. Few of us are self-authoring, given that being around the place involves having parents, and having parents involves being part of a whole world without ever having been consulted on the matter. But Harry is less self-authoring than most of us and now wants to claim control over his own story.

This idea of life-as-story is a particularly fashionable notion at present. Not everyone thinks of their life as a narrative. You could see it instead as a cycle or a montage or a mosaic, not to speak of a heap of fragments. “Narrative” suggests a certain shapeliness, whereas some of us regard our lives, rather as Henry James saw the realist novel, as “loose baggy monsters”. A human life doesn’t always have the clarity and coherence of a parable. “What’s your journey?” suggests that you feel yourself to be en route to a destination, but we don’t all live with some grand goal in sight. There isn’t that much continuity in every human existence. The philosopher Galen Strawson thinks it not only true but transparently obvious that who he is now isn’t who he was at the age of 10. Besides, everyone’s narrative includes a lot of other characters who usually turn out to be hard to control, as well as spawning a whole series of sub-plots which refuse to slot neatly together. The view that everything in the world conspires with everything else to form a luminously intelligible whole is known as paranoia.

Having been scripted by others, though, Harry is now eager to script himself — or, as he would say, own or take control of his life-story. It’s revealing, however, that he thinks of his life as some kind of property, to which his relation is one of proprietorship. You don’t own your life any more than you own your body. You can’t leave it in a pub by mistake, or swap it for someone else’s. Harry and Meghan think in acquisitive terms even when it comes to their very existence. Your life is a commodity to be invested on the most profitable of terms.

Which is to say, in the current barbarous jargon, that you’re a brand, just as your hair-style or apple chutney is. And that’s where the problems begin. Because a brand is precisely something you can’t exert complete control over. It’s a relational matter, in the sense that whether it takes off depends on the public. In striking out for freedom and autonomy, then, you find yourself the puppet of forces which are entirely anonymous, just as a toothpaste manufacturer does. You can try to fend off that anonymity by writing “Love”, “Meghan” or “As ever” on your products, as though you have a fierce personal affection for every potential customer, but that won’t fool anyone. The fickleness of consumers forces you into yet more desperate or ingenious self-reinvention in order to stay in business. In an age of self-determination, you find yourself adrift in a market in which nobody can be entirely self-determining. Postmodernism marks the point at which the logic of the marketplace begins to infiltrate the ways we think and feel.

In any case, no one can shape the course of their life in isolation from others. To form one’s history collectively is known as democracy. For two people to shape their selves in and through each other is known as love. Let’s hope Harry and Meghan keep on doing that. There may not be much more left.

It may be that our reverence for the dead masks a certain fear of them. Tombstones are usually inscribed with a few pious reflections on the deceased, but they’re as weighty as they are in order to keep them down. Otherwise the dead might go gallivanting off around the place, rattling their bones and dragging their shrouds behind them. Something like this is the point of a wake, which is still a common custom in Ireland. The corpse is treated with extravagant courtesy, with the coffin lid left open and perhaps a bottle of Paddy’s or Bushmills conveniently to hand. In the good old days, he might even have been taken for the odd whirl around the dance floor. All this is to persuade the deceased that he isn’t dead at all, since otherwise he might grow envious of the Guinness-guzzling living and return to plague them. The dead body is treated as though it’s really alive; but if it’s able to haunt the living, then maybe it is. Wakes exist to console the dead for not being alive, thus disavowing the fact of death; but they also celebrate death as part of the great natural cycle of growth and renewal.

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Why aristocrats are funny

By Terry Eagleton

Corpses and ashes are really fetishes. For Sigmund Freud, a fetish was a piece of matter invested with a mysterious power, and which thereby enters the sphere of the sacred. It’s a liminal affair, dead and alive at the same time, transgressing borders and disrupting our tidy conceptions of what’s inanimate and what is not. Ghosts have this unsettling capacity, and Freud’s word for the realm in which things which are suspended between life and death is the uncanny. Scarecrows and snowmen are uncanny because it’s hard to tell whether they’re dead or alive. Children may also appear uncanny, which is one reason why they play such a role in horror movies. They resemble adults in many ways, but at the same time they’re an alien species. In fact, it’s hard to say what they are for. They don’t work or rustle up delicious soufflés or have fascinating views on Islamic architecture. They are like visitors from some other dimension, and as with the creepy children in The Midwich Cuckoos, they may well be secretly communicating with each other at this very moment. If they are, then they’ve got a head start on AI.

The fetish plugs a gap — the gap left by the deceased, but also, more fundamentally, that perpetually unfulfilled void at the heart of the human subject known as desire. What bereaved relatives desire is for the dead to be present again; and if this can’t be accomplished by bringing them back to life, you can at least treat their remains as a surrogate for their living selves. It’s a way of disavowing the fact that they’re gone forever, since “forever” is not something we can conceptualize. No doubt this is why those who have lost a loved one but can’t locate their body are often desperate in their efforts to reclaim it. Recovering a single cadaver can involve extraordinary amounts of time, people and resources, but what’s being searched for is the nearest thing there is to a live human being. From another standpoint, however, the corpse is also what’s most different from it. When we hear the phrase “the body in the library”, we can be fairly sure that the body in question is unlikely to be reading a book.

Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the finest theologian who ever lived, refused to use the word “body” of a corpse. He spoke instead of the remains of a body. Human beings were in his view naturally embodied. If heaven doesn’t involve my body, Aquinas considered, it doesn’t involve me. The true self in his view wasn’t some elusive spirit lurking within the flesh, but the living flesh itself. This is why he wouldn’t have believed that the soul of Cleopatra was Cleopatra. To say that Cleopatra was human isn’t to say that she was a body with something superadded to it, but that she was a body of a certain kind, one different from material bodies such as ashtrays and umbrellas. Ashtrays aren’t able to join political parties and umbrellas aren’t capable of irony, whereas Cleopatra was presumably capable of both. Whether an AI machine can be ironic or join a political party is a question yet to be resolved.

Ashes, in this view, are the remnants of a dead body, not a living one. Our future ashes will have little more to do with us than someone else’s ashes will. The same goes for corpses, which aren’t the bit of a person that’s left to us after death, but are no person at all.

There’s no reason, then, to think that it’s outrageous to mix up people’s ashes or sling their corpses casually around. I would have no great objection to having my ashes lapped up by a leopard, granted that I was around to have such objections in the first place. Corpses and ashes can’t be treated abusively, any more than a can of sardines can be. Dead bodies are as senseless as slabs of concrete. It’s our fear which makes us afraid of enraging them. Revering the dead is a way of keeping them at arm’s length. They’re also stark reminders of our own impending dissolution, which may then breed a certain unconscious hostility to them. Jesus’s dismissive remark that the dead should bury their dead would have struck the pious Jews of his day as obscenely offensive. For them, burying the dead was a sacred duty, whereas Jesus himself turns out to be rather less in awe of the grave.

One might claim, then, that the 20-year sentence handed down to the rogue undertaker has no rational justification. It’s equivalent to the amount of jail time you would get for strangling someone, not just messing around with their remains. This isn’t, to be sure, a popular view. A great many people find what the man did abhorrent, and no doubt some families have suffered severe trauma as a consequence. Their disgust must be acknowledged and respected. Some years ago, however, millions of people in the Muslim world felt a similar sense of scandal and outrage at the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. Not many people in the West, and certainly not many intellectuals, considered those sentiments worthy of esteem. Yet the disciples of Islam in Baghdad and Birmingham were no doubt as mortally affronted by Rushdie’s representation of Mohammed as those families who feel that their deceased relatives have been grossly mistreated.

Perhaps Rushdie might have been rather more alert to how his satire might appear to a people who already felt abused and humiliated by much of Western civilization. Yet if corpses aren’t sacred, neither are books. There are devout Christians who enjoy jokes about Jesus, and plenty of Jews who laugh at anti-Jewish jokes or even pass the time inventing them. Not many Jews would be offended by the story of one Isaac Goldberg, who was walking with his adult son beside a river when the son missed his footing and fell into the water. “Help, help!” Goldberg shouts. “My son, the lawyer, is drowning!”

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By John Merrick

The point is that you can be serious and light-hearted about something at the same time. If we live our beliefs from the inside, we can also get a fix on them from the outside; and this double-take is part of the dualistic animals we are. This, admittedly, isn’t the case with those evangelical Christians who believe that every word of the Bible is literally true. To refute this view, you simply have to look at the nature of language. To read is not to move from one fixed, absolute meaning to another, but to interpret; and interpretation always involves open-endedness and ambiguity. No sign can be fixed and absolute, since it’s a sign only by virtue of being caught up with other signs. No piece of language is ever finished. This is true of notices in theaters which read “Please Do Not Sing Along with the Performers”, to which you could always add “You Drunken Yobbos”.

None of this is to claim that nothing is sacred. There are words which should never cross one’s lips (certain statements about the Holocaust, for example). It’s just that words of this kind shouldn’t include, say, jokes about mixing up corpses or the dog running off with the ashes. Some things are sacred and some are not; it’s just that we’re sometimes confused about which is which.

Most people don’t make such remarks simply because they’re stupid. If the government threatened to drive a motorway through their back garden, they would wise up on the planning laws quickly enough. They come up with such clichés because they don’t know much about politics, for the reason that the kind of politics we practice doesn’t seem to know much about them. The country, like much of the rest of the world, is gripped by a profound crisis of legitimacy. Great swathes of the population no longer have the faintest trust in its political institutions. It’s as though the passengers on a train greeted an announcement that they were approaching their destination with hoots of derision and snickers of skepticism. Politicians are about as popular as pimps. As far as institutions go, a lot of people still admire the Royal Family; but this is partly because the royals don’t really impinge on their daily lives, as politics is supposed to do. The fact that royalty does nothing of importance is one of the major reasons it stays in power. Most citizens see no more point in abolishing it than in ridding humanity of Morris dancing or the Yeomen of the Guard. There’s no harm in adding a few useless decorations to your domicile.

Widespread disaffection can lead to political revolution, were it not that people are sometimes too disaffected to be revolutionary. Astonishingly, however, a third of Britons told a recent survey that capitalism had failed and that a communist revolution was necessary. Or so The Times reports. It’s hard to believe that it’s true. A quarter of those polled declared themselves open to supporting enemies of the state like Russia and Iran, which is to say that the bespectacled bank clerk opposite you on the Tube train might well be a fifth columnist. The prospect of a collapse of legitimacy is why Edmund Burke appealed in the wake of the French Revolution for government by popular consent. This is one reason why he was a Whig and not a Tory. Power must respect the values and customs of the populace. Governing classes in Burke’s view survive only by engaging the affections of their inferiors, and a loveless sovereignty is politically bankrupt. India must be ruled with due respect to its indigenous culture, not with the ham-fisted brutality of the stereotypical imperialist.

Nations in Burke’s view aren’t primarily governed by laws, but by a set of affinities and tacit understandings between rulers and ruled. What holds them together is more cultural than political. If colonies like America can associate being subordinate to the Crown with their own civil rights, the more perfect will be their obedience. The only firm seat of authority, Burke declares, “lies in the minds, affections and interests of the people”. If this fails, and the common people take to the streets, then of course you unleash on them the full force of your repressive powers. There’s always a coercive fist within the consensual glove. But to unleash your powers is to risk an even more drastic loss of legitimacy. It’s better on the whole to woo your citizens than to shoot them down. Governments who do the latter have won and lost at the same time.

Cynicism about the political class isn’t quite such bad news for the Establishment as it might appear. People don’t live by politics alone, even when they trust and admire their politicians. The dull inertia of everyday life may be enough to keep them from tearing up the cobblestones. Most of them spend most of their time simply trying to keep their heads above water. What absorbs their attention isn’t the break-up of the social contract but the price of bacon. This is one way in which economics takes precedence over politics. What Marx calls the economic base is what Americans call the bottom line. A certain amount of economic pain has a distracting effect which may benefit the guardians of the system, whereas too much of it poses a threat to them. Even so, regular visitors to Davos may console themselves with the thought that revolutions only occur when people can glimpse an alternative to what they have now which strikes them as both feasible and desirable. If the problem isn’t simply a specific political regime but politics as such, this isn’t likely to happen. In the view of a disillusioned populace, even Lenin would simply be more of the same.

“They’re all the same” and similar sentiments may not be true, but the impulse behind them is surely authentic. People are right to be cynical about politics; it’s just that a lot of them are cynical for the wrong reasons. If the political sphere can’t bring genuine change, it’s largely because it’s severely constrained by the banks, major corporations, domestic bureaucracies and international capitalist institutions. In this sense, globalization breeds an erosion of political trust at the national level. The same is true of geopolitics, which forces political states into crippling amounts of expenditure while underfunding the institutions that ordinary people rely on. Besides, capitalism is the fastest-changing system in human history, which can make political promises hard to keep. Politics shrinks to a cramped arena in which room for maneuver is drastically curtailed. Nations become agents of forces they can’t control. The Britain that once ruled the world is now ruled by it.

There’s a false solution to the widespread prejudice against politics, which is to make a politics out of it. This is known as populism, which is currently sweeping the globe. You can denounce international set-ups while being bound hand and foot to the global corporations, and cheer for the Common Man while supporting the world-wide financial markets which are pushing him toward the breadline. You can even make a fortune on those markets yourself, while blaming immigrants for the social damage which such financial forces wreak. You can castigate elites in the name of the common people while stashing away millions of pounds or billions of dollars yourself and owning a large number of posh houses. You can also speak out for some ordinary people by demanding an end to immigration, while not speaking out for others who demand better health care and a decent standard of living. A figure who represents the whole of this hypocrisy is currently king of the world, able to change the rules of international football with a flick of his fingers. Pretty soon he’ll be setting the menu at McDonald’s. We’re in danger of a return to absolutism, when politics was a matter of the monarch’s will.

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Why aristocrats are funny

By Terry Eagleton

Some MPs claim to have been drawn to politics by sheer altruism. They prop up the Commons bar out of an insatiable desire to serve their country. Most people, however, are driven to political action by material reasons, not fancy ideas. Where the populists have the advantage is that these reasons exist in plenty — failing health service, crumbling schools, unemployment, buckling social provision  — and with consummate sleight-of-hand can all be attributed to a single source: immigration. Anti-immigrant politics means changing the population rather than changing the system. Moreover, populism combines its material grievances with deep-seated cultural ones, and this is a formidably powerful fusion. Who would have thought that culture, of all things, should play such a key role in the political realm? It is, however, culture in its most potent sense, which is to say issues of identity, rather than Balzac and Beethoven. Populism feeds on a profound human fear of the Other, along with an anxious attachment to the familiar. In blaming this monstrous Other for most of the nation’s woes, it refuses to recognize that capitalism has always generated private wealth and public squalor as sides of the same coin. It’s a form of life which populism wants to deepen and defend, whatever its apparent concern for the standard of living in Southend.

If “They’re all the same” is the mantra of the disillusioned citizen, what are the most common words spoken by politicians? “To be clear.” “I’ve been very clear from the outset.” “Kemi has always been clear about our policy on…” This is curious, because it suggests that people consider obscurantism to be the major vice of politicians, which surely isn’t true. They may be distrusted, thought to break their promises, spout a lot of garbage or be paid too much for doing too little, but not to obscure their meaning. They may lie from time to time, but they usually do so lucidly. Some of their deceptions are wonderfully transparent. Besides, clarity can be overrated. Part of the fun of everyday life lies in its ambiguity, as with the notice “Refuse To Be Put in This Basket”, the meaning of which varies according to which syllable of “Refuse” you stress. I pointed out many years ago that the instruction “Dogs Must Be Carried”, sometimes found on escalators in Underground stations, might be thought to exclude those who approach the escalator without a canine in tow. There’s an apocryphal story about the rockstar Bono opening a concert with an appeal for starving children. Clapping his hands, he says: “Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies.” “Well stop fucking doing it, then,” someone in the audience shouts in mock-indignation.

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Why aristocrats are funny

By Terry Eagleton

One of the finest ambiguities in the English language is built into Henry James’s novel The Wings of the Dove. Kate Croy and Merton Densher are a young couple in love but without the means to marry. They befriend a fabulously rich young American woman, Milly Theale, whom they discover to be terminally ill. Kate persuades Densher to pay court to Milly, who has fallen in love with him, so that Milly and Densher may marry and Densher may inherit Milly’s wealth when she dies. In an extraordinary twist in the narrative, Milly is told on her death bed of the plot against her, but bequeaths her fortune to Densher even so. The result of this act of forgiveness causes him such deep remorse, as well as such love for Milly’s memory, that he refuses to accept the bequest, and he and Kate part forever.

A question, however, lingers. Milly’s generous act breaks up Kate and Densher’s relationship as surely as might a bout of sexual infidelity. But did Milly foresee this consequence? Is that why she left Densher her money? Is her forgiveness a devious act of aggression? And is Densher’s penalty for deceiving her to be besotted with a corpse for the rest of his life? As often in James, the issue is undecidable. We shall never know whether Milly was saint or schemer. Life, as Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks, is like a rough ground, not a sheet of pure ice. Clarity is only occasionally to be attained. It’s there for the most part in the discourse of politicians. But sometimes they’re lying even so.

When I was a university teacher in the pre-AI epoch, a student presented me with an essay which was entirely plagiarized from a celebrated critic except for the outstandingly intelligent bits, which had been deleted. With becoming modesty, the student said he knew he wasn’t up to much intellectually speaking and so dumbed down the essay he was hijacking. (“Plagiarism,” incidentally, comes from the Latin word for “kidnapping”.) I briefly considered giving him marks for humility. He’s now a fairly well-known actor, who like all actors survives by pretending that someone else’s words are his own.

Around this time there was an outfit in the United States called Intellectual Bullshit Inc, which would write you an A-worthy essay on any topic you wanted, from water imagery in the later Shakespeare to the vaginal structure of the flea, but also a B or C-level one if that seemed more suitable to your capabilities. They would even churn out a whole doctoral thesis on your behalf, at the cost of thousands of dollars. No doubt they’ve now been overtaken by AI, as one form of plagiarism yields to another.

What counts as plagiarism, however, isn’t easy to determine. The very word “research” suggests that you’re working on materials which are not your own. It’s also arguable that all uses of language are creative, even language which is stolen. You have to make sense of the stuff you’re pilfering. Language is governed by rules, but as referees and umpires are aware, applying a rule is itself a creative act, involving tact, discretion, intuition, appropriateness and so on. There are no rules for following rules. Rules have to be interpreted, which is one reason why football crowds sometimes become irascible. We also have to know when to bend the rules or throw them away altogether. We do this when we say “taught” rather than “teached”, but not these days when we say “I was sat” rather than “I was sitting”, which is ungrammatical but has become the norm. 

Even so, there’s a sense in which what we say is always borrowed from others. “I love you” is always a quotation, however sincerely one may intend it. All language is second-hand, reach-me-down, off-the-peg, and clichés are simply those bits of it where this is blatantly obvious. An entirely original utterance, like the message of an alien, would be incomprehensible. No writer before Shakespeare came up with the sentence “My salad days, when I was green in judgement”, but it only works because we’re already acquainted with the individual words. Much the same is true of human behavior. We become unique individuals by spontaneously imitating those around us. Identity is a matter of mimicry. We are all plagiarized versions of our parents, though we aren’t of course identical with them. Two individuals being exactly alike, such as identical twins, is spooky, raising the mind-bending paradox of how something can be both itself and something else. The truth is everything is shop-soiled, tarnished, woven out of something else.

The idea that there’s nothing new under the sun, a thought which is an instance of what it claims, can be disturbing. This is because most of us are instinctive Romantics who believe in originality, and the idea of originality is closely bound up with individualism. The idea that all individuals are incomparable is built deep into the modern psyche, even though it’s a highly dubious claim. Oscar Wilde, whose mission in life was to be that inimitable genius known as Oscar Wilde, could never be caught doing the same thing twice or filching a phrase from another author. He made himself up as he went along; and if he disliked Nature it was because it kept mindlessly repeating itself and was incapable of improvising. This is ironic, since the Irish Wilde spent most of his time imitating the British aristocracy — though one might claim that in his case imitation was the sincerest form of mockery. A later colonial writer, the novelist V.S. Naipaul, entitled one of his books The Mimic Men, as though colonies like his native Trinidad could be seen as mere replicas or simulacra of the imperial homeland. In the same spirit, James Joyce called Ireland “an afterthought of Europe”. On this view, colonies are botched imitations of the real thing. They are mistranslations, smudged offprints, faded facsimiles. 

It’s hard for us to think ourselves back into the neo-classical mindset that preceded the birth of Romanticism — a view of the world for which originality wasn’t rated at all highly. What mattered was the collective wisdom of humankind, not an idea that some bright spark happened to come up with at 3 o’clock in the morning. A belief which the great majority of men and women had held over many centuries wasn’t necessarily true, but there was bound to be something in it. God wouldn’t be so irresponsible as to allow us to get the world seriously wrong over vast tracts of time. (In fact, he allowed us to think it was flat for an embarrassingly long time.) Nor would he withhold from us the few fundamental truths essential for our salvation. What we held in common was what was truly valuable, whereas quirkiness and idiosyncrasy were morally displeasing. They were also for the most part trivial and tedious, whereas the normative and familiar could be fascinating. An imitation of Homer or Horace might be deemed far more precious than an artistic creation of one’s own. Originality was the preserve of the Almighty, who could conjure his handiwork out of nothing as no mere mortal could. To usurp his privilege in this respect was a form of blasphemy. Human beings had their own form of eternity, to be sure, but it was known as tradition. The way to live well was to plagiarize what your ancestors did, a process which stretched back interminably into the past and endlessly into the future. Only the hubristic or dim-witted could imagine that their petty individual resources could outweigh this immense store of collective knowledge. Such was the neo-classical vision of the world, one which has now almost entirely vanished. 

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A number of Irish writers in the 19th century came up with some ingenious solutions to the problem of their nation being a poor reproduction of Britain. The Cork poet Jeremiah Callanan produced a number of English translations of Irish poems, but we don’t always know what Irish works they are supposed to be translations of. They are imitations without an original. His poetic colleague James Clarence Mangan writes “translations” from languages of which he had not the slightest knowledge, so that what seems to be derivative is in fact original. In any case, a translation can be as good as what it reproduces, or even better. The mellifluous “Vienna” is an improvement on the terse “Wien”. Besides, an inaccurate translation might convey the spirit of the original more fully than an exact one. Some other Irish poets indulged in what they called “anti-plagiarism”. This meant writing a poem modeled on an already published one, while maintaining that the published poem was stolen from the one you had just written. If the published work was in English and the new one was in Irish, this deftly reversed the colonial relation between the two nations, so that the larger island becomes a pathetic imitation of the smaller one.

The question of originality applies to politics in another sense too. Whatever revolution may mean, it can’t mean that everything we know stops and something entirely different starts. On the day after the revolution we would still need to pull up our jeans. Total social change would be inconceivable, since how would we identify it unless we retained some sense of what came before? We would simply confront an abyss between what we have now and a wholly different future, with no criteria to assess how the latter differed from the former. Besides, an alternative future has to be worked for, and it’s that process of recreation which bridges the gap between what’s present and what’s to come. We couldn’t speak of progress if there was simply one thing and then something completely different. The Boeing only represents progress over the Tiger Moth because both are aircraft. You can see Billy Connolly as an advance on Harold Lloyd because both are comedians, whereas the National Portrait Gallery isn’t an advance on a prosthetic limb. In this sense, all change involves continuity. At the beginning of the 17th century in Britain, people still burned witches, whereas by the end of the century they had established the Bank of England and the Royal Society; but what intervened between the two was a civil war, not a void.

All the same, the fact that there must be continuity in order to measure change doesn’t mean that all change must be incremental. It’s surely clear that modern capitalist nations aren’t able to participate in the global market while at the same time guaranteeing a decent standard of living for their citizens. They can’t, in short, sufficiently control the domestic effects of their own international operations, let alone adequately protect their people from the most devastating consequences of these forces. This is why they’re peculiarly vulnerable to the challenge of Right-wing populism, which like all proto-fascist movements denounces the global dimension of capitalism while supporting those who reap profit from it. Purely incremental change is unlikely to change this situation. The nation-state, which served the ruling classes of capitalism extremely well in its day, has now entered into conflict with the international interests of those classes, and is seeking to grab back some power for itself. If Starmerism lacked direction, as everyone from Blair to Burnham seems to believe, it’s because, given this contradiction, there’s ultimately nowhere for it to go. What we have instead is self-plagiarism, as the system carries on reproducing itself on the very brink of an alarmingly steep cliff. 

***

Terry Eagleton’s A Death of One’s Own will be published by Yale in September.

This will not have escaped the attention of the good citizens of Northern Ireland. Some of them believe that if an earthquake were to shatter Belfast, the London-based media would overlook it in order to announce the opening of a new bus lane in East Grinstead. The very province which proclaims its loyalty to Britain most clamorously feels side-lined by the sovereignty it has fought to preserve. When they think of the United Kingdom, some Ulster Unionists feel an ambiguous mixture of pride, resentment, sullenness and superiority. (The superiority being related to what they see as the mainland’s liberal and Godless culture.)

The Unionists’ very insistence on their British identity, which is what turns them outwards to the nation as a whole, is paradoxically intensely parochial and inward-looking. This is partly because loudly asserting your identity hasn’t, until very recently, been very British. The essence of Englishness, as with the essence of aristocracy, has been to take most of life for granted — from who butters your toast to where you were educated. Northern Irish Protestants, however, are cursed with being unable to stop thinking about themselves, which is always a sign of the outsider.

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They also have their own peculiar language. Jeffrey Donaldson declared that when he moved from one home to another to promote his political career, it was God who told him to do so. He announced that “I have seen for myself what God’s amazing grace can do to lift a sinner from the deep pit of sin” — though it wasn’t enough to get him off. It’s hard to imagine Andy Burnham speaking in the same terms.

Protestants, though, are obviously different from Catholics, not least because they’re more open to the influence of Puritanism. Some English visitors to Catholic Ireland in the 18th century were amazed at what they saw as the loose sexual talk of the young women, perhaps fondly imagining that it reflected their behavior. The Irish may have become more puritanical about sex after the Great Famine, when the perils of overpopulation had to be more urgently confronted, but they continued to enjoy dancing, singing and gambling. When they came to work in Britain, building railways and canals in the 19th century, they were often derided as lazy by native workers; but this was because as former small-time tenant farmers and farm laborers they had much less of a history of submission to industrial routines, and intended to keep it that way.

Puritans can have fun, of course, but for them life is fundamentally a serious business. The ultimate drama of salvation and damnation is inscribed in the minutiae of everyday existence, so that you’re spiritually at stake at every moment. Ludwig Wittgenstein once grimly remarked that we weren’t here to enjoy ourselves, which from a theological viewpoint is surely mistaken. So-called eternal life means self-delighting life, life without a utilitarian goal but lived as precious for its own sake. There’s absolutely no point to God, or for that matter to human history, any more than there is to a work of art. It’s this that the puritans, philistines, utilitarians and teleologists find so hard to take. They don’t see that trying to get somewhere is part of the problem, not the solution. Instead, they see each instant as merely a jumping-off point for the next, each feature of existence a function of something larger. In revolting against this ethic, art attempts the well-nigh impossible business of seeing something purely as it is in itself. It’s the true meaning of the term “realism”.

Pleasure, not least sexual pleasure, poses a threat to some puritans because it doesn’t seem to get you anywhere. This is one reason why so many Americans, who spring from a deeply puritanical culture despite all those strip clubs, find it hard to stay in bed in the morning. Doing nothing is morally suspect, while actually enjoying doing nothing borders on the sinful. It’s much the same with sex. Sex for the puritan mind is tolerable when it has a function (reproduction), but not when you relish it for its own sake. This is why it has to be confined to marriage. This is to see sexuality as an adversary. It’s a potentially destructive force which must be confined to the domestic arena in the same sense that a tiger in captivity must be confined to a cage. Once you transgress these bounds, all hell is likely to break loose, which is what has just happened to a devoutly Christian former leader of the DUP.

Puritans are right that sexuality can be a destructive force. Like all sacred phenomena (which is to say, things that are both life-giving and potentially devastating), it has to be handled with caution. But this doesn’t mean you have to regard it as an enemy. Rather as in ancient Greek tragedy the powers of Dionysus, a god who is both joyous and deathly, playful and savage, must be welcomed into the city rather than brutally repressed, so Eros must be given its place of honor there. Otherwise it’s likely to turn against civilization and tear it to pieces.

It’s this which puritanism is incapable of doing. In its view, sexuality is either a necessary evil or an anarchic force, and it’s hard to draw the line between the two. Yet as industrial society begins to emerge, it’s exactly this which we’re required to do. For the human body to submit to the disciplines of industrial labor, or to the ceaseless business of accumulation, means splitting it down the middle. Its less productive energies have to be siphoned off from its more productive ones, in case they interfere with their functioning. The place to which they’re diverted is generally known as culture, and consists of three main areas: religion, art and sexuality. Or — to put the matter in Freudian terms — the creative, imaginative, libidinal instincts must be repressed.

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The trouble with the repressed isn’t only that it has a tendency to return, like a zombie clambering vengefully from its grave, but that it lends the forces being stifled a new kind of glamour. Nothing is more seductive than the prohibited. We desire what we aren’t permitted to have. Censorship and concealment breed curiosity. Perverse creatures that we are, we have only to sniff an injunction to feel the itch to transgress it. Which is to say that the ego bows submissively to the authoritative superego, but also yearns to rebel against it. The son loves the father but wants to bring him low. This is one reason why no sovereign power can be secure. It’s also deeply relevant to the crimes of Jeffrey Donaldson.

Presbyterianism, a sect to which many in Northern Ireland loudly subscribe — including Donaldson — is an offspring of the Reformation of John Calvin and John Knox, and can display some particularly repressive attitudes towards sexuality. For the former leader of the DUP, ex-assistant grand master of the Orange Order and hard-line Right-winger, sex seems to have been the monstrous force which burst through its proper confinement to lawful wedlock and began to run riot.

The Christian Gospel to which Donaldson is dedicated, and which one imagines might be his only solace while behind bars, is remarkably casual about sex. It doesn’t mention it much, and when it does its attitude is generally relaxed and forgiving. Nothing could be more different from Christians, many of whom make a fetish of sexuality whatever their denomination. In this, ironically, they find themselves at one with a good deal of postmodern culture. Perhaps the solution is to get sexuality in perspective. That, however, is more easily said than done, because there seems to be something inherent in our sexual make-up which is lop-sided, disproportionate, hard to get into focus. It’s hard to avoid either hyping it or suppressing it. And this is because we’re not, at root, well-balanced beings at all, whatever the BBC might think.

For a joke to fall flat may be a calamity, as in the old Bob Monkhouse quip: “They laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well they’re not laughing now.” People and things falling flat, however, can be a source of high comedy. A good deal of humor is based on deflation and debunkery. A cohort of legendary British comedians (Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams) trade on sudden swoops from the sublime to the mundane — from the civilized tones of the cultivated middle classes to the blunter idiom of the populace. With their bathetic descent from posh to profane, these performers are a kind of class conflict in their own person. One thinks also of Monty Python’s “Summarise Proust” contest, a television game in which competitors were given two minutes to summarize Proust’s 3,000-odd page novel, first in evening dress and then in a bathing costume.

There’s a rich English tradition of savage debunkery, from Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift to Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis. The sudden puncturing of grandiose rhetoric, the urge to demolish and disfigure, are familiar features of English writing, as they are in the literary culture of Ireland. Flann O’Brien’s superb fiction plays off abstruse metaphysical speculation against the threadbare platitudes of pub talk, while James Joyce’s prosaic Leopold Bloom is a counterweight to his philosophically-minded Stephen Dedalus. The United States, a nation which likes to affirm and is nervous of negativity, has a less impressive history of satire.

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Speaking of Irish writers may remind us of just how little English stage comedy there would be without Irish émigrés. From Congreve, Steele, Macklin and Goldsmith to Sheridan, Shaw, Wilde and Brendan Behan, the London theatre has been dominated by Irishmen who washed up in the metropolis with little but their wits to hawk. Treading a thin line between insiders and outsiders, they could turn this hybrid status to fruitful comic use. They were insiders enough to grasp the manners and conventions of English society, yet distanced enough to have a quick eye for their absurdities. Wilde was an Irish Republican but also a parody of the English gentleman, while Richard Sheridan was a Whig Member of Parliament who secretly fellow-travelled with the revolutionary United Irishmen. Brendan Behan, who once remarked that he was a drinker with a writing problem, used to be hauled on to BBC television after the pubs had closed in order to demonstrate what lovable drunks the Paddies were. Shaw, a less inebriated exile, warned his fellow Irish writers against becoming court jesters to the British. It was, in fact, far too late: the Anglo-Irish Oliver Goldsmith performed precisely this role in 18th-century London literary circles.

Why does swooping from the sublime to the ridiculous make us laugh? The answer for Sigmund Freud in his deeply unfunny study of jokes is that we invest a high amount of unconscious energy in sustaining our noble ideals or social inhibitions. When these are suddenly deflated, we economize on that energy and release it in the form of laughter. Jokes liberate us momentarily from the reality principle, allowing us to indulge the pleasure principle instead. This is one reason why sexuality is a fertile source of humor, involving as it does both high romantic feeling and the lowly genitals. Few human activities are at once so exotic and so banal. How can the question of who copulates with whom lead to such murder and mayhem? Human beings are pitched between flesh and spirit, and humor reminds us of the double act that we are.

Most humor involves some sort of incongruity. We laugh when something seems out of place, when things go off the rails or are thrown out of kilter. Which is to say that a lot of humor springs from the baffling of expectations. Humor returns the kind of response we don’t anticipate, as with: “What do you call the useless bit at the end of the penis? The man.” We invest psychical energy in keeping the world orderly and predictable, and any sudden dissonance allows us to relax the unconscious strain which this involves. Even Charles Darwin, not a man given to giggling, thought that laughter was caused by the incongruous or unaccountable. “You’ve got to stop masturbating,” a doctor tells a patient. “Why?” asks the patient. “Because I’m trying to conduct a medical examination,” replies the doctor testily. This involves slipping from one frame of reference (masturbation in general) to another (masturbation here and now), which is a form of incongruity.

A quick slide of meaning or shift of perspective may be enough to be comic, as with Oscar Wilde’s “I live in constant fear of not being misunderstood”, or Dorothy Parker’s response to being told that people at Halloween duck for apples: “There, but for a single consonant, is the story of my life.” She also remarked that “the transatlantic crossing was so rough that the only thing I could keep on my stomach was the First Mate.” The decadent fin-de-siècle poet Ernest Dowson once declared that “absinthe makes the tart grow fonder”. With such deft changes of single words we are in the realm of wit, as with Wilde’s “The young people of today have no respect for dyed hair”. Even punctuation can make a difference. “The batsman’s Holding, the bowler’s Willey,” announced a cricket commentator, a phrase in which everything turns on a comma. Sexual jokes are funny because they allow us for a moment to lift our repressions and indulge in the unspeakable, while knowing that no real harm is likely to result from this.

“I’ve got them down to ten,” bawls Moses to his people as he descends Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, “but adultery’s still in.” A lot of humor depends on laws and prohibitions, since without them we would have nothing to transgress, and transgression is usually pleasurable. Deviating from a norm can take the form of eccentricity, especially in England. The English love what they call “a character”, like the Oxford don I once knew who used to stand in a pub with a cavalier air and a parrot on his shoulder. (His cavalier air was shaken only by his obvious fear that the bird might crap on his shoulder.) People who stick ferrets down their trousers or ride to work on a baby rhino are likely to be honored by Buckingham Palace. The upper class in particular are transgressive, since they regard themselves as superior to codes and conventions, even though they often set them themselves. Brian Howard, one of the louche Evelyn Waugh set, was once arrested by the police in an illicit drinking den in Soho. When asked for his name and address, he replied: “My name is Brian Howard, I live in Berkeley Square, and you, Inspector, I suppose, come from some dreary little suburb.”

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While the middle classes cling timorously to the rules, the upper classes proclaim their privilege by kicking over the traces, combining the glamour of rank with the effrontery of not giving a damn. In this sense they have something in common with the criminal, as we have recently witnessed. The British admire devil-may-care aristocrats, which is why they’re so fond of the second-rate poet Lord Byron; but they also champion those curmudgeonly types who thwart the government’s plans for a new airport by clinging stubbornly to their two acres of land. Individualism in the United States means the boldly enterprising spirit; in Britain it’s more a matter of idiosyncrasy.

It’s surprising that politicians don’t use humor more often, given that it’s one of the most superbly effective means of communication. Not many comedians are politicians, though Eddie Izzard has revealed ambitions in that respect. Some politicians are comedians, however — not in the sense of inspiring laughter but in being the object of it. Keir Starmer wouldn’t even make a decent straight man, let alone a comic. Harold Macmillan could throw off the odd witticism, as when he remarked that every man should go to bed with a Trollope. Those of us who remember the Labour MP Denis Healey know that he was good for a knees-up. Boris Johnson, by contrast, is that rare member of the human species, a man who is fundamentally frivolous. Most frivolity is skin-deep, but Johnson’s is a massively serious affair which goes all the way down. There’s nothing more profound about him than his superficiality.

Jokes are political in the sense that they prefigure an alternative form of life. Like art but unlike capitalism, they aren’t primarily concerned with profit and power. Instead, they represent a sharing of life purely for its own sake. It’s true that some of them can be more functional — breaking the ice, mocking an adversary, abusing an immigrant, showing what a clever guy you are — but the finest jokes have no more point than a kiss or a wave. They represent a small piece of utopia in a darkening world.

It’s true that under severe marital pressure I once took to visiting a gym. After a year of grudgingly lifting weights and hanging like an inverted bat from wall bars, the only perceptible difference to my body was a slight increase in the circumference of my calves. So I jacked it in and returned to debauchery and six-course meals heavy in carbohydrates, all of which made me feel a lot more lithe and sprightly. Exercise can be fatal to your health. Having spent a lifetime high on various kinds of dope, Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead was arm-twisted into going to a gym, where he did a few sit-ups and promptly dropped dead.

My churlish attitude to sport is shaped by childhood experience. A sickly, waif-like creature, I was forced to play rugby at school and opted to be a winger, which meant I could race purposefully up and down the touchline avoiding the ball. Over time, I developed the technique of appearing to play rugby but not actually doing so with a virtuosity far superior to those whose heads were stuck in the scrum. At the end of a game, the captain would clap me on the back with a gruff “Well done, Eagleton”, having mistaken taking flight for taking part. Afterwards I would sleep for a day. It’s remarkable how exhausting not playing rugby can be.

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How Salford made modern Britain

By Terry Eagleton

There have been moments, however, when I was proud to be mistaken for an athletic type. I was once in a swimming pool in the United States (I don’t know why, since I can’t swim) when two young boys approached me and asked “Are you a lifeguard, sir?” No doubt they needed a lifeguard present if they were to swim. I conceded rather reluctantly that I wasn’t but returned to my hotel glowing with quiet pride. Being mistaken for a lifeguard seemed second only to being mistaken for Tom Cruise.

So there’s something to be said for sport after all. In fact, it’s hard to think of a brand of popular culture which has such universal appeal as football, yet which combines this mass devotion with such magnificent displays of artistry. According to most theories of 20th-century culture, this isn’t supposed to happen. Instead, culture is sharply polarized between high and low, the former being unintelligible to the latter and the latter being contemptible to the former. Not much manages to slip over this well-policed frontier. There’s Shostakovich on the one hand and the Sun newspaper on the other. Yet football dismantles this opposition. It pulls in millions of ordinary men and women, yet also offers a dazzling display of talent which at times can touch on genius. No other cultural form can equal it in this respect.

It is, in fact, a form of secular religion, vastly more popular than the churches, with its own pantheon of saints, demi-gods, collective rituals, communal ecstasy and time-honored ceremonies. In the United States, the religious fervor surrounding sport borders on the pathological: no political speech is possible without a sprinkling of sporting metaphors. One day when I’ve nothing better to do I might find out what a slam dunk is, since it occurs about as often in American speech as the phrase “proud Americans”. (I know what a slam dunk means, but not what it is.) As for Britain, if you want to bring the place to its knees, ban all football games immediately. The result would be an outbreak of social disruption not far short of revolution. Governments would be toppled, public buildings would be razed to the ground and supporters’ clubs would take over the running of Whitehall.

In reality, football is a cunning way of heading off such turmoil, not of creating it. All ruling classes are aware that it’s not only bread but circuses that keep the common people content. Theater, pageantry and spectacle are crucial ways of keeping governments in power, siphoning off energies which might otherwise prove troublesome. Much of this today is known as television, rather as for the ancient Romans it was called gladiatorial combat; but football offers a great deal more than TV.

For one thing, it allows every plumber and taxi driver in the country to be an expert. People who might have trouble in spelling “fortuitous” can make the subtlest of judgments on whether a player is minimally off-side, or whether someone who’s playing mid-field should be moved upfront. They could also probably tell you when their club last played Everton, and what the score was. In a society for which the past is largely irrelevant unless you can package it as “heritage”, football helps to sustain the idea of tradition. You are heir to a heritage which stretches back far beyond your birth. Not many young Mancunians know who Harold Macmillan or Harold Wilson were, but a lot of them know about Matt Busby and George Best.

Football also allows people an experience of solidarity in a social order sorely lacking in it. It’s true that like many forms of solidarity, this can involve a collective hostility to others. Could there be Celtic without Rangers? But there’s more to it than that. A demonstration is a crowd of men and women united by a common goal — to drive out immigrants, for example, or protest against a war. A football crowd, like an audience at the London Philharmonic, is united simply by a shared love of what they’re witnessing, and that affection is intensified by the knowledge that thousands of others are feeling it too. It’s true that a lot of players are grotesquely overpaid, but many of them would probably want to do what they do even if they weren’t so grossly over-recompensed, which is more than you can say about sausage manufacturers.

Football is a form of collective celebration which includes an appreciation of the individual — of the defensive agility of one player or the strategic sense of another. Besides, football clubs can be the focal point of local identity, in the way that supermarkets or the town hall can’t be. Even those who’ve never been to a game in their lives may well see the club as in some way symbolic of their city. All this, to be sure, has been much diminished by the absorption of the sport into corporate capitalism, a scandal which has politicized many an outraged fan. The obvious solution is that clubs should be owned and controlled by their patrons, not by avaricious overseas businessmen who wouldn’t know a free kick from a throw-in.

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When did I last go to a soccer game? Maybe 70 years ago. I haven’t ever played the game myself, since as I began by saying I have principled moral objections to physical exercise. If others want to shorten their lives by chasing a ball, doing 50 press-ups a day or indulging in other potentially suicidal activities, that’s up to them. This isn’t a popular view in a society which makes a fetish of the body. We live in a culture in which you bear your body around with you like a sickeningly fragile piece of china which might shatter at any moment. In a postmodern world in which people insist on being themselves, one treats the body as though it were someone else’s. One thinks of the unctuous Mr Pecksniff of Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, warming his hands at the fire as benevolently as if they belonged to a friend. It’s a self-alienation implicit in the phrase “to put something in your body”, as if it were an icebox or a paper bag. You mustn’t put a vaccine in your body, for example, even if failing to do so may inflict a painful death on others. Having to take an aspirin can trigger a panic attack in some young people. A meal becomes as complex, potentially as lethal an operation as defusing a landmine. Judiciously selected items are occasionally placed in the body with scrupulous care, an activity once known as eating. We become custodians of our bodies, attending to their every whim like those of some imperious aunt or querulously demanding pet.

Postmodern bodies also demand their own sealed-off spaces. It’s a far cry from the libidinal riot of medieval carnival, where it could prove hard to say where one body ended and another began. Some people today say “excuse me” if they come within five yards of you. Smoking is forbidden not only because it can kill you but because smoke violates other people’s space. It constitutes a lethal, almost invisible link between them. It won’t be long before we walk around zipped up in astronaut suits and communicating only by radios built into our helmets. Hygiene is a posh word for not interacting with others. In this context, football reminds us of the other meaning of the word “body”, namely a mass of men and women who assemble together either for some practical purpose or just for collective enjoyment. It’s the people’s theater or concert hall. Which doesn’t mean that I’ll be watching the Champions League any time soon…

One answer might be that they thought he was politically safe. This portraitist of the proletariat was from a middle-class background in a posh part of Manchester (the family actually kept a servant). He was also a stout Conservative who poured scorn on the suggestion that his work was in any way Left-wing. In one sense, that’s clearly true: to represent working people on canvas isn’t to promote their cause. Yet Lowry portrayed them as having a dignity and poignancy which one can see as implicitly political. What an artist says of his or her own work isn’t necessarily the last word. T.S. Eliot described “The Waste Land” as no more than a piece of rhythmical grousing. He was wrong.

Salford in those days was a town with a river so foul that not even canned fish could survive in it. Even so, the place was immortalized by a celebrated local folk singer, Ewan MacColl:

I heard a siren from the docks,
Saw a train set the night on fire,
Smelled the spring on the Salford wind,
Dirty old town, dirty old town.

Not every Salfordian rejoiced in the knowledge that their city was a byword for squalor. MacColl was a communist activist who in the Thirties had been a member of Red Megaphone, a Salford-based theater group which was revered throughout Europe. His partner was the formidable Joan Littlewood, whose Theater Workshop brought politically committed drama to the East End of London in the Sixties. Littlewood took under her wing a young woman called Shelagh Delaney, the daughter of a Salford bus driver, whose play A Taste of Honey stunned the cultural scene. Unusually for the time, the piece included a character of color, though in Salford this wasn’t that surprising.

Salford, after all, was home to the Manchester docks, where ocean-going vessels came and went up the Ship Canal, making it something of a cosmopolitan place. As a child, I lived in constant terror of being kidnapped by a Lascar, without having the faintest idea of what a Lascar was. Many years later, a truculent young man by the name of Morrissey, who was a pupil at my grammar school and has since fallen under the malevolent spell of Nigel Farage, pointed out that his songs were laced with allusions to Delaney’s play.

Delaney, who was employed for a while at a factory where my father spent most of his working life, had an on-off romantic relationship with the brash young son of a Salford bookmaker. His name was Albert Finney, and the two of them made a short film together. Finney went from Salford grammar school to RADA, graduating at just the moment when the new wave of working-class film and drama was breaking across Britain. One of his school friends, Harold Riley, became a distinguished painter, following in Lowry’s footsteps. Finney, too, is rumored to have turned down an honor from the Queen. My mother also remembered seeing the young writer Walter Greenwood, whose Thirties bestseller Love on the Dole became an immensely popular film, setting out for London in his ill-fitting best suit for a brief spell of celebrity.

The connections don’t stop there. When the Salford filmmaker Mike Leigh needed money to fund his early cinematic efforts, Finney stumped up the cash. Leigh also gave me some invaluable advice when I had a play staged in London 30-odd years ago. He hailed from the only area of the city which could be described as middle-class, a tiny enclave, and grew up not far from the home of an Indian schoolboy who attended Manchester Grammar School and whom I encountered while we were both working on the Christmas post. The next time I saw him was on the big screen playing Gandhi, having changed his name to Ben Kingsley.

Unlike Lowry and Finney, he seemed to enjoy being a knight. Nor was he the only Salfordian to win respectable recognition. My primary school was set in a warren of malodorous little streets in the city center, and the composer Peter Maxwell Davies was born and brought up in one of them. He would later study at Manchester, Rome and Princeton, ending up as Master of Music to the Queen and a knight of the realm. We once appeared together on a TV arts show, and I astounded him by whispering the words “Holly Street” into his finely tuned ear as the studio manager was counting down. He later decamped to Orkney, about as far from the dirty old town as one could wish.

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By Terry Eagleton

Around the corner from Holly Street lived a lab technician who spent his spare time reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire in the Salford public library. He was to become the country’s most renowned punk poet, and his name was John Cooper Clarke. Both of us have honorary doctorates from the local university, so that Cooper Clarke, with his cadaverous features, snake-thin body and purple-dyed spiky hair, now solemnly calls himself “Dr” in the publicity for his poetry-reading tours. He gave up hard drugs some years ago and even put on a tiny amount of weight, though he’s still almost invisible if you look at him sideways. Some ironist on a Salford street shouted at him: “Ay, Clarke, get back on the drugs, yer fat fuck!”

Lowry, Riley, Delaney, Finney, Clarke, Morrissey — all these names have something in common. It was Irish immigration into Salford and Manchester that laid the basis for a thriving working-class culture there. Even Eagleton is an Irish name of sorts, though Scottish in origin. The family probably went to Ireland as planters and returned, suitably humiliated by the Almighty, as proletarians. It’s easy to be pious or sentimental about such self-fashioning artists and writers. The Monty Python team had a hilarious sketch featuring a working-class writer sweating over the raw stuff of language while rebuking his coal-begrimed son for poncing around in the pit and betraying his old dad’s plebeian values.

Yet there were mill girls in Lancashire in Victorian times who would rise an hour early before work to read Shakespeare together, and it’s hard to be satirical about that. Few traditions are more honorable than those of the men and women who taught themselves to read, write and debate despite their lack of formal education. Ruskin College in Oxford, the Workers’ Educational Association, and university departments of continuing education have all played a vital role in this project. Some literary critic once described the novelist Thomas Hardy as an “autodidact”, despite the fact that Hardy, an apprentice architect, was more highly educated than the great majority of his fellow country people. What the critic meant was that he hadn’t been to Oxford or Cambridge. Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure, makes it abundantly clear that he could imagine few worse fates.

An Oxford don was once invited to speak to a group of students at Ruskin College, most of whom would have been trade union activists or Left-wing militants in their former lives. Anxious not to strike a patronizing tone, the speaker decided that self-flagellation was the most productive tactic, breaking off his speech every few minutes to confess how little he really knew about the subject in hand, and how frightfully difficult it was to say anything definitive about it. He indulged in this scraping and squirming right up to his final words, which were a coyly self-effacing “I really don’t know” whereupon a voice from the back of the room thundered, “You’re paid to know!”

Some years ago, I was asked to give a talk in Bristol to one of the local groups which composed what was then the Worker Writers Association. This was a network of working people throughout the country who as former train drivers, postal workers or domestic servants were mostly engaged in writing their autobiographies, and who would meet together to discuss their work. A few of them even managed to get their stories into print. I was asked to speak about the theory of autobiography, and tried to keep it as comprehensible as I could without squirming and scraping, aware that nobody in the room had seen the inside of a college. When I finished speaking, an elderly, partially blind woman rose to her feet and asked rather querulously, in a rich West Country accent, what kind of language I was talking. Fearful that I’d failed to make myself clear, I was about to launch on a reply when she spoke up again. “Because I’d like to learn that language.”

This is because the resurrection can’t be represented. Not because it’s too sacred, but because although Christians believe it actually happened, it isn’t an event in the sense that the Budget or the war against Iran is an event. You wouldn’t have been able to take a photo of it had you been lurking around Jesus’s tomb with your phone. It’s not as though he yawned, scrambled to his feet, shucked off his shroud and walked out blinking into the sunlight. The resurrection throws into question the whole idea of what counts as something happening. Is waiting, for example, an event — or is it the absence of one? Falling in love is an event of a kind, but not in the way that burning a piece of toast is. The resurrection is beyond representation not because it isn’t real, but because it’s too real to make an image of. If there is something one might call ultimate reality, we wouldn’t be able to capture it in language. It would lie on the far side of our speech, like the unconscious.

But Jesus’s rising from the dead isn’t just a “spiritual” or symbolic affair, because it involves an actual human body. The risen Jesus eats with his friends to show that he’s not a ghost, he has real wounds in his hands and so on. Yet this body is of a different order from the body of, say, Pete Hegseth — not because it’s less flesh-and-blood than he is, but because it’s more intensely so.

Whether anything happened in the tomb or not also raises the question of who reported the body being missing. The first person to do so was Mary Magdalene, who was probably a sex worker and thus in the eyes of the establishment not the most dependable of witnesses. She was also of course a woman, and the testimony of women at the time was regarded as worthless. So the fact that it was Mary and some female companions who first reported that the tomb was empty would have been highly embarrassing for the Gospel writers, who might well have omitted this bit of the narrative had they felt able to do so. The fact that they didn’t suggests it was too widely believed to be left out.

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By Terry Eagleton

All of this is deeply inconvenient for the pious of this world, who demand a rather more positive icon of the Almighty than an empty space. Icons, however, are specifically forbidden by the Yahweh of the Hebrew scriptures. You can’t make graven images of God because the only authentic image of him is human flesh and blood. You can’t wield him as an idol or fetish in combat with your enemies, or try to scramble into paradise by wafting incense at a statue of him. In fact, you can’t even give him a name, because this, too, would be a way of trying to have him in your pocket, using him as a tool to promote your own interests.

Then again, it’s easier for some Israelites to project their Oedipal fantasies onto him and see him as Big Daddy, a vengeful deity who will punish them for their transgressions and so relieve them of their guilt. The Hebrew name for this false image of Yahweh as patriarch and superego is Satan, which means Accuser. When Christian nationalist Americans hail God as Commander-in-Chief of the Cosmos, they are committing what the Scriptures know as idolatry, for all their neatly creased trousers and shiny white teeth. The bad news is that God has no more peculiar concern for the United States than he has for East Grinstead. There are no favorite nations — not even Israel.

In fact, God gets quite testy with the ancient Israelites. Some of them keep wanting him to behave like a Super Being, whereas in fact he isn’t a being at all, in the sense that the Princess Royal or a set of bagpipes is a being. He isn’t any kind of object or entity or individual. Nor does he keep meddling in human history like an American neocon. God and the universe don’t make two. He isn’t in Heaven in the sense that he might be in Chicago. He certainly isn’t in the skies, despite the fact that people tend to gesture reverently upwards when they invoke his name. In the Book of Isaiah, when the Israelites think that he can be appeased by burnt offerings, he complains that their incense stinks in his nostrils — and asks them what they are doing about protecting the widows and the orphans and shielding the poor from the violence of the rich.

When the Virgin Mary bursts out into a triumphal chant when she’s pregnant with Jesus, she praises the God who has brought down the mighty from the thrones and raised up the lowly, filled the poor with good things and sent the rich away empty. These are typical themes of the Hebrew scriptures. As an obscure young woman from a notoriously backward part of the country, Mary is an image of the poor herself. The child in her womb will be murdered by the Roman state for fearlessly speaking the truth. He will fall victim to the kind of torture and death reserved by the Romans for runaway slaves and political insurrectionists. In fact, he was lucky to get away with only six hours on the cross. Some victims of crucifixion thrashed around for days.

It’s doubtful that he was a revolutionary himself, but a few of his closest followers almost certainly were. One of them, Simon, is specifically called a Zealot, a member of the anti-imperialist guerrilla movement of the era; two others (James and John) are given a nickname with Zealot connotations, while Judas Iscariot might have sold his master out because he had hoped he would lead an armed rebellion against the Romans and was disappointed that he didn’t. Jesus himself was a vagrant with no profession who railed against the ruling caste and seems to have had a particular distaste for the family, not least his own. A fidelity to his mission takes priority over attending your kids’ graduation.

A great many pre-Christian societies had rituals of death, burial and resurrection. Vegetation and fertility cults, myths of the slain or wounded god who will finally regenerate the sterile land: all this, ironically, lurks beneath the surface of the most boldly “modern” of all English poems, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The poem is archaic and avant-garde at the same time. It would seem, perhaps, that these patterns and rhythms are somehow built into the human psyche. In this respect, Christianity doesn’t introduce something entirely new to humanity but builds on a long tradition of sacrificial victims. The victim in question is the scapegoat, who takes on itself the burden of sin and guilt of a whole community, and by dying to this barren condition rises to new life.

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Christianity, however, transforms this pattern in the act of conforming to it. Fertility cults, sacrificed gods, the release of fresh water onto parched land and so on: all this is essentially about power. The tribe needs to exert power over Nature to grow its crops, and acts this out symbolically in the form of a god who is buried in the earth and then rises to new life. The seed must die in order for the plant to flower. What Christianity does is to raise all this from the level of Nature and biology to that of history and morality. Death is still essential for redemption — but now it’s death in the form of a loving self-giving to others, as exemplified in the life of Jesus. It’s this — not burnt offerings or slain idols — which constitutes the necessary condition of new life. You have to die to the system represented in Jesus’s day by the organized brutality and injustice of the Roman Empire, and be born again into a community of friendship. This is why baptism is about drowning, not washing.

It’s all a long way from bunny suits and painted eggs. Easter is about fun and joy, to be sure, but like any genuine happiness it comes at a steep price. Even if only in symbolic terms, you have to travel all the way through death and dispossession if you’re to emerge somewhere on the other side. Doing this without any guarantees up your sleeve is known as faith. This is why Jesus is said to descend into Hell when he dies — into that cacophony of mocking yelps, sniggers, hoots and cackles which is the domain of the demonic. The demonic is the sworn enemy of life and meaning, devoted to demolishing what it sees as the ludicrous fiction that anything human can be of the slightest value. You have to live all this in order to get beyond it, moving from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Or as W.B. Yeats puts the point: “Nothing can be whole or sole /That has not been rent”.

You don’t, however, simply leave death behind. The most unpleasant part of the Christian message is that if you love properly, you’re likely to be killed. It’s the least cozy kind of love imaginable, compared with the romantic, erotic and sentimental brands of the stuff that are peddled nowadays. Jesus dies as a martyr, which is to say one who freely gives up their life for others. It’s a little extremist for English taste. But it’s unlikely that any power short of this is going to bring down the death-dealing imperial machine now ruled not by Caesar but by Donald J. Trump.

The novel is also a covert assault on ruling-class British ideology. Among other things, it’s a dark parody of R. M. Ballantyne’s Victorian classic Coral Island, in which a group of marooned children manage to pull through by sheer public-school spirit and backbone. Jack, the proto-fascist character in Golding’s version, is a hangover from this stiff-upper-lip heritage, but is one of the first of the boys to surrender to barbarism. Golding saw himself as something of an outsider in British middle-class society and was plagued by feelings of social inferiority. For all its literary renown, Lord of the Flies is an act of revenge on the Establishment.

The anti-humanist thesis which shapes the novel is familiar enough. Human beings are in the grip of dark, primordial powers which a skin-deep civilization is too feeble to restrain. Once that civilized veneer cracks, these malevolent forces will break through and play havoc with our moral idealism. Civilization is just a sublimated form of savagery. All this is a rather vulgarized version of Sigmund Freud’s view of the relation between ego and unconscious. But it’s also an outlook deeply influenced by the history of British imperialism, which involved a confrontation between so-called civilization and so-called barbarism. The most subversive moment in that history is recorded in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the imperialists find a mirror of themselves in the so-called natives. The Other turns out to be as close as breathing. The stiff upper lip is a shield against the fact that there’s something sinisterly attractive about the chaos and bloodlust which the “natives” supposedly represent. Mrs Moore, the sensitive, humane middle-aged woman at the centre of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, feels the vibrations of meaninglessness emanating from the Marabar Caves and loses her grip on life. Joseph Conrad, a naval officer like Golding, speaks in his novel Nostromo of the imperial project as being as pointless as trying to plow the sea. At the very moment when the colonialists need a robust identity in order to impose some order on a resentful population, they are overwhelmed by a sense of cosmic futility. They can only accomplish this project if they are far from home, but being far from home is also what can sap their faith in the enterprise.

This happens in a different way in Lord of the Flies. The terrifying beast which the boys fear is real enough, but it’s inside them, not out in the ocean or deep in the jungle. In promoting its bleak case about humanity, however, the novel stacks the cards in one flagrantly obvious way. The idea is to show that men and women will quickly revert to primitivism if the pressures on them are sufficiently powerful. But Golding’s characters are not men and women but children. And since children are only semi-civilized in any case, it’s no great surprise that they should take to sticking pigs and smashing each other’s glasses. Boys (even choirboys) will be boys. They will also be adults, but they aren’t yet. What if Golding had put the members of a Yorkshire brass band or a bunch of chartered accountants on the island? There’s no assurance that they would have behaved impeccably, but it’s unlikely that they would have torn themselves apart with such alacrity.

Novelists quite often stack the cards to ensure the results they want. Take, for example, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a satire of Stalinism. The book shows how swiftly the project of building socialism succumbs to a brutal authoritarianism; but to illustrate the point it uses farm animals, and farm animals aren’t remarkable for their ability to engage in complex social or political operations, any more than children are. If you set your case up in a particular way, the conclusions you’re looking for will fall obediently out the other end.

Golding’s novel is an example of what one might call the Room 101 syndrome. In Orwell’s 1984, Room 101 is where you confront what you fear most, and how you cope with this terror is the ultimate test of who you are. The hero has an understandable aversion to having rats burrow through his cheeks, and breaks under this hideous prospect. He cries out to his torturers to do it to his partner instead, and the guilt of this betrayal destroys him. But why should how you act in a moment of extremity be taken to define who you are? A lot of us would betray anyone at all to avoid our tongue being chewed by rodents, including the odd babe-in-arms, but to claim that this reveals our “real” self is absurd. The extreme doesn’t necessarily define the norm. The belief that to press someone to their limit is to discover who they are goes hand-in-hand with the equally dubious claim that everyday existence is inherently inauthentic. Once you peel it away, you reveal the real thing. Once you put children in a situation where there are no civilized restraints, you find out how uncivilly unrestrained they are.

Jack Thorne’s vividly imaginative recreation of the book for television deletes its religious dimension. The dead parachutist on the islands, presumably the pilot of the doomed aircraft, is referred to in the novel as “a dead man on a hill”, a reference to Calvary, and the role of the child Simon (Simon Peter, Jesus’s right-hand man) is to bring the good news that there’s nothing to fear about it. Instead, he is murdered for his pains, as indeed was Simon Peter. Christianity, however, doesn’t maintain that human beings are irretrievably corrupt, whatever Golding may think. It rejects both the bright-eyed progressive view that we’re naturally selfless and compassionate, but also the sour-faced reactionary case that we’re a bunch of deep-dyed villains who can be saved only by a gratuitous act of divine grace.

It isn’t, however, a question of steering judiciously between these two different viewpoints. It’s rather a matter of grasping that they’re opposite aspects of a single situation. The very powers which allow us to forge genuine progress (healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and so on) are also the powers which enable us to commit genocide. It’s the self-contradictions of the human species which are at stake here. Because we have bodies of a certain kind (laboring, communicative, cooperative, and so on) we can develop technologies far beyond the capability of squirrels. This is why squirrels have no National Health Service, as far as we can tell. But it’s also why they can’t stockpile nuclear weapons. They can’t send vital resources (sacks of nuts, etc.) to less privileged squirrels overseas, but neither can they run secret torture facilities like the CIA.

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Jane Austen was no Romantic

By Terry Eagleton

The liberal tends to hold that once we’re allowed to be free, our better natures will flourish; the conservative believes that only by the strict application of order and discipline can anything morally valuable be squeezed out of our selfish, indolent make-up. Christianity is both a great deal more pessimistic than the liberal and considerably more optimistic than the conservative. The doctrine of the Fall, which has nothing to do with a divinely prohibited apple, suggests that we’re in a sorry mess, as a quick glance around the globe might confirm; but the Christian Gospel also holds that we have a capacity for self-transformation, and that if only we can let go of the present there’s a glorious future in store for us. It isn’t, however, attainable without passing through loss, deprivation, suffering and death, if only in symbolic terms.

For some progressive thinkers, neither world wars were supposed to happen. They seemed to be inexplicable disruptions of a history which had been marching upwards and onwards at least from the Victorian era, or even from the 18th-century Enlightenment. Charles Dickens may have scourged the evils of his age, but he thought it vastly superior to any previous phase of history. For some conservative thinkers, the Holocaust is eloquent testimony to the callowness of this vision of progress. Today, we are fearful about our future, but we tend not to ask whether a species capable of such atrocities really deserves to survive. If it’s finally wiped out by climate catastrophe or nuclear war, might not this simply amount to getting its comeuppance?

We should recall, however, that if a lot of men and women spent their time planning and executing the Holocaust, a lot of others gave their lives to bring the Nazi regime to an end. Besides, if Lord of the Flies is a parable of the darkness of the human heart, then it could give comfort to the malign forces its author fought against a few years before he came to write it. If violence and cruelty are built into our natures, then it might be that our responsibility for torture and murder is diminished. We are, after all, only being faithful to the kind of animals we are. But the Second World War wasn’t the result of human nature. It was the consequence of a complex set of historical factors, any one of which could have been different. There may have been no need for William Golding to give his crew orders to fire on the enemy. And if there hadn’t been, he may not have written the novel now showing on television.

In Marx’s view, this magnificent achievement involved one or two misfortunes: mass poverty, grotesque inequalities, blighted lives and grinding exploitation. It also brought with it perpetual wars between competing capitalist states, the extermination of colonial peoples, and a rapacious social order in which more or less everything from love to art to sport was subject to the profit motive. Yet Marx didn’t allow his fury at these atrocities to dim his admiration of the class that gave birth to Balzac and Dickens, Mozart and Mendelssohn, Rembrandt and Turner. “Bourgeois” for him was never simply a swear word. Instead, he held in tension a positive and negative judgment of that class, in what was known as a dialectical approach in the days when radical young men wore sideburns and denim suits. He especially appreciated their insolent upfrontness. The feudal order had concealed its brutality behind church, monarch and lord of the manor, but with capitalism it was out in the open. “All that is solid melts into air,” he remarks in the Manifesto, “all that is holy is profaned, and humanity is at last compelled to face with sober senses its real conditions of life.”

The middle classes worship fact rather than fancy, use rather than ornament, the material as against the ideal. They tell it like it is, instead of spinning utopian dreams or fantasizes of King Arthur. The dominant literary form was now not epic or romance but the realist novel, tales of ordinary men and women rather than of gods and demons. Religion was still an active force, but more for the sake of social cohesion than love of God. The Victorians feared that morality would collapse without the Almighty, and the collapse of morality might bring with it political disaffection. What Walter Bagehot called the “ceremonial” aspect of British society, with its quaint cults and esoteric rituals, still flourished, but truth and reality were increasingly a matter of land, cash and property. What mattered was what you could touch and taste, buy and sell.

In commending the middle class’s lack of hypocrisy, Marx is perhaps a touch too charitable. If the Victorians were crassly materialist, they were also remarkably high-minded. Fantasizes of King Arthur did indeed continue to be spun, not least by the man whose poetry was Queen Victoria’s bedside reading, Alfred Tennyson. In civilized circles, money was still as unmentionable as excrement, and Freud was to detect some fascinating relations between the two. This coyness lingers on: even today, the British speak of appointing someone to an academic post, while the Americans talk of hiring. Despite this, the gap between materialism and idealism has always been starker in the States than it is in Britain. Brits are more likely than Texans to be embarrassed by the high-toned rhetoric of Our Brave Men and Women in Uniform or This Wonderful Nation of Ours. Hyperbole like this borders on the impolite in the UK, where it’s customary to play yourself down, not wear your heart on your sleeve and not lavish praise on your own children.

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ICE theatrics are getting real

By Malcolm Kyeyune

The Americans, however, have invented an ingenious way of reconciling their spiritual high-mindedness with their love of money. This is to turn the pursuit of profit into an enterprise every bit as spiritual as Buddhism. America has a dream — but it’s a dream of power, prosperity and infinite self-expansion, not of community or humility or selfless devotion. It’s an idealism of the will, not of the soul, and only one can play at a time. This is why it’s not entirely true to see Donald Trump as having abandoned the usual lofty American talk of God’s Own Nation and other such blasphemies for a coarser, grosser, in-your-face discourse. There’s no denying that he’s coarse and gross, but one needs to remember that in the Land of the Free, making an enormous amount of money is itself a kind of spiritual project. Idealism is built into everyday life, not a spirit that soars above it. The Puritans who founded the United States believed that worldly success might be a sign of God’s favor, so that the material and the ideal were linked from the outset.

They’re also linked in the sense that the millionaire is a kind of magician. He can change the world with a stroke of the pen or a word on the phone. Money is a brute fact, but one which can make the most extravagant fantasy become real. Fantasists like Trump can’t stand the recalcitrance of the world and want it to be instantly pliable to their touch. Most of us have to adapt our desires to reality, whereas autocrats can do the opposite. No doubt it all goes back to the breast. The infant feels hungry and out pops a nipple. It’s not the smartest way of preparing for adult life, even if it keeps you alive.

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Does Trump read Shakespeare?

By Terry Eagleton

There’s something to be said for the idea that Trump has stripped some of the veils of rhetoric from a brute reality. He doesn’t say much about God, freedom and democracy, which US Presidents are supposed to do. He was once photographed holding a Bible and looked as uneasy as if he was cradling a rattlesnake. Instead, he talks about oil, rare minerals, grabbing other people’s territories and flogging off their resources. 19th-century imperialism felt the need for some vacuous moral platitudes in order to explain why they were killing and enslaving so many people. The White Man’s Burden was one such cliché, as was the notion of bringing the fruits of civilization to the barbarians. Today, the fruits of the barbarians are being brought to the civilized, as with Trump’s weird desire to own a bunch of polar bears in Greenland. It’s like threatening a nuclear war if you can’t have Wales. Yet he quite often dispenses with the usual deceitful rationalizations for such behavior. His is the language of realpolitik, not of the preacher.

It may be that American imperialism is a roundabout way of teaching geography to the younger generation. Americans are notoriously bad at knowing whether, say, Vienna is to the north or south of New Zealand, or what the capital of Scotland is, and invading other countries involves having to look at maps to make sure you raze the right place to the ground. A lot of American citizens know exactly where Vietnam is, which was one of the few benefits of their visit to the place some decades ago. There might, however, be rather less painful ways of obtaining this kind of knowledge. Globes, for example.

Governing classes have long known that power works most effectively when it’s intangible. The ideologies which shape us most profoundly aren’t sets of doctrines. They form the invisible color of daily life, the taken-for-granted values built into our behavior. The state is wary of smashing up political demonstrations, not so much because it has tender feelings for the demonstrators but because power which becomes too conspicuous tends to lose its credibility. It much prefers to work deviously, obliquely, without having to reveal its steel hand. To do so preserves the illusion of its neutrality, a view of the state questioned by a renowned thinker who believed that its purpose was to protect private property (no, not Marx: Cicero). Trump, however, is doing just the opposite in Minneapolis and elsewhere. He takes a positive delight in parading his power, turning it into theater and spectacle, using ICE officers as an extension of his monstrous ego. It’s a gross violation of the bourgeois playbook.

It didn’t take two deaths in Minneapolis to alert the world to the excessive violence of the United States. It’s the only English-speaking country which uses the word “aggressive” positively. Freud argued that what’s wrong with the superego isn’t that it punishes us, but that it punishes us well beyond our culpability. It lays obligations on us which it knows we can’t fulfill, then fills us full of guilt because we can’t live up to its insanely unreasonable demands. In short, it’s not only punitive but malicious, sadistic and vindictive. And all this is betrayed by the pointless surplus of violence it wreaks upon our heads.

Such a surplus has long been evident in the United States, fueled by its Puritan heritage. Ten police cars with their sirens screaming close in on a single septuagenarian shoplifter. Six or seven ICE officers pile themselves on top of a single protestor. This isn’t just because every cop in town likes to grab a piece of the action when his radio starts to crackle. It’s also the result of a Puritan fear of chaos and a paranoid insistence upon order. Allow one individual to get out of hand and before you know where you are (a key phrase in this style of argument) millions of them will be running wild searching for toddlers to eat. Power of this kind is irrational, which is why it provokes those it oppresses into rebellion in order to oppress them even further. This is what is unfolding in Minneapolis.

Puritans like clean distinctions and neat antitheses. Their minds are intolerably tidy. America is the land of the good guys versus the bad guys. All police officers are heroes and all Somalis are scum. No previous President, however, would have used those latter words. He would have tarted them up in fancy moral phraseology. With Trump, however, what you see is for the most part what you get, which sounds like honesty but is in fact callousness. We seem to be moving into a post-ideological era — not ideology in the sense of convictions, but in the sense of actions and beliefs which try to mask their ugliness in exalted speech. The cop who killed George Floyd didn’t even try to look as though his life was under threat. Americans are sometimes admired for telling it like it is, unlike us two-faced Brits. What the admirers forget is that how it is can be pretty revolting.

There would have been a word or two about the importance of community spirit, along with the recklessly controversial proposition that peace is to be preferred to war. Those who have behaved heroically in the past year would have been commended as an inspiration to us all. There would also have been praise for people who serve those less fortunate than themselves, punctuated by a few irritable comments about “this stinking autocue”. People enduring hardship would have been exhorted to persevere in their misery. Kindness and tolerance would have been elevated over conflict and brutality. There might even have been a mention of homelessness, though not of its social causes, or of antisemitism, but not of the fact that massacring Palestinians in their thousands doesn’t help in laying this monstrosity to rest.

The trouble with speeches by figureheads is that the moment they say anything definite they’re likely to be divisive. To avoid splitting the nation into warring factions, you have to keep your pronouncements as bland and vacuous as possible. The Pope, for example, has just denounced war, which isn’t likely to send many generals into a blind panic. Perhaps the King would do better simply to sit there nodding and smiling for five minutes, with the odd wave of the hand or twitch of his bat-like ears.

Or perhaps the whole concept of the speech should be overhauled so that it becomes a practical report on the nation. Charles might point out that two or three potholes still need filling in in Lower Staughton Street in Derby, and that St. Swithin’s primary school in Abergavenny could do with a few more slates on its roof. There’s still a petty thief on the loose in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, and a Mr Worthing of East Grinstead admirably resisted the temptation to ride his bike through a red light. All of this would be unbelievably boring. But so is the speech at present. And at least it would be saying something.

Why do we need a monarch? To symbolize the unity of the nation, some would argue. But the nation isn’t united, and nor should it be. People who are being ripped off and exploited shouldn’t reconcile themselves with their exploiters simply in the name of their shared nationhood. Teachers and pupils in schools which can’t afford to mend the roof shouldn’t feel solidarity with managers thinking of selling one of their several sports fields to a property developer. The idea of national unity is far too convenient for the minuscule elite who actually rule the country. If the King symbolizes the unity of the nation, then it is a bogus one. Most appeals to unity are attempts to displace attention from divisions rather than tackle them. The royals are a family, so the argument goes, and so is the nation. As a conscientious father, the King loves all his children equally, and is prepared to make a handsome profit out of any of them at all.

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Andrew: the half-buffoon prince

By Terry Eagleton

Nations are abstract phenomena, in the sense that nobody has ever clapped eyes on one or taken one for a walk, so it’s arguable that they need some tangible incarnation to persuade people that they exist. (Jesus Christ is supposed to have served this role for God.) And this is what the monarch provides. But so did Hitler. Countries can get along perfectly well without seeing a particular individual as incarnating their very essence. Nobody asks this of the banks or the railways. We continue to shop at Tesco even though there is no Mr Tesco to make us feel that buying a bunch of bananas is more than just a sordidly commercial affair. Tesco don’t fall apart because they have no figurehead to signify their unity. Besides, if there were a King Tesco it would have to be an individual, and the problem with that, as the royal family abundantly shows, is that the defects of the individual are always at risk of undermining the symbolic role he or she performs. King Tesco might turn out to hobnob with pedophiles or sell the possibility of an interview with his partner to a fake journalist for an eye-watering amount of cash.

The best way to avoid this problem is to select individuals for this role who are as boring and low-profile as possible. Kate Middleton fits this bill, as a demure, excessively well-behaved daughter of the Home Counties without an unconventional view in her head, as does her colorless spouse. Downplaying yourself has the advantage of turning yourself into a blank screen on which other people can project their fantasies; but if you press this blankness too far you end up with the likes of the former Prince Andrew, one of whose more minor defects is to look like everyone’s bank manager. The late Queen maintained a reasonable balance between individual personality and symbolic role by intimating that she had quite a bit of the former but was muting it in the name of the latter. She did this, of course, as a form of service to the nation, which these days is the chief rationale for royalty as a whole. It’s a scandalous piece of hypocrisy. As that other scion David Dimbleby lately revealed in his TV series, the Crown pumps an enormous amount of money out of the country, not least in the Duchies, only to present this rip-off as a selfless service. Cutting the odd ribbon is what it gives in return for this barefaced plunder. The King’s swollen retinue of cooks, valets, shirt-buttoners, trouser-zippers, senior sock adjusters, assistant armpit fresheners and so on is all in the service of the common people.

But the royals were always likely to run into headlong collisions with the modern age. One can see this conflict as a shift between two different meanings of the word “cool”. Before Princess Diana arrived on the scene, “cool” in royal circles meant emotionally restrained, as with the kind of public-school off-handedness which remains just an inch or two short of outright insolence. From Diana onwards, however, “cool” came to mean what Robbie Williams would mean by it. Charles is cool in the old-fashioned sense, whereas Harry is cool in the postmodern sense. That culture had begun to penetrate the inner sanctum of traditionalist Britain, and the path was prepared by the likes of Sarah Ferguson, who as a personality has about as much in common with the late Queen as Danny Dyer has with Jeremy Irons. The monarchy needed urgently to modernize, yet modernizing would nearly prove its downfall. All families, however sealed to outsiders, have a chink in their armor known as marriage, through which all sorts of potentially deadly viruses can enter. Had the royals but known it, a particularly lethal strain of infection was on its way across the Atlantic in the form of Meghan Markle.

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Can King Charles re-enchant Britain?

By Aris Roussinos

Or, to put it another way, sham show business is now up against the formidable resources of the real thing. Real jewels contend with fake ones designed for the big screen. One kind of glamor and mystique is in the process of ousting another. It’s a battle between the values of Holyrood and those of Hollywood, and the latter has a lot more wealth, power and influence than the former. There’s more than the royal family at stake in this confrontation. Britain survived the loss of its Empire with its traditionalist values still pretty much intact. If it had lost Cecil Rhodes, it could still boast of Richard Dimbleby, father of David and suave, unctuous, eminently reasonable voice of the nation.

As for the younger Dimbleby, he’s surely living proof that nepotism isn’t always a form of corruption. No doubt his surname helped him into the BBC, but once established he proved himself at least the equal of his father. Now, though, even settled traditions like the Dimbleby dynasty are under threat from the eternal Now of a consumerist culture — with a series of recent assaults on the BBC just one sign of this onslaught. If it weren’t for his ample girth, Dimbleby would be turning over in his commentator’s box.

There are global forces at work behind this conflict. In a roundabout sense, the Harry and Meghan spectacle is a consequence of Margaret Thatcher. Her reign marked the beginning of the demise of traditional, one-nation Toryism in the face of a deep-rooted capitalist crisis. Yet it’s on this paternalist ideology that the monarchy depends. Throughout Europe, the kind of solid, long-established, cultivated bourgeoisie that Thomas Mann or Marcel Proust would have recognized and applauded has given way to an army of sharks, grifters, financial thugs and high-class swindlers. In royal circles, greed is no longer simply a matter of quietly siphoning off common resources by long-approved procedures but of selling yourself to media corporations. Nothing could symbolize this whole dismal situation more aptly than electing a New York real estate mogul to the most powerful position in the world. There was a time when the political class kept a certain discreet distance from the big capital in the name of which, by and large, it governs. That age is about as unlikely to return as King Arthur.

The split between traditional paternalism and capitalist acquisition runs right down the personality of Prince Harry. A man who remains the very epitome of the service ethic — loyal, honorable, full of military ardor and a passion for the so-called underprivileged — is also the helpless captive of Hollywood. If he’s an enemy of the media, he’s also an exploiter of it. His only alternative to the hidebound conservatism of the Palace is the commodity culture of postmodernity. There’s no middle ground between the stuffed shirts and the stars. Those who, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, are both city financiers and country squires don’t realize that in the long run the former role is scuppering the latter one.

One argument in favor of the monarchy is that it provides a thread of continuity in an otherwise fragmented world. Yet the very concept of continuity has been under fire for several decades now, in contrast to the notion of self-fashioning. Rather than drawing your identity from the past, you make yourself up as you go along. The idea of having only one self is as absurd as having only one handbag. Contemporary culture claims this is just the way identity is. It isn’t going to fall apart because we abolish the monarchy or the House of Lords. It’s in pieces already, and that’s simply how it works. The past is just a great storehouse of styles and images which we can draw on when we need to, but which provides us with no kind of moral guidance. This is a scandalous matter for the political Left, which as Leon Trotsky remarked has always lived in tradition. It’s simply that our traditions are those of the Jacobins, Chartists, Suffragettes and hunger marchers, rather than the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Changing of the Guard.

Now, on the 250th anniversary of her birth, Austen is less an author than an institution. She belongs more with the House of Lords and the Bank of England than with Thackeray and Trollope. The British have an insatiable appetite for studies of her, however coy or twee. If you want to retire tomorrow with a fat bank balance, write a book called Jane Austen and Dogs. There aren’t actually any dogs in her fiction, but no matter. The Secret Sex Life of Jane Austen would do even better if you’re prepared to lie through your teeth for a couple of hundred pages. Studies of a gay Austen, predictably enough, abound.

It is with Austen, though, along with Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth, that the novel in Britain becomes a serious literary form, not simply a matter of Gothic horror or soppy romance. Before she came to write, the genre was seen by polite society rather as The Sun is regarded in Oxbridge senior common rooms: despised as swashbuckling or sentimental trash, rather than a medium of serious moral inquiry. Austen was well aware that she was up against a widespread contempt for what she was creating, but refused to concede that fiction was just fantasy for upper-class women with too much time on their hands.

One might also claim that she invented the typical English prose style. Reading her work, the bluff, hearty tones of Henry Fielding now seem antiquated, along with the sanctimonious moralizing of Samuel Richardson. In their place, we have a style of writing which is good-humored but not quite genial, reasonable and temperate yet also quietly devastating. It’s this supple, self-assured prose, laden with ironies and obliquities, which descends from Jane Austen to George Eliot, Henry James and E.M. Forster, and which even finds a resonance as late as John Le Carré. Fiction of this kind is mannered but not elaborate; sharply satirical, yet intent on keeping its cool. The very shape of Austen’s sentences, with their delicate equipoise and complex symmetry, reflects the social and moral values she upholds. Previous novelists tended to deal in epic characters and events, but Austen is one of the first English writers to find moral significance in such minor but critical matters as remembering to light a fire for someone in their bedchamber, or failing to wait for a companion who has gone off to fetch you a key. What the Henry Fieldings of this world would scarcely have noticed becomes of momentous importance to an author on whom nothing is lost.

Given this miniaturizing way of seeing, more typical of a woman of the time than a man, Austen has sometimes been accused of overlooking the great historical events of her time (the Napoleonic wars, for example). Yet nothing could be more crucial to the social history of her age than the fortunes of the landed gentry and aristocracy. By and large, it is these men and women who populate her fiction, and generally speaking they aren’t looked upon in a favorable light. This is partly because Austen wasn’t of their number herself. She was the daughter of a clergyman of modest means and earned at most £1,000 from her writing, but her family had connections with the wealthier gentry. In this sense, she was on the fringes of the social order she observed, half in and half out, familiar enough with its ways to portray it convincingly yet enough of an outsider to be dismayed by its selfishness and arrogance — the appalling Lady Catherine de Bourgh of Pride and Prejudice being a memorable example of the latter.

Later novelists in Britain would find themselves in an equally ambiguous position. The major Victorian novel — the Brontë sisters, Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy — is the product of the lower-middle class. Its authors are close enough to the common people to dramatize their lives from the inside, but at the same time aspiring, reasonably well educated and on terms with their social betters. If the internal exile finds himself in a painful place, caught between alternative identities and chronically anxious, it’s also a peculiarly creative one. From Henry James, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound onward, 20th-century “English” writing is dominated by literal émigrés rather than spiritual ones.

Austen’s position, then, in the genteel society of her time was an awkward one. As a semi-outsider, she found herself upholding the ideal values of the gentry and aristocracy in the face of an actual upper class which consistently violated them. She was sufficiently part of that class to have a quick eye for the size and value of a landed estate, and the likely social status of its proprietor. She rarely sees anyone working on the land. All the same, what she sees around her, as well as good sense and sound judgment, is a landed class which is investing more and more in trade and the financial markets; and though Austen had nothing against honest tradesmen, she saw this as threatening to undermine the social order she esteemed. In her eyes, the gentry weren’t just a bunch of entrepreneurs, but the linchpin of a whole paternalist way of life. Hence the ritual trips to poor tenants’ cottages and the dutiful tending of low-life sickbeds which figure in her fiction.

But social mobility was on the increase, as the impecunious younger sons of baronets were in pursuit of the daughters of city merchants. There is a chink in even the most closed family known as marriage, through which insidious influences may enter. Urban wealth, moral frivolity, glib metropolitan manners and ruthless self-interest were invading the tranquility of the English countryside. The custodians of English culture were at risk of being infected by various forms of moral anarchy, from the disowning of parental authority to the giddy pursuit of fashion, from sexual flightiness to the worship of money.

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Inside the Jane Austen theme park

By Tanya Gold

Throughout Britain, finance capital was flying to the aid of mortgaged estates about to sink without trace; but in Austen’s eyes, there was a high price to pay for this liaison between city and country in terms of conduct and manners. Manners for her meant not the passing of beefburgers without dropping them on your partner’s lap, but a whole other set of moral values that were now under siege: kindness, considerateness, patience, sympathy and deference. Grace and good breeding were matters of virtue and self-discipline, not simply drawing-room airs which any charlatan might assume. There was a new cult of spontaneous feeling abroad, which would later be called Romanticism. For Austen, all this was dangerously subjectivist and self-indulgent; there was something to be said for sensibility, but it needed to be firmly restrained by sense.

One could write much of this history by tracking the fortunes of the word “gentleman” in the English language. A merchant or industrial capitalist, however prosperous and well-connected, couldn’t be a gentleman in Austen’s time, but his public-school-educated son certainly qualified. In Emma, Robert Martin is a “gentleman-farmer”, man deemed “respectable and intelligent” by the head of the local gentry, Mr Knightley; but this doesn’t mean that Knightley would invite Martin on a shoot or propose marriage to his sister, since he isn’t gentlemanly enough.

A growing alliance was being sealed between landed, mercantile and industrial capital by the public-school system, in which the sons of dukes learnt not to patronize the offspring of cotton barons. The had to learn to be less proud, and the middle classes less prejudiced. The result was a powerful ruling bloc which later in the 19th century would prove easily capable of taking on and defeating the burgeoning working-class movement. Over the Channel, in revolutionary France, the nobility and the bourgeoisie had faced each other across the barricades; in England, the two classes combined in a spirit of moderation for which the nation became renowned. If ever we decide to drive on the right, we shall do so gradually.

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Spare us another Pride and Prejudice remake

By Poppy Sowerby

Yet if Austen was an astringent critic of upper-class society, she delivered that critique with a stylishness and lightness of touch which were themselves part of that social order. The question is how to unite sobriety of judgment with vivacity of spirits, a combination brilliantly illustrated by Elizabeth and Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. The ideal is to be both good and fine. You need sprightliness but not levity, independence of thought but not errant individualism. Emma Woodhouse of Emma has too much liveliness, whereas Fanny Price of Mansfield Park has too little. Austen’s own prose is an exemplary fusion of the instructive and the entertaining.

Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice remarks that she first became aware of her affection for Mr Darcy when she set eyes on his elegantly laid-out estates. The reader suspects for a moment that this is ironic, as though Elizabeth were to confide that she first fell in love with him when she saw the size of his bank balance. But there is no irony intended. What Elizabeth means is that the way Darcy has laid out his estates is a moral as well as aesthetic affair — a matter of sound judgment, a sense of proportion, an aversion to vulgar spectacle or useless ornamentation. A man’s taste is a guide to his soul.

In the end, there is no clear distinction between the moral and the aesthetic; and this is true of Austen’s own fiction, which blends artistic pleasure with moral insight. The problem, as the novels themselves reveal, is that there are people in the world who have the manners of an angel and the morals of a tomcat.

You might think, then, that the best place for a writer to be is as far inside the language he is using as possible. But that’s not really true. The writer needs to feel language like a second skin, but if he pushes this too far, it will end up feeling more like a set of old clothes — too familiar to engage attention. If he’s too much on the outside of a language, by contrast, he will know its grammar and vocabulary, but not its rhythms, tones and textures. And so writers must be constantly engaged in a double act — they must pay attention to language, but also to the world it registers.

The playwright Tom Stoppard occupied that most privileged of vantage-points, being simultaneously inside and outside of a language. He inhabited English more fully and deeply than almost any of his artistic compatriots, partly because he came to it as an émigré. For the expatriate, language can never be taken for granted and Stoppard never lost a sense of its freshness and strangeness. He occupied this inside/outside position in his life as well as his art: lionized by the Establishment but never quite at home there. Those on the outside can sometimes see more than the insiders, and often in a satirical light, but as Oscar Wilde discovered, they may have to pay a high price for doing so.

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Wilde could never quite decide whether he wanted to join the English aristocracy or to put a bomb beneath the lot of them. Stoppard, who dined with Margaret Thatcher and rode to hounds, seems to have been plagued by no such dual alliance. But it does invade the language of his drama, as language is at once a taken-for-granted medium and an object on which loving care is to be lavished. Much English theater is marked by this ambivalence. One of the nation’s best-loved comedies, for example, is Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer, which concerns the trouble which ensues when a couple of gallants mistake a private house for an inn. In a sense, Goldsmith himself was similarly confused, treating the public space of Britain as though it were his home, which it wasn’t (he came from County Kildare and studied in Dublin). And there were times when Samuel Johnson’s group, of which Goldsmith was a member, made his alien status abundantly clear to him. It’s hard, though, to see how “English” stage comedy would have survived without Irish immigrants: Richard Steele, Thomas Sheridan, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Synge, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan… All of these men lived at the conjuncture between two cultures, allowing one to show up the strangeness of the other — and something of the same can be said to a limited extent of Stoppard.

The outsider or semi-outsider is always tempted to outdo the insiders at their own game, which is no doubt one reason why Tom Stoppard enjoyed a spot of grouse-shooting. This simultaneous baiting and imitating of the insiders was also true of Wilde, who was an English aristocrat in the way that only a non-English non-aristocrat can be. For him, imitation was both flattery and mockery. He acted himself far better than anyone else could have done, and, like Stoppard, frequented many a country house party, even though he believed that Ireland should rule over Britain and not vice versa. Joseph Conrad fled from revolutionary upheaval in his native Poland, rather as Stoppard was the child of parents in flight from the Nazis, and ended up as a sailor in the British merchant navy. One consequence of this transition was to remold him as a highly conservative pseudo-Englishman, patriotic and patriarchal, plus Anglais que les Anglais.

The same was true of TS Eliot, who was born in Missouri and became a Tory Anglo-Catholic in England. Eliot remarked of his fellow American, Henry James, that he was a European in the way that only a non-European could be, which also applies to Eliot. All these writers brought to a highly insular United Kingdom a range of experience to which it had been largely closed, and went on to produce major art on this basis. It’s one of the few forms of immigration of which the British have approved, though there are doubtless those among them who regret the fact that we outsourced our art to a bunch of foreigners for whom free verse is perilously close to free love. Other outsiders, notably James Joyce, passed disdainfully over the UK and headed straight for Paris. Authors such as Stoppard, Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul belong to the tail-end of this tradition. If you hail from somewhere beyond Britain yet make a significant contribution to its cultural life, you’re as much in line for a knighthood as an MP who has served his time on all the right committees.

Tom Stoppard was no Anglo-Catholic Tory, though, but a mainstream, middle-class liberal. This was the social world in which he moved, which makes for a tedium far removed from the flair and brio of his plays. It was where he was most utterly unoriginal. He cherished the usual middle-class liberal pieties and was much exercised by the issue of freedom and censorship, though not conspicuously by such questions as poverty, unemployment and exploitation. There’s always something a little self-serving about artists championing freedom of speech. It’s a vastly important matter, to be sure, but one might be rather more persuaded of the fact if some of those who advocate it also turned their attention to political questions less bound up with their own lives. Stoppard had some urgent comments to make about political freedom, but none which we hadn’t heard before.

There’s one way, however, in which he flouted liberal pieties without anyone really noticing. He first came to fame with the magnificent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which one of the jokes is that the eponymous characters are impossible to tell apart. This isn’t supposed to happen in British theater, preoccupied as it is by “character”. You have to have rich, complex, well-rounded, highly individuated characters if you’re to end up outside Buckingham Palace shyly displaying your gong. Aristotle, however, didn’t agree. In his view, what mattered in the theater was the dramatic action, on which, so he claims, character is a kind of “coloring”. No gong for him, then. He can even, he tells us, imagine a drama without any characters at all, a fantasy which Samuel Beckett would later put into practice.

Stoppard also transgressed the conventions of British theater with his passionate interest in ideas. The British don’t much care for ideas, which like cheese and wine are largely the product of freedom-loving foreigners — and which might encourage people to think in ways which end up endangering the stock market. They enjoy biography instead, since it’s more “human” to hear about what a great sculptor had for breakfast than to indulge in a lot of fancy aesthetic talk about their art. Stoppard’s Arcadia pushes against this prejudice as obstinately as it can — though I’ve seen members of the audience shaking their heads in bemusement. There are also times, however, when the humor and wordplay defuse the power of the ideas, rendering them more consumable. Like all good liberals, Stoppard knew when not to go too far.

Stoppard’s work is celebrated for its wit — a form of humor which it seems you don’t have to work at, and which is, therefore, more appropriate to the English gentleman than the honest bourgeoise. It can be a form of frivolity, but one that redeems itself from the merely vacuous by its agility of mind. It can be funny and coruscatingly intelligent; it can convert the serious into the sportive, but it can also be stinging, rapier-like, combining style and poise with a devious form of aggression. The gag, by contrast, is more impersonal, more capable of being passed from hand to hand and less expressive of a unique individual. We relish witticisms partly because they jolt us into thought, but also because they seem apposite, spot-on, hitting off a truth at a single casual stroke. Wit is the enemy of sentiment and empathy, laced with a hard-boiled quality which puts it a long way from the tear and the twinkle. Gags or jokes are sporadic events — but the wit or dandy is never off-duty. Their permanent mild amusement is possessed by those remote from the grind and rigor of this world, an everyday form of art admired for its well-crafted form as well as for its scintillating insight.

Aristotle speaks of the “great-spirited man”, by which he means not a hero but an individual whose life has gone supremely well. Virtue for Aristotle is a kind of success — not just success in the way Jack Nicolson might understand it (though Aristotle thought it included getting one’s hands on the best theater tickets), but also in the sense of having enjoyably fulfilled one’s powers and capacities. From the outside, this would seem true of Tom Stoppard. Yet all authentic achievement probably draws at some deep level on damage, anxiety and failure, so it’s fitting that the final work of this superbly accomplished artist should be Leopoldstadt, in which he poignantly explores his own Jewish origins. Not to know for sure whether you are a Jew — it is a hesitation between identity and non-identity which today’s so-called identity politics surely needs to confront.

There are, believe it or not, people who actually hold the bizarre position that every viewpoint is true. If you happen to bump into one of them, all you have to do is to ask them whether they believe that the viewpoint that not all viewpoints are correct is also true. The logic of their own position, in short, should compel them to abandon that position. You can be pretty sure, however, that they won’t. They’re more likely to say, “Well, that’s true for you, but not true for me”. This might make sense if we’re talking about whether Schoenberg is a finer composer than Mahler, but not if we’re talking about whether there’s a country called Iraq, or whether eating certain kinds of mushroom is likely to poison you. You can be deeply, authentically convinced that William Hague is an alien and still be wrong. Truth isn’t about how you feel, which is another reason why it’s unpopular in a society which elevates sentiment and sensation over fact. (The last time this happened in British culture on a large scale was in the cult of sensibility of the 18th century.) The phrase “true for me but not for you” doesn’t make sense, at least if we’re speaking about what’s been established as fact. It can’t be true for you but not for me that there was once something called the slave trade, or that there are people who can hum and whistle different tunes simultaneously. There are truths about human subjects, but the truth itself isn’t subjective. It may be a truth about a human subject that I currently have a headache, but I know this only because I have the concept of headache, and know how to apply it to others and myself; and all this is because I participate in a public language in which the concept of headache has a function, and has that function whether I like it or not.

What counts as a fact, to be sure, is a deeply controversial affair, and sometimes impossible to establish. This is the kernel of truth in the postmodern shell. You might regard facts simply as those collective interpretations of the world which happen to have caught on — which are so embedded in what we say and do that it’s currently inconceivable to imagine our way beyond them. This leaves the door open for a future in which “drinking boiling water is a bad idea” is no longer a fact, possibly because we’ve found ingenious ways of insulating our throats from being scalded, or because evolution has taken us beyond such pain altogether. So what’s a fact now won’t be then. On the other hand, you can argue that if it was a fact in ancient Greece that the poetry of Horace was admired, this fact remains true today, even if we ourselves no longer admire it.

If facts are just versions of the world that have caught on, however, why has this happened? Is it just a matter of chance? One plausible answer is that they have caught on because they reflect the way the world is. But the way the world is is itself a matter of interpretation, so there are problems with this response as well. If we’re to establish the truth, we need evidence. We must also be prepared to renounce our version of reality if the evidence strongly suggests that it’s false. This, presumably, is what the BBC tries to do in order to arrive at an impartial assessment of an issue. But the BBC is quite plainly biased on all kinds of subjects. It isn’t impartial when it comes to rape or paedophilia; it detests terrorism and supports the monarchy; it’s opposed to racism and seems oddly to believe that accidentally releasing prisoners is a subject of momentous significance.

Some of these prejudices seem to me to be splendid, a phrase which some liberals might find discomforting. Isn’t prejudice wrong in itself? This surely can’t be true. To be prejudiced is to hold a negative or positive attitude toward something habitually, so that when you encounter it you already have a certain opinion of it. (The word “prejudice” literally means “pre-judge”.) And this is surely true of almost everyone. Hardly anybody comes to the question of terrorism or the monarchy with an entirely blank mind, completely free of assumptions and value-judgments. We bring the burden of our previous experience unconsciously to bear on these topics, as well as being affected by the moral climate in which we live. There’s no impartiality on matters of racism or pedophilia, and quite rightly so. The problem for the media lies in establishing the facts about such crimes — whether they’ve actually happened, who perpetrated them, how they came about and so on. To be biased in a pejorative sense of the term means not to be morally neutral about the crimes themselves but to distort the evidence concerning them.

We view the world at an angle, and judge it from a certain perspective. God’s-eye standpoints are not to be had, as the phrase itself (“standpoints”) unwittingly suggests. For postmodern theory, all we have is a clash of competing perspectives, like an intellectual version of the marketplace, and those viewpoints that win out become known as the truth. This, however, is to misunderstand the concept of perspective. When I look at a cathedral, I see it from a specific angle; but I’m well aware that there are other vantage points from which it could be viewed, and my own perception of it takes these into account. It’s as though they’re invisibly present within it. I don’t imagine that the Gothic façade I’m seeing is all there is to the building. The same applies to intellectual debate. To have an angle on something is to be aware that other angles are possible, but that doesn’t mean that they’re all of equal value.

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In fact, nobody actually believes that any viewpoint on a subject is as good as any other. Nobody holds the opinion that the best way of treating a broken leg is to tickle the patient until he’s squirming hysterically on the floor. Some liberals, however, imagine that every point of view, like every person, is to be respected — not because it’s necessarily true, but because taken together these different standpoints add up to the truth. The truth, as Hegel remarked, is the whole. If our view of the world is distorted, it’s because it’s lopsided. But this is surely nonsense. One doesn’t arrive at the truth about ghosts by adding the view that they exist to the view that they don’t exist. The liberal case overlooks the fact that different opinions can be in outright conflict. And this, in turn, is because liberals feel uneasy at the idea of conflict. Instead, they tend to insist that all convictions should be respected, a piety which is thoroughly unpleasant. It’s unpleasant because it invites us to respect the beliefs of Himmler and Tommy Robinson. Trying to be nice to everybody just gets you into trouble. You shouldn’t hand Donald Trump and the right-wing press a victory by meekly resigning.

“The fight for the truth is on,” runs a BBC slogan. But so is the fight against bias, and the question is whether the two can be reconciled. One is expected to report the world as it is, without bias or prejudice; but what if the world itself is biased? What if reality is one-sided? If you want to reflect the way things are both accurately and neutrally, then you have a problem when one partner in a struggle has justice on its side and the other doesn’t. If you portray the Israelis and the Palestinians as being equally at fault, you buy your neutrality at the expense of the truth. This, at least, is the case for people known as moral realists. Moral realists maintain that activities like torture and genocide, when they take place, are objective features of the world. They’re not just a matter of what we make of certain events; rather, they are (or can be) facts, as much part of the world’s furniture as Claudia Winkleman or the town of Ramsbottom. In case this sounds too dogmatic, let’s remember that establishing what counts as a fact can be a ferociously complex business. All that’s being asserted is that phenomena like oppression and injustice aren’t just ways of seeing what’s going on, but are as much part of what’s going on as tanks and drones.

To claim that Israel has long treated Palestinians with gross injustice is to state what one considers to be a fact. We aren’t speaking here of opinions. If the claim is mistaken, then one needs to be shown why this is not a fact — why one’s evidence is flawed and partial, one’s reasoning is in error and one’s judgment is biased in all the most negative ways. If this can be successfully argued by an adversary, then one is bound to abandon one’s claim. If the claim is just, however, it means that the truth itself in this particular matter is one-sided. And how then is one to report it accurately without bias?

Tragic figures who overreach themselves and come to nothing are traditionally said to fall prey to hubris: for the ancient Greeks excessive pride or self-assurance. Andrew was already an arrogant young puppy by the time he arrived at prep school, and later had his head swollen even further by being applauded for killing Argentinians. The result of hubris is nemesis, when someone or other cuts you savagely down to size. In Andrew’s case, the agents in question are too numerous to count, but they include one of the most courageous of his victims, his elder brother and — probably above all — himself.

Philosophically speaking, the Greeks were for the most part rationalists, but the tragedians among them knew that life didn’t work like that. Everyone was potentially guilty, not least the innocent. This was because the ancient Greeks saw guilt less as a subjective state than an objective affliction, rather like illness or pollution. Oedipus is a so-called guilty innocent: the fact that he never intended to kill his father, or have sex with his mother, is morally speaking neither here nor there. In fact, he never once justifies his actions by pleading ignorance, to the amazement of the modern mind.

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If Andrew is far from a tragic figure, it isn’t only because he lacks the necessary dignity, but because tragic figures must evoke some kind of sympathy. Aristotle writes of tragedy as evoking in us both pity and fear: fear because the destruction of the hero reminds us of our own sickeningly fragile state, and pity because we need to have some sympathy for the protagonist if his plunge from a great height is to move us. You can’t be an Oedipus or a Hamlet if you’re mostly responsible for your own undoing, as is the case with Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

Andrew doesn’t know very much. No doubt he has some knowledge of ships, horses and dubious commercial dealing, but like almost all of the rest of his family, he’s probably never read a book. This is another way in which he differs from certain classical tragic heroes, whose problem isn’t ignorance but an excess of knowledge. Take Sophocles’s Oedipus, for instance. He is one of the smartest of tragic heroes, not least because he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, by doing so saves his city from destruction. What he doesn’t know, however, is who he is, which is to say who his parents are.

This is also true of Andrew, who of course knows who his parents are but not what ought to follow from this knowledge. To be a prince is to know that you have enormous privilege, but also that you must play it down. You can only maintain it by being suitably discreet about it. In a democratic society, entitlement survives by seeking to conceal itself. The late Queen was said to be horrified by the retinue of cooks, footmen and multi-purpose lackeys that accompanied her eldest son when he descended on some unfortunate friend for a weekend party. She herself went around Buckingham Palace switching off lights to save electricity. If your elite status has no rational foundation whatsoever, but depends in the end on nothing more substantial than the approval of the common people, you don’t flaunt your luxurious lifestyle in ways likely to alienate them.

Instead, you keep in mind the fact that admiration and resentment, veneration and derision, lie cheek-by-jowl in the public mind. You have to make sovereignty look like service. You don’t make public visits to banks, unless they’re food banks. You don’t descend on the offices of transnational corporations but on old people’s homes. Andrew’s problem is that he never learned this golden rule. Rude, bullying, pompous and infantile, he wasn’t only socially superior but actually behaved as though he was, which makes life uncomfortable for those close relations of his who are just as pampered as he — but have the nous to keep quiet about it. He once talked on television about “my first day at public school”, as though to remind us that he wasn’t sent to a back-street comprehensive. To be truly upper-class, by contrast, is to be ignorant of class altogether.

Oedipus does finally come to how little he knows. His search for his own origins leads him to uncover a monster which is no less than himself. At the root of his identity lie murder and incest, a darkness that no mere knowledge can dispel. As with Andrew, the revelation of a sexual transgression brings Oedipus low. In tragedy, you have to be careful what you do, because past events can breed calamitous consequences in the present. What you thought safely buried in the past can return to haunt you. Your own free actions can come to confront you as alien forces. Old ghosts refuse to lie quiet, but rise up to cry out for justice. In the face of this, the tragic protagonist must come to recognize just how frail and finite he is, and only then can he be redeemed.

Lear’s regal delusions run so deep that he has to be hauled through hell for them to be purged. “They told me I was everything”, cries the dethroned king, “’tis a lie — I am not ague-proof”. Caught in a storm, surrounded by fools and madmen, the lunatic monarch comes to acknowledge that he is not everything but nothing (“I am a very foolish fond old man”), and only in this act of self-knowledge can he become something. He has done grave harm to a young woman, his daughter Cordelia, but comes to repent of his crime and beg her forgiveness.

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All this has a political dimension in the play. Knowing his own weakness allows Lear to feel solidarity with the dispossessed:

Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel…
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.

These are not words one imagines Andrew wakes up with on his lips, or indeed the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shakespeare writes in Lear that the“superfluous and lust-dieted man” must have a change of heart and “shake the superflux” to the poor. Excessive wealth and privilege insulate the body from the afflictions of others. A superfluous and lust-dieted man isn’t a bad description of how some now view the former prince. There are those of us who believe that princes are superfluous anyway, so that the phrase “a superfluous prince” is as much a tautology as “business ethics” is an oxymoron; but Andrew has taken that to an extreme. He would now seem, frighteningly, to have absolutely no purpose in being around the place — to be surplus to the needs of humanity. That is indeed the kind of forlorn condition which might lend itself to tragedy. But there’s nothing tragic about justice. However futile his life from here on, he has got his comeuppance. His heart is still beating, which is more than can be said for Virginia Giuffre.

King Charles would no doubt be pained by the suggestion that the finest work of his beloved Bard might be read as promoting some kind of communism, or even social democracy. He once called me “that dreadful Terry Eagleton” because he thought that I didn’t venerate the Swan of Avon sufficiently. Even so, he would have done well to make the work required reading for his delinquent brother, alongside stripping him of his house and titles.

American men are generally taller than British ones, and tend to move in a different way. A student on a US campus once told me he knew I was English by the way I walked. Hegseth stands with his arms hanging loose but slightly bent like a gorilla. In the 19th century, Irishmen were taller than their British counterparts. We know this from the statistics kept by the British navy at the time, which had a fair number of Irish recruits. Many of them would have been brought up eating almost nothing but potatoes, and potatoes contain almost everything you need for a healthy diet. This was also a reason why the Irish made such good navvies, building Britain’s roads, canals and railways. Upper-class men are for the most part taller than working-class ones. In the gentlemen’s toilet at the Cambridge Union there’s a sign on a very high beam which reads “Mind Your Head”, but given the size of some of the young Rt. Hons who frequent the place it may not be intended as a joke. When I was a student at the place myself I felt like a stunted Northern prole scurrying among braying Brobdingnagians, of whom more in a moment. 

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As you grow older you may not grow smarter but you certainly get smaller. Just look at pictures of Prince Harry next to his grandmother. Jesus Christ is believed by some of his less theologically sophisticated followers to have been exactly six foot tall. One wouldn’t want a short guy as a savior. Given the age in which he lived, however, he was probably about the size of Ronnie Corbett. As for Shakespeare, you could probably have put him in your pocket. On the other hand, Napoleon, generally considered to be gnome-like, was actually the average height for males of his time. Seeing him as dwarfish was just British propaganda. I used to be exactly the same height as Mick Jagger, but this is no longer true unless we’re shrinking at the same rate.

There is a Lilliput Press in Dublin, run by a suitably diminutive publisher. It’s named of course after the pint-sized characters in the Dubliner Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels. During his stay in Lilliput, Swift’s protagonist is much too gullible, which is the reason for his name. He takes on the conventions and perspectives of his hosts far too zealously, hotly denying the charge that he has had sex with a Lilliputan woman without once raising in his defense the physical impossibility of doing so. By contrast, when he arrives in Brobdingnag, a land populated by giants, he refuses to adjust to their form of life and remains obtusely Anglocentric. He delivers a self-satisfied account of British customs and institutions to the king of the country, from which the king “cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl on the surface of the earth”. This isn’t quite the impression Gulliver intended to give.

The question is what distance you need to establish between yourself and what you confront in order to give a true assessment of it. Gulliver’s problem is that he’s either too close to a culture to criticize it, or too remote to do so adequately. As Bertolt Brecht remarked, only someone inside a situation can judge it, and they’re the last person who can judge. Swift was Anglo-Irish, and thus knew a good deal about living on the cusp between two civilizations. If he hated a lot about the British establishment, he also detested a good deal about the people of Ireland. His satire isn’t polished and urbane, but savage and polemical, shot through with fury and disgust.

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At one point in the novel, Gulliver wonders whether there’s a race of creatures somewhere in the world to whom the outsized Brobdingnagians appear as minuscule Lilliputans. Might there be an infinity of sizes? What is the “proper” height to be? The answer, of course, is that there is no such thing. Human beings like Gulliver think that they’re the right size; but this, as Ludwig Wittgenstein points out, is like a man exclaiming “But I know how tall I am!” and placing his hand on top of his head. This philosophical fall guy hasn’t grasped the fact that size is relative to a norm, which isn’t something purely subjective. Otherwise we would have to say that everything is just the size, weight and shape that it is, which is to say nothing at all. We are the right size for our world, sure enough, but that’s because we’ve shaped it to suit us.

The problem is that there are many different norms, as Gulliver’s Travels demonstrates. One of the book’s purposes is to show how at least some of one’s own norms and conventions may be universal, but not necessarily in ways we should find gratifying. The Lilliputans differ from humans in various ways, but there are also ways in which they are disconcertingly similar. They, too, are excessively ambitious, mean-minded, foolishly proud of honors, ridden by political rivalries and so on. In one sense, this lets humanity off the hook: if our own vices are to be found everywhere, this makes us less responsible for them. But it also brutally undercuts those utopian thinkers who hope to stumble upon an ideal society somewhere over the ocean. By ascribing all-too-human qualities to beings so physically alien to us, the Tory Swift maliciously unsettles the progressive thinkers of his time.

Like Gulliver before the king of Brobdingnag, colonialism comes face to face with civilizations very different from its own; but by remaking them in its own image it refuses to be disturbed by their difference. Gulliver has the chance to objectify his own way of life, seeing it for a moment through the estranging eyes of the horrified king; but he refuses to allow his identity as a chuckle-headed Englishman to be thrown into question, and the Irishman in his author invites us to smile at this obduracy. The joke, however, is finally on us. In the final part of the novel, Gulliver finds himself among the Houyhnhnms, a race of wise and virtuous horses; but instead of trying to see them judiciously, as he does the Lilliputans, he ends up yearning to be one of them himself. He begins to think of himself as a horse, chatting to his own horses for several hours a day and finding the human smell of his wife and children intolerable. He swings from a puffed-up pride in his own kind to a pathological hatred of them. He’s always either too deeply in or too far out, too close to judge or too distant to do so, too rigidly normative or too ready to throw norms to the winds.

Swift’s hero, in a word, finally goes mad. He has objectified his own culture to the point where he loses touch with it altogether. Either you refuse to have your identity called into question by a different way of life, or you idealize that way of life in an absurdly uncritical fashion. The sentimental liberal who refuses to breathe a word of criticism of female genital mutilation in Africa is simply the flipside of the bigot for whom cultures other than his own are naturally inferior. The liberal’s problem is one of cultural relativism: all societies do things in their own peculiar way, and that’s just fine. It’s a deeply condescending viewpoint: sex trafficking is okay for them but not for us. To claim that something is acceptable because it’s part of your culture is to claim that it’s alright to do it because it’s what you do. There have been more persuasive arguments. 

All human cultures are contingent. They arose and evolved in largely random ways, and none of them is based on any divine or metaphysical necessity. If God exists he has a special regard for absolutely none of them, not even the United States or Israel. Jesus was too busy reviling the Pharisees to walk on our own green pastures. There might just as well not have been an English or Malaysian people, and there might not be at some point in the future. History is littered with the husks of civilizations that believed they would last forever. Some British values in the past would be deeply objectionable to Britain in the present, and most of what’s claimed to be peculiarly British — honor, fair play, modesty, decency, a racist police force, and so on — can be found in a host of other societies as well. 

None of this implies that one shouldn’t value aspects of one’s own culture. It’s just that one should do so ironically. To live ironically is to commit oneself to a course of action or form of life while recognizing its fundamental contingency. The same is true of the individual life: you play tennis and stack the dishwasher while acknowledging that none of this will ultimately matter because in the end you will be dead. That’s no reason to stop doing such things, but it may prevent them from filling your attention to the point where you can’t see around and beyond them. Jonathan Swift was a supreme ironist; Gulliver’s problem is that he doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

The odd thing about flattery is that it works, even if you know that’s just what it is. Even Trump can reach beyond his own swollen ego long enough to see that all those scarlet tunics and rows of gleaming fish knives aren’t purely for aesthetic effect, yet he relishes them all the same. One is reminded of the physicist Niels Bohr, a convinced rationalist who used to display a magic icon on his house to protect it from evil spirits. When asked whether he really believed in such nonsense, he replied that it was reputed to work whether you believed in it or not.

In the eyes of many beyond the United States, Trump is a walking assemblage of all the most unpleasant qualities of the stereotypical American. Rather as the British at their stereotypically most repellent are snobbish, two-faced, cold-hearted and likely to let you die in a ditch so as not to interfere with your privacy, so Trump is loud, brash, crass, arrogant, greedy, philistine, aggressive, and pathologically upbeat. (Some of my best friends, I should add, are American. My children, for example.) Trump is the American equivalent of a Frenchman who has a ring of onions round his neck, a troop of mistresses in tow and can’t stop shrugging his shoulders.

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Trump needs a Fool

By Terry Eagleton

We know that Trump is fond of Britain. In fact, there’s something a little Scottish about his sandiness of hair and complexion. It’s therefore not unreasonable to assume that he’s a devotee of Shakespeare, an author who, with his usual prescience, has much to say about the 47th ruler of the American Empire. There’s a lot about The Donald in Hamlet, for example. One of the mysteries at the heart of the play is why its protagonist takes so long to kill his step-father, Claudius the King, knowing that Claudius has murdered his own father and then married his own mother. Every time he comes near to dispatching the usurper, however, Hamlet’s hand is mysteriously stayed.

One solution to the enigma has been proposed by the Freudians: the hero can’t do away with Claudius because he subconsciously finds in him an image of himself. In killing the prince’s father and marrying his mother, Claudius has done just what the oedipal Hamlet himself unconsciously wants to do. Murdering the king would thus turn out to be self-slaughter. It’s not a solution likely to appeal to the British, who have common sense rather than a subconscious. But Hamlet was a foreigner, and foreigners, lacking our own self-understanding, may possess desires of which they’re unaware. The theory may look weak when applied to Hamlet and Claudius, but it’s strikingly relevant to the relationship between Trump and Vladimir Putin. Why is every threatening deadline suspended or quietly ditched? Why is it taking him so long to recognize that the man is a crook and a killer, who poisoned Alexei Navalny just as Claudius poisoned Hamlet’s father? Clearly, because Putin is the tyrant Trump longs to be, the alter ego he can’t shake off, the shadowy brother for whom democracy is just a sick joke and law must bend to power.

One might also detect a touch of Nigel Farage in Shakespeare’s Prince Hal. Both men hang around taverns, and both do so to project an image of themselves as “Normal Guys”. Hal is a Right-wing populist who courts the common life in the form of Falstaff, a boastful knight, and his cronies so as to use this inside knowledge for the ends of power when he finally becomes king. Once he ascends to the throne of England, he will turn on Falstaff and cast him off, just as Farage will sell out the ordinary people on whose back he hopes to climb to power. (He once said  the worst thing about running Ukip was having to work with low-grade individuals.)

Then there’s Macbeth, who was Scottish and would probably have liked golf. He might also have been sandy-haired. As a monarch he’s rapacious, brutally ambitious and has a brisk way with his enemies, though his wife refuses to take a back seat à la Melania. Given how Lady Macbeth ends up, Melania may well have made a wise decision. Macbeth also feels that without consolidating his kingly power, he lacks identity and is perpetually unfinished, his life being merely a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. Shakespeare is worried about people whose identity is so protean and mutable that there’s nothing solid or definitive about them (the Pucks and Ariels of this world, along with the Macbeth witches); but he’s also troubled by those stolid souls who aren’t able to be anyone but themselves. Some characters have too little selfhood, while others have an excess of it. He seems to believe that this conflict is built into the kind of animals we are.

All this is, among other things, a reflection on Shakespeare’s own profession as an actor, which involves projecting oneself into others without losing grip on yourself. Only a strong self can take on another. Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream wants with Trump-like infantile greediness to perform all the parts in a play staged within the drama, but the joke is that he can’t be anyone but himself. Hamlet hasn’t a clue who he is, which strikes Polonius’s advice to him (“This above all, to the own self be true”) as pointless and pedantic as most of what he says. What if your true self is a serial killer? Have those who mouth the postmodern mantra “I like to be myself” paused to consider this question? Being themselves is precisely what’s wrong with a lot of people.

Othello is magnificently capable of being himself, but for the same reason, incapable of empathizing with anyone else. He is in love with his own burnished, mouth-filling rhetoric, a splendid actor who thinks of himself as entirely authentic; whereas Trump, for all his love of the theatrical and spectacular, can’t act at all. His lack of flexibility in this respect is also a lack of humanity. Yet the devil is a shape-shifter too. Othello’s devious adversary Iago can assume any persona he chooses (“I am not what I am”), which is why he can bring Othello down. (Trump has a certain low cunning about him, but our own home-grown Iago is surely Peter Mandelson.)

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In defence of stereotypes

By Terry Eagleton

There are also parallels between Trump and King Lear, one of which is that the latter goes mad while the former is slightly touched: think of those sudden grimaces and surreal digressions. Lear is a despot who “hath rather slenderly known himself”, while the President is a would-be autocrat whose only flash of self-knowledge to date has been to reply to a journalist who asked him why he didn’t drink. “Can you imagine what I’d be like if I did?” came the response.

The difference, here, is that Lear is a tragic figure, whereas Trump is not. To use the word “tragic” is to claim that Lear can find out who he is only by being hauled through hell. Only by being hacked down to nothing can he become something. In the depth of his madness, or is it his sanity, Lear rounds on the Fool and cries in agony, “Who is it who can tell me who I am?” Trump wouldn’t even understand the question, let alone be able to give an answer. King Lear is about the horrifying process to which someone as cocooned in false consciousness as Trump would need to submit in order to be saved.

Speaking of salvation, Trump was described by one of his acolytes as “a proud Christian”. He is, in fact, no more a Christian than Paddington Bear, whatever he may consider himself. You can’t just take someone’s word on the question of whether they are a Christian or a fan of Taylor Swift or a Manchester City supporter. People who claim to be Swifties, but have never heard her sing, and wouldn’t recognize a photo of her — like those who claim to support Manchester City but have never watched them play — are either lying, self-deceived or have no grasp of the concept of supporter. Much the same goes for claiming to be a Christian.

The so-called Beatitudes of the New Testament single out several groups of people as particularly blessed: peacemakers, the poor, the meek, the merciful, those who are persecuted, those who hunger for justice. Trump has a word for these people: losers. And, of course, he’s right. This is no way to get on in life. In fact, it’s the quickest way to become an abysmal failure, rather like the founder of the Christian movement. The Gospel has Jesus warn his comrades that the world will hate them and murder them. Much of the world also hates Donald Trump, which is about all that he and Jesus’s followers have in common. The current power structure is threatened by love, wants to do away with it, and looks at the moment as though it’s winning. It’s just that for tragedies like Lear, what looks like losing may actually be in some well-nigh incomprehensible way the only true way of living — which is to say, in the end, the only way of succeeding.

Admittedly, there lacks a vigorous tradition of satire in the nation: their impulse is always to affirm rather than deflate. Satire is thus at odds with the idealizing tendency of American culture. It’s the opposite of that most depressing type of humor, good clean fun. The days of the great Tom Lehrer, who sang of chopping up babies and poisoning pigeons in the park, are long gone. For all his admirable readiness to speak up against power, Stephen Colbert is no Frankie Boyle and David Letterman is no Stewart Lee.

England, by contrast with the States, boasts of a rich lineage of satirists — from Chaucer, Ben Jonson and Dryden to Pope, Swift, Byron, Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis. (Waugh hasn’t always received the recognition he deserves: a few years ago, on a radio quiz show, the contestants were asked who he was, to which one of them replied “Hitler’s girlfriend”.) And over the centuries, a good many English politicians have feared the lampoons of Grub Street hacks, many of whom wrote anonymously or pseudonymously to avoid the wrath of the state. The satirist is a scourge of vice, but he punishes you by making you look pathetic rather than wicked. Stephen Colbert belongs in this distinguished company.

It’s common enough in political circles to hear people complain that “words just aren’t enough, we need to do something”. But authoritarian regimes have never underestimated the power of words, which can be as much a form of action as tearing down a fence. If all the supporters of Palestine Action were to hold placards reading “Plasticine Action”, as one protesting satirist did recently, the police might be forced to hire literary critics to determine whether this constituted a criminal offense. And what — as happened with another wag — if the words “Palestine” and “Action” appeared at different places on a sign? Perhaps the police would suggest there were nefarious intentions here; but appeals of this kind can always be taken too far, as with the police officer some years ago who arrested an anti-Royalist carrying a blank placard on the grounds that they may have intended to write something on it just before the royal limousine sailed past. It’s what one might call a subjunctive theory of crime — crimes that might be committed, thus allowing you to arrest anyone with saliva on the grounds that they might spit in someone’s face.

Satire mauls its object rather than elevates it, and is often too negative to be enjoyable. Swift’s suggestion that the starving Irish should cook and eat their own children stretches the permissible almost to breaking-point, fueled as it is by a furious sadistic energy. But Waugh and Amis can be extremely funny, and in any case all humor has a utopian dimension, however scurrilous and abrasive it might be. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, not the most rib-tickling of English authors, describes laughter as “sudden glory”. One might see it as the language of the body, as language proper disintegrates into a set of meaningless grunts or chortles and the body dissolves to the uncoordinated state of an infant. Comedy is, quite literally, a bodily disorder. The symmetry of everyday life encounters a sudden contradiction or incongruity, which means that for a precious moment we can stop investing our unconscious energy in the business of keeping things shipshape and release the energy we’ve saved in the form of laughter.

This melting away of meaning and coherence is part of humor’s subversive effect, since disorderly bodies of one kind or another have always been a target for authority. Laughter signaling a loss of self-discipline, is potentially dangerous. The body must be smoothly coordinated, as well as appropriately clothed. In the days when men regularly wore ties, the rebels and dissenters among them took to wearing roll-neck sweaters. This meant that you weren’t wearing a tie, thus preserving your nonconformity, but nobody could see that you weren’t, thus satisfying convention. There was anxiety as well as insolence in the question of the American reporter who asked President Zelensky why he wasn’t wearing a suit.

But humor can do more than question the status quo. It can also outline an alternative to it, one in which the sharing of pleasure and friendship becomes an end in itself, and is thus akin to art. Jokes might impress or cajole or disarm, but, like play in general, most don’t get you anywhere. But they can as a critique of a civilization in which getting somewhere is considered a sacred obligation. To mention Dante’s great poem is to recall that the word “comedy” can have a deeper meaning than anything that can be found in Derry Girls. The Divine Comedy doesn’t yield the reader many laughs, unless seeing people tortured in hell makes you chuckle, but that’s not what the poem’s title means. It refers to a condition in which all things are fundamentally well, whatever appearances to the contrary may suggest. It’s from this sense of serenity that true humor springs, so that the two meanings of “comic” converge.

If Donald Trump really wants to be a king, he should stop bullying satirists and find himself that most indispensable member of any royal entourage, a Fool. Though arguably the American President already has one: himself. Like Boris Johnson, he’s both monarch and clown, switching in a second from regal petulance to baby talk. He’s retained the cap of the traditional Fool but not the bells. Jesters, though, do more than make their masters laugh. His job is also to cut him savagely down to size, as with the Fool in King Lear. He holds up a mirror to the monarch’s feebleness and finitude, which most autocrats hardly find gratifying. When the distraught Lear cries: “Who is it who can tell me who I am?” The Fool replies “Lear’s shadow”, meaning that the king is a shadow of his former self but also that he, the Fool, who shadows his master wherever he goes, is the only one who can resolve the problem of his identity. When power goes mad, only the riddling, enigmatic talk of the jester is able to penetrate it. When it threatens to expand almost beyond limit, the satirist must step in to debunk and deflate it.

The Fool punctures the grandiose delusions of power by reminding it that it has a body and is therefore vulnerable. Just as we can never truly see our bodies in the round, so we can never entirely integrate them into our consciousness. The body hovers between being subject and object, and part of the jester’s task is to remind the rulers of this crippling incongruity. It’s this that Lear discovers in his wanderings on the heath. He thought he was everything, he mutters, but he is not “ague-proof”. Power is mortal, potentially diseased and desperately fragile, even though it behaves as though it will live forever.

Trump, having survived an assassination attempt, behaves like he is invincible. But you have to find some way of anticipating your death if you’re to live fully. To acknowledge a limit is to begin to transcend it. But Trump isn’t a man for limits or defects. Everything in his manically hyperbolic universe is fine, beautiful, fantastic, best ever, gonna be great. That’s why he needs the Colberts of this world, and also why he can’t abide them.

There’s plenty of food just beyond Gaza’s borders, just as in the Irish famine of the 1840s there was plenty of food in Great Britain. Almost 50 years before, Britain and Ireland had entered into a political union, so one might think that a famine in County Cork would have been treated in much the same way as one in Kent or Sussex. The British state, however, wouldn’t have allowed a million people to die of starvation in the Home Counties, but seemed rather more relaxed about the prospect of children in Galway or Donegal stumbling around with permanently green mouths because of the grass they stuffed into them.

When the British finally got their act together and provided soup kitchens in Ireland, it was far too late. Before then, ideological dogma prevented them from giving anything free to the poor. So famished men and women had to take up picks and shovels they scarcely had the energy to hold in order to build pointless roads, futile towers and other edifices for a nominal wage. You can still see these famine works in Ireland today: roads to nowhere, pathways laid down and then dug up again and rebuilt, all to preserve the principle that giving charity to the dying undermines their moral independence. A good many morally independent men and women lie buried throughout the country. Those who couldn’t stand on their own two feet with empty bellies were sent to the dreaded workhouse.

It’s clear that starvation in Gaza is being used as a political weapon, and this was also the case in Ireland. There was indeed a disaster — the failure of the potato crop across almost the whole country for several successive years; but it wasn’t natural at all, since one has to ask why at least a third of the Irish population was forced to rely on potatoes alone for their daily nourishment. The fact is, there was food in Ireland — it’s just that much of it took the form of crops, which the small tenant farmers had to sell in order to pay the landlord’s rent, while they themselves subsisted, for the most part, on potatoes. No Anglo-Irish landowners were stripped to skeletons.

Like some in the Israeli Cabinet, many in Westminster saw hunger as a political instrument. Some politicians saw in the famine a God-given chance to shake up this pathologically indolent nation and reorganise its ramshackle agriculture along the lines of the thriving British farm. Providentially, the potato blight killed off or drove into emigration a great many cottiers, rural laborers and small tenant farmers, whose pathetic patches of land could then be consolidated into more economically viable units.

Some Irish nationalists at the time denounced the whole project as genocidal, a view which modern Irish historians, anxious not to give comfort to the IRA, have generally derided. A number of them, however, have now come round to exactly that claim, just as the most unlikely people are beginning to believe that genocide may not be an excessively lurid term for the situation in Gaza. Some bien-pensant middle-class liberals are having to adjust their views in this respect. They might even come to admit that their past support for Israel has helped to embolden its predatory activities.

Hunger can be used by the people against their rulers as well as the other way round. Margaret Thatcher’s government was confronted with a hunger strike by Irish Republican convicts demanding the status of political prisoners, and responded to it without the faintest understanding of the history and significance of hunger-striking in Ireland. In fact, almost the entire treatment of the country by the British state during the Troubles overlooked that sagacious maxim, “Know Your Enemy”. In medieval times, a “mere Irishman” who felt that his lord had denied him justice might starve himself to death on his doorstep. The point of hunger striking isn’t to refuse food, but to refuse food from a certain source, and thus to deny that source any power over you. It may drive you to death, but it can’t rob you of your autonomy, an autonomy achieved by doing precisely nothing. By discarding your body, you also discard those who would seek to use it for their own ends. You can turn your utter powerlessness into a kind of victory. (Though whether killing yourself in the name of a united nation is a morally permissible act is another question. There’s a thin line between the genuine martyr, one who dies so that others may live, and the suicidal.)

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Who are you calling a terrorist?

By Terry Eagleton

It’s ironic that the Irish Republican prisoners’ demand was so moderate. Whatever atrocities they may have perpetrated, and there were certainly a number of truly vicious types among them, it was obvious that they were political prisoners, and should therefore have been granted the rights usually associated with that status. Refusing to do so was simply vindictive. Would they have gone around torturing and murdering for any reason other than to secure a united Ireland? Not even the apartheid government of South Africa pretended that Nelson Mandela was in the same category as a serial rapist. If you insist on viewing your political adversaries, however violent, as nothing but common thugs, it becomes harder to beat them. You have to try and see the world as they see it, if only to challenge their power.

The opposite of the hunger striker today is the people of Gaza, whose shrunken bodies reveal their political impotence. In his book Homo Sacer, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes of the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps as exhibiting what he calls “bare life”, existing in some liminal state between life and death. Such men and women are images of Nazi power at its extreme; but they are also in a sense independent of that power, since they are no longer responsive to it and appear not to care whether they live or die. You can’t conquer an enemy who doesn’t even acknowledge you. The bodies of these inmates are dehumanized, but it’s in this way that they are also most human, since to be deprived of one’s humanity is a fundamental possibility of being human. Being human is more than a biological affair, since it involves that surplus or excess over bare humanity which we call culture or civilization. Excess — having more than we strictly need — is part of our nature, so that having only what is strictly necessary, like having less than it, disfigures what we are.

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The brutal flaw in Israel’s starvation plan

By Alex de Waal

Some on the Israeli far-Right deny that there’s any hunger in Gaza, which casts some interesting light on the nature of ideology. What I mean by ideology is not doctrines or systems of ideas, but those values and beliefs which are so close to us that they are hard to objectify. It is the invisible color of everyday life — a matter of what Donald Rumsfeld might have called “unknown knowns” (though he missed that one out of his classifications). Certain convictions are vital to our identity, and those who hold them will sometimes swear that black is white if the alternative is to abandon their whole sense of selfhood.

There’s no end to the rationalizations by which men and women might evade a truth which involves having to transform their identities. You start by insisting that Hamas is hijacking all the food in Gaza, or that TV images of starving children have been lifted from elsewhere, and end up claiming that Palestinians tend to be rather scrawny in build and are allergic to flour, while those who aren’t are on hunger strike. Whenever there’s a sudden drop in the intellectual temperature, one can usually be sure that one is in the presence of ideology, which means that there are certain things that must, at all costs, not be said.

Who is and isn’t a terrorist isn’t always clear. The Nazis regarded the French Resistance as a terrorist organization, but the British begged to differ. Was the African National Congress in apartheid South Africa a bunch of terrorists or freedom-fighters? Terrorism, according to the OED, must be “unauthorized”, but it’s not clear who might legitimately authorize it. “The state” is the usual answer to the question of who has the sole right to inflict violence, but many a government, from imperial Rome to the modern United States, has engaged in the mass slaughter of civilians, which sounds pretty much like the use of terror. Were the bombing of Dresden and Coventry during the Second World War acts of terrorism, or simply the inevitable consequences of war? Yet being at war is no defense against committing abominations. On the contrary, it’s when you’re most likely to perpetrate them.

Not all unofficial or unauthorized violence is to be condemned. What if a crazed gunman breaks into a school classroom and prepares to pick off the children one by one, while you are standing behind him with a revolver in your hand? Not many people would argue that you shouldn’t shoot him in the back, and certainly not because you’re not “authorized” to do so. There just wouldn’t be time to get the Met Police or the Ministry of Defense on the phone. I say “not many” people would be against killing the gunman because some pacifists would refuse to do so on the grounds that the use of violence is absolutely wrong. Leo Tolstoy was one of them. (“Absolute” here, by the way, needn’t mean “very very wrong”, just wrong despite any set of circumstances you might think up to try and justify it.)

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Is Nigel Farage a man of the people?

By Terry Eagleton

The only problem with this kind of pacifism is what you say to the bereaved parents at the next meeting of the PTA. Not trying to kill the gunman is obviously a mistake, which is to say that literal pacifism is untenable. There are situations in which killing someone isn’t only permissible but obligatory. Not shooting the mad gunman would be immoral. But these situations are mercifully rare. Moreover, they almost all concern the right to self-defense against an act of unjust aggression. What you can’t do is commit an act of unjust aggression while claiming that it’s in self-defense, as the Israelis are currently doing in Gaza. Violence used in self-defense must be proportionate. You can shoot the crazed gunman in the back, but you can’t roast him slowly over a fire. You can take out Hamas operatives known to be intent on murder, but you can’t turn their country into a wasteland in order to do so. Besides, the gunman in the school is guilty, which is a judgment on the act he’s about to perform rather than on his moral character, whereas the vast majority of those slaughtered in Gaza are innocent. This, once again, isn’t a judgment on their moral character but on what they do (or in this case don’t do, i.e. murder people as members or supporters of Hamas).

Terrorism, however, is supposed to be for a political purpose, which isn’t the case with the crazed gunman. Think, however, of someone intent on assassinating a president (let’s not make it Trump) when you’re the only person who can stop him with a well-aimed bullet. Some pacifists claim that in this situation they would shoot for the legs but not the head. They aren’t absolutely opposed to injuring people, just to taking their lives. This isn’t a pedantic distinction, since there’s quite a difference between being crippled and being turned into a corpse. But what if the head is the only bit of the assassin you can get in focus? In this case you can kill justly for a political end — but if you’re an ordinary citizen, the act isn’t either authorized or official.

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We have forgotten the lessons of 7/7

By Brad Evans

So the dictionary definition of terrorism is fairly incoherent. An act of violence can be legitimate without being part of your professional duty or endorsed by the state. Or it can be ordered by the state but be in every other respect indistinguishable from terrorism. In any case, it isn’t always easy to distinguish political motives from more personal ones. A disaffected youth from an ethnic minority may kill in the name of a warped version of Islam, but also because he feels alienated and aggrieved. Or you may kill someone simply for the hell of it, like the Moors murderers in the Sixties. There’s a vein of anarchist thought in 19th-century Europe which believes in destruction for the sake of it. If you can bring nothingness into being with the flick of a finger, then your powers must surely rival those of the God who created the world. Destruction is an inverted form of creation, as every child with a balloon in its hands is aware.

The present Home Secretary appears somewhat insensitive to these distinctions, having recently placed spraying paint on aircraft in the same category as burning people alive. One consequence of this absurdity is that it devalues the significance of burning people alive. But then terrorism has always been too easily expanded a concept. It has its origin in the French Revolution, the event which gives birth to the modern era, and more precisely in the so-called Reign of Terror to which it gave rise. Terror becomes for the first time a specific form of politics, as though it was an alternative to neoliberalism or social democracy. It also begins life as a state-sponsored programme, not as a strike against the state. The way to govern is to scare one’s citizenry almost to death all of the time, as opposed to boring them to death all the time like the present prime minister. It’s worth noting, incidentally, that some of those who emphasize the cruelty and bloodlust of this episode seem rather less outraged by the French state’s suppression of the Left-wing Paris Commune eighty or so years later, which resulted in the slaughter and imprisonment of far more people than died at the hands of the Jacobins. The Commune, the historian Eric Hobsbawm remarked, was crushed by massacres of Parisians on a scale which would normally have been inconceivable in civilized 19th-century states.

There’s a case for arguing that the idea of terrorism was invented as a kind of joke. The Revolution was an age of –isms, and the word “terrorism” can be seen, somewhat fancifully, as a satirical smack at this use of language, indicating a bankrupt philosophy which consists of nothing more than spilling guts and hacking off heads. In a darkly ironic gesture, “terrorism” raises these depraved acts to the bogus dignity of a political theory. It’s no longer a question of using violence to enforce your kind of politics. Instead, violence is a kind of politics — a politics beyond politics, in the same way that some avant-garde art represents an art beyond art. Rather than persuading people to act in a certain way, you prevent them from acting in any way at all. The distinction between war and peace can no longer be sustained. From the terrorist’s viewpoint, the social order is itself a form of violence, so placing a bomb in a crowded café is just a more spectacular version of what goes on all the time.

Alternatively, of course, you can wrap the bomb around your body and combine murder with suicide. Suicide bombers usually see themselves as the humble instruments of a noble cause, but this contradicts the fact that the act of suicide is one of supreme self-sovereignty. A character in Dostoevsky remarks that in taking your own life you become for a moment divine, since you exercise the kind of dominion that is supposed to be reserved for God. It is the ultimate state of autonomy, even if it lasts no more than a few seconds. Behind this autonomy lies a vital notion in the Western philosophical tradition, namely the idea of self-ownership. My body belongs to me rather as a piece of property does, and as with a piece of property I can dispose of it as I wish. It’s true that I can’t leave my body in a pub as I can my umbrella, and it’s not clear what it is apart from inside my body which is doing the owning; but this dream of self-possession has been a potent force in European bourgeois thought. I can own my body pretty much as I can own the bodies of others, traditionally known as slaves; and just as I am free to kill them, so I am free to kill myself. In fact, doing so is the ultimate act of freedom. One response to this lethal way of seeing is to argue that we belong not to ourselves but to each other, which sets certain constraints on what we can do with our bodies. It’s important to point out, however, that the last thing people desperate enough to kill themselves usually have in mind is the doctrine of self-ownership.

The problem with violence is that it was there at the beginning, which is one reason why it’s so deep-seated. In order to create a civilization you have to dominate your environment, and that dominion doesn’t just go away once a civilized society is up and running. Instead, it is “sublimated” (in Freud’s term) to a higher end. This is known as the political state, which has a monopoly on the use of force. It turns that force outward against its enemies, as well as inward against its various domestic adversaries. But this means that violence is built into civilization, and is not just a regrettable aberration. That is at the heart of the social order which is profoundly at odds with it. And if that isn’t a gloomy enough reflection, there are also those who feel that they are unrepresented by that order, and that they can only draw attention to their plight by blowing other people to bits.

“If you’re Irish, come into the parlor,
There’s a welcome there for you;
If your name is Timothy or Pat,
As long as you come from Ireland
There’s a welcome on the mat…”

Despite this toe-curling stuff, the Irish aren’t a particularly sentimental bunch. A lifetime of labor on a small tenant farm wasn’t likely to predispose them to emotional self-indulgence. Rather, they were put on earth for other people to feel sentimental about, and the Irish themselves have been adept at parlaying this affection. Years ago, if you successfully applied for Irish citizenship, you would receive a passport and a bottle of whiskey. As the song might suggest, however, the spirit of hospitality for which the nation is legendary was always in shorter supply than it might appear. If your name is Timothy or Pat you can expect a fond welcome; if it’s Abdul or Noor you can get back to where you came from or risk having your front door smashed in.

Today, anti-immigrant violence is breaking out in a country which for a long time had far more of its citizens living abroad than at home. About a million people emigrated during the Great Famine of the 1840s, and a few million more did the same in the decades that followed. Getting out of the place has been one of the nation’s most cherished customs. And since it’s usually the most enterprising, resourceful individuals who jump ship, the exodus creamed off a lot of talent — along with a series of largely untalented US presidents. It also helped to provide Britain with a splendid lineage of stage comedy from Richard Steele, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan to Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Brendan Behan. A lot of comedy springs from the tension between seeing a situation from the inside and the outside simultaneously, and the Irish émigré in London was peculiarly well placed in this respect.

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By Terry Eagleton

It’s not surprising that Northern Ireland has been among the hot spots of racist conflict. There’s a history of hatred in the place which sometimes seems to run deep. This weekend, more than ever, is representative of that as tens of thousands turn out for the Protestant Orange marches, a flashpoint for sectarian tensions and a reminder of that antagonistic history. But if religious warfare has been quelled for the moment, some of those pent-up antagonisms are now being turned against Afghans and Romanians.

Northern Ireland is a small, parochial place where people don’t travel much, or are often eager to return home were they to move abroad. When choosing a university, many will favor Queen’s Belfast or perhaps Glasgow over Kent or Sussex. There are also natives of the North for whom Dublin is almost as foreign as Baghdad. At the same time, the province has the benefits and drawbacks of a place in which everyone knows everyone else. On the one hand, nobody can get above themselves, since everyone knows their grandfather was a wife-beater. And the young hothead who shot your son dead during the Troubles is now a respectable middle-aged grocer living a few streets down. On the other hand, the parochialism makes for a disposition to help one’s neighbor. Northern Ireland is one of the best places in Britain to collapse in the street.

But Northern Ireland also has a history of supremacism — something which perhaps lies beneath the recent violence in Ballymena, and the racist effigy of migrants in a dinghy, recently burned in Moygashel. In the 19th century, it was the only extensively industrialized part of the country, an illustrious example of progress and modernity in contrast with what was deemed to be a priest-ridden, spud-chewing, benighted peasantry to the south. Some of the spud-chewers spoke a foreign language, a notorious badge of social inferiority. Ashamed of their Gaelic surnames, a number of small tenant farmers and laborers took the name of their English or Scottish landowners instead, including (one imagines) an obscure family from the borders of Galway and Mayo which decided to appropriate the ancient Scottish name of Eagleton. The Titanic, pride of the Belfast shipyards, may have sunk, thus joining certain other much-celebrated British catastrophes (the Charge of the Light Brigade, Dunkirk, Peter Kay), but as the Belfast ship worker insisted, “She was alright when she left here”.

Along with Unionist Protestant arrogance went a culture of grievance and insecurity, an explosive political compound. When the Union flags are out in force in Belfast or Larne, you know that there’s general apprehensiveness about some Westminster measure which might sell their citizens down the river. The more you need to assert your identity, the less well-founded it is. True selfhood is what you can take for granted.

There was more to the country as a whole, needless to say, than priests and potatoes. It was in 19th-century Ireland that one of the most vital forms of modern politics was created. This was the mass movement, pioneered by the nationalist lawyer Daniel O’Connell, sweeping up thousands or even millions of the rural poor and eventually imitated in various shapes and sizes throughout the world. By and large, the rulers of Britain could envisage no more diabolical figure than O’Connell, despite the fact that his project was entirely peaceful. Modern mass politics was born in Ireland, in the teeth of smears and insults from the country’s colonial proprietors. Meanwhile, in the supposedly modern northeast of the nation, politics continued to be shaped by sectarian issues which ran back to the 17th century. So much for modernity.

There’s a streak of Ulster Protestant supremacism in the current hounding of immigrants in the North, though it’s by no means a protest confined to the Prods. Some working-class Catholics in Dublin are just as outraged. During the Troubles, some of the cannier intellectual apologists for Unionism appealed to the value of multiculturalism as a reason for sticking with Britain rather than throwing in their lot with the Irish Republic. This was always a two-faced argument, since there were precious few non-white faces in the North at the time, whatever may have been the case in London or Birmingham. You could thus mouth multicultural pieties without actually welcoming refugees.

It’s now become an even more disingenuous case, as in the years since the Troubles, parts of the Republic turned into multi-ethnic communities. The Celtic Tiger was now the much-touted icon of Irish modernity, while some of the citizens of Belfast and Derry continued to wrangle about justification by faith alone. Ireland had become a cool place to be, stuffed with glamorous British writers and actors taking advantage of its tax breaks for artists, while Northern Ireland continues to be archaically religious and socially conservative, propped up by financial handouts from Westminster which many of its politicians despise. The place may have produced Van Morrison, but you still struggle to get an abortion. Unionist politicians in the North can no longer denounce the Republic as a theocracy, given that no institution was now more cordially detested there than the Catholic Church.

It’s easy to point to the irony of a nation traditionally dependent on the generosity of others now shutting its door to the stranger. Whole villages in the impoverished west of the country would have sunk without trace in the decades after the Great Famine had it not been for the remittances sent home by members of the New York Police Department. This, to be sure, was a matter of the Irish helping the Irish, but there are also plenty of examples of other nations coming to the aid of the Irish who washed up on their shores. Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, who speaks a kind of “gibberish” and is picked up in Liverpool, a city packed at the time with immigrants from across the water, is probably an Irish refugee. The gibberish in question would have been the Irish language.

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Yet the irony of those who were welcomed now failing to do as they were done by needs qualifying. Like almost all immigrants, the Irish were met with hostility as well as hospitality. If Heathcliff is taken in, it’s only to be treated with brutality. If some of those whose names weren’t Timothy or Pat hung out signs on their lodging houses reading “No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish”, their exclusion from that sentimental parlour becomes rather more explicable. Besides, once you’ve taken in a bunch of white people like the Irish, they are likely to be assimilated and thus acceptable, as has happened in the United States and Australia. You can learn to embrace those whose difference is invisible.

Even so, there’s something peculiarly depressing about households in Ballymena having to hang signs on their doors reading “Local” to prevent them from being broken down. It’s a reminder that few things are more likely to drive men and women to rage than injustice. It’s just that the perception of injustice is in this case grotesquely displaced. Immigrants are often just as poor and needy as the natives who resent their very existence. They certainly have a great deal more in common with them than they do with the guardians of a system which chronically lacks the resources to fund adequate housing, health, education and other social services. If those resources were redirected from the private to the public sector, a good deal of rioting on the streets would come to an end. But that kind of wild talk sounds more like Jeremy Corbyn than sensible, pragmatic stuff.

In ancient Athens, democracy meant government by the people, but the word demos had a resonance of the common people, what some might see as the rabble or riff-raff. In a similar way, the term “the people” might include William Hague and Lady Gaga, but it has a more specific reference to people who don’t usually count, the extras or background artists of human life, individuals who fall outside the official social framework. Mick Lynch is more authentically part of the people than Stephen Fry, but not because he’s “uneducated”. Jeremy Corbyn is “educated” but part of the people. (In the 19th century, “uneducated” meant often enough “didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge”.) In the New Testament narrative of the birth of Jesus, the angels are countless, the people are counted (there’s a census under way), and the shepherds don’t count. [1. Sticklers for historical accuracy might be interested to know that there wasn’t actually a census going on when Jesus was born, since if there was we would have heard about it from other sources. It’s simply a narrative device for getting the Messiah born in Bethlehem, the royal city, as opposed to Nazareth, a scruffy little rural backwater.]

Things are defined partly by what they exclude. All the individuals, or a nation taken together, constitute the population, but you arrive at the idea of the people by subtracting from this unwieldy mass. Some of them — slaves or “aliens” for example — may live in the country but not be citizens. What other people don’t belong to the people? Intellectuals, for a start. The intelligentsia has no loyalty to any particular place or set of national institutions. Because the mind can roam restlessly over the globe without local constraints, these cosmopolitan figures are thought to constitute a threat to both piety and patriotism. They represent what has been called “the view from nowhere”, and such bloodless abstractions are far removed from the living, breathing reality of the common folk.

This is why the phrase “conservative intellectual” has a mildly oxymoronic ring to it. Conservatives are enamoured of the local and parochial, of family, region and nation, whereas intellectuals are supposed to subject all that to a critique governed by reason rather than affection, logic rather than partisanship, universal principles rather than local allegiances. People who seem to come from nowhere in particular have a sinister, slightly alien quality about them, which accounts for the spooky music of the TV programme Mastermind. The music of University Challenge, by contrast, is a jolly little jingle, but this is because students aren’t exactly intellectuals, in fact sometimes not even intellectuals in the making, and in any case nobody finds them creepy.

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The stereotypical intellectual, then, is really a Jacobin: cerebral, emotionally anaemic, eager to impose his abstract schemes on the messiness of human reality. Both Swift and Shakespeare were aware that ideas which have come unstuck from reality have a touch of madness and violence about them, and the great “English” antagonist of this deranged condition was Edmund Burke (he was of course Irish). In the English empiricist tradition, ideas must be rooted in the senses in order to be real. This is one reason why the novelist Anthony Trollope has always been popular among the British middle classes (Harold Macmillan once remarked that every man should go to bed with a Trollope), yet hasn’t an idea in his head. Once the Jacobins had passed into history, the stereotypical intellectual became the Marxist. The emotional anaemia of these outlandish creatures, not least their lack of humor, is clear enough to everyone who reads them.

Can aristocrats be part of the people? In one sense obviously not, since populism is nothing if not anti-elitist. In this respect, an essentially Right-wing ideology overlaps with a Left-wing one. Yet, successful elites aren’t those which maintain an aloof distance from ordinary people, but those which seek to sink their roots into the common soil and draw their energy from this source. The cultivated landowner admires the honest-to-goodness peasant. Hence the Wooster/Jeeves syndrome so central to English culture. Master and man must keep a certain respectful distance, to be sure, but beneath this they maintain a bond almost as intimate as that between man and wife. My Cambridge tutor had a civilized distaste for clichés but referred to his gardener as “the salt of the earth”. In The Idea of a Christian Society, T.S. Eliot tries to reconcile the minority culture of patricians like himself with the broader life of the nation. The poet W.B. Yeats saw shrewdly that if the Anglo-Irish landowning class to which he pledged his allegiance had managed to assume political leadership of the people, they might not have ended up having their grand houses burnt to the ground or being wheeled around Bournemouth in bath chairs.

Populism, then, can trade on the little man’s admiration for the great man. In the case of Nazi populism, the great man in question was of course Adolf Hitler. But Hitler was also a little man, morally as well as physically. No more commonplace incarnation of the destiny of the nation smirches the pages of history. The Spirit of the people shouldn’t have floppy hair and speak in a hoarse rasp. It was as though Jesus Christ had appeared on earth with a badly fitting wig and a wooden leg. As far as size goes, Nigel Farage has a similar advantage to the Führer. So the little man — the thrifty, industrious, aspiring member of the petty bourgeoisie, to whom both populism and fascism make their appeal — could look up to the Leader while at the same time finding in him a reflection of his own banality.

By pitting the people against the elite, populism aims to achieve an important political goal; but it does so only at the price of running into self-contradiction. It hopes to homogenize the people, and in doing so to suppress a number of vital conflicts within this supposedly unified body. Grotesque disparities of wealth, power, respect and recognition are brazenly papered over. Merchant bankers and garbage collectors share a common front against conventional liberal politics. The contradiction is that denouncing the elite also involves denouncing the faceless corporations on which populism ultimately depends. Despite their much-flaunted radicalism, populist politicians are no more eager to challenge the material interests underpinning the Western way of life than is the liberal metropolitan establishment they despise. The CEO of Tesco is part of the elite, but populists show a marked reluctance to send him packing. Deporting George Monbiot strikes them as a more attractive proposition.

In populist eyes, the people is self-identical — a single organism free of divisions or potentially subversive differences. Individuals may squabble over this or that, but the people itself is never wrong. The voice of the people is the voice of God, as Jacob Rees-Mogg remarked (in Latin, no less). His tongue was, of course, lodged firmly in his cheek: populists believe in the people, but this isn’t the same as having faith in what actual men and women do and believe, such as chucking Rees-Mogg out in a general election.

Far from being self-identical, however, the people is always incomplete. In order to be itself, it needs an Other, whether you call it Jews, immigrants, Arabs, illegals or some other theatrically demonized bunch of aliens. You need to be reminded of who you are by contemplating the fearful sight of who you are not. Where would Farage and his cronies be without a regular supply of small boats?

Sometime towards the end of the 18th century, Europe was gripped by a peculiarly bad idea. The idea was that every ethnic group had a right to its own political state, a notion which lies at the heart of Romantic nationalism. One nation, one Reich. For democrats, people have the right of self-determination; for populist nationalists, the people, ethnically defined, have this right. The distinction turns on the definite article. Ethnicity had been introduced into the argument about whether we should be ruled by ourselves or others. People, in all their conflicts of ideas and clashes of interests, had been transformed into a homogenous entity by virtue of being Poles or Slovenes. This proved from time to time an effective way of shaking off colonial oppression, but in some circles it also made being a Pole or a Slovene more important than anything else about you.

And this proved highly convenient for those governing powers who didn’t want men and women to go around describing themselves as socialists or feminists, Christians or Hindus, traditionalists or modernists. The problem was that if you looked far back enough, ethnic identities tended to disappear. Everyone turned out to be an outsider, interloper, carpetbagger, migrant or blow-in. Exile seemed natural to the human condition. No piece of land was the intrinsic possession of a specific tribe. Like Robinson Crusoe, what you find when you land on an apparently unoccupied island is a human footprint.

There are, however, some notable exceptions. Alasdair MacIntyre, who died last month at the age of 96, was born in Glasgow to parents of Irish descent, learnt how to read Irish as a child, and could still do so well into middle age. His father was one of the first generation of his family who spoke English as his first language. His hero was Andrew Fletcher, a Scottish patriot and enemy of the Act of Union with England. Though he taught at a range of universities, from Brandeis to Boston, Duke to Notre Dame, he kept Oxbridge for the most part at disdainful arm’s length, uneasy with its high-toned English culture. High Table and croquet in the quad weren’t his style. When he delivered a public lecture in Dublin some years ago, and was afterwards guest of honor at a banquet, he fled from the festivities and was found eating a sandwich alone in the bar.

Despite his suspicion of sociability, MacIntyre was a compulsive joiner, and in this sense true to his belief in the corporate rather than the individual. In the Fifties and Sixties, he moved from Presbyterianism to Christian Marxism, then to Marxism proper, joining the Communist Party only to leave it for various Trotskyist grouplets. He was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Two decades later, he came (almost) full circle by converting to Roman Catholicism. Aristotle, Marx, Wittgenstein and Thomas Aquinas competed for his intellectual loyalty, most of them distinctly out of favor in orthodox philosophical circles. In fact, MacIntyre was throughout his life a ferocious critic of that orthodoxy — a scourge of liberal individualism, abstract human rights, the unfettered pursuit of power and wealth and the whole moral temper of Western modernity. (A belief in universal rights, he once wrote, was equivalent to a belief in witches and unicorns). His disillusion with Marxism first set in when he was dean of students in the late Sixties, at the politically turbulent University of Essex, then in the grip of student insurrection. One suspects that some kind of personal trauma was involved in this confrontation between a Marxist dean and his unruly flock. Not long after, MacIntyre published a blistering critique of the revolutionary students’ guru, Herbert Marcuse.

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In the wake of this disenchantment, he moved to the United States, renounced all political engagement, and began to speak in mildly nostalgic terms of small, self-governing cooperatives, communities of frugal fishermen, craftsmen and the like. It was this — the self-help America of the early puritans, not the later human jungle of Wall Street or Hollywood — which helped to tempt him, rather improbably, across the Atlantic. At the point when the capitalist system was becoming increasingly global in reach, MacIntyre was singing the praises of the local. Advanced capitalism was here to stay, but more humane forms of life could be practiced on its fringes. The operatives of capitalism were citizens of the world, and thus what the ancient Greeks knew as barbarians, meaning those who belonged to no city. But mini-cities could be constructed in the system’s shadow.

Despite his international celebrity, achieved through such masterpieces as After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, MacIntyre was always a voice from the Gaelic margins, deeply at odds with metropolitan English culture. He was keenly aware how the liberalism it took for granted was itself a specific, contestable tradition. Those who stand at an angle to conventional society can unmask what it takes as natural and universal as arbitrary and contingent. In fact, it’s remarkable how many of the luminaries of the so-called New Left of the late Sixties and Seventies were exiles and émigrés of one kind or another. Perry Anderson, for many decades the leading Marxist intellectual in Britain, is an Anglo-Irishman from County Waterford; Alexander Cockburn was an Anglo-Irishman from County Cork; Raymond Williams hailed from the Welsh borderlands, Eric Hobsbawm was a Jewish refugee from Central Europe. Tom Nairn came from Scotland, Tariq Ali from Pakistan, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall from Jamaica and the philosopher Charles Taylor from Quebec.

As a Scot of Irish descent, MacIntyre was heir to a history which for all its violence and deprivation was more attuned to the communal than the individualist. It could therefore provide the basis for a powerful critique of a liberalism for which men and women weren’t fundamentally social animals, reason was abstract and instrumental and the most precious value of all — freedom — would tell you little or nothing about what the good life is or how to attain it. Instead, it leaves such matters to one’s subjective choices in the moral marketplace. In MacIntyre’s view, this way of seeing overlooks the fact that individual reasoning participates in a more collective reasoning, one which is always historically specific. Liberty is in the end the liberty to seek truth, another concept increasingly redundant in the modern age. Ethics become little more than an expression of personal preference in a world which has lost almost all sense of the common good. The moral universe is privatized. We still use terms like “goodness” and “happiness”, but the concrete contexts in which they were once embedded have disappeared with the onset of modernity, leaving moral concepts hanging uselessly in the air.

For MacIntyre, by contrast, the good must be more than just what I happen to desire. It’s always embedded in a particular set of collective cultural practices. If we have forgotten this, it’s largely because the 18th century Enlightenment stripped the self of its concrete social identity, so that each of us becomes an isolated, autonomous self in a world of abstract universal principles. Anxious to avoid moral relativism, MacIntyre acknowledges that there are certain standards which different cultures share. But to live well is less to conform to principles common to everyone from 13th century Padua to 20th century Pasadena, as some Enlightenment thinkers would hold, than to flourish in a way appropriate to one’s role in a concrete form of life. A good merchant is someone who behaves as a good merchant should, according to the standards set by his particular culture and tradition. Whether this is also true of a good blackmailer is rather less obvious.

Since social roles are in some sense objective, moral values become so as well. A lot of modern moral thought makes a sharp distinction between facts and values. You can describe a situation as scrupulously as possible, but doing so won’t lead you to a moral judgment or obligation. In the era of modern science, facts are just blank, inert stuff, and values must consequently be imported from elsewhere. Perhaps they’re simply subjective, or the arbitrary decrees of a capricious God. MacIntyre rejects this dualism: for him, describing a social role already implies certain values, in the sense of the need to act in certain ways. It’s because the self has been shorn of this social dimension in modern times that the problem arises. At the same time, it has been deprived of what MacIntyre sees as its status as a form of narrative. In his view, we live in narrative, but can no longer recount coherent stories of ourselves.

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All this makes MacIntyre one of the great moral philosophers of the 20th century. He was a radical Scottish puritan, austere and high-minded, who ended up supporting the revival of monasticism and switched his sympathies from the Bolsheviks to St Benedict. His dissent from the priorities of the modern age took an incongruous variety of forms but remained wholly self-consistent. If he turned back to Aristotle and Aquinas, it was in order to move beyond what he saw as the skepticism and subjectivism of the present. His work showed up the limits of rationalism, but was deeply averse to the irrational. It could win praise from both Leftists and conservatives, but gave no comfort to neoliberalism. MacIntyre refused to subscribe to the view that the individual was at the center of the universe; that reason is timeless and independent of practical social life; and that relations are primarily contractual and actions chiefly instrumental. In contrast with a mean-spirited utilitarianism, he saw society not as a means of individual self-promotion but as a good in itself. He was interested in practices like playing chess or writing poetry whose goods, as he would say, were “internal” to themselves rather than external goals to be pursued.

MacIntyre celebrated rootedness, yet as an academic was continually on the move. He was a critic of capitalism who rejected multiculturalism and looked askance at the struggle for recognition of women, gays and others. His dislike of the autonomous self could lead him to overvalue the corporate and collective, as well as to bowing the knee to an authoritarian Church. Yet in an age when Anglophone philosophy had been reduced to a trivial game for those in the know, complete with its in-jokes, ritual gestures and stereotypical turns of phrase, he never ceased to raise the most profound of questions.

The trouble with this view is that it sees democracy in purely instrumental terms. It judges political systems primarily in terms of whether they secure the best results, however “best” happens to be defined. This surely can’t be right, since even fascist regimes have come up with some impressive achievements from time to time. You can’t look only at the consequences of a form of politics, rather than at its internal operations. What my Tutor seemed not to grasp was that democracy isn’t just a way of getting things done, a way which for Winston Churchill was the least worst and for my Tutor the very worst, but what Aristotle would call a virtuous activity. This means among other things that it’s valuable in itself, not just for where it might get you. Aristotle isn’t altogether opposed to my Tutor’s viewpoint: he thinks that if there’s an individual who is clearly superior to everyone else, then it’s right that he should rule over them all; but he also believes that this is rare or non-existent.

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There’s also a sense in which Aristotle thinks, like my Tutor, that political arrangements should be judged instrumentally. But this means judged in terms of how far they help to secure the good life; and for Aristotle the good life is a virtuous one, which like ballet or laughter or gift-giving is an end in itself. You might say that the goal of the political state is human friendship, but friendship itself doesn’t have a goal. Human beings naturally have affection for each other and therefore desire to have a life together, Aristotle writes in the Politics, even when they have no need to seek each other’s help. This is strikingly at odds with the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke, for which government is basically a matter of individual self-interest. The state exists to prevent us from strangling each other or stealing each other’s property. Its function is thus largely negative. There’s an element of this in Aristotle’s view, but to his mind the state has a more positive role in creating the conditions in which individuals may flourish; and one form of that flourishing is their participating in the running of the state, which is to say democracy.

This view can lead Aristotle to some pretty authoritarian conclusions, but in anachronistic terms it also puts him on the political Left. (There are those, needless to say, for whom the political Left and authoritarianism are synonymous.) By and large, the Left has looked favorably on political society as the matrix of all individual flourishing, whereas the Right tends to interpret this as meaning that a totalitarian state should take you over. The key distinction between state and society is elided. It sounds authoritarian to some liberal ears to claim that society takes priority over the individual, but for the Left this is a statement of fact rather than a political imperative. Only by belonging to a language and form of life, does one become a person. The self is relational to its roots. There couldn’t be just one individual, any more than there could be just one letter or number. Society is constitutive of individuals, not simply a neutral space in which they move or a potential obstacle to their freedom. The liberal or conservative might retort that it’s the same the other way round — that society itself is simply a collection of individuals. But this isn’t quite true. Society is a set of relations between individuals, some of them formal and some informal, not an assemblage of isolated units.

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So democracy, or self-government, is an exercise of our powers and capabilities which is inherently valuable, as well as conducive to ends beyond itself. As far as its results go, Aristotle isn’t worried that under democracy the people will make all the wrong decisions, since though each of them will be a worse judge than the experts, they will collectively speaking be better, or at least no worse. One might also point out that human beings can abuse their freedom, but they aren’t fully human without it. Collective self-determination, i.e. democracy, may result in thwarting some people’s freedom, but to be self-determining is to be free, at least in one sense of the term. To be free is not just not to be governed by someone else, but to have learnt how to govern oneself alongside others.

Still, there are problems with this vision. For one thing, it seems to suggest that politics and morality are fundamentally incompatible. Politics may be based on the will of the people, but it’s hard to view ethics in the same way. Is murder wrong just because most of us think it is? An alarming number of medieval citizens believed in burning witches, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. What if the moral consensus of the future contradicts the orthodoxy of today? Most people in Britain once held that homosexuality was sinful, but most of them don’t hold that now. It’s disturbing, however, to suppose that we just make up our fundamental principles as we go along. It seems to suggest that humanity rests on nothing but itself. Democracy means that we are the ultimate authority, rather than that there exists a sovereignty beyond us to which we should conform. Human beings determine their own history, but according to no ground plan independent of themselves. Democracy, in a word, is secretly atheistic. God has been replaced by the Plebs, and humanity assigned an importance which may lead to hubris.

There’s also a strained relationship between democracy and the market. If men and women are self-determining in the political sphere, they wouldn’t seem to have much of this capacity in the economic one. On the contrary, their own free actions merge together in the marketplace to constitute alien forces capable of commanding the course of their lives. To be truly sovereign over oneself, you need an environment which is relatively stable and predictable. You can’t play a decent game of croquet if, as in Alice in Wonderland, the equipment keeps shifting capriciously around. A degree of predictability is a condition of freedom, whereas sheer randomness amounts to the death of it. The economic life of capitalism is like a surreal game of croquet in which things stroll off the pitch or morph into something else just when you want them to keep still. As far as keeping still yourself goes, you have to run very fast simply to do that, as the Queen remarks to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s tale. Socialism is among other things a response to the fact that a capitalist economy is inherently out of control, not out of control only at times of crisis. And in the world of Trump, politics has become almost as volatile and erratic as the stock exchange.

There used to be a time when the proletariat was seen as the potential downfall of this system. That it was destined to be the gravedigger of capitalism was a kind of irony, since it was itself a product of it. Today, the potential undoing of the system is still the system itself. Advanced capitalist economies have reached a degree of opaqueness, complexity and global reach which undermine some of their own moral foundations. Classical liberalism, with its faith in individual freedom, has evolved into an anonymous corporate world in which the individual is largely dispensable, and the nation-state along with it. A traditional respect for God, family, community and country gives way to rootlessness, faithlessness, the disruption of communities, the provisional nature of all values and a planet on which any place is more or less interchangeable with any other. Nor can you have proper self-determination when the self seems little more than a fiction, a fleeting nexus of impulse and desire without continuity or foundation. Neoliberalism rounds savagely on its more classical forebear, ripping up civil rights and redefining freedom of expression as the freedom to profit from hate speech. In reaction to all this, parts of the global capitalist system enter a kind of time-warp, turning back to the days when men were men, the nation stood tall, home and kinship were precious, God was in his heaven and the manufacture of automobiles was in Detroit.

Neoliberalism unmasks the embarrassing truth that capitalism and democracy aren’t at root compatible, even if we still have the privilege to choose which particular bunch of old Etonians should represent us at Westminster. This incompatibility wasn’t so evident in the age of classical liberalism, when the individual’s freedom to acquire property seemed to go naturally with his or her freedom to dissent, divorce, launch a campaign or rise in the social hierarchy. We don’t, however, speak of Walmart or the oil companies in terms of the individual’s right to private property. In practice, that whole discourse is almost obsolete; but neoliberalism has nothing but the language of wealth and acquisition with which to fill the ideological gap left behind. John Stuart Mill knew that liberal democracy was constantly under threat from “sinister interests”. Today, it has been effectively taken over by them.

The official name of the six British-owned counties in Ulster is “Northern Ireland”, but Irish republicans like Kneecap wouldn’t call it that because they don’t see why part of the country should have a name other than just “Ireland”. They might be slightly happier with the North of Ireland, or the Six Counties, or (as the novelist Flann O’Brien suggested) “the sick counties”. The group aren’t interested in post-colonialism, as so many students in Britain are, because they don’t believe that the term applies to their own situation. Northern Ireland is the fag-end of British colonialism, not a condition which comes after it. And though the Northern Irish middle classes now speak like almost everyone else of diversity and democracy, it’s still a sectarian state, one gerrymandered into existence a century ago to ensure that Protestants remained permanently in power.

Kneecap speak Irish and use the Irish form of their names. They would have attended Catholic schools in West Belfast where the Irish language is taught, just as it’s taught in most schools in the Irish Republic. The difference is that a lot of children in the Republic feel no more enthusiasm for learning the native language than many British children do for learning French or Latin, and a lot of them speak it as poorly as the British do French. It is, however, the official language of the nation: like other things in Ireland a polite fiction.

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There are, for example, two versions of the Irish constitution, one in Irish and the other in English, both of which state that in the event of a conflict of interpretation between them, the Irish version will be deemed to take priority. But the Irish version is widely believed to be a translation from the English version, meaning a copy assumes precedence over an original. Like other colonial peoples, the Irish were plagued by the sense that they were copies, mimic men, parodies of their metropolitan proprietors. It’s said that the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, on hearing that a wealthy American had arrived in Dublin to buy up original poetic manuscripts, took to writing the original drafts of his own work, complete with queries, deletions, hasty last-minute additions and the like.

Learning Irish in Belfast, however, is a more meaningful affair because it’s bound up with your political identity, and the language has grown there more rapidly than anywhere else on the island. The Falls Road in nationalist Belfast is full of advertisements for Irish-language classes, fraternal trips to Celtic Brittany, lectures on renowned Irish women and so on. Like war, culture is the continuation of politics by other means. Gerry Adams doesn’t speak Irish well, but it would be unthinkable for him not to speak it at all. Irish is also the everyday language of the so-called “Gaeltachtaí” or Irish-speaking areas in the Republic, where motorists can easily find themselves lost without trace because there are no English names on the road signs.

The Gaeltachtaí, which comprise only about 1% of the Irish population, are the fruit of the Gaelic League of the early 20th century, which revived a language on the point of extinction. Branded as uncouth and inferior, in steep decline because of its association with poverty and backwardness, it was the daily speech of most of those millions who either died in the Great Famine or were driven into exile by it, so that the death or departure of the Irish was coupled with the threatened demise of their native tongue. It was the nationalist intelligentsia who tried to retrieve the indigenous culture, and who were, on the whole, remarkably successful in doing so. Today in Ireland there are academically outstanding schools which teach everything through Irish, as well as writers who write only in Irish and families who speak only Irish at home, so that the children grow up bilingual. Newcomers to the country discover after a while that phrases like “ya fuggin’ gobshoite” aren’t actually Irish at all.

Kneecap must strike some English people as a curious throw-back. Didn’t all that nationalist militancy die with the Anglo-Irish Agreement? But the group is a reminder that nothing could be further from the truth. The guns may have, for the most part, fallen silent, but some traffic roundabouts (and occasionally some people) are painted red, white and blue, and there are pubs a Protestant wouldn’t drink in. Nowhere in Europe, for both good and ill, is there a more tangible refutation of the claim that ordinary people aren’t interested in politics. It’s true that many of the younger generation find politics a turn-off, but there are also those like Kneecap who are passionate about it, and the reason for this is that nationalism is a form of identity politics. It’s in this context of identity politics — of, say, gay rights or the women’s movement — that the group should be seen. Far from being archaic, they are the latest thing. From the Seventies onwards, revolution may have gradually given way to questions of identity, but nationalism can encompass both. This, no doubt, is why it has proved by far the most powerful form of radicalism in the modern age, starting with the partial independence of Ireland in 1921, and going on to dismantle one colonial state after another.

Kneecap are alleged to have shown support for Hamas and Hezbollah, an accusation they claim takes their words out of context. They might argue that making such statements are an attempt to outrage their audiences, and aren’t to be taken seriously. But many in Kneecap’s audiences would find little to outrage them on this score, and in any case the complaint that your words have been taken out of context has become the dreariest of clichés, as in “When I called you a contemptible little shit, my words were taken out of context”. More to the point, what context could they have possibly been taken out of? Perhaps you were quoting or joshing or pretending or just blind drunk, but it isn’t likely.

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The fact is that revolutionary nationalists, unlike Right-wing nationalists like Trump or Modi, tend to be internationalist in outlook. Nationalism is seen often enough as an inward-looking, chauvinistic affair, but some Irish nationalists in the early 20th century were keenly interested in anti-colonial struggles in India, Egypt, South Africa, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and were quite the reverse of provincial. One of them, Frederick Ryan, who crops up briefly in James Joyce’s Ulysses, edited an English-language anti-colonialist newspaper in Cairo.

It’s this history which lies behind Kneecap’s shouts of solidarity with anti-colonial movements elsewhere in the world, though it’s to be hoped that they don’t support the Hamas atrocities of October 7. Their opposition to Israel’s massacre in Gaza, however, is entirely understandable. These young men, too, belong to an ethnic group, the Gaelic Irish in the North, which has been hassled and humiliated over the years, treated as second-class citizens and as captives in their own country. The architect of South African apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, once expressed his admiration for the set-up. Their parents and grandparents will have encountered social prejudice, discrimination and perhaps even torture and death. Kneecap don’t, like some of their generation in Northern Ireland, dismiss all this as ancient history and turn instead to Taylor Swift.

It is, of course, possible to make a fetish out of history, as one can make a fetish out of territorial unity. Republicans call for a united Ireland, but unity isn’t a good in itself. If justice would somehow be served by carving England down the middle, it would be a plan well worth considering. But division is objectionable when it happens in the name of oppression, and the partition of Ireland, one of the most brazen political stitch-ups of the last century, is exemplary of this. A large group of people were deprived of their right to political self-determination in order to preserve the privileges of another group of people who were doing well out of colonial rule.

As I write, Kneecap is still taking heat because of some deeply offensive remarks about both Hamas and Conservative MPs. For this, they should clearly be brought to book. And yet Irish republicans are no strangers to hostility from across the water, where the image of the Irish has been either one of lovable rogues or disgusting barbarians. Since we’ve had the former in the shape of The Pogues, it’s no doubt time for the latter.

Why is the commander wrong? Partly because, morally speaking, he is a consequentialist. He believes that the way to judge human actions is to calculate their probable effects, then assess whether they are largely positive or negative. What counts as positive or negative is clearly a problem. Different people are likely to return different, sometimes conflicting, answers to this question. Perhaps the most familiar kind of consequentialism is utilitarianism, which weighs the sum-total of happiness which will result from your action against the sum-total of unhappiness it may cause. (You will, of course, need to define what counts as happiness, since what it meant for Plato isn’t what it meant for Marx or Jacob Rees-Mogg). What matters isn’t so much your intention, or the nature of the action itself, as the impact it will have on the world, which is to say whether it will increase overall human happiness or not. Actions are as actions do.

But how do we know what impact it will have? Any ethics based on consequences is bound to be retrospective. Only when you look back can you evaluate the fruits of your actions, since only then will they have come into existence. Trying to calculate them in advance is a tricky business. It would take a sizable team of investigators to trace the results of even the most trivial act. Perhaps I see an advertisement from the top of a bus, the colors of which remind me of another advertisement some years ago, which first turned me on to smoking. I take up smoking again — then die of lung cancer a few years later. As a result, one of my children drops out of college, becomes delinquent and hits you over the head with a whisky bottle one dark night in Hackney. After the assault, you develop blurred vision and drive your car into a butcher’s shop in Greenwich, gravely injuring an elderly customer. Their partner sinks into depression, and jumps off a bridge.

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It’s impossible, then, to say how many people are involved in a single action — and I haven’t even mentioned the agency which designed the advertisement, the workers who built the bus, or those who extracted the rubber which went into its tires. Who owns an action is a question which much concerned the ancient Greeks. For them, humans move precariously, in a tangled net of cause and effect which can never be grasped as a whole. Only God, or an omniscient narrator in a novel, can do that. What we do can spin out of our control, breed multiple effects, merge with the acts of others and confront us as an alien force. In this sense, we are all, like Oedipus, “guilty innocents”, caught up in potentially lethal situations which we never got to choose and might not even be aware of. The Christian doctrine of original sin, for which we’re all implicated in a condition for which none of us is actually guilty, is an equivalent of this tragic way of seeing.

There’s also the question of what doesn’t happen as a result of what you do, or don’t do. Maybe one of the schoolchildren you blow up would have grown up to discover a cure for cancer. We’re speaking here of what one might call the subjunctive realm — the spectral world of what might have come about had you acted differently. Here, however, one needs to tread carefully. It sounds reasonable to say, “If I hadn’t been delayed in getting to the airport, I would have been on the aircraft that crashed into the Atlantic with no survivors”. But it could be argued that if you’d been on time for the flight, history would have been different, and this alternative history might not have included the air crash. Perhaps you can’t alter one bit of history without changing the lot.

So judging solely from consequences has its problems. And there’s another reason, too, why it isn’t the soundest form of ethics. It’s strongly counterintuitive to claim that we think things are good or bad only according to the difference they make in the world. It’s not only that a bad action can have positive effects, or vice versa. It’s that we sometimes feel like saying that a way of acting is good in itself, regardless of the results it might produce. It’s good that someone is willing to go to their death to defend the cause of the innocent, even if the whole project backfires and leaves the innocent worse off than they were before. Similarly, it’s good that you don’t slaughter thousands of Gazan civilians, even if it means that you don’t get your hands on the militants of Hamas.

In Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons, the 16th century martyr Thomas More refuses to take an oath denying the authority of the Pope even though this means his beheading. He takes his stand, regardless of the consequences, because to do otherwise would be to betray his own identity. The real-life Thomas More was more of a consequentialist: he refused to deny the sovereignty of the Pope because he feared burning in hell if he did.

Actions which contain their value wholly in themselves are rather like works of art. Like art, they resist being treated in a merely functional or utilitarian way. We don’t ask what the “Mona Lisa” is for. Even actions of this kind, however, may have consequences which they don’t intend, or which are surreptitiously intended. Take, for instance, Henry James’s novel The Wings of the Dove, in which Kate Croy and Merton Densher are a young couple in love but without the means to marry. They befriend Milly Theale, a fabulously rich young American woman, who Kate discovers to be terminally ill. Kate persuades Densher to pay court to Milly, who has fallen in love with him, so that he and Milly may marry and Densher will inherit her fortune when she dies. Milly learns of the plot against her, but bequeaths her wealth to Densher on her deathbed anyway. Like a martyr, she uses death creatively, placing it at someone else’s service. The effect of this astonishing act of forgiveness and generosity causes Densher to fall passionately in love with Milly’s memory.

Remorseful for his and Kate’s plotting, he refuses to accept the heiress’s bequest. He is willing to marry Kate — but without Milly’s fortune. If Kate chooses not to marry him, he will make the legacy over to her. For her part, Kate insists that she will marry Densher only if he accepts Milly’s money, thus testifying that he has put his devotion to the dead woman behind him. Unable to resolve this deadlock, the couple part forever and the novel closes.

Milly’s dying act is meant to transcend the tangled web of cause and effect in its supreme disregard for consequence and calculation. It belongs to the category of action which James often calls “beautiful”, meaning those ways of behaving which have nothing in them for oneself and are performed purely for their own sake. There is a recklessness about living in this self-squandering way, a kind of extravagant pointlessness, but it is more than outweighed by its sheer grace and radiance. Milly’s is an aristocratic ethic, so to speak, as opposed to the mean-minded bookkeeping mentality of Kate and Densher.

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Milly’s final act seems like a riposte to consequentialism. It will certainly have no consequences for her, since she will very soon be dead. Yet her action has momentous effects for Kate and Densher. The question is whether Milly herself has foreseen those effects. Is she a saint or a schemer? Has she acted to demonstrate her moral fineness, win Densher’s heart forever or break up his relationship with Kate? Is her splendid disinterestedness a devious act of aggression? As usual with James, the answer is unknowable. The novel carefully allows us no access to Milly’s motives. It’s hard to say whether her graciousness is a form of egoism or altruism, a humbling of the self or a final assertion of it.

The commander who orders the school to be blown up, then, seems to believe that, morally speaking, the end justifies the means. This can certainly be the case. Hardly anyone thinks that it’s wrong to lie to the Gestapo about the whereabouts of your Jewish grandmother. The greatest of all theologians, Thomas Aquinas, wouldn’t have agreed. But though he thought lying was absolutely wrong, he didn’t think that “absolute” meant “very wicked”. He just meant it as a synonym for “should never be done”. Almost everyone, however, maintains that if you see a 10-year-old kid sneaking out of your front door with a five dollar bill of yours, it’s not permissible to shoot him in the back. (A lot more Americans are likely to do this than the British are — not because the British are morally superior to Americans, but because they don’t have guns.)

So there can be no general rule here. Some people probably believe that it doesn’t matter if you kill a million Palestinians, so long as you eliminate Hamas in the process. It’s worth asking how this makes such people different from Hamas. There are also those of us who hold that massacring the innocent — non-combatants — is never morally permissible whatever gains it might bring you, and that to see such mass slaughter as mere collateral damage is a moral obscenity. Dresden, Coventry and Hiroshima were cases of mass murder. If you’re allowed to do that, then you’re allowed to do more or less anything, and all talk of morality becomes superfluous.

Despite living with this linguistic diversity, the British are astoundingly bad at identifying accents, not to speak of imitating them. They can usually spot a Scot or a Cockney but are hopelessly at sea when it comes to the subtle distinctions between Manchester and Leeds. Everyone knows that that a series of richly rolled r’s and z sounds indicates the West Country, but not many people know that the natives of Ulster call children “weans” and say “What’s strange?”, meaning “What’s new?” They also have a unique form of intonation which makes it sound as though they’re always complaining, which some years ago during the Troubles they usually were.

If the British accent is a myth, so is a working-class one. There’s no distinctively working-class way of speaking in Britain. It’s rather that working people tend to speak with the accent of their region, whereas the middle classes tend to speak Standard English, which is common to all parts of the country. Even so, the grip of Standard or BBC English is loosening, and along with it ideas of correct or “educated” speech which have been with us at least since the 18th century.

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The effect of this is hard to overestimate. Over the centuries, millions of British people have been brought up to believe that their way of talking was improper. Since most of the people around them spoke improperly too, this didn’t matter much of the time; but it meant, for example, that people would think twice before asking them to read out a poem or give a brief speech at a wedding. Language is power, but the great majority of men and women had to make do with a second-class form of power, one contaminated by a verbal virus known as an accent.

This assumes that there are people who speak without an accent, which is as absurd as supposing that one could speak without vocal cords. The fact is that there is no such thing as an accentless form of speech, any more than there is a non-specific way of walking. An accent simply means a particular way of pronouncing a language, and Queen Camilla’s way is quite as particular as Katie Price’s. But there are styles of pronunciation which are socially acceptable and others which are not. The problem is that acceptability is entirely relative. It’s probable that a well-educated late 18th-century gentleman would have pronounced “Duke” as “Dook”, “obliging” as “obleegin”, and “cup of tea” as “coop of tay”. It’s unlikely that he would get to read the TV news if he was around today.

Standard English itself grew out of a regional dialect, roughly the area containing the key centers of London, Oxford and Cambridge. It was part of a strikingly successful attempt by a rising middle class to consolidate its cultural power. Just as they needed a common currency, so they needed a shared way of speaking by which they could recognize each another instantly, without going to the trouble of inventing a secret handshake or wearing a old school tie. “A pat on the back” now sounded like “a pet on the beck”, while “barth”, which was once amusingly rustic, was now polite usage for “bath”. “Really” came to sound like “rarely”, though the two can almost be opposites (as in “I really/rarely enjoy dancing”), and in Sloanish circles “It’s my birthday” became hard to distinguish from “It’s my bathday”, suggesting that you took a bath only once a year.

There are also variations in volume. Generally speaking, people get louder as you travel from Brighton to Lancaster, and there’s a myth in Northern Ireland that Protestants speak louder than Catholics. Some of the public school boys I encountered as a student at Cambridge in the early Sixties seemed to bray rather than speak. This was because only oiks like myself were anxious about other people overhearing their conversation, whereas those with true social authority didn’t give a toss. I was once sitting in a Cambridge hairdresser’s along with a dozen or so other customers when a large young man in cravat, hacking jacket and knee-high boots put his head round the door and bellowed to the barber “Johnnies, Albert!” (“Johnnies” meant condoms in those days.) It’s true that barber’s shops were one of the few places where you could buy such goods in those sexually repressed times, but the transaction was usually hushed and furtive, like buying hard drugs today. There was nothing hushed and furtive about the Right Honourables who swaggered along King’s Parade and hooted in cinemas at the feeblest joke.

It wasn’t long, however, before these young men would be fit meat for the satire of Monty Python. In the post-Beatles era, some ex-public school students at Oxbridge began to roughen up their accents, talk down their noses, and even introduce the odd glottal stop into their speech, as in “ta’oo” for “tattoo”. Old Etonians with orange hair and silver nose rings began to make their appearance among the dreaming spires. Anyone who addressed you with a cheery “Ow yer doin’, mate?” was almost certainly from Harrow or Winchester. Rishi Sunak slurs a little when speaking to ordinary people (you expect him suddenly to whip out a flat cap), just as Harold Wilson’s style of speech became more Yorkshire the further north he traveled. Prince William and Prince Harry speak like regular guys, whereas their father does not.

It’s all a far cry from the encounter between Oliver and the Artful Dodger in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Alone and tearful in London, Oliver runs into a “snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy” who says “Hullo, my covey, what’s the row” to which Oliver replies “I am very hungry and tired. I have walked a long way, I have been walking these seven days”. It’s hard to know how someone brought up in a workhouse can produce this impeccable piece of Standard English, but there’s a Victorian literary convention which holds that virtuous people tend to speak in this cultivated style. Oliver turns out to be of genteel birth, so perhaps his posh English is genetically determined. You can’t have a hero who drops his aitches, any more than you can have an archbishop who drops his trousers. Moral and linguistic propriety go hand in hand. A gentleman has both good morals and good manners, the latter reflecting the former. As in the novels of Jane Austen, problems arise when someone is socially a gentleman but morally a total bastard.

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A good deal of British humor springs from quick changes of linguistic register. Legendary comedians like Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, and Kenneth Williams all trade in abrupt shifts from the tones of the civilized middle classes to a blunter, more popular idiom. A pretentious flight of fantasy is punctured by a sudden crude or mundane comment. Taking poshness down a peg or two is a familiar British pastime, one that reflects the nation’s fondness for self-deprecation, but it’s particularly striking when the refined and the rough-spoken are combined in the same person. What marks the British sensibility isn’t so much pathos as bathos — sudden swoopings from high to low, all of which depend on an acute sense of the way language is bound up with rank and authority.

Speech divides as well as unites: if they haven’t heard you properly, the working class say “ay?”, the lower-middle class say “pardon?”, the middle class say “sorry?” and the upper class say “what?” In their slovenly way, the upper class are also supposed to say huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, which suggests that they’re as indolent in their speech habits as they are in most other things. The effort of pronouncing consonants is simply too exhausting for them, and can be left to their gamekeepers. Military speech, by contrast, is traditionally clipped and precise, as though everything you say takes the form of a command. Its briskness is also meant to dispel emotion, which can get in the way of killing people. It’s hard to tell someone you love them, or ask them to pass the salt, in the tones of the late Lord Montgomery.

Even so, some kind of Standard English will probably survive as long as the so-called public schools do. Most governing classes in history have educated their children apart from the common people, and teaching them a distinctive way of speaking, or even in some cases a different language altogether, has traditionally been part of that privilege. What kind of distinctive speech doesn’t matter: it might well have come about by some historical quirk that the idiom of urban Lancashire became socially dominant, so that the King would speak like Liam Gallagher and call Prince Andrew “our kid”. In that case, one would probably also come across dissident Oxbridge students with silver nose rings who sounded for all the world like David Dimbleby.