He would make more from the grave. Salò, an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, was as vile as it was accomplished, and set off a moral panic. Set in Italy towards the end of the Second World War, in the hastily established German puppet state known as the Republic of Salò, it tells the story of four depraved fascists who kidnap, torture and rape a group of beautiful young men and women in their palace. Over the course of the film, they come up with increasingly sadistic fantasies to sustain their arousal. In one scene, the prisoners are forced to eat human feces; in another, dog food stuffed with needles.

People fled the early screenings. Vincent Canby, the chief film critic of the New York Times, described the film at the time as “so repugnant” it “dehumanizes the human spirit”. It was banned in Italy in January 1976 following accusations of indecency; just over a year later, it was timidly shown in Rome, but even then certain scenes were omitted.

Fifty years after its ban, the film is worth rewatching (on an empty stomach). For it turns out Pasolini not only understood the cruelty of 20th-century totalitarianism, but foresaw the darkness of our own age.

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First and foremost, Salò depicts the moral obscenity of fascism, which Pasolini knew well. He was born in Bologna in 1922 — the year Mussolini came to power — and his first poetry collection, Poesie a Casarsa, came out in 1942, the year before Mussolini’s regime collapsed. His early poems were explicitly anti-fascist, as he insisted on writing them in the rough Friulian dialect of his mother’s native northeast rather than in Italian, and Pasolini actively participated in the Resistance. In the mid-Forties, he joined the Italian Communist Party, but soon after was expelled after being accused of corrupting four boys at a dance in Friuli (the charges were later dropped). He fled to Rome, which would become his greatest inspiration, but more or less remained a Leftist his whole life.

More subtly, Salò is also a critique of post-war Italian consumerism. “Everything is good when it’s excessive,” says a fascist autocrat in the film’s opening line. To Pasolini, this perverse greed didn’t vanish after the war, it merely took on a different guise. Long after the execution of Il Duce, he continued to see fascism everywhere in the neocapitalist Italy of the Sixties and Seventies, still in the afterglow of the postwar economic miracle that saw annual GDP growth peak at 8%. Yet if Italians reveled in their famous Fiat 500s, alongside an avalanche of other consumer goods, the director remained uneasy. “I think that consumerism manipulates and violates bodies neither more nor less than Nazism,” Pasolini said in the second-to-last interview he gave before he was murdered. “My film shows the sinister connection between consumerism and Nazism.” It hardly helped, of course, that actual fascists were roaming the streets of Italy at the time, spreading death and destruction as they went.

All the while, the director warned that consumerism would not lead to the liberation of man; instead, it would lead to the “reduction of the human body to a commodity” and “cancellation of another person’s personality”. He hated the idea of things being “mass consumed”, of bodies and personalities and art being interchangeable — all this he perceived as a threat to humanity’s spiritual integrity.

This, he argued, would ultimately lead to the destruction of civilization, since as people become increasingly obsessed with gratifying their desires, they become vulnerable to manipulation. Salò is therefore as much a dystopian satire, in the mold of A Clockwork Orange, as it is a historical depiction of late-fascist Italy. “It’s the first time I’m making a film about the modern world,” Pasolini said of his creation.

Pasolini’s idea of beauty reflected his politics. He had a way of finding the beautiful in the squalid, and the squalid in the beautiful. His attitude was summed up in his description of Rome, the setting of many of his novels and films, as “surely the most beautiful city in Italy, if not the world. But it is also the most ugly … the richest, the most wretched.” In his films, the hoodlums of the Eternal City possess a raw kind of beauty, while the wealthy are disfigured by an unseen ugliness.

It’s a technique clear in Salò, too. The elegant palace; the handsome youth; the final scene, where two young fascist guards dance together intimately while their victims are tortured elsewhere. How can such a terrible film be so exquisite? It’s as if Pasolini is warning us: no matter how dazzling something can appear in our consumerist society, it can still be rotten at its core.

Pasolini believed he had witnessed “Italy’s ruin”, and this pained him. His friend, the novelist Alberto Moravia, observed that Pasolini was a “great poet in the Italian tradition of mourning the fact that Italy is no longer the country it used to be”. He thought that Italy had lost its richness and vitality; that it had sacrificed its soul for a meaningless mass culture.

There are plenty of differences between the shabby chaos of Italy in the Years of Lead and our own digital moment. All the same, Pasolini was arguably something of an oracle, for in Salò you can spot a vision of our own twisted consumerist society. The system that Pasolini was criticizing has since been accelerated by technology. But that technology, and the instant gratification it offers, doesn’t seem to be making us happier. We’re now living in a world where Elon Musk’s Grok has been producing sexualized images at a rate of about 190 per minute; where so-called “gooners” watch hardcore pornography for days at a time. Like the fascists in Salò, these gooners numb themselves to pleasure, and so end up searching for ever more extreme and graphic content.

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The rest of us don’t have it quite so bad. Yet we are still addicted to scrolling TikTok videos, Instagram reels, and brainrotting AI slop. Plenty of thinkers, from James Marriott to Jonathan Haidt, have argued that social media is poisoning the human spirit, spreading a form of squalid consumerism that even Pasolini would have found hard to grasp.

Of course, it would be pointless to call for a return to the distant, low-tech past. As much as he may have lamented the passing of the poorer, slower country of his youth, Pasolini could no more banish the Fiats as we can TikTok. And anyway, nostalgia risks obscuring the problems of bygone eras. All the same, the filmmaker’s skepticism of modernity’s deadening impact is surely worth remembering. He thought that it was essential to fully embrace life, not to withdraw from it. “The mark which has dominated all my work”, he said, “is the longing for life.”

The column is hardly a significant contribution to the literature of travel writing. Nor is it the most offensive account of an American in a foreign country ever written. But that it was met with such deep hostility speaks to a profound contemporary anxiety with what Datskovska did: dare to write unselfconsciously about a foreign country.

If Stacia Datskovska is too much for us, what would we do today with Martha Gellhorn? The travel writer and war correspondent, who died 25 years ago, looked upon many of the places she visited with a greater degree of scorn and disdain, disillusionment and despair, than any American undergraduate student in Florence could muster.

Gellhorn was like the protagonist of one of William Boyd’s cradle-to-grave novels. Born in 1908 and dead by 1998, she bore witness to an outstanding chunk of the period the historian Eric Hobsbawm described as the Age of Extremes. In the Madrid of 1937, she saw the republican government under the siege of General Franco’s fascist army. She followed Russia’s brutal invasion of Finland in 1939, and was there when Dachau was liberated by the American Army in April 1945. In Sixties Saigon, she documented the savage brutality of America’s military might. At an age when most people are comfortably retired, she was covering the war in El Salvador.

Gellhorn was always a witness, never a saint. Unlike many contemporary authors, she does not go out of her way to show she is a good person. Her moral probity is never foregrounded. Quite the opposite. She complains about the shit weather. She is annoyed by the unfamiliar customs of the people she encounters in foreign lands. This degree of honesty makes her an anachronism in today’s literary climate.

It is understandable that her reporting was full of bleak description; war is meant to be horrible. But her travel writing had none of the extravagant sweetness of, say, Jan Morris. Gellhorn’s collection Travels with Myself and Another describes five “horror stories”: thoroughly unsentimental accounts of human absurdity, rendered in brisk and unflashy prose. She never idealised a place once she had seen it, even if she had in anticipation. Before she visited Africa, for instance, it was “a vast lion-coloured plain, ringed by blue mountains. Beautiful wild animals roamed across the land and the sky went up forever. There were no people in this picture, no Africans or anyone else.” She kept trying to get editors to send her there, but eventually gave up and paid her own way. What she found was not the virgin territory of her imagination but a place full of human muck.

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She describes the local population in a way that would make many modern readers wince. “The natives look like Caribbean Negroes,” she writes of Douala, “and are dressed in odd scraps which are apparently the lot of poor blacks who live anywhere near whites.” Her descriptions of the places she visited flit between revulsion and fascination — at certain times dehumanising the people she meets, and at other times endowing them with human dignity. “They are also very pleasant,” she continues, “unlike US Negroes who have plenty of reason to be surly and usually are. These Africans are after all at home, and bosses in their house… no one can push them around just because they have a white skin.”

These are candid testaments from the journal she kept, rather than polished thoughts. But even when she is writing in hindsight, there is an unvarnished quality to her prose that can be challenging to read. In another chapter of Travels, about a visit to China in 1941, she describes Hong Kong as a city which was “nailed together hurriedly from odd lots of old wood and sounded like a chronic Chinese New Year”. There is no attempt to spare feelings; you could get cut by a spike here or a broken chip there.

She was the same, apparently, in real life. At a dinner party, Gellhorn was once asked by the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien where she got her clothes from. She briskly replied: “Oxfam — I don’t give a fuck about clothes.” Being liked did not interest her. She once told a woman interviewing her: “This conversation is so boring I think I’m going to faint.” This quality makes her bracing to read, and read about. She wrote it as she saw it, warts and all. She never shied away from looking at the Other, even when her conclusions on it were not nice.  This abrasive attitude to everyone and everything would be interpreted, today, as a form of reactionary politics; it is better to not write about foreign people than to sometimes write negatively about them, some say.

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The alternatives are to write uncritically, or write about yourself, and Gellhorn would do neither. Like Datskovska, Gellhorn doesn’t look inward. As her biographer, Caroline Moorehead, writes, she “had no gift for introspection. Not just no gift: no taste for it either. Autobiography, the long journey through the past, for her spelt if not excessive self-love then at the very least self-absorption.” She wished to present — and allow the reader to make up her own mind — rather than oppressively impose her own self on whatever she wrote. If she did write about what she felt, she never dwelled on these feelings; to her, they were a distraction from what was in front of her.

Travel, for Gellhorn, was not about self-discovery. Paradoxically, it is this self-effacing aspect that makes her writing more honest than the very subjective stories — of the Eat, Pray, Love variety — that dominate the travel genre today. These modern accounts tell us more about the writer than the place that is meant to be described.

She had a great nostalgia for travel before the genre transformed, before mass tourism. This was the time when the “Mediterranean was clean”, and “when you were a person not a sheep, herded in airports, railway stations, ski-lifts, movies, museums among your fellow sheep”. In this instance, Gellhorn is asserting her self against what she sees as the homogenising tendency of the ski-lifts, the museum, the railway station. She looked back fondly at a time when it was uncomfortable to travel; she looked down on her sanitised present. “If attendance at airports was compelled by law,” she wrote, “we would protest in marches, demonstrations, picket the White House and Parliament, take the case to the World Court, write to The Times, raise the roof.”

But she couldn’t stop travelling. The bliss of getting out of oneself was so immeasurably rich to her. Once we are finally “inside the plane, our faces change, we toss jokes about, laugh, chat to strangers.” One doesn’t need to approve of all her observations, or sympathise with her fondness for an older age of foreign travel, to find some inspiration in her approach to writing. She could be grumpy and intolerant, parochial and savage, but she always strove to look outwards. Gellhorn’s was a life that testified to the importance of writing about foreign lands uninhibitedly and vigorously; without such travellers, our view of the world is diluted.

While most of us have spent the week praising the life and legacy of Queen Elizabeth II, she has been denounced by those who claim to speak on behalf of truth and justice. She wasn’t a benign monarch, these people say. She sponsored a system of racist division, and any black or brown person who mourns her death is a stooge of Empire and white supremacy. A House Negro. Self-hating. A coon.

It is indisputable that the British Empire committed many atrocities, and many of its advocates were motivated by racism. But the idea that Queen Elizabeth II’s international legacy can be reduced to colonial oppression and violence is a perverse distortion of history. When many West Indians moved to Britain in the Fifties and Sixties, their claim to a British identity and equal status with native white Britons was on the basis of being subjects of the Crown. Should they have rejected this? Is any black or brown person who accepts a knighthood a traitor to his race? Are all those nations where they are now flying flags at half-mast — from India to Nigeria to Jamaica to Ghana to Trinidad and many, many more — governed by self-hating coons? Every single one of them? Were all the postcolonial leaders who either decided to stay in the Commonwealth or join it motivated by profound self-loathing? This is not just an offensive argument: it’s patently absurd.

Rather than being a symbol of white supremacy, Queen Elizabeth II devoted much of her reign to fostering amicable relations with those countries which used to be a part of the British Empire. In April 1947, Princess Elizabeth spent the afternoon of her 21st birthday recording a filmed message to “all the peoples of the British Commonwealth Empire, wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and whatever language they speak”. Elizabeth calmly outlined her dedication to the colonies and countries that linked through Britain like a daisy-chain across the world: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” It was a promise she would keep.

By the time of her coronation, in June 1953, the Commonwealth, which had emerged after decolonisation, only had eight countries. They wanted to rule themselves, but they didn’t want to completely sever their relationship with Britain. It would be tempting to describe the Commonwealth as Anglophone, a continuation of the countries Britain conquered and subjugated, and imposed their language and customs upon: the pink splash across old maps of the world. But this is a simplistic way of looking at this mosaic of nations.

The picture is a complex one. Canada is a majority English-speaking and minority French-speaking country; Cameroon is a majority French-speaking country and minority English-speaking country, colonised by the Germans before it was handed over to France. Both Canada and Cameroon are part of the Commonwealth. The official language of Mozambique is Portuguese — and when it joined the Commonwealth, in 1995, it became the first country to do so that was never a part of the British Empire. Togo and Gabon, two former French colonies, have joined the Commonwealth this year. They are the 55th and 56th members. It is a club that people want to join, not a union imposed by force.

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If it’s not language, then what unites these nations? To a great extent, it was that quietly-spoken young woman, who, five years after giving that speech on her 21st birthday, became the Queen of Britain, and assumed the ceremonial position of managing the loss of an Empire. She didn’t bestride these newly independent countries like an aggrieved dictator. Nor was she a passive caretaker. She listened, and learned, and exercised her inquisitive mind. She was devoted to internationalism, and many nations warmed to those qualities. Elizabeth was the greatest diplomat of the 20th century.

Her diplomatic qualities were crucial in 1961. By that time, the Commonwealth had grown from eight to 12 members. That year, she would have to visit one small but profoundly consequential country in west Africa, and make sure it didn’t leave the club.

Ghana was the first black African country to gain independence, and it soon became the first African country to join the Commonwealth. The president was a charismatic firebrand called Kwame Nkrumah. He spent the Thirties studying sociology and economics in Pennsylvania, and selling fish on the streets of New York. After he moved to England, in 1945, he was often in Camden cafés chatting amiably with communists and anti-imperialists. When Nkrumah moved back to the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then known, and threatened the status quo by launching a mass strike, the governor-general Sir Charles Arden-Clarke described him as a “thoroughgoing communist”.

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1961 was the white heat of the Cold War: five years after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, and the year the Berlin Wall went up. Africa was decolonising, and many of these new nations were being courted by the Soviet Union. The Queen was scheduled to arrive in Ghana on 9 November 1961. The month before, Nkrumah had visited Moscow. Closer to Ghana, five days before her visit, a bomb exploded in the capital city of Accra which damaged a statue of Nkrumah.

The Queen was undaunted, telling Prime Minister Harold MacMillan: “I am not a film star. I am the head of the Commonwealth — and I am paid to face any risks that may be involved. Nor do I say this lightly. Do not forget that I have three children”.

The trip was a peach. She landed first in Accra and met several government ministers and dignitaries. These diplomatic endeavours were followed up by meetings with the chiefs and kings of Ghana. According to Nkrumah’s personal photographer, the Queen was genuinely interested in the people she met, asking incisive questions, for instance, about the cultural significance of native dress.

She was introduced to High Life music — a fusion of the native Akan musical rhythms and Jazz — and danced with Nkrumah. The revolutionary pan-Africanist leader, the chum of Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong, danced happily with the Queen of Britain; the Commonwealth was a model of tolerance. (This, at a time when any black man who stared at a white woman for too long could be lynched in the United States.)

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Ghana never left the Commonwealth. And by the Seventies, with revolutionary fervour ramping up across the developing world, the club had more than doubled its membership to nearly 30 nations.

If the legend of Elizabeth as the silent, passive doll Queen were true, the Commonwealth never would have worked. Her public inscrutability belied a deeply engaged person. Eugenia Charles, the Prime Minister of Dominica, and the so-called Iron Lady of the Caribbean in the Eighties, said of the Queen that, “it’s obvious that she’s not just talking pieties. She’s interested, definitely interested, in what is happening in each of those countries”.

The Queen of the Commonwealth was not the mute Queen of postage stamps. She was articulate, she argued, she cajoled. The former Prime Minister of Fiji, Kamisese Mara, put it like this: “If you don’t know what you’re talking about she’ll soon let you know that you’re not quite fully versed in what you’re talking about because she’s so knowledgeable.”

Shridath Ramphal, the former Commonwealth Secretary-General, knew this Queen, a version largely hidden from the rest of us: “Every prime minister, every president, and I’ve been up against some pretty radical ones, militant ones, ones that you might think probably don’t care too much for this all monarchical thing.” Even they, according to Ramphal, placed maximum importance “on those 15-20 minutes when they can sit down with the Queen and talk about their countries, their problems, because she knows them very well”.

Her ability to approach internecine conflict with wisdom and knowledge was never on greater display than in her attitude to the nation where she was staying on her 21st birthday: South Africa. A year after that speech, South Africa started introducing a series of laws that prohibited marriage between people of different races; forced people of certain races to live in certain areas; and reinforced and expanded all pre-existing discriminatory practices in the country. These laws institutionalised the inferior status of black people. The word Apartheid entered the lexicon.

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In 1961, South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth. The Afrikaner government saw the Queen as a symbol of British imperialism, and they wanted to be free to pursue their racist policies without hindrance. In 1986, Commonwealth leaders all decided, with the consent of the Queen, to impose economic sanctions on South Africa. The Queen later developed a strong relationship with Nelson Mandela. He called her Elizabeth, and she called him Nelson. He was the only non-royal to call her by her first name. In 1994, four years after Mandela was released from prison, and in the year of its first ever democratic and multiracial election, South Africa rejoined the Commonwealth.

The Queen’s decades of service within the Commonwealth display a more nuanced picture of the relationship between the British empire and the postcolonial world. This is a story that is about more than conflict. To have the Commonwealth — that legacy of the Empire — embraced by leaders who also embraced Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx illustrates the complexities of the post-colonial relationship to Britain. These leaders detested white supremacy and brutal economic exploitation. But they also loved the Queen. Through the dignity of her character, she transcended hateful divisions.

Many of these post-colonial leaders, like Nkrumah, later degenerated into corrupt and authoritarian despots. Others, like Mandela, are universally acclaimed. But for most of them the Queen was a genuinely popular figure. A source of unity rather than oppression. An embodiment of the greatest virtues in a divided world: curiosity, compassion, grace and knowledge.

King Charles may not possess exactly the same qualities as his mother, but he is the custodian of a magnificent legacy. Despite the fact Barbados removed the Queen as its head of state last year, it is still a part of the Commonwealth. And I predict many more countries will want to join. And despite the bitterness of parochial diaspora activists, we have this to console ourselves with: our head of state, for 70 years, was a unifying figurehead across the world.

Schools closed and the summer exams were cancelled, but I kept my new job. It was a comprehensive school, and my brief was to tutor kids who were academically struggling through Google Meet, the fat and ugly cousin of Zoom. Because everything was up in the air, I was given free rein to teach the kids whatever I wanted that could reasonably be considered English Literature. So I decided to teach them about the poets I have enjoyed since I was little, such as Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney. Those few months constituted one of the best periods of my life.

The OCR, one of the main exam boards in England, will remove the poetry of Heaney and Larkin (among other poets) from its school syllabus this September. Their justification is simple: the syllabus needs to be more inclusive and exciting. Heaney and Larkin are male and stale. They reflect a bygone era that doesn’t speak to an increasingly diverse classroom. They will be replaced by poets from British-Somali, British-Guyanese and Ukrainian backgrounds, and one of the first black women in 19th century America to publish a novel. 14 out of the 15 new writers added to the syllabus will be non-white. Jill Duffy, the chief executive of the OCR, stated: “This is an inspiring set of poems that demonstrates our ongoing commitment to greater diversity.”

This change is part of a wider movement to decolonise the curriculum. For too long, supporters of this movement argue, schools have deliberately excluded people of colour from the English canon and History textbooks. Just as ethnic minority people are discriminated against across society, they are marginalised in the classroom, and the latter injustice reinforces the former. One way to challenge this state of affairs is to decentre white, male authors, replacing them with writers who fall into other categories.

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Jeffrey Boakye, the author of the recent book, I Heard What You Said, is a prominent advocate for decolonising the curriculum. Boakye, a black British man of Ghanaian heritage, argues that teachers should engage more vocally with race politics. For him, “being a non-white teacher is an inherently political position”. And the reason why the curriculum is “so unapologetically white is the arrogance of empire”. Our values, he argues, are rooted not in “scientific, political and industrial revolutions” but “in genocide, slavery and colonialism”.

Boakye is an English teacher. And English, according to the movement to decolonise the curriculum, should advance social justice. In his book, Boakye refers to one of his students, a black girl called Gertrude; he writes that after he taught her a poem called “Checking Out Me History”, by the British-Guyanese poet John Agard, she felt seen. “It spoke to her experience of a white education that didn’t speak to her sense of personal history.” The poem mentions figures from history like Toussaint L’Ouverture and Mary Seacole: we are supposed to believe it is great precisely because it celebrates black heroes.

The viewpoint of the curriculum decolonisers is based on the assumption that black students resonate most with poetry written by black poets. That is nonsense. Why should a black African student, for instance, identify at all with a poem written by a West Indian man? Because of their shared race? Race is not the only thing that defines the life and experiences of a person; I used to think only avowed racists believed it does. At a more practical level, why should a poem be taught if it can speak to students only on the basis of their being black: what about the Asian and white and mixed-race students in the classroom? This is not inclusion; it is division.

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Decolonising the curriculum takes place at a superficial level, whereas I taught Larkin to my students because his poems move me at a visceral level: they convey the sense that, yes, this is what it is like to be haunted by fear and loneliness and impotence. And they do so with artistic virtuosity, using the right words in the right order to express such feelings. Consider these contrasting descriptions of death in his late masterpiece “Aubade”, both of them spot on but stylistically different from each other: the straightforward description is the “anaesthetic from which none come round”, and the more elegant version is:

The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is not a male or stale sentiment; this is a poem full of versatility and exactness, range and compactness. In other words, it is characterised by stylistic diversity, which should be a more relevant form of diversity in an English Literature classroom than the vagaries of skin pigmentation.

The poetry critic Jeremy Noel-Tod argues in a piece for the New Statesman that someone like Larkin should be replaced by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. He writes that, “as a white teenager growing up in rural Norfolk in the Nineties, I wish my teachers had taken the chance to talk about the Soyinka poem in class”, because the Nigerian poet “might have helped us to understand structural racism as the scaffolding of the home country we took for granted”. If Noel-Tod wants to argue Soyinka is as good a poet as Larkin, fair enough, but his argument doesn’t reference art or merit. He is treating poetry as a sub-set of sociology — arguing that we should read non-white poets because they offer us insights into social and political issues.

If English is simply another variant of sociology or politics, why should the study of it be distinguished from these subjects? Sheffield Hallam University has recently been criticised for suspending its English Literature degree and incorporating it into a degree that consists of Literature, Creative Writing and Language. The justification for this proposal is that the study of English should serve a purpose, that it should have tangible benefits, such as enabling students to get a professional job. Many of the people who advocate for decolonising the curriculum might object to this, not recognising that they are also arguing that English should have a purpose — not getting students a job, but making them less racist. Even if they don’t officially want English to be assimilated into other fields of the humanities, like politics, in practice that is what they promote.

This is profoundly patronising to a writer such as Soyinka. He is the first African to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But a white poetry critic like Noel-Tod doesn’t value him for his artistry, but for his activism.

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Another problem with filtering literature through this rigidly ideological lens is that it disables the fundamental quality of any devoted lover of literature: curiosity. It stops us from reflecting on the particular cultural context of a poet or his poetry, and instead takes a reductive view of writers. Consider the case of Seamus Heaney: why should a poet who grew up in rural Northern Ireland, in a Catholic family, be seen as embodying the white, male British establishment? Ultimately, though, what matters to those who love Heaney and Larkin is not their identities; it is their expert manipulation of language.

I love the firmness of Heaney’s lyricism and his scrupulous eye. In “Blackberry-Picking”, for instance, he writes of both the joy (“You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet / Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it / Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for / Picking”) and the darker side to this endeavour (“But when the bath was filled we found a fur, / A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. / The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush / The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour”). This is what ultimately distinguishes poetry, not communicating a direct message, but evoking a powerful sensibility.

Of course, a poet’s ability to do this does not depend on their race. The fact that great poets from non-white backgrounds are excluded from study is bad. But it is bad not because the identities of such poets are not being “centred”; it is bad because students are missing out on great poetry. Blindness to the artistic work of ethnic minority people is worthy of criticism, but assessing such writers on a tokenistic or ideological basis is another form of blindness: in both cases, the poetic merits of their work are ignored.

Those who support decolonising the curriculum see the relationship between non-white and white authors only in terms of conflict. They see it as a zero-sum game: we need to decentre white and male writers to empower writers from marginalised communities. But this underestimates the debt that many non-white authors owe to the traditions of Western literature. Writers are always in conversation with each other. Toni Morrison is renewing William Faulkner; Zadie Smith is renewing Dickens; Derek Walcott is renewing Homer. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was written in part as a rejection of Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but the title of Achebe’s novel is taken from a poem by William Butler Yeats and the plot resembles the structure of a Greek tragedy. There is some conflict between white and non-white authors in the canon, but there is also great continuity between these two groups. By ignoring this fact, Boakye is reinforcing an assumption anti-racists ought to dismantle: that to be Western is to be white.

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W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most influential radical black thinkers of the 20th century. But he also loved Richard Wagner. Du Bois proudly affixed himself to Western culture. As he put it, “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the colour line, I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. From out of the caves of evening that swing between strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”

C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian Trotskyist, similarly affirmed an attachment to Western civilisation: “I didn’t learn literature from the mango tree,” he once wrote, “or bathing on the shore and getting the sun of colonial countries; I set out to master the literature, philosophy and ideas of Western civilisation. That is where I have come from and I would not pretend to be anything else.” In his dying days, when he was visited by Edward Said, James wanted to talk to Said about classical music rather than colonialism. When he died, James was called the Black Plato by the Times.

The traditions of Western literature and culture belong just as much to black people as white people. It is part of my inheritance. And that is why I loved teaching those kids: I was sharing what belonged just as much to them as to the kids with hundreds of books in their family homes or a private education.

My favourite student was a boy called Peter. I could tell from his surname that his family came from Ghana. He came to every single lesson, while all my other students found an excuse to skip at least a few classes. I never met Peter. I still don’t even know what he looks like; his camera was always turned off. But we cultivated a connection, not through the fact that both of our families come from west Africa, but by familiarising ourselves with the great works of English Literature. We read Larkin and Heaney, but we also read Derek Walcott. We read snippets of prose too — George Orwell and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. The priority in studying James and Morrison was the elegance of their sentences, the effect of their imagery, and the sophistication of their tone. When we did approach the topic of racism, we had a foundation to build on. And all the time, I never felt the need to “decentre” white, male authors or slap on diverse voices for the sake of it. I was simply guided by what has moved me since I was a boy and continues to move me now: the transcendent beauty of great art.

Many of the protests in the summer after the death of George Floyd looked like festivals; people swayed as they sang. And at a time when actual festivals were banned, the events possessed an especially transgressive allure. We were breaking out of a recently organised old world of restrictions into a new one where the cause of racial justice transcended the obligations of social distancing.

The rules, the protestors affirmed, should not apply to them. In the first month after the murder, over 14,000 American protestors were arrested. In Washington DC, cars were burned down and bathroom stalls were spray painted with the “Amerikkka”. A fire was lit in the nursery of the parish house of a church called St John’s Episcopal Church, which is known as the “church of the presidents”, because every American president has attended it at least once since it was built in 1816.

But the nature of the protests constituted a break at a deeper level too, a new paradigm shift in racial thinking, both in America and across the rest of the world. There were protests in over 60 countries and all continents — including Antarctica. Now, racial justice is a matter of reflexive urgency; there’s no time to consider national or cultural context. Many expressions of anti-racism look like religious revivalism, any analysis of the complex realities of black people obscured by penance and sanctimony.

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Antiracism won't save you

By Tomiwa Owolade

The basic outline of what happened on the evening of May 25, 2020 was reported in every major newspaper on the planet. A middle-aged black man called George Floyd was choked to death in Minnesota by a police officer named Derek Chauvin, because Floyd was suspected of using fake money to buy cigarettes. His Name Is George Floyd, a new book by Washington Post journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, substantiates this outline with a glut of information. It is a detailed investigation into the life of Floyd, the nature and context of his murder, and the impact of his death on wider American society.

The authors conducted over 400 interviews for the book. They interviewed Floyd’s siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, lovers and friends. We get a solid picture of the man. We also learn a lot about Floyd’s ancestors — who they were, what they did, and where they fit within the narrative of America’s vexed racial history.

But there is very little in the book on the global impact of Floyd’s death. The authors do not have a lot of interest in the wider world, nor do they seem to have a great understanding of it. In one historical passage, for instance, they write that Scotland was a country that was dominated by “the British”. Colonies always know more about the metropole than the metropole knows about the colonies; faced with such American ignorance, it’s easy to conclude that the former colony has become the coloniser.

Culture changed so rapidly in America in the wake of that summer of protests, and we in Britain soon followed suit. Many American publications, for instance, started to capitalise the b in black —  including the New York Times, Washington Post and the Associated Press. Many British publications swiftly did the same: the b in black is now capitalised in the London Review of Books, for example, and the Times Literary Supplement. It’s become de rigueur so rapidly in British publishing that, when I submitted a proposal for my book, about the way American race discourse influences Britain, in 2021, I had to explain why I didn’t capitalise the word black.

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Lori Tharps makes the case for capitalising black: “Black with a capital ‘B’”, she writes, “refers to a group of people whose ancestors were born in Africa, were brought to the United States against their will, spilled their blood, sweat and tears to build this nation into a world power and along the way managed to create glorious works of art, passionate music, scientific discoveries, a marvelous cuisine, and untold literary masterpieces. When a copyeditor deletes the capital “B”, they are in effect deleting the history and contributions of my people.” Unlike Tharps, though, I am not American.

My ancestors were not brought against their will to the country where I’m currently living. In fact, most black British people are now black Africans, which means recent immigrants, or the children of immigrants, from independent African nations. The particular historical relationship between the transatlantic slave trade and black Americans does not neatly apply to the contemporary black British population. Pretending that it does would be to deny the history of my people, to borrow the argot of Tharps. Black people in Britain are essentially immigrant communities — the average black American, by contrast, can trace his ancestry further back than the average white American.

But in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, the catch-all framework of “Black Lives Matter” was imported to every corner of the planet, even though race relations are not the same throughout the world. They are instead mediated by a country’s unique history and culture. Now as then, insufficient attention is paid to the different contexts of the black people who do not live in America; we are simply put in the mould of black Americans.

It was bizarre, watching the majority of liberal democracies use the example of America to make sense of race in their own countries. People on the streets of central London were screaming “hands up don’t shoot”. British university students were passionately denouncing discrimination against BIPOC people — black, indigenous people of colour — without recognising that speaking for the interests of indigenous people in Britain makes one sound more like Nick Griffin than 20-year-old Molly studying History at Bristol University.

Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be an Anti-Racist monopolised the nonfiction bestseller’s charts in Europe for many months. And this trickled down to social media. Instagram listicles stipulated you needed to read those books if you wanted to understand the condition of black people. Not black American people (though these books are not even useful for that) but black people in toto.

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And, while the liberal democracies were committing penance, countries with distinctively worse human rights records swooped in like hungry vultures. The supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, said dark-skinned people face the prospect of being killed “within minutes” whenever they walk down the streets of America. The Russian Foreign Ministry condemned America’s human rights abuses.

Another patron saint of anti-racism, Layla Saad, was born and raised in Britain and now lives in Qatar. She has never lived in America in her life. Yet her book, Me and White Supremacy, is explicitly targeted at an American audience, and reached number five in the New York Times bestseller list in the summer of 2020. There is no mention in the book that she lives in a country that imports slave labour; there is a lot about the devastating toxicity of microaggressions. Although she doesn’t live in America, Saad lives on the internet (she has 650k followers on Instagram) and being on the anglophone internet is like inhabiting a terrain utterly dominated by America. The Atlantic writer Helen Lewis compared it to being in a room with a giant rhinoceros.

What is lost in all of this is the specific circumstance of Floyd’s death — aggressive policing, economic deprivation, the fraught relationship between black American communities and the police, drug dependency, and America’s war on drugs. And herein lies the value of His Name is George Floyd.

Samuels and Olorunnipa tell us that George Perry Floyd Jr — known simply as Perry to his family and friends — was born in October 1973 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to George Floyd Sr and Cissy Floyd, two people who wanted to make it as singers. North Carolina was their native state, but Floyd Jr grew up in the Third Ward of Houston, Texas, a poor and largely black area. He attended schools that were racially segregated and underfunded. His high school, Jack Yates Senior High School, has a student population that is 90% black and 10% Hispanic. This kind of education and upbringing is inconceivable for a black British person.

As a kid and teenager, Floyd wanted to be a rap star, a pro football player, and a supreme court justice. His life turned out very differently. He was arrested more than 20 times in his life by the police, often for dealing drugs, and he spent almost a third of his adult life in jail. He suffered from high blood pressure, anxiety, depression and drug addiction.

He moved to Minneapolis from Texas in 2014. A year earlier, he had been released after serving four years in prison for aggravated robbery with a weapon, a charge he personally denied but nevertheless accepted as part of a plea bargain for a reduced sentence. In Minnesota, he wanted a reset in his life. He worked variously as a security guard at a nightclub and as a truck driver. But he lost those jobs during the 2020 Covid pandemic.

You cannot show genuine respect to a group of people if you do not acknowledge their context — their origins, their distinctive lives, the communities and cultures they inhabit, who they are rather than what they represent. Expressing solidarity to communities victimised by racism is a good thing. But the global conversation about race went past the expression of solidarity after the death of George Floyd. And this heightened pitch is reflected in Britain to the detriment of black people, as we lose sight of the fact that they are not all the same — which of course should be the very first insight of anti-racism.

Consider British GQ’s next cover star, the Ealing-born Bukayo Saka. The 20-year-old English footballer has had a redemptive story since he missed the losing penalty in the Euros 2020 final last summer; he has been the brightest star in a rejuvenated Arsenal team that has a good chance of getting into the top four in the Premier League.

Along with a snazzy photo shoot, Saka recorded a video for GQ in which he lists his ten most essential items. There is an iPad, a portable music speaker, some Twix chocolate bars, a football, a PlayStation, trainers, and moisturiser: all the things you’d expect any sporty young man to be proud of possessing.

But Saka also included something else — a Bible, gifted to him by his father. “Religion is a big part of my life,” Saka says in the video. “Obviously I’m a strong believer in God.” Of course, by religion Saka means Christianity. And the use of obviously is striking: why is it obvious he would be a strong believer in God as a young person born and bred in the capital city of a western European nation? Well, it is obvious to him because of his family. Saka comes from a Nigerian family. And for many black African communities in Britain, Christianity is everything.

So Saka, one of the standard-bearers of the England national football team — which substitutes for religion in the country at large — also embodies another fascinating nexus: the relationship between a black British identity and Christianity, a religion that was introduced to anglophone west Africa by the British.

There’s a concept called the pizza effect. The original pizza was once a basic dish found in different pockets of Italy: a flat bread spread with tomato sauce; no toppings. When immigrants from Sicily and southern Italy moved to America between the late 19th and early 20th century, they introduced pizza to Americans. And these Italian-Americans, on the streets of New York and Philadelphia and Chicago, gave this basic dish a renewed colour: it became a food of multiple toppings and textures. After the First World War, pizza was reintroduced to Italy. And it became pizza: not just a flat baked bread with some tomato sauce — but a national dish of magnificent variation.

The same is true of Christianity in Britain today.

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How Christianity kills itself

By Tomiwa Owolade

Christianity is collapsing throughout Britain. A British Social Attitudes Survey from 2018 concluded that this decline is “one of the most important trends in postwar history”. More than half of the British public now say they do not belong to any religion, compared to 31% in 1983. But there are parts of the country where the flame of the religion is still bright.

You have to go to London, especially the inner-city, to find England’s most vigorous forms of Christianity. It is largely West African immigrants who fill the pews of decaying churches from Peckham to Woolwich, who renovate new churches in Brixton and Lewisham, and who volunteer for Christian centres and charities up and down the capital. If you want a solid sense of the sacred, a connection to Britain’s ancient Christian past, you are more likely to find it while eating jollof rice in a big tent in Kennington than eating a Yorkshire pudding in a small room in Harrogate.

This is not a utopian vision of liberal multiculturalism. London is the most cosmopolitan city in Britain. We all know that. But it’s also the most religious and socially conservative city in the country. 62% of Londoners, for instance, identify as religious, compared with 53% of the rest of the country. 25% of Londoners attend a religious service at least once a month; only 10% of people outside London do. 24% of Londoners think sex before marriage is wrong, compared to 13% of the population. London is the most homophobic city in the country: 29% of people in London think homosexuality is wrong, while 23% outside London think this.

The city is not only diverse in markers of visual difference, such as skin colour and types of dress, but also in values. There is social libertinism and social conservatism and everything squeezed in-between. Many tend to focus on diversity in terms of surfaces, rather than diversity of values. The awkward tensions of the latter are tacitly accepted, like a squeaky-clean parent knowing his kids spent the night doing drugs in their bedroom but not mentioning it at breakfast the next morning. It’s a very British sort of relationship — traversing that thin border between tolerance and hypocrisy.

In the city 56% of Christians pray regularly. Only 32% outside of it do. London is more Christian today than it was during Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister. According to David Goodhew, the director of ministerial practice at Cranmer Hall in Durham University, between 1979 and 2012 there was a 50% rise in the number of churches in the capital city. Many of them are built in boroughs of London with a large black population such as Southwark.

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In defence of wokeness

By Tomiwa Owolade

The political scientist Eric Kaufmann points out that secularisation is “almost entirely a white British phenomenon”. When the share of white British people decreases in an area, secularisation also slows down. The number of white British people who ticked no religion in the census rose from 15.4% in 2001 to 28% in 2011. By contrast, the number of black Africans who ticked no religion in that same time span rose only by a tiny amount: from 2.3% to 2.9%.

Given it’s black Africans who are driving the rise of Christianity in London, conservatives who want to renew Christianity in Britain would do best to stop relying on public pronouncements by Justin Welby and Pope Francis. Instead, they should lobby for an open-borders immigration policy for all the African countries Britain once colonised.

Many of these communities are Christians because of the British Empire. Christian missionaries may have been a part of colonialism, but their influence extended beyond the colonial government, establishing schools and discouraging practices hitherto common in pre-colonial Nigeria — human sacrifice, slavery, twin infanticide, and polygamy.

Christian missionary schools also provided the foundation for many forms of African nationalism. Pro-independence leaders, like Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe, were educated at schools established by missionaries. Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, an icon of revolutionary black African nationalism and the first leader of a black African country to gain independence from a European colonial power, was educated at a Catholic missionary school.

Meanwhile, Yoruba Christians have incorporated the God of the Old and New Testament into their own language. Whenever Yoruba people pray, for instance, they use the word Olódùmarè to refer to the God of the Bible, and this is the same name for the God of the native Yoruba religion.

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It’s unsurprising, then, that many black Africans in Britain today emphasise the importance of Christianity to their identity. In general, black British people are more than twice as likely to say religion is very important to them. Most black British believers are Christian. Yet the centrality of Christianity to black British identity is hardly spoken about. Saka treasures his music record and his football. But on Instagram, his name is not Bukayo Saka but “God’s Child”.

Christianity can accommodate tension. It is both radical and conservative: it proclaims the downtrodden will inherit the earth and it praises life-long monogamy. It incorporates the puritanical fervour of Leviticus and the ravishing sensuality of the Song of Solomon. Its central figure is both a man who was abused and spat on and crucified, like a slave, but also a figure of transcendent divinity. What can be more beautifully Christian than the fact its future in the bosom of what was once the largest empire in the world is now being sustained by communities it once colonised?

Many people, like Oliver Dowden, the chairman of the Conservative Party, think that the culture wars in Britain are between the woke Left and the conservative Right. This is only partially correct. They are also between the liberal-Left and the woke Left; they are also civil wars.

Dowden made a speech a couple of weeks ago at an American think-tank called the Heritage Foundation. It wasn’t exactly Churchill in Fulton, Missouri, but it made a splash. Dowden denounced woke ideology as a terrifying force: “a social media mob,” he said, “can cancel you merely because you have dared to challenge one of the Left’s fashionable nostrums.”

Dowden’s analysis of woke politics is slightly misplaced; and so too is the criticism of the speech made by the former MP and government minister David Gauke in the New Statesman. Gauke is wrong because, though he admits cancel culture is a problem, he sees it as a minor nuisance.

I can understand how: if you think it’s simply a battle between academics and conservative journalists, it can seem like a minor conflict. One that is only played out in the hyperactive transient world of social media and radio talk-in shows. But it is not just a clash between Scylla and Charybdis. It is also a family fight. And this is why the word ‘woke’ should be used.

It is now fashionable among a certain type of Left-liberal or centrist to say ‘woke’ is a meaningless term. It is certainly true that it is much abused. Some newspaper columnists relish going after ‘woke snowflakes’ with the zeal of indiscriminate big-game hunters. I can see why one would want to remove themselves from that. It’s all so vulgar, and disavowing the term ‘woke’ thus seems like a cleaner choice.

But there is no point denying that there are conflicts around the issues of gender, free speech, race and culture. And that these conflicts are not only waged by the Right-wing press, but are in fact found within many institutions largely staffed by liberal-Left people. The culture wars, which are often derided as fake and drummed up by the Right, are real. They are an extension of politics — and politics is by its very nature oppositional.

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Woke also has a sharp Anglo-Saxon sting; it’s a name that sticks. “Social Justice Warriors” is too long and its acronymic version SJW is dull. Progressive is too loose and airy. Woke gets straight to the point, and is useful in conveying, in its aggressive consonantal force, the internecine nature of this conflict.

The transgender debate, for instance, is not a conflict between reactionaries and progressives. It is a battle between older liberal-Left women and younger progressive women; between older gay and lesbian radicals and younger ones. Mumsnet and the Observer have done more than conservative think tanks to highlight the tension between biological sex and gender identity. It is not lavishly funded conservative institutions but grassroots feminist organisations such as Woman’s Place UK which are at the forefront of the fight against gender-identity politics in Britain.

It may seem like an intergenerational conflict because older women care less about what people think of them than younger women. But there are many younger people who are privately sceptical about elements of the politics of social justice. The key word here is privately.

We tend to think this conflict is made up of Right-wing cranks and irate historians (and a group of inexplicable feminists!) against an online-savvy Left. But ask many people in the publishing industry about what they really think of J.K. Rowling, Kate Clanchy and sensitivity readers — and the obscuring effect of self-censorship becomes clear. Some of them will be happy to chat to you, over the phone or in a pub, and express their views. But it has to be off-the record.

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These people are Guardian readers. They hate the Tories. They support Black Lives Matter, and are gravely worried about climate change. But they are scared stiff about saying the treatment of J.K. Rowling was terrible, that Clanchy made a mistake in responding to a Goodreads comment on Twitter but her detractors have behaved terribly, and that the use of sensitivity readers is crude and patronising. This is what they believe, but they don’t want to lose their jobs.

People who say woke is meaningless are evasive about this intra-Left conflict. They point to people such as Robert Tombs and David Abulafia, who will gladly write columns for the Telegraph excoriating the woke Left. Tombs will (falsely) claim in the Times that Churchill was not a racist. But where are the academics who will argue that Churchill was a racist but also a great man? When is the Guardian going to publish that?

Such people do exist, but if they think any criticism of woke politics will put them in the same camp as people like Tombs, they’ll prefer to stew away quietly. Many of the same people who bemoan the divisive nature of the culture wars are doing absolutely nothing to make it more nuanced. Claiming that certain figures from the past who were racist were not in fact racist is an extreme view; but so is denying that some of these racist people should not be considered heroic or virtuous or praiseworthy in other respects.

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In English departments, many academics do not want to be labelled as racists, so they publicly acquiesce to calls to decolonise the curriculum, but many of them are, again, quietly sceptical. They value the principle of diversity; they also subscribe to a humanist approach to literature that affirms great books can’t be wholly reduced to politics. They love equality. But they also love pluralism and honest intellectual discussion.

They know these things should not conflict with each other — we can consider the politics of a text without viewing that text entirely through the lens of politics; we can value both diversity and frank intellectual debate. But they live in an atmosphere in which they are in conflict. And so they do nothing about it because they don’t want to face a backlash.

This is why saying and using ‘woke’ is important. It brings what is obscure into the open. It allows the debate to be had within the liberal-Left, where it needs to be had. It is clarifying.

But many (here, here, here, here, here, and here) argue that cancel culture doesn’t really exist. It’s just a Right-wing talking point. To which I would respond: how do you know? There is so much self-censorship going on that people are not being honest about what they believe about certain sensitive issues. They don’t have the wealth or power of J.K. Rowling; they are scared of losing their jobs. That is cancel culture.

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In another liberal-Left organisation, the Labour Party, the tensions are revealed by a poll last year which found that only 25% of Labour Party voters support defunding the police — one key policy of woke ideology. Even among 18-24 year olds, the wokest demographic, it is only 44%. When asked whether we should view society’s problems through the lens of white privilege, the poll also found that only 29% of Labour voters agreed. More than half think “woke practices” have gone too far.

Of course, people have complex views. One might support taking the knee, believe statues of certain slave traders like Edward Colston should be taken down, and believe that we should learn more about slavery and colonialism at school, but such people might still be critical of other aspects of woke ideology. This is why they would be reluctant to describe themselves as anti-woke. To do so might imply opposition to all those things. But they could also describe themselves as non-woke or woke-sceptical; the fact that wokeness can be ambiguous does not mean it is a meaningless term. It just means it can be ambiguous.

Wokeness has a family resemblance to other progressive ideologies — but it is also distinct. Many socialists are non-woke; their analysis is rooted in class politics rather than identity. I also think it’s lazy to simply describe wokeness as liberalism. It is often profoundly illiberal. If woke-deniers think the Right is often misusing the term, they should take ownership of it. Simply saying ‘woke’ is a meaningless term, without offering a more attractive alternative, is a form of evasion.

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One reason why this matters on the liberal-Left is because the vast majority of 18-24 year olds now back liberal-Left parties. There is an old adage that people become more conservative as they get older. But if the changes in people’s lives which lead them to become conservative, such as owning property and having kids, are becoming increasingly rare, then that transition to conservatism might not come to pass for many young people. This is why the battle between the woke Left and the non-woke or woke-sceptical Left is especially salient. It has repercussions for all of us.

Questions such as: what is a woman, how should we examine our past, how we should think about race in an increasingly diverse society, and how we should think about free speech and tolerance are all absolutely key for trying to make sense of the nature of public discourse today and in the future. They ultimately boil down to the question of who we are, and what we should do about it.

But someone who more clearly embodied the figure of the satyr, and is in the process of being cancelled, was Norman Mailer. According to an article by Michael Wolff in the Ankler, plans to publish a collection of Mailer’s essays for the centenary of his birth next year have been abandoned by his publisher Random House. Wolff writes that a junior staff member was offended by an essay Mailer wrote in the 1957 entitled “The White Negro”, in which Mailer rhapsodises about the revolutionary potential of black people in a slightly creepy way. But it’s not exactly clear why the Mailer book has been cancelled. In any case, you can still read the “The White Negro” at Dissent magazine.

The essay valorises rebellion. It is about wanting “to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self”. Mailer was repulsed by anything bourgeois or conformist; he loved Jazz, which, he wrote, made a “knife-like entrance into culture”. The main character of “The White Negro” is the “hipster”, whose Mecca was Greenwich Village in New York, and who tended towards existentialism. Mailer was a Philosopher of Hip, which constituted a “ménage-à-trois” made up of the bohemian, the juvenile delinquent, and the Negro. The Hip was the marriage of black and white, but it was “the Negro who brought the cultural dowry”.

James Baldwin described the essay as “slumming”, but he also recognised that Mailer had taken Hip more seriously than the pretentious, patronising Jack Kerouac set. Indeed, Mailer wrote that “the over-civilised man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic”. But “to be a real existentialist … one must be religious, one must have one’s sense of the ‘purpose’”. Black Americans had this purpose because they were so marginalised in society; they lived life to the full because life was on the edge for them.

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The essay is not especially offensive. It relies on crude stereotypes about black people to advance its points, but it’s not The Turner Diaries. If anything will truly cancel Mailer, it is not outrage but indifference. How many people under 40 still read his work today?

In his own time the satyr was never marginalised by the American cultural establishment. In fact, his career was enabled by the fact that post-war America opened the door to things it had previously seen as threatening. Mailer was a straight white man, and so the cancellation of his essay collection could be seen as another strike against an enduring hierarchy. But he was also a Jew, and when he was growing up, many of America’s top universities, like Harvard and Yale, had quotas that limited the number of Jews they took in.

And so Mailer became the Don Juan of the literary world: Alfred Kazin once described him as the “Rabbi of screwing”. Norman Podhoretz said he was “immensely preoccupied with the issue of manly courage”. Mailer loved to arm wrestle with strangers and fist fight. This fed his fame. By 1960 he was firmly established as a public intellectual, but he wanted more drama, more violence. That year he decided to run for mayor of New York City. In November, during a party to celebrate his candidacy, he stabbed his wife Adele Morales and nearly killed her. Morales refused to press charges, and Mailer ultimately received probation and a suspended sentence.

He got off not only legally but socially. Rather than cancelling him, many of his contemporaries supported him. James Baldwin saw Mailer’s violence as a form of emancipation: “It is like burning down the house in order, at last, to be free of it”. Lionel Trilling, one of the most distinguished critics in America, saw it as a “Dostoyevkian ploy”, a way for Mailer to “test the limits of evil in himself”. In 1969, Mailer decided to run for Mayor of New York again. He was encouraged to do so by his friend, the feminist icon Gloria Steinem.

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So Mailer’s relationship with women is not straightforward. Kate Millett tried to make it seem so, in her book Sexual Politics: she condemned him for misogyny. In response, Mailer wrote “The Prisoner of Sex” for Harper’s magazine, in March 1971. His dispute with the burgeoning women’s liberation movement, he wrote, was its evasive attitude to biology. Women, because of their reproductive capacities, were men’s “only connection to the future”. But feminists sought to disentangle themselves from this reality. Women, he wrote, “were a step, or a stage, or a move or a leap nearer the creation of existence”. Without women, men would be deracinated: what would be the point of living if you can’t pass on your genes?

Although Mailer slept with many women, he denounced contraception. Every fuck was meaningful to him. Sex was an existential force, rather than a recreational activity. And this partly explains his appeal: he scrutinised life with a passionate intensity. This is insane, you think, reading some of his work. But you can’t stop reading. His seriousness can be invigorating.

This explains, I think, why Joan Didion — who has been canonised as a feminist saint after her recent death — endorsed Mailer’s “The Prisoner of Sex,” writing that his view “strikes me as exactly right”. Didion herself wrote a critical essay in 1972 about feminism, arguing that the movement was becoming trivial and infantilising: “Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children.” The novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who tweeted her irritation at the cancellation of the new Mailer essay collection, was also sympathetic to “The Prisoner of Sex,” writing that Mailer “is shameless in his passion for women, and one is led to believe anything he says because he says it so well”.

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Shameless is the perfect word for Mailer. He was invited to participate in the Town Hall debate in April 1971, sponsored by New York University and the Theater for Ideas, on the topic of women’s liberation. The panel included Germaine Greer. He was his usual abrasive self, threatening at one time, in response to jeers from the audience, to expose himself:

“If you wish me to act the clown, I’ll take out my modest little Jewish dick and put it on the table. You can all spit at it and laugh at it, and then I’ll walk away and you’ll find it was just a dildo I left there. I hadn’t shown you the real one.”

He also exposed himself in his writings, which can be compelling, or embarrassing. The two are inextricable: he risked embarrassment constantly because he was so naked in his passions and ambitions and insecurities. He stalked the twentieth century like a proud satyr: hideous, provocative, funny and insightful, and always true to himself.

This could make him a good fit for our time, where explicitness is tolerated, even if the explicitness we tolerate is often shrouded in paradoxes. We have the increasingly byzantine etiquette of online dating, but we can also watch anal gang bangs with a couple of clicks. Some contemporary figures are cancelled because they openly believe in biological sex, while some historical figures who promoted sex with children are celebrated.

Obscenity was treated in a less hypocritical and more transparent way in the past. We still have taboos; but it’s increasingly unclear what they are now. It seems Mailer isn’t being censured for nearly killing his wife, but for writing an essay about black people in an overly enthusiastic way.

He’d probably be delighted. The brouhaha with Random House will likely make more people pick up and read Mailer’s work; and he would rather be loudly castigated than consigned to obscurity. This attempt to bury him may undermine a more efficient form of cancellation — cultural amnesia.

Critical race theory is now widely accepted by the liberal-Left media and much of academia. It’s not just the bad laws of the Jim Crow south. And it’s not just a few racist people here and there. Racism is not some bad apples; it is as American as apple pie.

For Martin Luther King and, later, Barack Obama, American racism was the consequence of a liberal and egalitarian country failing to live up to its principles; for supporters of critical race theory, by contrast, these principles were predicated on the subjugation of black people. The American Dream is rotten to the core.

In critical race theory, then, the key historical moment is not the abolition of slavery — or the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which brought an end to segregation in public places — but the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that “separate but equal” public schooling was unconstitutional. It violated the fourteenth amendment — which, after former slaves were granted citizenship, had assured all citizens “equal protection of the laws”. If black Americans have separate schooling, they can’t realise that equality: so concluded the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

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This seems like a tremendous achievement. Indeed, in many standard textbooks on the history of the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board is seen as the first big crack in the edifice of Old Jim Crow. But the founding father of critical race theory was sceptical about its positive impact. In an article published in the Harvard Law Review in 1980, Bell argued that the decision was based on:

“value to whites, not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation.”

In other words, the decision was motivated not by principled idealism but cynical self-interest. Domestic legislation in the fifties was shadowed by the Cold War — and in the battle against communism, America wanted to be seen as a moral exemplar.

But Bell’s critique of Brown v. Board runs deeper than this. Bell considered himself a realist, and viewed those who celebrated Supreme Court victories with bemusement. A few laws don’t change 250 years of slavery followed by 100 years of segregation and terror. “My position”, he wrote in his 1992 Faces at the Bottom of the Well, “is that the legal rules regarding racial discrimination have become not only reified (that is, ascribing material existence and power to what are really just ideas) … but deified”. This is because “the worship of equality rules as having absolute power benefits whites by preserving a benevolent but fictional self-image, and such worship benefits blacks by preserving hope”.

Hope was the very emotion, however, that animated the politics of King and Obama. (The latter’s second book was entitled: The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.) But Bell is having none of this.

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“I think,” he writes, “we’ve arrived at a place in history where the harms of such worship outweigh its benefit”. Those who persist in clinging on to the vision of the nation as a bastion of enlightened values are, according to him, at best naive.

This display of world-weariness, in contrast to doe-eyed idealism, is one shared by the most esteemed black American intellectual in the second term of Obama’s presidency: Ta-Nehisi Coates. No one writes much about Coates anymore. Perhaps because he left Twitter. The last memorable thing he did was base a villain in a comic book on Jordan Peterson. But six years ago, after the publication of his book Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, he was anointed by Toni Morrison as James Baldwin’s successor — the nation’s intellectual and moral conscience on matters of race.

Coates isn’t a theoretician like Bell; he is a polemicist. In his writing, the realist attitude central to Bell’s critical race theory is expressed with piquant force. Racism is a constitutive part of America’s identity, Coates argues, and anyone who deviates from this fact is deluded, naive or malevolent. “There is nothing”, Coates writes about racists, “uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy”.

Coates is known for his essays in The Atlantic, which are stylish, personal, historical and very long. The overall mood is one of disenchantment. The American Dream is not for black people. Between the World and Me is written as a letter to his son, and it contains no consoling words for the future: “I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals”. The view that the moral arc of history bends towards justice is an illusion. “America”, Coates writes, “understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men”. He is an atheist.

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Bell was not; he was a Christian. And his detached pessimism was tempered by an aggressive moralism. In his book, Ethical Ambition, which mixes memoir and self-help, he emphasised that:

“humanity at its essence is both an ongoing readiness to recognize wrongs and try to make things better, and the desire to help those in need of assistance without expecting reward or public recognition”.

So there is a point in being human, and that point is to do good. The virtues that are most important to Bell are “passion, courage, faith, relationships, inspiration and humility”. He often reads less like a radical subversive than a hokey Grandpa, slipping you moral maxims rather than sweets. Which raises the question: how can someone with such piety end up conceiving an ideology characterised by doleful pessimism?

Bell is in truth an unlikely candidate for the godfather of critical race theory, an ideology sceptical about the positive impact of anti-racist legislation. When he was younger, he worked for the NAACP, the establishment anti-racism group that believed American society could be transformed through the legal system. He worked, in particular, as a civil rights lawyer in the fifties Deep South. But eventually the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights division asked him to stop being a member of the NAACP: they thought he couldn’t be objective. He quit his position in the department, but continued to work for the anti-racist organisation.

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One plausible way to reconcile these two sides of Bell — the moralist and the pessimist — is to emphasise his Christianity. He believed in the permanence of racism just like any Christian believes in the inevitability of sin — nevertheless, the inevitability of sin does not mean we shouldn’t try to be better.

But perhaps a better way to account for this tension — a way that explains the similarities between Bell and non-Christians like Coates — is to view his conception of critical race theory as a case of thwarted idealism in the American Dream. America did not become a post-racial utopia after the civil rights revolution; therefore racism is a permanent feature of American society. Just like every passionate atheist is in some sense an inverted believer, people like Bell who are so antagonistic to American idealism belie their underlying attachment to it. This is true of critical race theory in general.

Although he is not a Christian, Coates is as profoundly American as Bell. His criticism of the nation is animated by his acceptance of American exceptionalism. “One cannot”, he writes, “at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error”. His proposal is this: “to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard”. In other words, he takes at face value the ideals of the American Dream (the very same American Dream that, he argues, is not for black people).

Meanwhile, the opponents of critical race theory see its ideas as hostile to — or at least inconsistent with — America (Fox News has mentioned it over 1,900 times in four months). In an exact inversion of critical race theory’s contention that racism is present in every aspect of American life, many on the Right — in this case, Christopher Rufo — now complain that critical race theory has “pervaded every aspect of the federal government” and poses “an existential threat to the United States”. Rufo and his ilk aren’t opposed to, say, teaching the history of slavery and segregation in American schools; what they oppose is schoolchildren acknowledging their whiteness. Rufo calls it state-sanctioned racism.

The irony is that critical race theory is not, as it sees itself, a realist’s ideology. And it is not, as its main opponents view it, fundamentally un-American. Like many on the conservative American Right, it espouses an idealised view of the nation’s self-professed values: if they truly believed these values were fundamentally corrupt, then what would be the point, as Bell and Coates do, of holding America to them? The truly realist position is one like Coleman Hughes’s: he has shown, with evidence and dispassionate argumentation, that black Americans have made material progress in recent decades.

Although Rufo may deny this of himself, many on the conservative Right do cling on to a form of American idealism that is insensitive to the existence of racism. But critical race theorists cling on to their own idealism by concluding that, because America is not yet a post-racial society, racism is an inexorable feature of the country. The vision of the shining city on a hill becomes the sole means by which to judge the nation — while the material realities of black people fade into the distance.

This piece was originally published in August.

He eventually became a YouTube Bruh: that genre of male intellectual celebrity, like Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray, “destroying” idiots in bite-sized video clips. But the appeal of Hitchens, to me at least, wasn’t just polemical; he possessed a suavity that impressed me powerfully. He was just as likely to riff on Anthony Powell’s twelve-novel sequence on twentieth-century British upper-class life as to publicly humiliate a religious crank.

I was 13 when I first discovered him. He had a similar appeal to me as James Bond: the willingness to engage in combat, the charm and sophistication of a worldly bruiser, even the booze. In a 2000 documentary called Hitch Hike, made by Channel 4 and tracking Hitchens’s book tour of his polemic against Bill Clinton, he said, “Jimmy Cameron was the reason I wanted to become a journalist”. He added that Cameron, who was a foreign correspondent, wrote a piece in 1966 outlining all the things he had accomplished as a journalist. Here is Hitchens ventriloquising Cameron: “I’ve sat with Ho Chi Minh, and I was deported from South Africa, and I was there listening to Nehru at midnight when India became a free country. I’ve also swum in all the five oceans and fucked on all five continents”. Hitchens himself made the world of the hack seem glamorous.

Or, perhaps, not the glamour of Bond or a foreign correspondent, but another form: the monied public intellectual. As Ian Parker puts it in his excellent 2006 New Yorker profile of Hitchens: “Hitchens has the life that a spirited thirteen-year-old boy might hope adulthood to be: he wakes up when he likes, works from home, is married to someone who wears leopard-skin high heels, and conducts heady, serious discussions late into the night.”

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On the topic of glamour, there was something also Francophile about him, and not just his fondness for exposing part of his chest in interviews and debates. He was an eighteenth-century style iconoclast, a public school Voltaire, who took down sacred cows: Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, and God. This tendency toward confrontation was instilled by his education in Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, the heretics of Communism. One must never stick rigidly to the party line. Individual responsibility and moral conscience were essential.

Nevertheless, there was also a coarseness beneath his oratorical sheen: when he tried, for instance, to divorce the civil rights movement from its religious influence, emphasising the secularism of A. Philip Randolph over the religious fervour of Martin Luther King. This was sophistry. Arguing, as he also did, that religion poisons everything, was intellectually juvenile and inconsistent with his deep appreciation of John Donne.

When he said, moreover, “there is an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person’s propensity to be impressed by the measurement of IQ”, this was a brilliant epigram. H.L. Mencken would be proud of its rhetorical force, but it’s also nonsense: IQ is one of the most stable findings in psychology and social science.

Related to this coarseness was his deep appreciation for vulgarity and obscenity. Substantial passages of his memoir Hitch-22 are dedicated to explaining the games he used to play with Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Clive James and others: the boomer version of Dr Johnson’s Club. He called the gathering “the Bloomsbury kebab joint”. One of their games consisted of substituting the word “heart” for “dick” in well-known titles, or the word “love” for “fuck”, or “love” for “hysterical sex”. So they got, among many other confected titles, “The Dick of the Matter”, “The Man Who Fucked Women”, and “Hysterical Sex in a Cold Climate”.

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He once said to an audience who were distracted by a heckler, “leave him alone … I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire”. On the question of Mother Teresa’s virginity, he wrote: “Who can say what happened with the dashing boulevardiers of Skopje when Agnes Bojaxhiu was but a pouting and trusting lass? (The whole problem with missionaries is that one never quite knows their position.)”.

This bawdiness was at times entertaining and at times embarrassing. But what we value in intellectuals is not often the particular arguments they make but their personality. As Edward Said wrote, in an essay about public intellectuals, “when I read Jean-Paul Sartre or Bertrand Russell it is their specific, individual voice and presence that makes an impression on me over and above their arguments because they are speaking out for their beliefs. They cannot be mistaken for an anonymous functionary or careful bureaucrat”.

The voice of Hitchens worked less well in print. As Martin Amis once wrote of his good friend: “He thinks like a child; he writes like a distinguished author; and he speaks like a genius”. Martin’s father Kingsley was more brutal: he described Hitchens as “the one who can talk but can’t write”. This was in the Seventies, during Hitchens’s New Statesman days, when his prose was more functional and didactic. According to Amis fils, however, Hitchens’s writing improved after 1989. But there were still some odd tics in his style after this, such as his tendency towards using brackets for a needless digression on some point, and puncturing that digression with a showy italicised word or phrase. I can endlessly listen to him speak in interviews and discussion panels; but reading him can be a bumpy experience.

When Amis said Hitchens thought like a child, he was getting at something. Although Hitchens’s moral convictions seemed admirably clear, they also strayed into simple-mindedness: some of his criticism of the “anti-imperialist” Left and religious extremism is still valuable, but his zealous support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan looks even more disastrous now.

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Although Hitchens spent much of his career going after sacred cows, many of his fans now treat him in a hagiographical fashion. After the Spectator journalist Angus Colwell wrote a piece criticising Hitchens’s gung-ho support for the war in Afghanistan in August, many people described Colwell as possessing “sour grapes” and argued that Hitchens was “living rent-free” in his mind. These responses speak to the cultishness that surrounds some of Hitchens’s fan base; it is like someone is attacking their dad.

But if there is one thing worth taking from the writings and life of Christopher Hitchens, it is the importance of thinking critically and independently. Turning a blind eye to his faults out of a sense of sentimental loyalty seems profoundly un-Hitchian. It’s a shame that many of his supporters do this. But then again, as the title to Julien Benda’s book about intellectuals suggests, La Trahison des Clercs, public intellectuals are often like clerics. We should be able to admire Hitchens’s voice without taking it as holy writ.

Madame Bovary was set in the place he hated most: his home. He was born 200 years ago, in Normandy, to the distinguished and fabulously named doctor Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, and his saturnine wife Caroline. The region is famous for the Franco-Viking rovers who conquered England and Sicily; exquisite Gothic architecture; and the city where Joan of Arc was put to death. But it’s also a maritime region connected to the English Channel: wet, windy and grey. It is a place that is both exotic and drab, dramatic and domestic.

This second son got struck with nerves and epilepsy and instead of becoming a lawyer, became one of the most influential novelists of the nineteenth century. “Flaubert established, for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible,” according to James Wood, one of Britain’s foremost literary critics.

But Flaubert was also a luminous stylist. “The morality of art”, he wrote in a letter, “consists in its beauty, and I value style even above truth.” It is odd that an author best known for realism emphasised style above truth. Finding “le mot juste” was his priority. And this subordination of the world as it is to a perfect expression of it points to an important paradox in Flaubert. He became the father of realism by accident.

Flaubert hated the world, mediocre and imperfect as it is, and wanted to transfigure it through his beautiful art. But, in order to do this, he needed to dirty his smooth fingers. Madame Bovary was accused of obscenity, because it was too realistic for the time, but was later acquitted by a French court. “The entire value of my book if there is any,” Flaubert wrote, “will consist in having been able to proceed straight on a hair suspended over the double abyss of lyricism and vulgarity.” This letter was addressed to a woman who played a pivotal role in his life.

In the summer of 1846, the 24-year-old Flaubert, briefly staying in Paris, met Louise Colet. She was a catch: beautiful, 11 years older, a prize-winning poet, and the mistress of the famous philosopher and statesman, Victor Cousin. Over the next ten years, their romance would consist of pregnancy scares and a rich trove — the ones that weren’t destroyed — of erotic, philosophical and literary letters. These letters, like his novel, would seesaw between the lyrical and the vulgar.

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By the time he started Madame Bovary, when he was 29, Flaubert had been travelling through the East for two years. He had grown fatter and clumps of hair had fallen from his head. His face was distinguished by his blonde, drooping moustache. He wanted to write a novel about the classical world, or about the East, something with a flavour of otherness. But his best friend, Louis Broilhet, told him about an old lady he had met in Normandy. She was visiting Flaubert’s mother.

The old lady had had a son named Eugéne Delamare, a former medical student of Flaubert’s father. Delamare had eventually qualified as an officier de santé rather than an official doctor, and, after marrying an older widowed woman who subsequently died, he married a pretty young woman named Delphine. She cheated on him, squandered all his money, and ultimately killed herself. Delamare committed suicide later, leaving their only child in the care of his impoverished mother, who shared her story with Broilhet, who shared it with Flaubert. Madame Bovary was born.

It seems strange that, after a few years of travelling through the Orient, and writing manuscripts about the East and the classical world, Flaubert would dedicate the next five years to writing about a domestic housewife in provincial France. But he kept returning to Normandy. He was a Parisian on and off, but Normandy was his home; while writing Madame Bovary, he lived with his mother and young niece in a house in Croisset. There was a symbiotic relationship between the drab surroundings and the intensity of his imagination. As he put it: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Julian Barnes has described Madame Bovary as the “first great shopping and fucking novel”. Emma Bovary, bored by being shacked up with a mediocre man in provincial France, dreams of Paris. She wants the life of cities, with their “unlimited opportunities for deep emotions and exciting sensations”. Instead, she’s stuck in the small town of Yonville, which is as boring as it sounds, with a bloke who’s not interested in the theatre, can’t swim or fence or shoot. And who can’t make her laugh.

But Emma meets Léon Dupuis, a young clerk. Soon after meeting, they have, in Francis Steegmuller’s brilliant translation, “vague conversations in which every new subject that comes up proves to be one more aspect of a core of shared feelings”. In other words, they fall in love.

Léon and Emma bond in particular over their shared love of reading: “Have you ever had the experience”, he asks her, “of running across in a book some vague idea you’ve had, some image that you realize has been lurking all the time in the back of your mind and now seems to express absolutely your most subtle feeling?”

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Bovary is, among other things, a novel about the experience of reading novels. Léon is reflecting the experience of reading back to us, making us feel, along with Emma, recognised. “Yes”, we think, “we read exactly for that reason: to have our most subtle feeling absolutely expressed.” Emma wants to be recognised by Charles. And she reads her romance novels not because she recognises herself in them — these women lead genuinely exotic lives — but because she recognises her desires through them. They tap into what she wants. The lyrical is tugging away at the mundane.

Dupuis, frustrated by bourgeois conventions, departs to study law in Paris, leaving Emma alone in Yonville. She is then seduced by an aristocratic rake called Rodolphe Boulanger. And after their first kiss, she remembers the “heroines of novels she had read, and the lyrical legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. Now she herself was one of the amoureuses she had so envied: she was becoming, in reality, one of that gallery of fictional figures.”

These descriptions seem so affected that they invite the reader to question the authenticity of Emma’s feelings. Rodolphe, too, distrusts her pleas for love: “The more flowery a person’s speech, he thought, the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed.” We are rapt by this tension between Emma’s enchanting fantasies and the devastating blandness that surrounds her. It makes her idealism seem thin.

There is always a cynical gravitational force beneath the lyricism of Flaubert’s prose; everything is brought back down to earth. Rodolphe gets bored of Emma, who “was like all his other mistresses; and as the charm of novelty gradually slipped from her like a piece of her clothing, he saw revealed in all its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and always speaks the same language”.

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It is the violence of Emma Bovary’s imagination that, among other things, undoes her. Her wish to escape from provincial Normandy is shown to be pointless: the romantic fantasies she longs for are just as disheartening as the mediocre life she lives. Although Flaubert hated “realism”, he also wrote that “I equally despise that false brand of idealism which is such a hollow mockery in the present day”. He rejected the seductive charm of the Orient, and willingly came back home; he hated Normandy, but the alternative was not better. As a man, he at least has greater freedom to travel than his heroine — he is physically and materially free. But, like Emma, he is spiritually trapped. As he famously said: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”

This is what all novelists essentially aim to do: to simultaneously present the world as it is and the world as the characters want it to be. Flaubert achieved this because he was so disgusted by reality, yet the attempt to utterly transfigure it exhausted him. He was annoyed by his finished product. Madame Bovary was serialised in Revue de Paris in the autumn of 1856. Things got off to an inauspicious start when the first ad for the novel printed the author’s name as “Gustave Faubert”. After the first instalment appeared, Flaubert was typically cheerful about seeing his work published for the very first time. In a letter to his friend Louis, he wrote, “Everything in it seems bad.”

If Flaubert believed in anything, it was perhaps the chimera of perfection. He wrote and rewrote in search of it. The early drafts of Madame Bovary amount to 4,500 pages of text; the completed version is just over 300 pages. But, in the end, he was never satisfied. His wish for a complete sentence degenerated into destructive fury. Of Madame Bovary, a work many consider to be one of the finest novels of all time, Flaubert wrote later in his life: “I would like to find some way of making a lot of money so I could buy up every copy of Madame Bovary in existence, throw them all into the fire, and never hear of the book again.”

Rilke’s poem “Die Aschanti,” about his visit to the exhibition, is characterised by sadness. In the exhibition, he writes, there are “no brown girls who stretched out / velvety in tropical exhaustion,” “no eyes which blaze like weapons” and no mouths “broad with laughter”. What a bummer. Rilke has to settle for ordinary, human and fundamentally inauthentic Africans: “O how much truer are the animals / that pace up and down in steel grids”.

The Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole studies Rilke’s attitude to human zoos in his essay “The Blackness of Panther.” Its title is partly annexed from a more famous Rilke poem, “The Panther”, about big cats behind bars in Paris. Cole draws a parallel between the panther, or the captured African in a human zoo, and the way the African is perceived more generally amongst a segment of Western society. Like the new collection it is part of, Black Paper (released last week), it examines what it means to be an African person in a world shaped by white people’s cultural norms.

Cole finds the codes associated with it to be restrictive. “Was I African?” he asks in one passage, about growing up in Nigeria, because “I didn’t feel it. What I felt was that I was a Lagos boy, a speaker of Yoruba, a citizen of Nigeria”.

“The Africans were those other people,” he writes, “some of whom I read about in books, or had seen wearing tribal costumes in magazines, or encountered in weird fictional form in movies”. He does not see his reflection in them. The label, then, is a fiction imposed on him by western culture.

Cole is more sympathetic to the general term “Black”, but even here he acknowledges how rooted it is in one singular definition. The label “Black” was not “about every Black person in the world”, he writes, but “it was localized to the American situation. To be Black in America, that localized tenor of ‘Black’ had to be learned”. Having a “Black skin (sometimes just a shade or two off-white) was the admission to the classroom, but Black American cultural codes were the lesson”. Cole writes that he has learned to love the codes, since moving to America over twenty years ago, while acknowledging that “it wasn’t the only Black” that he knew.

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These are quandaries that have recently been explored by another, perhaps less well-known, novelist who grew up in Nigeria and later studied in America. Timothy Ogene’s new novel Seesaw (out next week), set in the very recent past, is a playful and lacerating satire on the codes the black immigrant needs to satisfy in order to curry favour with a self-styled progressive institution in America.

Frank Jasper, the protagonist and narrator, is a failed novelist from the fictional southern Nigerian city of Port Jumbo, based on Ogene’s home town Port Harcourt. Ogene’s first novel, The Day Ends Like Any Day, has a similar title with Jasper’s first novel The Day They Came for Dan. But unlike Ogene’s novel, which won the Book of the Year award with the African Literary Association, Jasper’s novel does so badly that he decides to write a review of it under a pseudonym for an obscure website entitled The Ganges Review of Books. Very soon after this appreciative review goes up, the website completely disappears in favour of a screen selling viagra.

Jasper’s big break comes in the form of the William Blake Program for Emerging Writers, which allows him to travel to a New England college town and get mentored by other writers. When he arrives, he is bemused by protests he encounters on campus. They don’t fit with his conception of American radicalism. “My idea of an American radical protest,” he writes, “was ossified and romantic, involving pictures of people in long hair smoking marijuanna, playing drums and banjos”. What he witnesses instead are protestors that “might as well have been business executives, clear-eyed with state-of-the-art digital equipment”. In other words, the self-styled revolutionary vanguard of progressive institutions have become much like the old-school establishment of old.

On campus, Jasper also meets a fellow African writer Barongo Akello Kabumba, who is from Uganda. And a British-Indian academic called Sara Chakraborty, who grew “up in Surrey as the grandchild of Afro-Asian immigrants”. He takes a strong dislike to the pair:

“partly because I didn’t understand the depth of their moral authority, the immutable authority with which they said things about the world and people and identity and the ‘post-colonial world’ in a few days than in all the years I lived in it”.

Their conception of the “post-colonial” world, and the position of Africans within it, is sterile and monolithic: Jasper’s post-colonial world “was nothing like the fully formed and footnoted gunfire sentences I heard from Sara Chakraborty, nothing like the costumed performers of the Ugandan writer”. Instead, it “was just another tired world of complicated people trudging along, like anywhere else, mostly oblivious of life beyond their neighbourhood, full of pain or courting happiness, vile or honest”.

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Underpinning that passage is a plea for moral universalism: for seeing that, despite their differences, the post-colonial world is fundamentally as emotionally rich and also as boring as the Western world. And Ogene demonstrates this very combination in the novel itself. Apart from the zestful humour in the narrative, there is also tedium. In the passages set in Nigeria, for instance, Jasper is a slacker par excellence, who spends much of his recreational time taking drugs and watching pornography. The novel reminds me not only of post-colonial novels, or campus novels, but also of the decadent novels of Michel Houellebecq, in which a buoyantly satirical attitude to twentieth-century Western society is combined with hardened cynicism.   

And Jasper is a thoroughly cynical character. While acknowledging the silliness of race experts, those who tell guilt-ridden white people what they want to hear, he occupies the position of black expert to his advantage. He was “still in the US when” his agent

“sold me to the Montana-based group as an ‘understanding expert on all matters black and ethnic’. He had played up my background as a ‘son of the black Atlantic whose maternal ancestors were descendants of slaves who came back to West Africa’”.

He adds with acidic scorn: “if Americans were going to devour themselves, he said to me afterwards, someone might as well hide under the table for crumbs”. This cheerfully parasitic attitude is not one that Cole explicitly argues for in his essays, which are scrupulously analytical. But it does demonstrate that the analogy of the human zoo, while powerful, fails to capture the symbiotic relationship between the patronising white person and the African. To put it bluntly: it’s a grift that seems to satisfy both parties. The Africans at the zoo were forcibly captured; the African novelist freely moves to the West.

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Jasper’s relationship to his status as a race expert is, however, ambivalent: while it materially enriches him, it also deforms his humanity. “I wasn’t advancing any single ideology,” he considers, “or worldview or notion of progress, and wasn’t trying to attack anyone”. Rather,

“I just wanted to exist and cry and laugh and fuck and live and die without prefixing or suffixing my actions with any universal idea of blackness or Africaness or whatever thing out there I was supposedly tied to as a POC or BAME or warped extension of someone else’s imagination”.

This warped tendency doesn’t just apply to black people. Other ethnicities feel it too. In an interview with Lauren Oyler, the Argentinian novelist Pola Oloixarac talks about the inspiration for her latest novel, Mona, which is out in the UK next year. “I was a person of colour when I was in the US,” she says, but “if I took a plane and went anywhere else, or if I crossed the border I wasn’t a person of colour anymore. So it wasn’t an essential trait. It was more of a particular fiction that was imposed on me”.

The titular protagonist of the novel is Peruvian and, like Jasper, is already the author of one novel and living in an American college campus:

“Mona had arrived at Stanford not long after the waves she made with her debut novel tossed her onto the beach of a certain impetuous prestige — and at a time when being a ‘woman of colour’” began to “confer a chic sort of cultural capital”.

The narrator of Oloixarac’s deliciously acerbic novel adds that, again invoking our opening analogy, “American universities shared certain essential values with historic zoos, where diversity was a mark of attraction and distinction”.

When Mona is nominated for a prestigious literary prize in Europe, she travels to Sweden, where she meets a diverse range of writers, whose background she anatomises like a modern-day Carl Linnaeus (the pioneering Swedish taxonomist). There is the obnoxious French male writer, the pious Israeli female author, the sexy Scandinavian writers. There is a sense that she is trapped by the instinct to perceive these characters solely through the prism of their identity. And a part of the narrative tension is this tendency against a countervailing emphasis on a person’s particular experiences. She chafes at being seen as the “Latin writer”: “The phony solidarity of having a ‘Latin’ culture in common with other writers was something that always repulsed her”.

She recognises, like Jasper and Cole, that such labels do not reflect the humanity of an individual. While they can breed important forms of solidarity, and can be useful in analysing prejudice and discrimination, we shouldn’t cling to them too tightly. It is ironic that many self-styled progressives, many of them well-intentioned, do so. It illustrates the comfort, under a progressive guise, that comes with being attached to racial essentialism: the comfort of expecting people from other racial or ethnic backgrounds to fulfil a role.

Labels should be used, if they are to be used, as the start of someone’s identity, not the full definition of it. They should be used to open the doors to a deeper understanding of who that person is, rather than perceived as the only thing that matters. The alternative is race representatives, people who are exhibited, or exhibit themselves, to a white audience, to be gawked at and cuddled, and are expected to possess a morality befitting a child.

The original patient of psychoanalysis was never treated by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud; she was treated instead by its John the Baptist, Josef Breuer, who co-wrote Studies on Hysteria. “The discovery of Breuer’s,” wrote Freud of his colleague in 1917, “is still the foundation of psycho-analytical theory”. What Breuer discovered, and Freud later developed, was that neurotic conditions could be treated by a “talking cure”. By talking about her childhood experiences to the analyst, the patient can relieve herself of the disorders that burden her — and subsequently alleviate, with the help of the analyst, the physical manifestations of such disorders.

Psychoanalysis, then, is medical treatment by language. Adam Phillips, one of the leading psychoanalysts in England, writes that “Freud was as much, if not more, of writer than a doctor”. Like the Fin-de-Siècle writers who uncovered the dark undercurrents of bourgeois conventions, or the modernist writers who questioned coherent narratives, Freud was an integral part of the lively intellectual culture that witnessed the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and much of continental Europe. And it was very much a literary culture.

To briefly psychoanalyse: as a child Freud was gifted at languages, became familiar with Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French and English. And yet it was medicine he ultimately studied at the University of Vienna: as the firstborn son, he wanted to be dutiful and serve his impoverished family.

All of which begs the question that haunts his legacy: did his treatment work?

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Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, in Freud’s Patients: A Book of Lives (out last month), thinks not. “Freud’s cures were largely ineffectual,” he writes, “when they were not downright destructive”. Borch-Jacobsen examines 38 patients Freud treated in his 50-year practice, but his book is concerned less with the efficacy of psychoanalysis and more with portraying, in selective but vivid detail, the individuals Freud treated. “We all know the characters described by Freud in his case studies,” he writes, “but do we know these illustrious pseudonyms?” His book is “an attempt to reconstruct the sometimes comical, most often tragic and always captivating stories of these patients who have long been nameless and faceless”.

Anna Von Lieben, referred to as Cäcilie M by Freud, was his most important patient for a period of six years, beginning in 1887. She was, Borch-Jacobsen writes, part of the “Viennese Jewish upper bourgeoisie”: brought up in a palace, where her family hosted Brahms, Strauss and Liszt. She was treated in Paris by Freud’s hero, Jean-Martin Charcot, otherwise known as the Napoleon of Neuroses. In Vienna, she was also a patient of Breuer.

Von Lieben was obese. She tried to curb this by following a strict diet of caviar and champagne. And she was an accomplished chess player: she liked to play two games simultaneously, and, while she slept, she would have a chess player on standby near her room in case she woke up and fancied a game. Perhaps not unrelatedly, Von Lieben had facial neuralgia and attacks of the nerves. For this, Freud was brought in to treat her.

He was her “nerve doctor”. He used hypnosis to purge her of childhood traumas. Unlike the talking cure Breuer used on Pappenheim, however — in which the patient simply remembers her traumatic experiences — in Freud’s talking cure the patient is invited “to relive and forget their traumas”. But he also gave her morphine — and this was what stopped her neurotic attacks, not hypnosis. “The famous cathartic cure of Cäcilie M”, writes Borsch-Jacobsen, “was in fact a morphine cure”.

Her husband, Leopold von Lieben, “finally decided to end her treatment with Freud, which had spanned almost six years and had produced no lasting improvement”. Anna von Lieben died of a cardiac arrest when she was 53. Her children referred to Freud as der Zauberer — the magician — who performed worthless tricks on their mother.

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Cäcilie M is not the only woman in Borch-Jacobsen’s book who could afford champagne and caviar. Three quarters of Freud’s patients were rich. Fanny Moser, referred to in Studies on Hysteria as Emmy von N, was “said to be the richest woman in Central Europe”. When she was 23, she married a 63-year-old Swiss businessman named Heinrich Moser, who had amassed his wealth by selling watches in Russia and Asia; three years later, Heinrich died and left most of his fortune to his wife.

Freud’s patients were not only rich; they were fashionable. In late nineteenth century German-speaking Europe, psychoanalysis became à la mode. It didn’t work as an effective medical treatment for neurotic ailments. Psychoanalysis was embraced, consistent with Veblen’s contemporaneous model of “conspicuous consumption”, as a way for the bourgeoisie to signal their affinity with cutting-edge theories and practices. They were seduced by the ideas of psychoanalysis rather than by the outcomes of it; it was evidence that they were citizens of a modern civilisation.

And Freud also saw himself as modern: he was a figure of the Enlightenment, who defined himself against the reactionary force of religion. He skipped his mother’s Jewish funeral. He didn’t have his sons circumcised. And his children were forbidden to enter a synagogue while they were living with him. In one of his last books, Moses and Monotheism, he argued that Moses was Egyptian rather than Jewish. In 1937, when Freud was visited by the French psychoanalyst René Laforgue, he was asked whether he feared the Nazis. Freud said: “The Nazis? I’m not afraid of them. Help me rather to combat my true enemy”. When Laforgue asked who this was, Freud replied: “Religion, the Roman Catholic Church”.

He was, though, operating within a tradition. Religion sustained attacks throughout the nineteenth century in the German-speaking world, by thinkers of the Higher Criticism movement, which sought to demystify documents that were considered sacred ― to look at the unvarnished world behind the text. Freud had a similarly iconoclastic vision: to look beneath the surface of our selves. Like two other successors of the Higher Criticism tradition, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, he recognised that religion satisfied a deep human craving, but denied the sanctity of religious doctrine.

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It is perhaps ironic, then, that Freud is often treated as a messiah. Frederick Crews, in his extensive and pugnacious biography of him, opened with this sentence: “Among historical figures, Sigmund Freud ranks with Shakespeare and Jesus of Nazareth for the amount of attention bestowed upon him by scholars and commentators”. We find him engrossing because he presented his beliefs as universal truths ― but also because these truths tease rather than satisfy us. They draw us in like a great novel or a play in that they don’t offer a definitive sort of closure, but something to dwell on. Freud was closer to a literary messiah like Shakespeare than a religious messiah like Jesus; embracing him will not make us see the light.

In fact, his theories made us more mysterious to ourselves. As Phillips puts it, it was “knowledge that he wanted, but not necessarily clarity”. The paradox at the heart of psychoanalysis is that it is an attempt to shed light on something it views as irreducibly opaque: the self. Kant, the father of the German Enlightenment, said know thyself. Freud said sure ― but it won’t be enlightening.

And if we can’t clearly know ourselves, how can we expect to know others? How, for example, can an analyst know his patient and vice versa? Janet Malcolm, in “The Impossible Profession”, her essay on psychoanalysis, posits that “the concept of transference”, which is key to psychoanalysis,

“at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: We cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain”.

Psychoanalysis, as Malcolm suggests, constitutes a fundamentally tragic way of seeing life: as an unending struggle to know other people. One of Freud’s most famous theories, after all, was based on a classical Greek tragedy in which a man doesn’t know his own mother when he sees her.

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But if we accept the premise of psychoanalysis — that life is inevitably tragic — then treatment, which psychoanalysis also claims to offer, seems elusive. If life is an unending struggle, the notion of being fixed is futile. This is another way in which psychoanalysis, despite Freud’s self-image, doesn’t fit with the model of enlightenment, in which our bodies and minds can be continuously improved, but rather starts with the same premise as religion or literature or myth: that human suffering is inescapable.

The psychoanalysis of patient zero, Bertha Pappenheim, was disastrous. “The treatment,” writes Borch-Jacobsen, “had never shown any real progress and as early as the autumn of 1881 Breuer was thinking of placing Bertha in another clinic.” She ended up spending four months in the Bellevue Sanitorium in Switzerland, addicted to morphine because of Breuer’s attempt to alleviate her facial neuralgia.

Later in life, she had a successful career: she translated Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women into German and, in 1904, founded the League of Jewish Women, which became the largest Jewish women’s organisation in Germany. In 1907, she also funded a home for unwed mothers and “illegitimate” children in Neu-Isenberg. A friend named Dora Edinger says Pappenheim “violently opposed any suggestion of psychoanalytic therapy for someone she was in charge of”. She utterly rejected the practice. In 1954, a year after Ernest Jones revealed Anna O was Pappenheim, in the first volume of his biography of Freud, a German postage stamp was issued. The left side read: “Bertha Pappenheim”. The right side read: “Helfer der Menschheit,” helper of mankind.

Freud was not a helper of mankind. He was too transfixed by tragedy. He ultimately did not want to improve us in any direct way; he wanted only to refract our disjointed selves back to us, like the analyst with the patient, or the novelist with the reader.

Many describe Franz Kafka’s disenchanted fables as tragic. And this is certainly true. But they are also farcical. To watch someone being relentlessly wrong can be grimly enjoyable — as long as you’re not the person in question.

The term white feminism, as it is commonly used today, is a classic example of the Kafka Trap. If you show too much interest in the lives of people of colour, you risk being accused of white saviourism — which is another way of saying you have a suspiciously condescending attitude to people of colour. But if you don’t show enough interest, you are insufficiently intersectional. You only care about the white, middle-class cisgendered women in your social circle.

White feminism is a classic example of the Kafka Trap because whatever you do is either too much or not enough. You are never right.

Joanne Harris, a bestselling novelist, recently wrote a blog post entitled “White feminists, I’m looking at you”. Harris describes white feminists as “women who ‘don’t see’ race, and who think that counts as a virtue” and are “quite happy to see women abused, as long as those women are different from their own privileged circle of friends”.

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She argues that white women are too defensive when they get accused of racism: “I get it. It’s easier to focus on the words and what they mean, rather than the reason they were used in the first place. So stop thinking about the words, and think about what you did, instead. Consider whether you said or did something that was harmful.”

But whether something is harmful in the first place surely depends on the meaning of words and the content of what was said? Otherwise, what justification would there be for saying the thing was harmful?

Harris’s blog insists that her white female readers should be thoughtless. Instead of reflecting on the situation at hand, they should simply listen to their critics. In short, she wants them to acquiesce to any charge of racism levelled against them: “This isn’t about you”, she states. “No-one cares why you caused harm. All that matters is that you did.”

But is it true that no one cares why someone caused harm? If someone who is, in general, an intelligent and lovely person caused me harm, I would be especially curious to know why they did. And conversely, if I caused someone harm, I would want to know how. But then again, I’m not a white woman; passivity is not for me.

Apart from being an exercise in incoherent pontificating, and a text that instructs a group of women to fulfil archaic gender roles, Harris’s blog is also narcissistic. If no one should care why a white feminist caused harm to a group of people, why should anyone care what a white feminist like herself has to say about any of this?

In principle, Harris is encouraging greater tolerance. She says that white women are not perfect, and that she includes herself in this: “White feminists, I’m looking at you. White feminists, I’m looking at me.” But this ostentatious meekness presupposes that everyone apart from white feminists will be acting in good faith: if white feminists are not perfect, why should we assume everyone else is? In truth, no one is perfect.

But if you only insist on the imperfections of one group of people, that provides the perfect backdrop for the Kafka Trap. Whatever they do will always be judged by a harsher set of standards.

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In her blog, Harris is perhaps referring to Kate Clanchy, a writer and teacher who was recently denounced on Goodreads and Twitter for the way she described some of her students in her memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. Three writers in particular — Chimene Suleyman, Monisha Rajesh and Sunny Singh — condemned the book for its use of racist language and the hurt this has caused people of colour. Clanchy described one student as having “chocolate-coloured skin” and another as possessing “almond-shaped eyes”. Clanchygate, as these things often do, descended into chaos. Those three critics of Clanchy unpardonably received racist abuse and trolling on Twitter.

Before this summer, I only knew Clanchy as a teacher on Twitter who shared viral poems of her students. When I first heard about the incident, I was gently bemused by it. The first real shock came when Picador, Clanchy’s publisher, announced she would be rewriting sections of the book. Something was not right here — the book was only published two years ago, not fifty or even twenty, and it would have been read by countless people at the publishing firm.

I don’t think the publishing industry is staffed by people who are indifferent to racial prejudice. So what could have gone wrong? The novelist Amanda Craig, a defender of Clanchy, suggested on Twitter that the book would have benefitted from sensitivity readers — people of colour who are paid by publishing companies to ensure any description of ethnic minority people is not offensive.

But the problem with sensitivity readers is that people of colour are not the same: what is offensive to one black or Asian person is perfectly fine to another. It assumes that there is a correct line on such matters, and only a select elite of people of colour can establish it. But I don’t want a clerisy of ethnic minority people to shape what I read; I want editors to do their job and ensure the book is as good as it could be.

An example of a person of colour who was not offended by the descriptions in Clanchy’s book is one of her former students: Shukria Rezaei. Writing in the Times, Rezaei pointed out that “in the book, she describes one of her pupils as having ‘almond-shaped eyes’. Critics labelled this description patronising, insulting, offensive, colonialist and racist. This upset me. I am that girl with the almond eyes. I did not find it offensive”.

She added that “almond eyes” is “a term that I have often used in my own poems. My almond-shaped eyes are at the core of my Hazara identity”. In other words: context matters. And in reading both the testimony of her former students and the book for myself, I came to the conclusion that the imputation of racism made by Clanchy’s online detractors was unjustified.

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Clanchy entered Rezaei — and many of her other students —into poetry competitions; Rezaei had just immigrated from Pakistan (but her family is originally from Afghanistan) and didn’t speak good English. Clanchy found Rezaei funding to stay in school for an extra year because her immigration status was unsettled. And Clanchy found Rezaei scholarships and helped with her university applications.

Rezaei is not the only young person of colour Clanchy has helped. In her Times article, she quotes Asima Qayyum, another former student of Clanchy’s, who says:

“Kate gave us platforms we never expected. She fought for us to be in rooms and places we had never been welcomed in before and made sure people heard what we had to say. I know first-hand how cruel and completely unacceptable racism is in any form, and from my experiences it’s not something I’ve ever associated with Kate. I just want people to know and hear from a student who has worked with Kate for almost ten years that my experience with her has impacted my life in so many positive ways it’s unimaginable.”

In a recently published open letter to The Bookseller, a group of Clanchy’s former students characterised by what they call “multicultural diversity”, describe their personal experiences of Clanchy as one of “unequivocal care and support, always, for us as poets and as people”. On the topic of whether Clanchy is exploiting them, they say: “Kate’s promotion of our poems does not take away our agency: we do not speak through Kate, and she does not presume to speak for us”.

If the claim of “listen to people of colour” is meaningful then it needs to include voices such as Clancy’s former students in any estimation of her. Yet all too often “listen to people of colour” means listen to a select group of people of colour, take their word for writ, and suspend your critical faculties: what else can help explain how a publishing company that hitherto passionately supported an Orwell-prize winning book can acquiesce after an online backlash?

Some may argue that Clanchy is guilty of a type of white saviourism: the privileged English teacher condescending to refugee students. This would be a cynical distortion of what is evidently a generous woman trying to do her best to encourage marginalised young people to thrive. Some of the descriptions of her students in the book did make me cringe a bit, but reading the entire book did not leave me with the impression of a racist. Quite the opposite. Clanchy is genuinely enthused by living in a multiracial England.

Yet the Kafka Trap enables an English teacher who has gone out of her way to help refugee students thrive to become paralysed by the accusation of racism. Any further response from her would be used as evidence against her.

Joanne Harris addressed her piece to white women, but the Kafka Trap has severe implications for anyone who believes there is an important distinction to be made between clumsy writing and racial prejudice. Between imperfect women (and remember, no person can be perfect) and people complicit with racism. And between those of us who believe in tolerance and those whose minds have been degraded by a politics that speaks the language of compassion but is in practice vindictive.

To describe Erasmus Darwin — the grandfather of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton — as simply a doctor would be selling him short. He was a figure the stature of Samuel Johnson. Unlike Johnson, however, he stayed in the Midlands and was transfixed by science. Darwin was a pivotal member of the Lunar Society, that constellation of thinkers who believed in the power of science to improve humanity. Coleridge, his friend and correspondent, described him as “the most original-minded man”.

He was also an abolitionist. The emancipation badge, the medallion with the inscription “Am I Not a Man and a Brother” that inspired Darwin’s verse, was made for the Society for the Abolition of the Slavery. It was the most popular symbol in the fight against the slave trade in the late eighteenth century. And it was created by Darwin’s good friend: Josiah Wedgwood.

Stoke has unfairly acquired the status of a provincial backwater. It is a Brexit city and its football team is a punchline: a foreign player can be good, but he can’t be that good if he can’t do it on a rainy night in Stoke. But Stoke’s most famous son was the emblematic figure of the long eighteenth century. Wedgwood’s work is mentioned in the novels of Austen and the letters of Gibbon. He made ceramics for Catherine the Great and the Georgian Royal Family; his family-surgeon and close friend was Erasmus Darwin; his other friends included Joseph Priestley, the minister and scientist who discovered oxygen.

Tristram Hunt, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and former Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, has written a fluent and insightful biography of Wedgwood. Near the start of The Radical Potter, Hunt states: “Wedgwood’s marriage of technology and design, retail precision and manufacturing efficiency, transformed forever the production of pottery, and ushered in a mass consumer society”. But what is clear from the biography is that Wedgwood was also responding to the demands of a new consumer society.

By 1700, Britain was behind in terms of ceramic production. Japan and China were masters of exquisite design. British ceramics, by contrast, were crude. Lorenzo de Medici, the most powerful supporter of art in Renaissance Italy, loved Chinese porcelain. And so did Henry VIII. Louis XIV of France adored Chinese porcelain so much he even created a porcelain pavilion for, Hunt writes, “ceramic-themed assignations with his mistress Mme de Montespan”.

However, as Hunt notes, “over the course of the early eighteenth century, the need to substitute Asian and European imports with indigenous manufacture was vital in the development of a mass-market, consumer goods industry”. This need was satisfied by Wedgwood.

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The Wedgwood family had been minor potters in North Staffordshire for two centuries before Josiah was born. What made North Staffordshire so useful was the proximity of clay and coal in the environment. Pottery ran through the veins of the family the way clay and coal veined the earth.

Wedgwood developed a leg disability from smallpox when he was 12. This meant he could never be a “thrower” — someone who operates the foot pedal on the potter’s wheel. Misfortune, was in this case, a stroke of luck. His disability allowed him to instead get stuck in on the more cerebral aspects of the business. “Design, innovation and business were aspects of the pottery trade”, Hunt writes, “to which Wedgwood could devote the attention that he could no longer apply to the thrower’s bench”.

The task of Wedgwood and his business partner Thomas Bentley was, in the words of Hunt, to “see off the attraction of luxury Chinese porcelain, dominate the fast-moving retail market, satiate the insatiable appetite of the middling sort with fashionable products sold at a healthy profit and soak up the emulative spending power of the increasingly taste-conscious Georgian consumer”.

Wedgwood came from a nonconformist religious tradition; he subscribed to political radicalism and popular democracy. His business success was nevertheless beholden to the patronage of the aristocracy. He made a creamware for Princess Charlotte, the wife of King George III “who set the fashion in London”. Hunt emphasises this ideological fissure when he notes that “a luxury product endorsed by high society was thus by far the most effective means for developing a profitable, mass-market commodity and if Thomas Bentley and Josiah Wedgwood were to secure the patronage of the trend-setting nobility they had to jettison their political radicalism, Nonconformist ethos and thirst for democracy”. The fissure, however, would be more brutally exposed by Wedgwood’s entanglement with the trans-atlantic slave trade.

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The demand for ceramics was linked to a demand for other goods in the eighteenth century; porcelain was a pretty appendage to drink and grub. In particular, the period witnessed a tea craze. Tea was imported by the East India Company from China. The Company also imported sugar from slave plantations in the Caribbean. Sugar went from being a luxury product to a “dietary staple”. It was used to make chocolate, jam and treacle. But most importantly it was used to drink tea. 8,000 tons of sugar were imported to Britain in 1663; it was 97,000 by 1775. Britain had developed a sweet tooth.

But it was a sweet tooth that encouraged an industry characterised by savage cruelty. As Adam Hochschild makes clear in his book Bury the Chains: “When slavery ended in the United States, less than half a million slaves imported over the centuries had grown to a population of nearly four million. When it ended in the British West Indies, total slave imports of well over two million left a surviving slave population of only about 670,000”. Wedgwood was complicit in this industry: he exported pottery to slave plantation estates in Barbados and Jamaica. And he personally took commissions from slave-owners. But by the 1780s, he was passionately opposed to the slave trade.

The committee for the abolition of the slave trade was founded in 1787 by William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp: the Three Musketeers of British Anti-Slavery activism (With Olaudah Equiano as d’Artagnan). Wedgwood was subsequently elected to the committee. During this period, he “wrote impassioned letters, circulated petitions, attended meetings and joined boycotts”.

He also created the emancipation medallion, which was, as Hunt notes, “the dominant motif of anti-slavery activism until illustrations from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin became prominent in the nineteenth century.

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Wedgwood was, so it seems, a bundle of contradictions. Much of his working life was spent trying to negotiate his desire for business success with his concern for social justice. Eric Williams, the Trinidadian statesman and historian, famously argued that the British ended the slave trade for financial rather than moral reasons. For Williams, this is an indictment of Britain. Many people today — on the Left and Right — denounce corporations and businesses who ostentatiously display support for social justice movements. The phrase ‘virtue signalling’ is typically used as an insult.

Although many critics denounce social justice warriors and woke capitalists as sanctimonious, the underlying criticism of them is that they are insufficiently moral; that they are engaging in activism to sell something or gratify their vanity or be in with the Cool Kids. They are not doing it simply because it is the right thing to do.

But what is clear from Hunt’s biography of Wedgwood is that the Staffordshire potter used our materialism and desire to emulate high-status people to advance the abolitionist movement. The materialism and trend-setting craze that fuelled the slave trade — the desire for sweetened tea and sumptuous ceramics to adorn them — also undermined it: this time by seeing respectable people wearing a beautifully-crafted medallion. As Hunt writes: “Even though the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century had helped to fuel the Atlantic slave trade, Wedgwood’s understanding of its ethos of emulation now enabled him to popularise abolitionism more effectively than any number of Sharp petitions or Equiano readings”.

Social movements, political ideologies and religions don’t spread because we individually analyse beliefs and say This is Obviously Good and This is Obviously Bad. We are sociable creatures: we care about what our peers do and the behaviour of charismatic people. This isn’t a normative judgement; it is a descriptive fact. Rather than bemoaning virtue signalling and woke capitalism, we ought to understand how we actually behave. The spread of an ideological movement through material interests is not necessarily a bad thing. 

Which is not to say it’s necessarily good either. The moral focus should be on the beliefs themselves, rather than how they are spread. I am critical of many contemporary vogueish social justice movements. However, I am critical of them because I think they are wrong and or harmful, not because many high-status people support them. 

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The assumption which seems to underpin the view that it is necessarily bad if moral movements are spread by non-moral means is that we are solely motivated by ethical reasoning. Any deviation from moralising therefore constitutes a betrayal of the principles we claim to espouse. But this assumption is untrue. We don’t only care about right or wrong; we also care about status.

A part of me thinks we should be more moralistic, not least because I think people who espouse an essentialist form of identity politics, and companies that jump on the bandwagon of social justice, flatten rich individual experiences. But that’s probably my religious prejudice speaking: talk of individual moral conscience only makes sense by presupposing a coherent and distinctive self. That we have a soul.

But we are also mammals. The means through which our moral norms spread will always be somewhat imperfect, haphazard, bungling; reflecting the vagaries of status. Charles Darwin’s paternal grandfather was Erasmus Darwin. His maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood.

Critical race theory is now widely accepted by the liberal-Left media and much of academia. It’s not just the bad laws of the Jim Crow south. And it’s not just a few racist people here and there. Racism is not some bad apples; it is as American as apple pie.

For Martin Luther King and, later, Barack Obama, American racism was the consequence of a liberal and egalitarian country failing to live up to its principles; for supporters of critical race theory, by contrast, these principles were predicated on the subjugation of black people. The American Dream is rotten to the core.

In critical race theory, then, the key historical moment is not the abolition of slavery — or the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which brought an end to segregation in public places — but the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that “separate but equal” public schooling was unconstitutional. It violated the fourteenth amendment — which, after former slaves were granted citizenship, had assured all citizens “equal protection of the laws”. If black Americans have separate schooling, they can’t realise that equality: so concluded the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

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This seems like a tremendous achievement. Indeed, in many standard textbooks on the history of the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board is seen as the first big crack in the edifice of Old Jim Crow. But the founding father of critical race theory was sceptical about its positive impact. In an article published in the Harvard Law Review in 1980, Bell argued that the decision was based on:

“value to whites, not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation.”

In other words, the decision was motivated not by principled idealism but cynical self-interest. Domestic legislation in the fifties was shadowed by the Cold War — and in the battle against communism, America wanted to be seen as a moral exemplar.

But Bell’s critique of Brown v. Board runs deeper than this. Bell considered himself a realist, and viewed those who celebrated Supreme Court victories with bemusement. A few laws don’t change 250 years of slavery followed by 100 years of segregation and terror. “My position”, he wrote in his 1992 Faces at the Bottom of the Well, “is that the legal rules regarding racial discrimination have become not only reified (that is, ascribing material existence and power to what are really just ideas) … but deified”. This is because “the worship of equality rules as having absolute power benefits whites by preserving a benevolent but fictional self-image, and such worship benefits blacks by preserving hope”.

Hope was the very emotion, however, that animated the politics of King and Obama. (The latter’s second book was entitled: The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.) But Bell is having none of this.

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“I think,” he writes, “we’ve arrived at a place in history where the harms of such worship outweigh its benefit”. Those who persist in clinging on to the vision of the nation as a bastion of enlightened values are, according to him, at best naive.

This display of world-weariness, in contrast to doe-eyed idealism, is one shared by the most esteemed black American intellectual in the second term of Obama’s presidency: Ta-Nehisi Coates. No one writes much about Coates anymore. Perhaps because he left Twitter. The last memorable thing he did was base a villain in a comic book on Jordan Peterson. But six years ago, after the publication of his book Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, he was anointed by Toni Morrison as James Baldwin’s successor — the nation’s intellectual and moral conscience on matters of race.

Coates isn’t a theoretician like Bell; he is a polemicist. In his writing, the realist attitude central to Bell’s critical race theory is expressed with piquant force. Racism is a constitutive part of America’s identity, Coates argues, and anyone who deviates from this fact is deluded, naive or malevolent. “There is nothing”, Coates writes about racists, “uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy”.

Coates is known for his essays in The Atlantic, which are stylish, personal, historical and very long. The overall mood is one of disenchantment. The American Dream is not for black people. Between the World and Me is written as a letter to his son, and it contains no consoling words for the future: “I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals”. The view that the moral arc of history bends towards justice is an illusion. “America”, Coates writes, “understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men”. He is an atheist.

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Bell was not; he was a Christian. And his detached pessimism was tempered by an aggressive moralism. In his book, Ethical Ambition, which mixes memoir and self-help, he emphasised that:

“humanity at its essence is both an ongoing readiness to recognize wrongs and try to make things better, and the desire to help those in need of assistance without expecting reward or public recognition”.

So there is a point in being human, and that point is to do good. The virtues that are most important to Bell are “passion, courage, faith, relationships, inspiration and humility”. He often reads less like a radical subversive than a hokey Grandpa, slipping you moral maxims rather than sweets. Which raises the question: how can someone with such piety end up conceiving an ideology characterised by doleful pessimism?

Bell is in truth an unlikely candidate for the godfather of critical race theory, an ideology sceptical about the positive impact of anti-racist legislation. When he was younger, he worked for the NAACP, the establishment anti-racism group that believed American society could be transformed through the legal system. He worked, in particular, as a civil rights lawyer in the fifties Deep South. But eventually the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights division asked him to stop being a member of the NAACP: they thought he couldn’t be objective. He quit his position in the department, but continued to work for the anti-racist organisation.

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One plausible way to reconcile these two sides of Bell — the moralist and the pessimist — is to emphasise his Christianity. He believed in the permanence of racism just like any Christian believes in the inevitability of sin — nevertheless, the inevitability of sin does not mean we shouldn’t try to be better.

But perhaps a better way to account for this tension — a way that explains the similarities between Bell and non-Christians like Coates — is to view his conception of critical race theory as a case of thwarted idealism in the American Dream. America did not become a post-racial utopia after the civil rights revolution; therefore racism is a permanent feature of American society. Just like every passionate atheist is in some sense an inverted believer, people like Bell who are so antagonistic to American idealism belie their underlying attachment to it. This is true of critical race theory in general.

Although he is not a Christian, Coates is as profoundly American as Bell. His criticism of the nation is animated by his acceptance of American exceptionalism. “One cannot”, he writes, “at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error”. His proposal is this: “to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard”. In other words, he takes at face value the ideals of the American Dream (the very same American Dream that, he argues, is not for black people).

Meanwhile, the opponents of critical race theory see its ideas as hostile to — or at least inconsistent with — America (Fox News has mentioned it over 1,900 times in four months). In an exact inversion of critical race theory’s contention that racism is present in every aspect of American life, many on the Right — in this case, Christopher Rufo — now complain that critical race theory has “pervaded every aspect of the federal government” and poses “an existential threat to the United States”. Rufo and his ilk aren’t opposed to, say, teaching the history of slavery and segregation in American schools; what they oppose is schoolchildren acknowledging their whiteness. Rufo calls it state-sanctioned racism.

The irony is that critical race theory is not, as it sees itself, a realist’s ideology. And it is not, as its main opponents view it, fundamentally un-American. Like many on the conservative American Right, it espouses an idealised view of the nation’s self-professed values: if they truly believed these values were fundamentally corrupt, then what would be the point, as Bell and Coates do, of holding America to them? The truly realist position is one like Coleman Hughes’s: he has shown, with evidence and dispassionate argumentation, that black Americans have made material progress in recent decades.

Although Rufo may deny this of himself, many on the conservative Right do cling on to a form of American idealism that is insensitive to the existence of racism. But critical race theorists cling on to their own idealism by concluding that, because America is not yet a post-racial society, racism is an inexorable feature of the country. The vision of the shining city on a hill becomes the sole means by which to judge the nation — while the material realities of black people fade into the distance.

In America, the picture seems more rosy. 65% of Americans identify as Christian. But ten years ago the figure was around 75%. And in the early 1980s it was close to 90%. The trajectory is clear.

There is, of course, a distinction between identifying as a Christian and going to church every week. On the latter front the picture in Western Europe is strikingly bleak. As Harriet Sherwood puts it in the Guardian: “In the UK, France, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands, between 56% and 60% said they never go to church, and between 63% and 66% said they never pray”. But what interests me more is disaffiliation — the lack of willingness to espouse even a Christian identity.

This is secularisation: the transformation of religion from an integral part of civic life to a fading husk. The relationship between Christianity and secularisation, framed this way, looks antagonistic. Secularisation is Christianity’s bête noire.

David Lloyd Dusenbury’s new book, The Innocence of Pontius Pilate, investigates the relationship between Christianity and the secular. And he comes to a radically different conclusion. Rather than viewing them as conflicting poles, Dusenbury argues that the secular is a product of Christian thinking.

This viewpoint, or something very similar to it, is advanced in Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual, Tom Holland’s Dominion, Nick Spencer’s The Evolution of the West, and many works by John Gray. I don’t think Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are fans of this view.

Secularity, he writes, doesn’t come “from a priest-baiting eighteenth-century philosophe”. Rather, “it is a coinage of medieval Christian writers”.

To substantiate his thesis, Dusenbury goes further back than medieval Europe to the most consequential legal judgement in the history of western civilisation: the Roman trial of Jesus.

When we think of secular, we immediately conceive it in terms of the privatisation of religious belief. Properly speaking, the secularist would say, religion does not belong in the public sphere. But a more fundamental distinction is between the temporal and the divine: what is secular is the distinction between the laws of man and the laws of God.

What constitutes the secular, in this frame, owes much to an utterance made by Jesus in the Gospel of John. As he is tried and convicted by Pontius Pilate, Jesus proclaims: “My kingdom is not of this world”.

This still seems abstract. How does that allusive proclamation lead to a greater limit of religion’s role in society? A famously doctrinaire bishop in an African port city is the first person to edge us towards our modern conception of the secular: Augustine of Hippo.

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Augustine’s Homilies on the Gospel of John is crucial for understanding the secular. Augustine insists on the guilt of Pilate in the trial of Jesus. And he contrastingly affirms the innocence of Christ. Augustine, writes Dusenbury, is thus “led… to theorise the reign of God and the kingship of Jesus in a way that radically contrasts them with the ‘reign’ of any human empire and the ‘kingship’ of any human sovereign”.

When Augustine examines Jesus’s statement “my kingdom is not of this world”, according to Dusenbury, “he hears a delineation, by Jesus, of a novel form of jurisdiction that renders all other forms of jurisdiction, eo ipso, worldly — which is to say, secular”. Most human judgements are, according to Augustine, “melancholy and lamentable”.

This means “they derive not only from human laws and insights but from human ignorance and prejudice”. Human laws are provisional and subject to the failures and biases of human reasoning. By contrast, the law of the Lord is perfect.

Another Roman African, Pope Gelasius, substantiated this distinction in the late 5^th century when he proclaimed in Latin duo sont. This means: “there are two”. The laws of Caesar are distinct from the laws of Christ. According to Gelasius, “no Caesar is competent to clarify the ‘venerable mysteries’ that are celebrated, and promulgated, by the church”.

Ultimately, writes Dusenbury, “it is the African prelates Augustine and Gelasius, I believe, who transmit to medieval clerics and legal theorists in Europe a lexicon of ‘secular power’, and an interpretation of the Roman trial of Jesus that will be cited and reconceived, between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries, in continent-shaping ways”.

How is this interpretation of what is secular seen in the early modern period? This was the time when our modern notion of toleration was first thoroughly systemised. Hobbes, according to Dusenbury, argued that the “Ecclesiastics ‘have not Regal Power in this world’, Hobbes writes, for the simple reason that ‘the Kingdom of Christ is not of this world’. It is only because of this – which is to say, because of the Roman trial of Jesus – that Hobbes can definitively state that ‘Faith hath no relation to, nor dependence at all upon Compulsion’”.

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Because the law of God has no jurisdiction in the world of man, people should not be compelled to subscribe to religious doctrine. The case for identifying with Christianity thus rests on the persuasive power of Christian doctrine itself.

Dusenbury also examines Samuel von Pufendorf’s interpretation of the trial of Jesus in light of secular power. Pufendorf, little read now, is according to Dusenbury “Locke’s rival in forging the modern logic of toleration”. Jesus, according to Pufendorf, is a king but “his kingdom is not of this world. A correct reading of the Roman trial of Jesus is thus, according to Pufendorf, a sine qua non of a European political culture in which ritual and confessional differences are tolerated”.

Because the sovereignty of Jesus does not extend to the drama of human life, differences between communities need to be tolerated — as a way of managing the conflicts and imperfections that come with being human as much as anything else. To assume Christian doctrine ought to have a monopoly on human behaviour is to suggest Jesus does in fact have jurisdiction in this world. This goes against the injunction: “my Kingdom is not of this world”. The interpretation expressed from Augustine to Pufendorf, by contrast, underpins one of the distinguishing features of modernity: religious and ideological tolerance.

Tolerance also immediately evokes the Enlightenment. And one of the most striking parts of his book is Dusenbury’s comparison between two giants of the French Enlightenment: Voltaire and Rousseau. “Voltaire”, he writes, “is obsessed, in a thoroughly provincial way, with the infamies of Christian Europe”.

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The Voltairian position is familiar. Christianity is a bastion of intolerance and persecution. A religion which, left unhindered by the civilising force of secular power, is a threat to universal human rights.

But Dusenbury adds that, “Rousseau, levelling his eye on further horizons, realises that it is Christianity’s critique of cultic violence, and its unease with the archaic temple-state, that must be entered into what Paul Veyne called the ‘inventory of differences’ of global history”.

The temple-state is the synthesis of religion and state. And it is an integral part of the non-Christian world. The key point, as Dusenbury puts it, is that “Pilate is a legate of the Roman temple-state in the Judaean temple-city. For Pilate, as for the Judaean Temple elites who charge Jesus with blasphemy and treason, the codes of religio and the saeculum had not been decoupled. It is in part because Jesus decouples them that he is sent to the cross”.

What are the implications of this? If Jesus died not only to redeem humanity but also to “decouple” the temple from the state, then embedded within Christianity itself is the conviction that religion should have a limited role in organising the civic life of a nation. Expressed another way, the fact that people don’t feel obliged to identify as Christian anymore, and are thus rapidly peeling away from it, is itself a consequence of Christianity.

A large part of why there are so few Christians is because many baby boomers lost interest in Christianity and raised their millennial children without any religious affiliation. The conventional explanation for this is the permissive society from the 1960s onwards, but if permissiveness — my kingdom is not of this world — is deeply woven into Christianity itself then the rapid decline of Christian affiliation is unsurprising. Some now joke, with a mixture of Wildean exuberance and smirk, that the Anglican Church is no longer a Christian institution. But it is simply following a normal path.

Which is not the same as saying it is following a necessary path. There are many strands of Christianity. During the medieval and early modern period many Christian churches did embody intolerance. Today, many Christians (and non-Christians) do intelligently argue that Christianity should play a more prominent part in public life. But religions are complex entities, entangled with deep tensions.

Dusenbury emphasises the oddity of Christianity when he mentions the Justinian law code. The central irony, as he puts it, is this: “Justinian inscribes, at the head of his foyer-text to his monumental code of Roman law (and with it, of much European law), as a sanctifying and legitimating figure, the name of a man who was crucified by a Roman judge as a Roman convict”.

Christianity is, of course, flourishing in sub-Saharan Africa. And the most Christian part of Britain is London — in part due to immigration. But is it any surprise that a religion with the Code of Justinian can also provide the context for its own material demise?

Another counterpoint is that America is officially a secular state while European countries usually have state religions — and the former country has a more vigorous religious culture than the latter countries. This is true. But I am interested in secularisation less as a description of how a country is constituted, and more as a social fact and an evolving process. And even in America the prominence of religion in civic life has been in decline.

Dusenbury’s dense, erudite book is not only a historical account and an exercise in theological exegesis; it is also a veiled commentary on our contemporary religious landscape.

Is this increasingly post-Christian landscape sunny? There was a recent report by a think tank called Onward which found that the proportion of under-35s saying they have just one or no close friends has trebled in the past 10 years: from 7% to 22%. Millennials and members of Generation Z are less likely to be members of a group or participate in group activities than previous generations were at similar ages. And people under 25 are three times more likely than people over 65 to distrust their neighbours.

Joining a Church won’t be a panacea to these issues; but it probably will encourage a wider network of friendships and a greater sense of civic belonging. Then again, as Joseph Henrich pointed out in his book The Weirdest People in the World, the move away from extended family networks to smaller-scale communities is itself a consequence of Christian marriage norms.

Christianity gives with one hand and takes away with another.

By June, every title in the top ten of the New York Times’s bestselling nonfiction list was an anti-racist book. Magazines, newspapers, Instagram influencers, book clubs and bookshops all encouraged readers to educate themselves about racism by reading an approved list of books. The same titles kept reappearing.

A new canon was soon established. It included, among others, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Ijeoma Uluo’s So You Want To Talk About Race, Akala’s Natives, Layla F. Saad’s Me and White Supremacy and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist. Never mind that these books differ from each other in content, style and genre; they constituted an integral wish-list for any aspiring anti-racist. And DiAngelo’s was top of the pack.

DiAngelo’s latest book, Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm, is released this week. The audience is, of course, progressive white people; she describes her intended “white progressive” readership as generally on the Left, but they can also be moderates, centrists and soft conservatives. They probably read The Root or the New York Times and “listen to NPR or the BBC as they commute to their job at a non-profit or tech company”.

Like so many of these recent books on race, Nice Racism is, quite explicitly, a self-help book rather than an anti-racist polemic.

Though she now has a very successful career, DiAngelo had a harrowing childhood. Her parents separated when she was young, and she moved apartments several times a year; her single mother couldn’t pay the rent. DiAngelo grew up without medical and dental care. She was called dirty at school and shunned by her peers. When she was ten, her mother died of cancer.

DiAngelo received her undergraduate degree in her mid-thirties at Seattle University, and her PhD, in the field of multicultural education, more than a decade later at the University of Washington. It was between the time of her degree and her doctorate that she became a diversity trainer, since when she has spent 20 years advising white-led businesses and organisations on how to positively interact with black and ethnic minority people. It was out of this work that she conceived the concept and title of her bestseller: white fragility.

White fragility is white people’s inability to discuss race and racism without being defensive and anxious. Whenever the vexed topic of race comes up, DiAngelo argues, white people bristle. This is because white people have been “socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves”. Everywhere you look you see white people in positions of political, economic, and cultural power; white standards of beauty are the norm; and black and ethnic minorities are presented throughout society as stupid, incompetent, and dangerous.

And all of this has been normalised to such an extent that, when such racial inequities are pointed out, “we become highly fragile in conversations about race”. Because the challenge to the “internalized superiority” of white people triggers a response of debilitating discomfort, anti-racist white people need to “build” their “racial stamina”— their ability to endure such conversations.

White fragility, however, is not benign: “it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage”. The genius of DiAngelo’s argument is that she can use any rejection of her thesis as evidence of its soundness. Condemn it out of hand and, well, you’re just suffering from white fragility.

What leads to white fragility, DiAngelo argues, is the belief that racism is individual actions committed by unkind people. This is an outdated view. Racism is instead deeply woven into the institutions of our society; every white person is socialised to be racist, and it is up to each individual white person to undo this socialisation.

This is why DiAngelo has no truck with individualism, meritocracy, and colour-blindness — they obscure the collective social fact of racism by suggesting we are unique individuals outside the matrix of race, or we can achieve social mobility without race, or that race doesn’t shape or influence how we perceive the world.

Even though DiAngelo explicitly disavows individualism, there is an essentially individualist mindset implicit in her argument: the individual who has to face up to her own socialisation in white supremacy. Individualism is bad because it suggests white people can escape from the forces of socialisation; but the only way to tackle white fragility, DiAngelo suggests, is by strengthening our individual capacity to sustain such conversations. White Fragility is not a utopian manifesto. It is not a Marxist polemic. It is a self-help book for white people who want to know how to confront racism.

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Yet while many self-help books are about making you feel good, or at least providing you with the tools to feel better, this isn’t quite the same with DiAngelo’s work. There is a Lutheran-like emphasis on the need to purge yourself of racism. And there is a distinctly pessimistic strain: “Racism is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society”, DiAngelo writes, “that I do not see myself escaping from that continuum in my lifetime”.

The two books often bought alongside White Fragility, Saad’s Me and White Supremacy and Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist, encourage the reader to use a journal when reading the text – a confessional volume itemising their list of racial sins. Becoming an anti-racist is not a walk in the park.

In her 2001 book, Race Experts, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn analysed the intersection between race and the vogue for individual self-improvement in the wake of America’s civil rights movement. “The race experts”, she argues, “moved in to fill a void created by the collapse of the civil rights coalition and the loss of the clarity of the early movement, capitalizing on a long-term trend in American culture toward reliance on experts for guidance in all aspects of public and personal life”.

The civil rights movement was characterised by a commitment to egalitarianism and a universal standard of moral conduct: “It rested”, Lasch-Quinn writes, “on historical truths about America’s pluralism and its racial crimes. It rested on moral truths about harmony and justice”. The rhetoric of the new race experts, by contrast, is characterised by an emphasis on racial difference and individual self-expression:  “The therapeutic notion of identity called for unlimited self-expression as a goal”, Lasch-Quinn writes, “instead of a collective rehabilitation aimed at the formation of a morally viable community”.

Nevertheless, underneath the seeming chaos of individual self-expression lurks the strictures of ritual: “Despite its ostensible commitment to baring all emotion and thought”, Lasch-Quinn writes, “it has its own rituals and forms that actually constrain certain kinds of expression, perhaps the kinds we as a public need the most”. We are encouraged to educate ourselves about racism, and what is lost in our vain attempt to make full sense of the complexities of race is compensated for by the security of race experts telling us what to do and think.

DiAngelo’s tone is earnest and straightforward. There is a charm to how briskly she addresses contentious issues. The world is confusing and she encourages humility in her readers. She has the charisma of a prim no-nonsense teacher.

Saad possesses a similar quality, but she is more explicit. Her book Me and White Supremacy began as a 28-day Instagram challenge. It then became a PDF workbook that was downloaded by over 100,000 people around the world.

It is written as a companion guide for white readers to unpack their complicity in white supremacy. Saad is our Virgil: with characteristic humility, she describes her work in the introduction as a “one-of-a-kind personal antiracism tool structured to help people with white privilege understand and take ownership of their participation in the oppressive system of white supremacy”.

That Saad was born in Britain and grew up there and in Qatar — where she currently lives — does not stop her from using a term like BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of colour) to refer to ethnic minority people. Like all successful self-help authors, she knows her own audience: they are either American or have internalised American culture to such an extent they can read about the marginalisation of “indigenous communities” without batting an eyelid.

At times Saad sounds like a boorish Italian-American boxing coach from the 1950s, or a barking Army general in a Stanley Kubrick epic: “There are no safety nets, no shortcuts, and no easier routes. You will want to close the book, run away, and pretend you never heard of me”, she instructs her reader: “You will want to blame me, rage at me, discredit me, and list all the reasons why you are a good person and why you don’t need to do this work. That is a normal, expected response. That is the response of the white fragility and anti-Blackness lying inside”.

But you can, of course, overcome this. She is more upbeat than DiAngelo. Like an old-fashioned textbook, there are questions at the end of each chapter to answer.

Kendi’s How to be Antiracist, by contrast, is distinct in one important way from many other contemporary anti-racist books: he believes black people can be racist to white people. As a college student, Kendi briefly thought white people were aliens. He no longer believes this. “Whenever someone classifies people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviourally inferior”, he writes, “whenever someone says there is something wrong with White people as a group, someone is articulating a racist idea”.

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In How to be an Antiracist, definitions are absolutely critical for Kendi. He wants clear and consistent definitions on the terms racist and anti-racist. A racist is someone “who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea”. And an anti-racist is someone “who is supporting an anti-racist policy through their actions or expressing an anti-racist idea”.

How to be an Antiracist is the most unnuanced book I have ever read; he splits everything down the middle. There is no such thing as a race-neutral policy: every policy is either producing or challenging racial inequities. “The opposite of ‘racist’”, Kendi writes, “isn’t non-racist. It is ‘anti-racist’. One who ‘believes problems are rooted in groups of people’ is a racist”. By contrast, one who “locates the roots of problems in power and policies is an anti-racist.”

But for Kendi, being a racist is not the worst thing in the world. “It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur”, he writes. “It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it — and then dismantle it”.

Kendi, like DiAngelo with her concept of white fragility, is effectively saying: get over yourselves. Stop being squeamish about being called racist. This aggressively dispassionate style of reasoning, however, is opposed to the true emotional character of people — something earlier anti-racist activists appealed to rather than denied. How, for example, can we be animated to fight racial injustice if we strip racism of its moral content and treat it as simply an analytical tool? isn’t the fact we are upset by being called racist a good thing because it implies we have intuitively accepted the moral case for fighting racism? Of course, many evidently racist people deny they are racist because of the social stigma attached to being called racist. But it’s still possible to identify their dishonesty without diluting the moral content of the term. To do so would be to undermine the legacy of those who proscribed racial prejudice in polite society.

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Ultimately, both Kendi and DiAngelo, despite themselves, fit established stereotypes about America. The individualism, the meritocracy (they are both now wealthy and distinguished public thinkers), the vigorous evangelical piety, and, perhaps the most American thing about them: the neurotic fascination with race.

In her latest book, Nice Racism, DiAngelo’s fixation with race reaches a new pitch of intensity. Among her practical solutions for confronting racism includes attending something called an affinity group. A white affinity group is white people meeting together to discuss their internalised superiority, implicit bias, confusion, and resentment — and doing this in a racially segregated space so as not to cause harm to “racialized people”.

Another thing she suggests is getting “accountability partners of colour”. This is a black person who has agreed to coach you, think with you, and challenge you on your inevitable racism. And you should pay them for this.

If you are inclined, you could also seek out white accountability partners. DiAngelo says she doesn’t offer to pay her white friends for this, but she generously informs us that “there are white people with strong analysis and deep experience who do offer professional aid coaching”.

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Apart from the dangers of encouraging and retrenching racial segregation, there is something so intensely cringeworthy about all of this. An accountability partner? White affinity groups? DiAngelo’s prose, in this book, is deadening rather than enlivening, tedious rather than instructive. Her analysis and recommendations lack sophistication, original insights, sprightly sentences, and astute observations. It is like reading a HR manager’s attempt to write a bestseller.

How can we have constructive discussions about race when everything is so tightly scripted? How can we have genuine conversations when our emotions are disregarded rather than acknowledged?

DiAngelo evinces no curiosity about the lives of ethnic minority people: they come out of this book as shallow as a street puddle. There is no attempt to dig beneath the surface of oppression and marginalisation. How, exactly, can we build authentic cross-racial relationships on the basis of all of this?

But, as she reminds us in one passage, her book is not an attempt “to teach white people about Black people. I am seeking to teach white people about ourselves in relation to Black people and other people of color”. In the end, it is supposed to be about the individual white person overcoming a barrier to greater racial enlightenment. In truth, what is offered is not enlightenment but an emotionally and intellectually enervating form of narcissism.

Tippi Hedren had never acted before. But on the basis of that advert alone Hitchcock offered her a five-year contract on $500 a week. He first cast her in The Birds, his dreamscape horror film set in northern California. The fact she wasn’t a star meant Hitchcock had greater leeway to exercise his Pygmalion instincts: he instructed her on what to wear, what to eat, what friends to see, and he isolated her from the other actors. Hedren later accused Hitchcock of sexually harassing her in Marnie, their final film together.

How did a greengrocer’s son from the East End of London, end up, by the time Marnie was being shot, the most powerful film director in the world? Edward White’s enjoyable jaunt through the different aspects of Alfred Hitchcock is not a straightforward biography; we don’t go from baby Hitch at the twilight of Victorian England to a portly octogenarian in sunlit California. The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock examines Hitchcock thematically. Through these themes an answer to that question emerges.

Hitchcock grew up in Edwardian London. As a boy, he read Edgar Allen Poe, John Buchan, and G.K Chesterton — works of fiction that combined cheap thrills with weightier metaphysical themes of dread and alienation. He loved the West End, and grew up in the culture of music halls and pubs. Both parents had Irish backgrounds, but his father was raised in the Church of England. When his father married his mother, he converted to Roman Catholicism.

He retained in later life all the fears and anxieties of his childhood. He was scared of policemen, strangers, driving, solitude, crowds, heights, water, and conflict of any sort. Like a child playing with his favourite toys, he preferred to work on sets rather than locations. And it is childishness, this desire for control, that, paradoxically, fuelled his status as an auteur.

Hitchcock was christened as such by La Nouvelle Vague, that avant-garde movement from the country that invented the cinema. But he was never the sole “author” of his films. Unlike Woody Allen or Quentin Tarantino, “when it came to screenwriting, Hitchcock relied on the talents of others”. Nevertheless, all his scripts had to have a “Hitchcock touch”: “The biggest trouble”, he once said, “is to educate writers to work along my lines”. He also had to educate actors to work along his lines, and this dictatorial approach to female actors, especially, is the most troubling aspect of his career.

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White describes Hitchock’s relationship to women as “complex” and “contradictory”. On the one hand, “he surrounded himself with women, sought out their friendship, gave them responsibilities and opportunities that few men of his station did, and proudly championed their work”. But on the other hand, it was through women that “he revealed the darkest, most discomfiting parts of himself”. White wonderfully describes him as a “curious brew of J. Alfred Prufrock and Benny Hill: English repression meeting English bawdiness, which may be two sides of the same coin”.

Hitchcock claimed his life with his wife Alma was celibate, and joked that when they conceived their only child he used a fountain-pen. When directing his first film at 25, The Pleasure Garden, he was baffled when one of the actresses refused to go inside water for a drowning scene. A cameraman had to explain to him what menstruation was: “I’ve never heard of it in my life!”. Yet a few years later, during a screen test with the Czech actress Anny Ondra for his first talkie film Blackmail, he questioned her on her sex life.

He also maintained throughout his career that he made films “to please women rather than men” because the majority of cinema-goers were supposedly women. White points out that the producer of his TV show was a woman, as were many of the screenwriters he worked with. Still, the most famous scene he ever shot features a woman, who the audience had up until then thought was the protagonist of the story, being stabbed to death less than halfway through the film.

Psycho cost $800,000 to make, and it made 15 million dollars. Hitchcock self-financed the film, and its success made him the richest director in America. After the high-budget Technicolor suspense thrillers of the 1950s with Grace Kelly, James Stewart, and Cary Grant, Psycho was a different affair. It was a black-and-white horror. The famous shower scene, lasting 50 seconds, took seven days to shoot. Chocolate syrup was used for the blood, and Janet Leigh’s body double for the scene was the Playboy model Marli Renfro.

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The most remarkable thing about the film was not the content, though, but the publicity. Hitchcock made cinema managers sign contracts which forbade audience members from entering the film after it started. He also ordered that, after the final haunting shot of the film was shown, cinema lights be kept low for a further thirty seconds. The effect was electric. Audience members apparently ran out of their seats; many soiled themselves. Promotional posters for the film featured Hitchcock pointing to his wristwatch next to the words: “No one … BUT NO ONE … will be admitted to the theatre after the start of each performance of ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S PYSCHO”. He was a consummate showman.

This concern for appearance was also evident in his attire. White dedicates one chapter in his book to exploring Hitchcock as a dandy. “Despite looking like a staid British bank manager”, White writes, “Hitchcock apportioned great depth to the surface of things. He wasn’t showy”, but “he was committed to the perfection of appearance as a way of exerting control over himself and the world around him”.

After he became rich in the mid-twenties, Hitchcock made a pilgrimage to Savile Row to establish his look: “dark business suit with white shirt, dark tie, and highly polished black shoes”. This trademark look was more than a disguise: it was, as White quotes Philip Mann on dandies, “a uniform for living”. The clothes expressed his soul. And that an outward appearance can express a soul illustrates an equally important element of Hitchcock’s aesthetic vision: Catholicism.

“One should add”, White writes, “that English cultural life in the years of Hitchcock’s childhood and young adulthood was more informed by Catholicism than at any moment since the early seventeenth century”. The two most prominent dandies in the decade Hitchcock was born, Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, were converts to Catholicism. Two novelists born less than a decade after Hitchcock, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, would convert later. Chesterton was a favourite of Hitchcock’s childhood. According to White, “the identifiably Catholic idea that can be found in Hitchcock’s aesthetic sensibility” is that “surface beauty is transcendental, a gateway to another dimension of experience”. He adds that “some of the most famous shots in Hitchcock’s films display objects that seem to be imbued with forces, good and evil, beyond the physical realm”.

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There’s a tension, according to White, between Hitchcock’s Catholicism and his experimental techniques: “the magical elements of Catholic teaching to which Hitchcock was drawn were defended fiercely by the Vatican in the years of Hitchcock’s creative life as a bulwark against modernity — a condition that Hitchcock not only grasped but embodied”. Nevertheless, White contends Hitchcock found a way to fuse the “magical” and the “modern”: “he had a fixation with technique and precision planning, but this was used to create a filmic world that slipped the grasp of science, technology, and rational thought”. He used modernist techniques, then, but resisted the overarching beliefs that explained them. And the Catholicism that suffused his films was the vague and cryptic kind, not clearly articulated doctrine.

This is why, perhaps, when people asked Hitchcock what his films were about, he shrugged: “I don’t give a damn what the film is about”. He disdained attempts to find larger meanings in his work; he wanted them to be appreciated for their form and visual excellence. In this sense, he resembled the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who claimed of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Any ass can assimilate the main points of Tolstoy’s attitude toward adultery but in order to enjoy Tolstoy’s art the good reader must wish to visualize, for instance, the arrangement of a railway carriage on the Moscow-Petersburg night train as it was a hundred years ago”.

Both rejected ideological or moralistic readings of their work; both were characterised by their stylistic virtuosity; both were fascinated by obsessional love and delusion; and both exercised omnipotent control over their art. Hitchcock’s control over his actresses recalls Nabokov’s description of his characters as “galley slaves”. Hitchcock and Nabokov were both born in 1899 and took America as their home at around the same time: they were two expats from the Old World who gave sunny post-war America a sinister edge.

In November 1964, Hitchcock had even written a letter to Nabokov asking him to write a script for two films. The first was a spy film, which Nabokov declined. The second was about “a teenage girl who realises that the hotel run by her family is a front for an organised-crime operation”. Nabokov was intrigued by this, but it never came to fruition: “Demands on both men’s time meant the collaboration never happened”. Our loss.

Nevertheless, even if his films were not about large overarching themes, White’s book shows they were nevertheless a crucible through which many of the currents of the twentieth-century clashed. Hitchcock wanted us to watch his films for entertainment; but we know they are more than that. He was a modernist and a Catholic. Elegance and charm mixed in his films with sex and violence. As White notes near the end of this stimulating book, Hitchcock’s “variegated legacies, buttressed by his phenomenal talent and unconventional personality, make him a codex of his times, usually complex, often troubling, but always vital”.

Entitled “The Prisoner of Sex”, and later published as a small book, Mailer’s essay is largely a rebuttal to Kate Millett’s book Sexual Politics, which, alongside D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, denounced Mailer’s work as misogynistic. When “The Prisoner of Sex” was first published, the editor of Harper’s magazine took out an ad in The New York Times announcing: “The Favourite Target of Women’s Lib Chooses His Weapon. Harper’s Magazine”. Adding: “Pick up a Copy. Before Your Newsstand is Picketed”.

The Prisoner of Sex is an odd book. Mailer refers to himself throughout in the third person. It contains literary analysis of the smutty bits in Miller and Lawrence, long and technical digressions on female anatomy, and meditations on the metaphysical nature of sex. For Mailer, the main problem with the women’s liberation movement is it evades the fundamental fact of biological difference: “Women, like men, were human beings” he writes, “but they were a step, or a stage, or a move or a leap nearer the creation of existence”.

Women, because of their reproductive capacities, were men’s “only connection to the future”. Without women, men would be alienated from nature: they would just bundle along, without any point or significance to their lives. This is why Mailer, who was a serial womaniser, was opposed to contraception and masturbation: they interfered with the organic, procreative essence of sexual relations. J Michael Lennon, Mailer’s authorised biographer, writes that, “from one perspective, his sixty years of writing can be seen as an untrammelled examination of all things sexual”. Alfred Kazin once described him as “the Rabbi of screwing, the Talmudist of fucking, the writer who has managed to be so solemn about sex as to make it grim”.

Joan Didion endorsed the book, writing that Mailer’s view “strikes me as exactly right”. Joyce Carol Oates was also sympathetic: Mailer, she writes, “is shameless in his passion for women, and one is led to believe anything he says because he says it so well”. Anatole Broyard, critic for The New York Times, called it Mailer’s best book. But it was also often panned — and badly. Brigid Brophy, in a review for The New York Times, contends that the “prose proceeds from malapropism” to “the rhapsodic plateau of the inside of a Christmas card”. The book was nominated for a National Book Award and earned Mailer $200,000 in royalties; but the only way I could buy it this year was to wait four weeks for my second-hand copy to arrive.

At the time of the debate, in 1971, Mailer was at the peak of productivity. Between 1965 and 1975, he wrote 16 books, directed three films, produced a play, and ran for Mayor of New York City. Mailer had been a key figure in American literary culture since his debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948. It spent 19 weeks in first place on the New York Times bestseller list and 40 translation rights were sold. Mailer was 25.

A year later, he briefly moved to Hollywood and hobnobbed with Charlie Chaplin, Marlon Brando and Humphrey Bogart. In the 1950s, when his follow up novel, Barbary Shore, was not as well-received as his first, he became the Philosopher of Hip. Fuelled by marijuana, booze, coffee and sleeping pills, he became a countercultural essayist who celebrated the intense immediacy of life. The fact that he stabbed and nearly killed his second wife Adele Morales in 1960 didn’t really hamper his fame. In his career, he gave over seven hundred interviews.

Millett was invited to take part in the Town Hall debate but she declined. Gloria Steinem, who was friendly with Mailer, also said no. But six months before the debate, an Australian academic at Warwick University published a book entitled The Female Eunuch. It became a bestseller and made the author a celebrity. For many people, the Town Hall debate was simply Germaine Greer versus Norman Mailer — the icon of Women’s Lib against the quintessential Male Chauvinist Pig.

In any case, the first speaker of the debate was Jacqueline Ceballos, the leader of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women. In her speech, Ceballos argues that the root of everything — the peace movement, the civil rights movement — is “women’s liberation”. She mentioned that at work women are underpaid and overworked. And that we should encourage women to sue employers who discriminate against them.

She is not against marriage, but rather wants to change the direction so that “If women are married in a society that pushes them towards marriage, they should be paid for the work they do”. They should also receive pensions and vacation pay. And she attacks how women are portrayed in advertising as “stupid” and “senile”. A woman “gets an orgasm when she gets the shiny floor”. Doll-like before marriage, afterwards she is presented as a bitter shrew.

After her speech, Mailer says to Ceballos: “While everything you presented was certainly to the point and even politically feasible I would ask if there was anything in your programme that would give us men the notion that life might not continue to be as profoundly boring as it is today”. She is too square for him.

Greer is next to speak, “that distinguished and young and formidable lady writer Miss Germaine Greer from England” in Mailer’s words. Speaking in a posh British-Australian accent, Greer proclaims that she has to confront “the being I think most privileged in male elitist society — namely, the masculine artist. The pinnacle of the masculine elite”. The audience breaks into laughter: the statement seems to be directed at Mailer.

Women artists were either “menials” or “Goddesses”. Women can “neither be one nor the other with peace of mind” because “we are unfortunately improper Goddesses and unwilling menials. There is a battle waged between us”. Greer adds that: “The achievement of the male artistic ego is at my expense for I find the battle is dearer to him than the peace would ever be. The eternal battle with women, he boasts, sharpens our resistance, develops our strength, enlarges the scope of our cultural achievements”. Mailer says in response that the women’s liberation movement is insufficiently “dialectical”. That it’s possible for women to be both “slobs” and “Goddesses”. And it’s only through “extremes of experience” that women can achieve a higher state.

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The next speaker is Jill Johnston, a dance critic at The Village Voice, who would two years later publish a book entitled Lesbian Nation. She argues that “Until all women are lesbians, there will be no true political revolution” because women must give each other a new sense of self, and “until women see in each other the possibility of a primal commitment, which includes sexual love, they will be denying themselves the love and value they readily accord to men – thus affirming their second class status”.

Mailer tells Johnston it’s time to close her speech, as she has gone over the allotted time. Two of her friends come on stage, and they start rolling on the floor together. To which Mailer responds: “Hey you know it’s great that you pay 25 bucks to see three dirty overalls on the floor, when you can see lots of cock and cunt for four dollars just down the street”.

The next and final speaker is Diana Trilling, who identified as an old-school feminist and was a key member of ‘The Family’: the group of writers and intellectuals in New York associated with magazines like Partsian Review, Commentary, and The New York Review of Books. Trilling states that the women’s liberation movement, as evidenced by the hostility to Mailer, has “an authoritarianism already this advanced in purpose and efficiency. Here we have achieved virtually nothing on behalf of women other than perhaps to open a door on grievances which they have either tried to suppress or lived with in loneliness”.

Trilling is opposed to many feminists “who will invalidate the biological differences between the sexes”. She objects to Mailer because while honouring biology, he “implicitly acquiesces in the intolerable uses in which culture has made of the biological differences between the sexes”. She adds that: “Biology is all very well Norman. All these women have biology. But they also have a repressive and life-diminishing culture to contend with”. And Mailer’s essay “fails in its imagination of the full humanity of women, as it would never fail in its imagination of the full humanity of men”.

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After Trilling’s speech, Mailer reiterates his position: “Biology or physiology is not destiny. But it is half of it”, and if we ignore this we get the “most awful totalitarianism of them all” because it is a “left totalitarianism”. He dislikes what he considers the humourless aspect of the women’s liberation movement. And he states that female liberty, like every liberty, will be achieved against the grain, against the paradox that “there is much in human life that forbids liberty”.

The issue goes at the heart of human existence: “it is the deepest question that faces us”. He wants the discussion to be at a serious level, but “if you wish me to act the clown, I’ll take out my modest little Jewish dick and put it on the table. You can all spit at it and laugh at it, and then I’ll walk away and you’ll find it was just a dildo I left there. I hadn’t shown you the real one”. (Mailer’s three oldest daughters, ranging in ages from 21 to 12, were in the audience, as were his mother and sister).

Throughout the debate, the audience is raucous and intense. Audience members keep on storming off and shouting at the panel. The event is ostentatiously theatrical. It is less a debate than a carnival of competing egos. This is no surprise: Mailer was a showman throughout his career.

Greer, meanwhile, was involved in theatre groups in Australia and Britain. At Cambridge, she became a member of the Footlights. Her doctoral thesis was on Shakespeare’s comedies. The image of Greer as the Women’s Lib icon is also slightly misplaced, for as her biographer Christine Wallace puts it: “She was not a part of the grassroots feminism that gained momentum in America, Australia and Britain as the 1960s rolled on. Rather she was part of the counterculture, whose ‘free love’ tenet coincided with her libertarian view of spontaneous sex as the universal balm”.

Greer was involved with the anarchist libertarian group “the Push” during her MA at the University of Sydney.  She wrote articles for Oz, a countercultural underground magazine, where she promoted sleeping with rock stars. In 1969, she co-founded and edited the pornographic magazine Suck, where she gossiped about the sex lives of her friends. This was a time when many prominent members of the women’s liberation movement condemned pornography as misogynist. She wrote for Playboy in the 1970s and appeared nude in a copy of Suck published in 1972.

Lynne Segal described The Female Eunuch as “unrepresentative of women’s liberation in the early days; the movement was predominantly dismissed [by] Greer’s individualistic anarchism and dismissal of collective action”. Sheila Rowbotham described Greer as a “scarecrow feminist” who avoid “the stiff tense humourless tightness” of feminism and other revolutionary groups, but end up “becoming a sophisticated brand of titillation on the media” and “perform for a male audience”. Life magazine described her as “The Saucy Feminist that even Men like”. After reading The Female Eunuch, Henry Miller, one of Kate Millett’s bêtes noires, said: “The one woman in the Women’s Lib movement I’m in love with is Germaine. Oo-la-la! She is everybody’s liberator and she writes like a man. Reading her is like reading Tropic of Cancer.”

The ostensible conflict between Greer and Mailer in the debate also belies the bond between them. Greer did her MA thesis on Lord Byron, and Mailer is in many respects a 20th century Byron: a writer who burst to celebrity in his mid-twenties and is consumed by the multiple dimensions of sex. In a piece for Oz magazine, she writes this about her encounter with a woman called Dr G (who she revealed is actually Greer): “Norman Mailer’s penis blossoms in her head”. Diana Trilling wrote afterwards that Greer did the event so she could sleep with Mailer.

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There are more complicated aspects to Greer’s character. In The Female Eunuch, Greer argues that women should be “fucking for sex instead of ego and prestige”. And that they should also “mate down” — dating men with lower status than them. This was around the same time she was promoting “starfucking”.

Moreover, at the beginning of her book, she states: “The opponents of female suffrage lamented that woman’s emancipation would mean the end of marriage, morality and the state; their extremism was more clear-sighted than the woolly benevolence of liberals and humanists, who thought that giving women a measure of freedom would not upset anything. When we reap the harvest which the unwitting suffragettes sowed we shall see that the anti-feminists were after all right.”

But a year before writing this, she married the first man that asked her hand in marriage. Asked decades later why she married Paul de Feu, she said: “We got married because he thought it was a good idea” and “I thought he knew what he was doing. I am a woman of the fifties, I wait to be asked”. Elsewhere she states: “Men have to court me and make the running. I have never rung up a man in my life”. This from the woman whose book is about women taking control over their own sexual lives.

Despite her contradictions, The Female Eunuch is, nevertheless, a beautifully written, erudite, consistently fascinating, and very funny book — even if you don’t agree with all her arguments. As she states in her Town Hall speech, women should not be compelled to be either “menials” or “Goddesses”. She is not a feminist icon; she is an immensely gifted and complicated woman.

Ten years after the Town Hall debate, Martin Amis visited Mailer in his New York apartment to profile him for the Observer. Mailer is now married to his sixth wife and has eight or nine children. He needs to “earn $400,000 a year to stay abreast of alimony and tuition fees”. When Amis reminds Mailer of his previous opposition to any form of contraception, Mailer retorts: “I’ve got eight kids. I can’t afford to believe that any more. My hopes and expectations have changed. I no longer feel prepared to go to the wall for any big ideas”. Prisoner of Sex indeed.

Similarly, when we think of historical opposition to the public consumption of alcohol, temperance and prohibition inevitably come to mind — the very opposite of happiness. The people behind these movements, we assume, were rural, reactionary busybodies who hated fun. They were also probably racist. And they definitely had no sense of humour. They were people you wouldn’t want to have a drink with because they wouldn’t want to have a drink with anyone.

Richard Hoftstadter, the influential American mid-twentieth century historian, eloquently expands this characterisation. “Prohibition,” he wrote, was “a pinched, parochial substitute for reform which had a widespread appeal to a certain type of crusading mind”. He describes this “crusading mind” as “linked not merely to an aversion to drunkenness and to the evils that accompanied it, but to the immigrant drinking masses, to the pleasures and amenities of city life, and to the well-to-do classes and cultivated men.” It was a “rural-evangelical virus”, spread around America by “the country Protestant”.

You can picture these people with fine precision: the ideological ancestors of Pat Robertson and every other Christian fundamentalist crank. This viewpoint, however, is a myth. An excellent myth which appeals to our contemporary intuitions about religion and secularism, freedom and authority. But a myth, nevertheless.

The “crusading mind” that characterised the temperance movement was underpinned not by reactionary impulses, but by the principles of social justice. As Mark Lawrence Schrad puts it in his utterly fascinating new book, Smashing the Liquor Machine, “Prohibitionism wasn’t moralising ‘thou shalt nots’, but a progressive shield for marginalised, suffering, and oppressed peoples to defend themselves from further exploitation”.

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Consider, for instance, someone like Carrie Nation. Born in Kentucky and raised in Missouri, she became infamous for going into taverns and smashing their windows with a hatchet. She has been described as a Bible-thumping Amazon. Some historians blame her strange behaviour on menopause and sexual frustration. If you search for her name on Google Images, the first picture that comes up shows her holding a hatchet on her gloved right hand and an open Bible on her left. She looks absolutely terrifying; Mary Whitehouse decked in black in Midwest America.

But looks, as they say, can be deceiving. As Schrad puts it: “She was not some Bible-thumping, conservative ‘holy crone on a broomstick’, seeking to legislate morality or ‘discipline’ individual behaviour”. Rather, she was a “populist progressive” who viewed alcoholism as a social evil that, among other things, endangered women.

In Kansas City, she built a women’s shelter. And when she retired, she built an institution called “Hatchet Hall”, which Schrad describes as “part rest home for the impoverished elderly, part safe haven for women fleeing abusive husbands, and part homeschool for their children”.

Crucially, she didn’t view the “drinker as a sinner”, but as a victim, like “prostitutes” or “slaves”. The sinner was the person selling the drink. The same is true of other prohibitionists: they made clear that their objection was not against the person drinking, who they saw as a victim, but the liquor traffic that exploited them. Some people today would say they had a saviour complex.

Nation was also anti-racist. She donated “her lecture proceeds to the black African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. And when she did speak at churches that denied blacks, she demanded that all be admitted entry. If that made racists uncomfortable, well, then they could leave”. Indeed, the relationship between temperance, women’s rights, and black civil rights was a close one. Most abolitionists, suffragists, and civil rights leaders in the nineteenth century supported prohibition.

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William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the influential abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, was also a staunch prohibitionist. In a letter he wrote in 1830, he states his principles clearly: that because “all men are born equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” it means:

“That intemperance is a filthy habit and an awful scourge, wholly produced by the moderate, occasional and fashionable use of alcoholic liquors—consequently, that it is sinful to distil, to import, to sell, to drink, or to offer such liquors to our friends or laborers, and that entire abstinence is the duty of every individual.”

Women’s rights leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were also prohibitionists, and formed together the New York State Temperance Society. There they proclaimed it was the duty of women “to speak out against the liquor traffic and all men and institutions that in any way sanction, sustain, or countenance it”. At the women’s rights convention organised by Anthony and Stanton in 1866, Frances Harper, whom Schrad describes as “the most prolific and bestselling black poet and author of the nineteenth century”, spoke. Like “most abolitionist suffragists”, she was also a “proponent of temperance”.

Or consider the more recent example of Walter Rauschenbusch. He was a Baptist minister during the Progressive era — the early decades of twentieth century America — who espoused Social Gospel: a form of Christianity utterly dedicated to fighting against social injustice and exploitation. Rauschenbusch saw the liquor industry as a source of these evils, and was cited by Martin Luther King as a key influence.

So why is he overlooked in accounts of prohibitionism? As Schrad puts it: “Walter Rauschenbusch upsets all of our two-dimensional stereotypes of evangelical Christianity. He was compassionate, not commanding; cosmopolitan, not conservative; socialist, not reactionary”. As a result, “the most influential evangelical of his day almost never appears in traditional prohibition histories”.

Nor was the temperance movement limited to America. To strengthen his point that the movement was progressive, rather than reactionary, Schrad widens his analysis by examining prohibitionism around the world. He points out social democrats like Belgian Emile Vandervelde and Swedish Hjalmar Branting espoused it; Tolstoy and Gandhi, advocates of non-violent resistance and opponents of social injustice, also promoted it.

Even Lenin, perhaps the most consequential Leftist of the twentieth century, subscribed to temperance; he viewed Vodka as a tool used by the authorities to stupify and subjugate the masses. (Lenin was also opposed to free love, which he considered a bourgeois rather than proletarian demand. He thought sex had a “social interest, which gives rise to a duty towards the community”. Shame he was also a mass-murdering tyrant.)

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Closer to home, there was also a temperance movement in Britain and Ireland. Henry Vincent, an influential leader of the Chartists, wanted to connect the Chartist movement with the Temperance Society. Meanwhile, nineteenth-century Ireland, under the influence of the Irish priest Thebold Mathew, had a greater proportion of people who followed temperance than anywhere else in the British isles. (Yes, you can read that last sentence again.) As Schrad writes, when mass immigration to the States happened in the wake of the Irish famine, “the Irish Paddy fresh off the boat was statistically more likely to be a teetotaler than the heavy-drinking white, nativist evangelicals in the American heartland”.

Frederick Douglass, the iconic abolitionist leader, was particularly inspired by his friendship with Father Mathew. In a lecture Douglass delivered in Cork, he said: “Seven years ago I was ranked among the beasts and creeping things; to-night I am here held as a man and a brother”. He added: “If I can but forget the position in which I once was, I can turn my attention to teetotalism, and shall be able to speak as a man for a few moments”.

The dignity conferred on him by a teetoller is the same dignity as being a free man — the implication being that slavery and drunkenness are fundamentally akin. Both are ways through which we exploit our fellow man. Douglass emphasised this connection between drunkenness and slavery by stating: “If we could but make the world sober, we would have no slavery”. Two days after his speech, Douglass took Father Mathew’s temperance vow.

So why has our understanding of prohibitionism been so distorted? The main reason, I suspect, is because we project contemporary assumptions to the past. Prohibitionism was reactionary because it was led, in our mind, by evangelical Christians — while forgetting or ignoring the fact that the campaign against the slave trade, for instance, was led by evangelical Christians, or that many influential early feminists, like Josephine Butler, were also evangelical Christians.

Yes, abolitionists and early feminists, like the temperance movement, were irritating busybodies. They did often look a bit scary. But they also proudly espoused views — such as the inherent dignity of black people and women — which may seem common sense to us now, but were certainly not back then.

So, strange as it may sound, when we clink our glasses today, let us spare a thought for the temperance movement. Many of the same people involved in that cause were right on fundamental issues. More to the point: the principles that underpinned those correct views were the same principles that animated their prohibitionism. Surely we can all drink to that.

On the very first page of Black Skin, White Masks — which has just been published as a Penguin Modern Classic, using Richard Philcox’s translation — Fanon states: “I’m not the bearer of absolute truths”. Which doesn’t sound very saintly. He was trying to emphasise his humanity instead of being seen solely for his race. The book is an investigation into neurosis and alienation; the crisis of a man who thought he was just a man, but discovers instead he is a nègre. “Look Mummy, a nègre,” a little child says and points to Fanon.

The text is often dense: Fanon mixes literary analysis of obscure novels with the jargon of phenomenology. He can be horny, sad, angry, introspective and playful — all on the same page. The sections that seem to be influenced by Hegel are particularly tough work. It is not entirely surprising that the book was a damp squib on publication. No major French newspaper or journal reviewed it; by the time Fanon died from leukaemia, at the age of 36 in a hospital in America, it had been out of print for many years.

Fanon did have aspirations to be a playwright. And the drama involved in the text is positively theatrical. He didn’t type the manuscript himself, but rather dictated it to his inamorata, Josie; this explains the sudden shifts in register and tone. This is not a contained book; it bursts with the energy of a young man.

Fanon was 27 when it was published, a Jacques the Lad who loved football, and as a teenager stole marbles and snuck illegally into cinemas with his friends. In a letter he sent to a friend about the book, which is quoted in Macey’s biography, he affirms: “I am trying to touch my reader affectively, or in other words irrationally, almost sensually. For me, words have a charge. I find myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question mark.”

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Another reason why Fanon can be called a saint was his strident moral universalism; but this universalism can be explained, at least partly, by his background as a black man from the French West Indies. As he puts it in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks: “As those of Antillean, our observations and conclusions are valid only for the French Antilles”. The rest of the book is, indeed, very French.

Fanon was born to a middle-class family in the French West Indian colony of Martinique. His father was a civil servant and his mother a successful shop owner. The family were so well-off they could afford servants. They even owned a second house in the outer suburbs of Fort-de-France, the capital city. Martinique was an old colony: many of its institutions, such as its schools and courts, were modelled on metropolitan France. Fanon attended a fee-paying lycée, a privilege that poor West Indian blacks couldn’t afford — neither could poor whites in France.

One might think, on knowing that a white population lived in Martinique, that they were the emissaries of mainland France. They would be wrong. The Békés — as the Martinique-born white population was called — were opposed to Martinique being integrated as a French territory in 1946, and they supported the Vichy regime during the second world war,

They were a clannish, endogamous minority composed of landowning families. Interracial marriage here, unlike in metropolitan France, was completely taboo. In a documentary by Stuart Hall on the nations of the Caribbean, an elder Béké man, with a grin on his face, compared them to the mafia. They lived in a hill just above Fort-de-France: there was a rivalry between the landowning Békés and the rising urban black and mixed-race middle-class families in the capital city.

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Free speech warriors are the real puritans

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Fanon’s life was in many ways not just an embrace of republican France, but a rejection of the lifestyle and beliefs of Békés. He fought for de Gaulle’s Free France, and was decorated with a Croix de Guerre. He married a white woman. And, at a deeper level, his commitment to republican French universalism — which, of course, wasn’t fully practised in France, as he later found out when he moved there to study medicine — was in stark contrast to the American-style racial obsessions of the Békés in Martinique.

Fanon, in his book, is trying to affirm the universal brotherhood of man. In one passage, he states: “we must recall our aim is to enable better relations between Blacks and Whites”. It is no surprise, then, he is sensitive about anti-Semitism: “Anti-Semitism cuts me to the quick,” he writes. “They are denying me the right to be a man. I cannot dissociate myself from the fate reserved for my brother.”

He rejects being viewed as black person. He wants to be seen simply as a person: “The black man, however sincere, is a slave to the past. But I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the Compass.” Later he lyrically adds: “It is not the black world that governs my behaviour. My black skin is not a repository for specific values. The starry sky that left Kant in awe has long revealed its secrets to me.”

Unlike many self-described anti-racists today, who engage in performative demands for white guilt, Fanon states: “I have not the right as a man of colour to wish for a guilt complex to crystallise in the white man regarding the past of my race”. What he wants, instead, is respect and dignity: “I, a man of colour, want but one thing. May man never be instrumentalised. May the subjugation of man by man — that is to say, me by another — cease. May I be able to discover and desire man wherever he may be”.

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Yet Fanon is also often linked with the Négritude movement, a group of black Francophone intellectuals who wanted to cultivate a distinctively black consciousness. This is partly because the most famous Négritude intellectual was the poet and politician Aime Cesaire, who was not only a fellow Martiniquan, but also taught Fanon at the Lycée Schoelcher.  However, Fanon was largely ambivalent to the Négritude movement, and in Black Skin, White Masks he expresses views that run contrary to their ethos: “In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilisation unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past”. And he later states: “No, I have not the right to be black. It is not my duty to be this or that”.

What animates Fanon most was a deep curiosity. In the book’s conclusion, he asks: “Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?” Indeed, the final sentence is: “My final prayer: O my body, always make me a man who questions.” And so explicitly linking Fanon to his French colonial background has its pitfalls; it potentially blunts his wish to be free from his past, and to be, as he put it, “constantly creating myself”.

But while his background didn’t determine his views and attitude, it did, to a considerable extent, influence it. What can be more French — apart from the obvious things — than turning the act of asking questions into something sacred? On the front cover of the new edition of Black Skin, White Masks is a photograph of Fanon. He looks both proud and sceptical, embodying the most captivating features of French culture.

If Fanon was an icon of anything, it wouldn’t be Third World revolution, but rather republican France. But he was not an icon; he was simply a man. And his humanity was all the more transparent in the tragic gap between his universalist ideals and the reality of being seen as just a nègre.

“Unlike the progressive counterculture of the 1960s, which encouraged sexual openness, flamboyant individualism, and euphoric cultural mixing, today’s social justice crusades are built around joyless rites of self-interrogation, announced publicly but conducted inwardly.”

As much as anything else, many of today’s debates about identity and free speech deal with aesthetics. By presenting these activists as puritan zealots, the Quillette editors can invoke the contrasting glamour of the sixties counterculture. Today’s young activists are uncool.

In his new book, Free Speech and Why it Matters, the comedian Andrew Doyle also invokes past progressives that were more sympathetic to free speech so he can criticise the contemporary Left. Referring to civil rights, gay rights, and women’s rights campaigners, he writes: “without freedom of speech theirs was a lost cause”.

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Doyle also charges his defence of free speech with an optimistic tone. Freedom of speech is important because it allows us to defeat bad ideas: “We are far better placed to know and overcome evil if we are acquainted with its essence, and the best way to achieve this is to listen and to read”. The implication, here, is that progressives who have abandoned free speech not only shy away from difficult truths, but have also lost faith in our capacity for greater moral progress.

Nevertheless, both Doyle and the Quillette editors make a series of points that complicate this neat distinction between the optimistic progressive radicals of the past, who embodied the essence of free speech, and their dour incarnation in the present.

Puritanism is not simply about being pessimistic about the human condition, and unwilling to entertain new ideas. It is, as the American novelist Marilynne Robinson put in her essay, “Puritans and Prigs: An Anatomy of Zealotry”,  about the struggle for moral goodness. Struggle is the key word here. For Robinson, being good “is a great struggle and a mystery”. This means that “moral people seem to me especially eager to offer pardon in the hope of receiving pardon, to forgo judgement in the hope of escaping judgement”. So in trying to suppress your base instincts, trying “govern oneself”, you adopt a more tolerant attitude to the beliefs of others — this is the essence of free speech and the antithesis of cancel culture.

Doyle touches on this in his book. In one passage, he writes that we all understand the impulse towards censorship because we sometimes feel it. But in trying to enforce this instinct, we also “degrade ourselves by subordinating our reason to baser instincts”. This valorisation of reason over instinct, as Ralph Leonard and Maria Albano have written, recalls elements of Platonism and traditional Christianity: it is puritan in its assumption that human passions are so volatile and dangerous that they need to be contained by reason. Doyle puts the point more forcefully when he writes, “we find that in many cases the greatest threat to free expression comes from ourselves”. It is only through constraining our primal instinct toward censorship, then, that we can ensure freedom of speech.

The impulse towards censorship, then, is base. Repressing that instinct for censorship — our reason suppressing our base passions — is puritan. Consequently, puritanism fosters the environment for greater liberty. The relationship between constraint and freedom is also explored by the Quillette editors. They consider, for instance, the French Revolution and its often-cited legacy. “In its liberal form”, they write, “the revolution peaked with the constitution of 1791, which created a democratic constitutional monarchy”. The revolution degenerated, however, with the Terror — the orgy of denunciations and executions that gripped republican France: “As with communists, religious fundamentalists, Cold War McCarthyites, and autocratic populists, the architects of this terror argued that the Republican project was too urgent to be constrained by the need for due process, free speech, the right of assemblies, or other civil liberties”. They compare these people who are unconstrained by moral principles to modern-day progressives who see themselves as “vanguards against racism and fascism”.

But therein lies a tension. The criticism of contemporary progressives in this section is that they are unable to sufficiently constrain their base instinct for censorship; but the soixante-huitard radicals the Quillette editors admire were also characterised by their very lack of inhibition. Later on the editors state, quite correctly, that “crowdsourced dissent-suppression campaigns” show that freedom of speech depends as much “on a hospitable intellectual culture as on legal codes”. Which begs the question: what does this culture consist of? It does not depend on openness and radical optimism; rather, free speech depends on a puritan ethos.

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Doyle, for instance, points out that a genuinely hospitable intellectual climate would consist of a sceptical attitude to people in power being able to enforce hate speech codes without descending into tyranny. “You might trust our leaders to judge these matters sensibly, but it takes a certain myopia not to see governments of the future might want to abuse the precedent”. Doyle’s case against censorship, then, also partly depends on a pessimistic view of human nature. “The price we pay for a free society”, he argues, “is that bad people will say bad things. We tolerate this, not because we approve of the content of their speech, but because once we have compromised on the principle of free speech we clear the pathway for future tyranny”.

This talk of tradeoffs is reminiscent of what Thomas Sowell calls the constrained vision of life: there is no perfect or optimal way to organise society because our interests are always in a state of tension. To try to overcome this tension, as utopians of far Left and far Right have done, leads inevitably to a state of pitiless tyranny. The culture most conducive for free speech is thus one that maintains this tension — accepting that liberty and self-expression cannot be sustained without a degree of discipline on the part of those who participate in society. In other words, puritanism.

Doyle even invokes the fragility of civilisation against the demonic tendency toward censorship. “Civilisation”, Doyle writes, “is the barricade we erect to hold back our baser instincts. This cannot be sustained without free speech and, although I do not believe we are as yet experiencing a full-blown crisis, the first fissures in the barricade are certainly widening”. But he doesn’t go deep enough here; free speech itself cannot be sustained without tolerance.

Doyle’s elegantly written and moderate polemic is in stark contrast to his personae as Titania McGrath — his largely unfunny satirical embodiment of woke culture. In this book, Doyle is more like the eminently reasonable schoolteacher he once was, patiently instructing us on the virtues of free speech, and emphasising the importance of decency and good moral conduct. The problem is the class is no longer a room of well-behaved students; his audience now resides in the cynical digital landscape, where there is little incentive for the kind of puritan self-control necessary for the free exchange of ideas.

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Even John Stuart Mill, the archetypal liberal thinker, views intellectual tolerance more like a quid pro quo between conflicting interests than a vindication of abstract rights: “minorities, seeing that they had no chance of becoming majorities”, he writes, “were under the necessity of pleading to those whom they could not convert, for permission to differ. It is accordingly on this battlefield, almost solely, that the rights of the individual against society have been asserted on broad grounds of principle, and the claim of society to exercise authority over dissentients, openly controverted”.

In their earlier denigration of contemporary progressives as puritanical, the Quillette editors and Doyle have it backwards. The problem is these progressives are not puritanical enough. In her essay on puritanism, Robinson distinguishes between Puritanism and Priggishness. She describes Priggishness as “a consuming loyalty to ideals and beliefs which are in general so widely shared that the spectacle of zealous adherence to them is reassuring.” This is a more accurate description of many progressive activists.

A “prig with an original idea”, Robinson adds, “is a contradiction in terms, because he or she is a creature of consensus”. A prig is a person who has not thought deeply about an issue, but is absolutely convinced he has the correct opinion on it. Many of today’s contemporary progressives are pejoratively derided as moralisers, but the problem is many of them do not moralise enough — they don’t go through the individual grind and struggle a truly moral person often has to go through to get to their position.

This is not to say that puritanism necessarily leads to tolerance. Of course, many self-described puritans have been the very opposite of tolerant; there is a reason it’s a synonym for zealot. But some of the core principles associated with it are still valuable for us today, even if many of the people associated with it have behaved abominably. There’s also a risk that this maintenance of tension can lead to a sort of moral relativism, and make us unwilling to try to persuade those who we think are genuinely wrong. But puritanism doesn’t imply there are no right or wrong answers, but simply that humans will always be vulnerable to stumbling on the wrong answers. And a philosophical approach that recognises this is better placed to paint the kind of society conducive to the free exchange of ideas than one which naively assumes we can perfect humanity.

Malik features prominently in the first two episodes of Adam Curtis’s new film series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World. It begins like many of his previous films, with the conviction that the current state of the world is confusing, and then proceeds to trace this confusion back to obscure movements and individuals in the past.

Curtis’s subjects include, besides Malik, Mao Zedong’s last wife, Jiang Qing, the British model Sandra Paul and her aristocratic husband, Robin Douglas-Home. These episodes are concerned, principally, with whether the individual can impose his or her own fantasies on the world — and at what cost. The viewing experience is trademark Curtis — a mishmash of visual clips juxtaposed with the narrative voice of the traditional BBC. David Lynch meets David Attenborough.

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Tracing Malik’s life in Britain, we see clips of him being interviewed on colour television; we also see him in black and white stills, adorned with the beard of a cult-leader. When he first appears in the film, with his softly-spoken Trinidadian accent, the impression is of a reflective man, not someone beholden to dangerous fantasies. His only discernible desires are the empowerment of black people and an end to racial injustice.

V. S. Naipaul, in his extraordinary essay on Malik, offers a very different impression of the man. Written in 1979, ‘Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad: Peace and Power’ presents him throughout as a narcissist utterly divorced from reality. He is ready to kill to fulfil his delusions. Naipaul’s point, still relevant today, is about how ostensibly noble politics can be deformed by individual pathology; and how idealism, when it is not rooted in reality, can degenerate into a sectarian fantasy. Naipaul notes that Malik espoused an essentialist view of black people: “the Negro who had not dropped out, who was educated, had a skill or a profession, was not quite a Negro; there was no need for anyone to come to terms with him. The real Negro was more elemental.”

After 14 years in Britain, Malik had grown frustrated with it. He was prosecuted and imprisoned for 10 months under the 1967 Race Relations Act for inciting hatred against white people. In 1971, he moved back to Trinidad to establish a commune. There he was visited by a strange couple.

Gale Benson was a 27-year-old divorced British model and socialite — and the daughter of a former Tory MP. Her lover, Hakim Jamal, was a black American revolutionary-playboy who had previously dated the actress Jean Seberg and the editor Diana Athill. (Athill, incidentally, was a long-term editor of Naipaul.) After two months staying in Malik’s commune, Benson was stabbed with a cutlass by Malik’s followers and buried. Very soon after Benson’s murder, a local Trinidadian man named Joseph Skerritt was also killed. Jamal was told that Benson had simply ran away; he subsequently left. A year later, he was killed in a gang-related incident in Boston.

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The bare facts are well-established. But Curtis and Naipaul diverge on the motivations behind these murders. Strangely, Naipaul’s explanation for them is more Curtisian than Curtis’s: they were the fulfillment, he suggests, of a fundamentally sinister fantasy. Naipaul describes Malik as a “Carnival figure”.

“He was an entertainer, a playactor; but he wasn’t the only one. He failed to understand that section of the middle class that knows it is secure, has no views, only reflexes and scattered irritations, and sometimes indulges in play: the people who keep up with revolution as with the theatre, the revolutionaries who visit centres of revolution, but with return air-tickets, the people for whom Malik’s kind of Black Power was an exotic but safe brothel.”

This characterisation of liberals who fethisise black radicalism, whilst leading affluent lives, recalls a passage from Albert Murray’s 1970 essay collection The Omni-Americans. In it, he quotes a black resident of Westchester County who said to Murray: “If you don’t go in there moaning and pissing and moaning and making threats, they’ll call you a moderate and drop your butt fifty times faster than Malcolm ever could.” The resident later emphasises the gratuitous nature of this spectacle. Speaking directly about his wealthy white neighbours, he writes: “But damn, man, the minute you sound off, you realized they’ve tricked you into scat singing and buck dancing for them; because there they are, all crowding around, like watching you masturbate, like they are ready to clap their hands and yell, ‘Go man, go, get hot man’”.

This speaks directly to a tendency among many white progressives today who encourage black people to be angry. Of course, black people often have a justifiable reason to be angry, and solidarity against racism is a good thing. But the fixation of some progressive white people with that anger speaks more of condescension than solidarity. It implies that to be authentically black is to perpetually resent white people — which is another way of centring white people, and allows little space for the other emotions and experiences that constitute the life of a black person.

This is the way Naipaul presents Malik and Jamal: men whose radicalism was patronised, in both senses of the word, by affluent white people. And they seemed to welcome this. John Lennon, for instance, donated his hair and money to support one of Malik’s communes — even as he denounced the white liberal as the devil. Jamal pursued relationships with wealthy white women while promoting an especially sectarian brand of black nationalism.

Malcolm X had a different approach. Like them he grew up a petty criminal. After he underwent his prison transformation, however, the sanctimony of his rhetoric was consistent with his puritan lifestyle. Part of the reason he left the Nation of Islam was that Elijah Muhammad spoke like Pat Robertson to the public but behaved like John F. Kennedy with his secretaries.

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But Malcolm wasn’t simply puritan in his personal life — he was also frugal when it came to support from white people. There is one striking scene in Spike Lee’s film on Malcolm, for instance, where a young radical white female college student is trying to get his attention: “What can I do?”, she asks. How can I support the cause? Malcolm responds by calmly saying: “Nothing.” Self-described disciples of Malcolm, Malik and Jamal, might have said the same, but their actions reflect a different answer: give us lots of money and sleep with us.

This tension — between servility on one side and hatred on the other — is destructive for any type of politics concerned with social justice. Malik was a performance artist who gratified the appetite of white progressives, and whose desires were in turn encouraged. He was led to believe he was God; but he still needed the approval of white people for this. His mind was full of these strange, polarising extremes. When Jamal had apparently told him that Benson had become a “mental drain”, ordinary moral constraints need not apply: she would have to be killed. Malik and Jamal had developed a close bond, and she was getting in the way.

According to Naipaul, Benson was Jamal’s slave in the relationship. She wore African clothing and adopted the name Hal Kigma, an anagram of ‘Gale’ and ‘Hakim’, to represent her total devotion to her lover. The white liberal woman is either a slave to the empowered black man or a hindrance to the movement — a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And the murder of Benson, Naipaul’s account suggests, was the latter. After she was killed, Malik led members of the commune to wash in the sea. They wanted to purge themselves after killing a devil.

Curtis’s film offers a different account for the motivation behind the murder of Benson. According to Curtis, Malik’s actions were a reversion to his criminal past. The all-black commune he’d established, Black House, was simply a front for his drug dealing. He murdered Benson not out of race redemption, but because in Trinidad he was growing and exporting marijuana to America, and he thought Benson was going to rat him out. In Naipaul’s account, Malik’s Black Power rhetoric was underpinned by the fantasies of a madman. In Curtis’s film, by contrast, the Black Power rhetoric was underpinned by the logic of a callous gangster.

Curtis’s account certainly seems more plausible, but Naipaul’s account is more instructive for today. It is an indictment of a culture fascinated by the strength conferred by victimhood — a culture vulnerable to the grievous abuse of those who view reality through the prism of transgressive play. But it is also a critique of white progressives who, instead of treating black people with dignity, mistake condescension for solidarity — and confuse the rage of a black person with his entire personality.

Liberalism, the story goes, emerged with the dawn of science in seventeenth century Europe. Instead of “finding certainty in god”, Descartes found it “in the individual”. Each human became “not a subsection of our family, or class, or tribe, or religion, or race, or nation,” writes Dunt. “We are individuals. We can think for ourselves. We have a capacity for reason. This was the philosophical truth that emerged from the ruins of the world certainties.” 

Before Descartes came along, we had the Middle Ages — the age of tyranny and enforced superstition. Then these two revolutionary ideas came along in the early modern period of Descartes — that you are an individual and you are capable of reason — and would, Dunt writes, “go on to destroy the old world and create a new one, based on rights, reason, and liberty.” These two ideas are the axioms of liberalism, and in the seventeenth century they were disseminated, along with the affinal values of scepticism, science, democracy, and human rights.

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As a piece of narrative, this story is enchanting. Imagine the solitary Descartes, in his damp Dutch bedroom, stumbling across the simple idea that would revolutionise his conformist civilisation: cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. This is, in fact, how Dunt presents it. But as a historical account of liberalism, it is erroneous. Liberalism didn’t emerge as a revolt against the certainties of Medieval Christianity; its origins lie in Christianity.

If any individual could be said to have conceived liberalism, it would be the father of Christianity, St. Paul, in the first century. As Larry Siedentop writes in his book Inventing the Individual, “Followers of Jesus began to claim his sacrificial life and death amounted to a dramatic intervention in history, a new revelation of God’s will”. This, not Descartes’s epiphany, was the insight that gave rise to the concept of the individual:

Previously in antiquity it was the patriarchal family that had been the agency of immortality. Now, through the story of Jesus, individual moral agency was raised up as providing a unique window into the nature of things, into the experience of grace rather than necessity, a glimpse of something transcending death.

In other words, in antiquity, your sense of self was grounded in the family network you belonged to. Then came the Pauline moral conviction: you had individual agency.

Siedentop’s direct quotation of Paul’s words is striking in their similarity to Dunt’s exaltation of Descartes: “So if anything is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new”. This moral revolution was grounded in the view that we are all equally made in the image of Christ: neither Jew nor greek, slave nor freeman. And the moral universalism implied by this conviction suggests, as Siedentop puts it, there is “a moral agency potentially available to each and everyone, that is, to individuals”. Rights, like identity, used to belong to tribes — now, they belonged to us, as individuals, since we all individually belong to Christ. And so the individual, as we now more or less understand it, was born. And liberalism depends — fundamentally — on the existence of individuals.

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Dunt has a habit of presenting historical incidents as clean breaks from the past: Descartes’s discovery; the work of the Leveller philosopher Richard Overton; the French revolution. But it’s worth remembering that these are moments in a gradual evolution of ideas. The effects of epochal events take time to be measured. Siedentop argues, for instance, that although that initial conception of the individual can be traced back to Paul’s moral revolution, it was the canon lawyers of Medieval Europe that really lay the groundwork for our modern conception of liberalism.

The notion of natural law, for example, was rooted in the ancient world, but was revised by Christian moral intuitions to become natural rights. These rights were ascribed to the individual, based on the assumption of underlying moral equality between all persons.

Of course, these principles were not genuinely applied in practice until about five minutes ago in historical time. Nevertheless, as I’ve said, ideas and concepts take their time. As Siedentop puts it:

the pattern by which liberalism and secularism developed from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century resembles nothing so much as the stages through which canon law developed from the twelfth to the fifteenth century…The canonist, so to speak, ‘got there first’.

The person who conceived of the individual was not the embodiment of early modern scepticism but a rambunctious Jew from the 1st century. The people who lay the foundation for modern liberalism were not English Puritan radicals, French Enlightenment libertines, and eccentric Victorians; they were the lawyers and theologians ensconced in the ivory towers of Medieval Europe.

This may seem intuitively strange, but to consider it another way, let’s consult another book published last year: Joseph Henrich’s The Weirdest People in the World. WEIRD stands for western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic. It describes, in short, the psychological profile of people from western countries. This profile is unique. As Henrich writes:

Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, we WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles.

This profile is exactly consonant with how Dunt depicts the liberal — not as a subsection of family or tribe, but as an individual. And indeed, the people in WEIRD countries are the most receptive to liberal concepts and beliefs. But reading Henrich’s book shows clearly that what led to us seeing ourselves as individuals, rather than as simply parts of a larger network, was not the innovation of early modern thinkers. Rather, it was a consequence of the marriage and family proposals of Latin Christianity’s early churches.

Throughout much of history, people lived in dense family networks. Your social circle consisted of your cousins and in-laws. The social norms that came about as a result of this, what Henrich calls kin-based institutions, “constrain people from shopping widely for new friends, business partners, or spouses. Instead, they channel people’s investments into a distinct and largely inherited in-group”. The Medieval Catholic Church changed this. Between the first and thirteenth century, they prohibited both marriage to relatives and polygnous marriage; required bride and groom to publicly consent (I do!); and encouraged couples to set up independent households.

By the end of the Middle Ages, well before Descartes burst onto the scene, Europe was already defined by monogamous and nuclear marriages. People married comparatively late, with both men and women marrying in their mid-20s. Many women never married at all — by 30, 15-25% of north-western European women were unmarried, compared to China where the figure was between 1 and 2%. Families were relatively small, and fertility rates relatively low.

This, ultimately, led to WEIRD psychology. Because we were freed from the constraints of our family or tribe, we became more interested in the idea of ourselves as individuals. It was the policies of the Medieval Catholic church, then, that led to the psychological profile which makes us most receptive to liberal beliefs and concepts.

Dunt does concede in one part of his book that “although modern liberalism is overwhelmingly secular, one of its ironies is that the seeds of its growth were planted by Christians making pious protests against Catholicism”. But he doesn’t go far enough. In fact, it’s only “ironic” because Dunt doesn’t recognise that the term ‘secularism’ is in fact profoundly Christian. As Tom Holland writes in his book Dominion, the very words with which we reject religious authority and proclaim individual conscience derive from Christianity itself: “‘Religion’, ‘secular’, ‘atheist’: none of these are neutral. All, though they derive from the classical past, come freighted with the legacy of Christendom. Fail to appreciate this, and the risk is always of anachronism.”

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But Dunt, of course, very much wants to stress that liberalism is a radical ideology — perhaps because the word itself has often, in recent years, been characterised as stodgy and slightly embarrassing. Badly dressed centrist dads who revere the EU and Radiohead are liberal. Calling yourself a classical liberal on Twitter is like confessing you wear socks with sandals. Liberalism is also, nowadays, in opposition to populist nationalism and identity politics — beliefs which, in contrast to the popular conception of liberalism, possess a certain vigour.

Dunt’s worry about the anaemic nature of contemporary liberalism is well-founded. So is his wish to present a compelling narrative — the Age of Science against religious tradition and authority. Because narratives are a powerful way of expressing belonging. And liberalism, Dunt stresses, needs to find a better way of articulating belonging, being a part of something greater than the individual self, without sacrificing the underlying principles of liberty and equality.

One way to do that is perhaps, as Siedentop suggests at the end of his book, emphasising that our values are Christian — that we are not simply individuals: we also have a collective custom and a tradition that gives dignity to our individualism. The problem is, a lot of liberals will feel squeamish about this, arguing that our values are universal, not religious. And liberals are meant to be sceptical about tradition.

But the assumption, shared by many of all political or religious beliefs, that these principles belong to all of us is itself a product of our Christian inheritance, which dictates that we all belong in the body of Christ. That we deny this religious inheritance in favour of a vague moral universalism is proof of just how powerful that inheritance is: our intuition is so universalist, we forget it comes from a particular place — that it is WEIRD.

Liberalism is not simply a live-and-let-live philosophy, a radical questioning of tradition and old certainties; it is also a product of the Christian tradition. Which is another way of saying the tradition is itself radical: prior to it, we were not seen as individuals, but merely extensions of a tribe; after it, liberal thought intuitively makes sense to us. The answer to Dunt’s title — How to Be a Liberal — is through absorbing, knowingly or unknowingly, some of the moral assumptions of Christianity.

By this logic, evidence of prejudice is insufficient qualification for racism; the group you are prejudiced against also needs to be structurally oppressed. This explains why many say that white people can’t be victims of racism; they may suffer prejudice, but they are not systematically disadvantaged in school, employment and the criminal justice system on the basis of their race. And this is why, for many, there is no distinction between racism and structural racism; racism is structural by definition.

But this definition raises an important question: that if racism is about disadvantages in education, employment and the criminal justice system, what does this mean for ethnic minorities who are not disadvantaged in contemporary Britain along those lines?

The Labour Party, an avowedly anti-racist movement, has been plagued in recent years by accusations of anti-Semitism. The recent EHRC report found “a culture within the party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it”.

Many Labour supporters and sympathisers have tried nobly to make sense of this contradiction. In a recent article, Novara Media writer Ash Sarkar distinguished anti-Semitism from other forms of racism. Anti-Semitism, she contended, is unrelated to “systemic disadvantage in either the jobs market or the criminal justice system”. Sarkar emphasised in a later tweet that she does not think Jews are privileged, or that they don’t face racism; she simply thinks that the racism they face is different from the racism other minorities face.

Nevertheless, Sarkar seems more sympathetic to the structural definition of racism. She argues, for instance, that “better party strategy, or fairer media coverage, does not result in a healthier anti-racist politic”. This is because “the bullying of black MPs might be stamped out, but it would not mean that Labour’s policy on policing or immigration would improve”. So a “healthier anti-racist politics” is one that focuses on structural inequalities rather than interpersonal prejudice.

The anti-Semitism scandal within the Labour Party has been specifically about the spread of noxious ideas and instances of interpersonal abuse. Sarkar, on the other hand, argues that anti-racism is actually about dismantling the material inequalities in our society, and that “racism against Jewish people does not result in the harsher prison sentences, wage gaps, stop and search or unequal healthcare outcomes that we see with other groups“.

Jews, by this logic, do not qualify under this definition of racism, which emphasises structural inequalities — that same definition to which Sarkar and many others are most attached to. If structural inequalities are the basis for racism, then Jews in contemporary Britain cannot by definition be victims of racism.

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Can you really teach kids not to be racist?

By Tom Chivers

This concept of racism is not only insensitive to anti-Semitism; it also fails to account for prejudice against other minorities in Britain. British-Indians and British-Chinese people, for example, have the highest educational attainment out of all ethnic groups in the country. They also have the largest percentage, as a share of their population, in the higher managerial, administrative and professional roles.

More than 30% of British-Indians are employed in professional roles — the highest rate of all ethnic minorities in the country. They are stopped and searched by the police at the same rate as white people; British-Chinese people are stopped and searched at an even lower rate. How can the structural definition of racism, then, account for racism against these particular ethnic minorities?

One could argue that it is a basis for explaining racism against some groups but not others. But invoking structural inequalities, without explaining how and why race is the critical factor in these inequalities, shows this definition falls foul of the disparity fallacy: that different outcomes in education, employment and the criminal justice system are necessarily a consequence of race.

Structural inequalities might be a consequence of race, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are. If these outcomes were necessarily because of race, this wouldn’t just mean that minorities with worse outcomes were racially disadvantaged. It would also imply that some minorities, like Jewish people, are racially privileged. (And remember: if you are racially privileged, you can’t be a victim of racism.)

This would seem to be the view of Andrew Murray, one of Jeremy Corbyn’s advisers. Murray says that Corbyn struggled to empathise with Jews because “he’s empathetic with the poor, the disadvantaged, the migrant, the marginalised… Happily, that is not the Jewish community in Britain today”. He adds that Corbyn would have empathised with the Jewish community in “the 1930s” or at “Cable Street” — but not now, and this is because “the Jewish community is relatively prosperous”. Murray’s statement is delivered with the grace and subtlety befitting an aristocratic communist.

Murray was expressing that Jews don’t count in an understanding of racism that emphasises structural oppression. This is an instance of one account of racism monopolising the other ways it manifests itself. This isn’t simply wrongheaded. In the case of anti-Semitism, it is especially dangerous. As the German social democrat August Babel said, anti-Semitism is the “socialism of the fools”. Jews supposedly possess power and privilege; so to call them out thus makes one a foe of structural inequalities.

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Why anti-racism is all about white people

By Wessie du Toit

This is why the rapper Wiley, in his hate-filled logorrhoea on Twitter, promoted the (untrue) view that Jews played a disproportionate role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This is linked, in his mind, to the exploitative role of Jewish music managers in contemporary Britain. Wiley genuinely believes he was identifying and condemning structural racism.

One of the saddest parts of that episode was seeing some young black men on my social media feeds expressing sympathy with him. If racism is about prejudice and power, what language can we use to condemn black men from working class backgrounds endorsing anti-Jewish ideas? As the writer John-Paul Pagano puts it, “when racism poses as resistance by victims of racism, as anti-Semitism often does, it disqualifies Jews from concern”.

Similarly with American rapper Ice Cube, who shared on his Twitter account a painting of hook-nosed men sitting atop slaves. In light of the death of George Floyd, he thought he was just identifying the forces hindering racial progress; like Wiley, he was convinced he was expressing anger at the structural inequalities that plague his country.

The French comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, after multiple convictions of hate speech against Jews, also rejects the charge of anti-Semitism; he affirms he is simply inveighing against the Establishment and Zionism. He, too, filters his racial prejudice through the paradigm of fighting structural inequalities.

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How not to be a white anti-racist

By David Swift

Ethnic minority people can express rage at racism without deploying anti-Semitic tropes; they can even adhere to the structural definition without resorting to anti-Semitism. But the issue is that this definition is blind to the prejudices against Jews and other minorities. Chinese people, Indians and, increasingly, Nigerians in contemporary Britain do not easily fit within the paradigm of structural oppression.

This is not to say that racism can’t be manifested structurally; of course it can. But racism is more complex than simply looking at which groups are distributed at the bottom or top of our society’s institutions. Recognising the messy truth is more important than endorsing a clean narrative. The former enables you to finely target different manifestations of prejudice; the latter stunts your curiosity and compassion.

Labour activists and avowed anti-racists will only be able to express genuine compassion with Jews once they recognise that the structural definition of racism is not simply limiting but dangerous, adding fuel to the already-dangerous flames of anti-Semitism.