By my semi-tendentious definition, the Cold War, or at least something cold-ish, began shortly after the Russian Revolution, when Allied interventionists — British, French and Americans — supported “White Guard” anti-Communists in the Civil War, which Lenin won; but his victory was the merest brooding pause. How could there be reconciliation, with our gameboard’s Slavic sector so lurid with starvation, executions, disease? Failing to export Bolshevism to Ukraine and Poland, and suffering economic punishment by the West, Russia postponed “permanent revolution” in favor of “socialism in one country,” and became a fortress besieged. Sooner or later, both sides agreed, the whole world must go capitalist or Red. Against each other they played proxy matches for some 75 years, until the USSR fell in 1991-92. Then we threw a dust cover over everything and went upstairs to start new games.

Shokokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don takes place mostly from 1911 through Tsarism’s trench war suicide of 1914-17 and the resulting fratricide of 1917-20. The book was published in serial form from 1928-40 — at one point Stalin’s permission was required before publication could proceed. At its heart is the fictional (and tragically contested) Don Cossack village of Tatarsky.

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Sholokhov, himself, was born in a place like this in 1905. His father was Russian, and his mother a Cossack’s Ukrainian widow. At age 13 the boy became a fighting Red. “Not everyone who lives through terrible times can transform them into art,” remarks his editor-translator, who praises the novel for “a very special authenticity”. And if you would like to know exactly how terrible those times were, let me quantify: during the Civil War, nearly half of the Don region’s inhabitants died, fled or were driven away.

Amidst such dueling mannequins of take-charge citizenship as John Galt and Gladkov’s Comrade Gleb Chumalov (“Comrade Gleb” to his estranged wife) canters bravely brutal Grigory Melekhov, Quiet Flows the Don’s main character. He’s Don Cossack almost through and through; for his grandmother was a Turkish war bride, pregnant with Grigory’s father when the neighbors trampled her to death on suspicion of witchcraft; “and the village acquired its breed of hook-nosed savagely handsome Melekhov Cossacks or, as they were commonly called, ‘Turks.’” 19th century critics might have made much of Grigory’s “mixed blood” when interpreting his personal and political changes of alliance — too many of those to summarize.

For in this truly named “Soviet Gone with the Wind” he will commence a scandalous liaison with Aksinya, the wife of his fellow woman-beater Stepan Astakhov (her charms include a “shift rucked above the knees and her legs, white as birch-bark and parted unashamedly”), before he breaks off with her for a parent-appeasing marriage with Natalya Korshunov, who adores him and whom he pronounces frigid, returns to the irresistible Aksinya. With her he sets up housekeeping in a rich landowner’s employ, gets conscripted into the Great War, “and all of them together, young Cossacks uprooted from their villages, in the atmosphere of death and destruction that followed them, were already wilting and changing like stalks of mown grass” — as Aksinya gets drafted into putting out for the young master of the house — while for Grigory it will be conscription all the way!

See him for instance frogmarched into useless battles, inveigled into Redness until that side’s cruelty makes him defect to the equally slaughter-happy Whites; briefly allured by the idea of a Cossack Republic, not to mention re-conscripted I don’t know how many times — and a stellar fighter he is! — hunted out of his home (“a distant relative of the Melekhovs, a hospitable Cossack, hid Grigory in a stack of dried dung fuel”) and on it goes: pursuing and being chased, promoted, proscribed and simply outlawed… for, by now, he has killed old neighbors, former friends. “Indeed,” says Montaigne, “what are we but sedition and discrepancy?”

From an orthodox Bolshevik standpoint, Grigory therefore deserves a bullet. As for Cossacks in general, well, they were renowned as the Tsar’s cavalrymen, who did great service in 1812 against Napoleon and rode down peaceful demonstrators in the year of Sholokhov’s birth, so why would ruthless Red revolutionaries trust them? Had the frontline not kept jittering back and forth, and had there been less requisition, rape, indoctrination and murderous shattering of families — oh, and had neither dekulakization nor forced collectivization impended — the Cossacks might have caused less trouble for their alternating overlords. But Tatarsky, like Aksinya herself, goes on changing occupiers; so that Grigory, who by now would just as soon live quietly with his true love, loses her again and again.

I’d hazard he has also lost himself — sedition and discrepancy! One of his White Guard subalterns derides him as “something like a Bolshevik” because he takes umbrage that the officers “look down on you. But from their point of view they’re right… Even though you wear officer’s insignia, you have remained… an uncouth, unpolished Cossack… You blow your nose with the help of two fingers.” — To this he good-humoredly replies: “Just you wait. One day I’ll go over to the Reds, and then I’ll be as sharp as steel… I’ll rip the guts out of you, heart and all!” — So is he inclining Sovietward? Hardly! — “I’ll tell you this, good woman, your son Grigory has turned out to be the worst enemy of Soviet power. When we cross over to that side, he’ll be the first to get a rope round his neck.” The speaker (what a charmer!) then sets fire to seven reactionaries’ houses. “Below him in Tatarsky a sparkling ruddy foxtail was flaring against the slate-black sky.”

In Gladkov’s Cement, which follows the Orthodox line, leading cadres and their non-Party herd must beat off an attack by Cossacks on their cement factory. Comrade Gleb bags one such troublemaker, who turns upon us the “ferocious, bloody eyes of a trapped animal. His eyes were darkened with fear and deadly hatred.” But even Gladkov must allow the Cossacks their courage: the captive “whooped, as the Cossacks do at riding displays,” then jumps over a convenient cliff, because that’s just how they are, you see. 50-odd pages later yet another lot of “bearded Cossacks” will be “coming in a horde, grinning like man-eaters, with whoop and yell and swords empurpled with blood. The Cossack villages would release their thousands to come on across the land like a swarm of locusts…” Somehow they do not sound much like the hard-working, home-loving, insular people described by Sholokhov.

In Quiet Flows the Don, then, Cossacks are grubby, lice-ridden, stingy, greedy, xenophobic, quarrelsome, lustful to the point of rape (Natalya got deflowered by her own father); but unless “mobilized” by Red or White coercion they would rather bring the hay in than “come on across the land like a swarm of locusts.” Here is a certain unwilling locust named Grigory; it is 1914; he has just lanced his first Austrian and sabred his second: “His steps were fettered and heavy, as if an insupportable load had been placed on his shoulders; disgust and bewilderment were crushing his spirit.” Year after year the disgust goes on.

The loved ones fell on all sides, the red Cossack blood flowed, and eyeless in sleep from which there is no awakening, they rotted while the guns thundered their funeral dirge in Austria, in Poland, in Prussia. Even the East Wind could not carry the mourning voices of their wives and children to their ears. The flower of Cossack manhood left its homeland and perished out there amid the slaughter, the lice and the horror.

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Menaced for telling the truth in Book III about Red repression of the Don Cossacks, Sholokhov (who I must reiterate was sincerely Red) paused to write Virgin Soil Upturned, a novelistic hosannah to the collectivization forced on these same people. He may have believed in the activists’ progressive intentions, or hoped to believe, or composed this tale to save himself from the Gulag. Meanwhile he bravely denounced torture and murder where he saw it, and got two of the cruelest cadres arrested. He was then “encouraged” to turn Quiet Flows the Don‘s protagonist into a Red John Galt.

In a personal letter he confided: “I simply cannot make Grigory into a Bolshevik… Let [the bigshot editor] Fadayev… not go on trying to prove to me that ‘the law of artistic production demands such an ending or else the novel will be objectively reactionary.’”

In a private argument with Stalin, Sholokhov courageously insisted that a counterrevolutionary such as General Kornilov could still be “‘subjectively’ honorable when seen as a member of his own class.” It is for this that I favor Quiet Flows the Don above all other Cold War chesspieces; for once we claim that no group who asserts what we despise can possibly be honorable, we make violence against its members less unthinkable. And why? Grigory for his part has no choice but to fight. His “class analysis” is unsteady; you see, he has other interests, such as “the brownish sweat-faded circles under the arms” of Aksinya’s blouse; “his eyes followed every movement.”

How long the discussion continued and how close Sholokhov came to being arrested nobody knows. But Stalin let him have his way.

He finished his masterpiece at the end of 1939, supposedly on Stalin’s birthday. The Nobel Prize came to him in 1965.

In 1969 Pravda declined to continue serialization of his novel about the Second World War on account of its mention of purges, labor camps and Stalin’s military mistakes — another reason to honor that brave and honest Communist Mikhail Sholokhov.

And was he brave or honest in denouncing Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich? He did whatever so many cadres did, “taking a stand” against writers in bad odor. This has exactly been remembered to his credit. He might have merely been politically stupid, in company with my American neighbors who declined to see our Iraq War as a crime — for it is easy enough to live with repression when we do not see it, and especially when it is applied to people we have never met. (Quiet Flows the Don achieves much of its tragic power because the killers know their victims personally, as did a certain victim or perpetrator named Sholokhov — who unlike Solzhenitsyn escaped a Gulag sentence.) Anyhow, who won’t be enthused about repression if it accords with our Party line? Quiet Flows the Don does not enthuse. It sees both sides.

He ranted against Pasternak and other dissidents, for which I might call him ignoble, complicit — but how badly was he pressured and how much did he understand in his pampered, drunken old age out there in his Don village? (Steinbeck went from being a champion of Okies to a supporter of the Vietnam War. Heinlein was a former socialist who campaigned for the Right-winger Bob Dole.) Sholokhov took a stand, made enemies and was accused of toadyism. But was he a toady of the Whites, the Soviet establishment, neither or both?

He got smeared for plagiarism — first by Stalinists for whom Grigory was insufficiently Red (had some reactionary militarist written this trash?), later by supporters of the intellectuals to whose persecution he gave public approval. In Ukraine, thanks to Putin’s continuing rape of that country, every Russian cultural figure from Solzhenitsyn to Pushkin to Tschaikovsky is officially malodorous, so I was hardly surprised when an amateur literary historian assured me that Sholokhov was not only a plagiarist but also that his great work was no better than wastepaper.

A professional literary expert then explained that he could not have written Quiet Flows the Don; her candidate for authorship was Andrey Platonov, whose work I know well enough to love. To my mind it is far too dreamlike and formally inventive to be Sholokhovian. Well, well. It makes sense that Ukrainians would despise a Stalinist whose masterpiece was composed even as Stalin deliberately starved to death Ukrainian peasants by the millions. And so Stalinists and anti-Stalinists alike go on calling this great author a literary thief, although no one has proven any such thing.

Now that all the authors mentioned in this essay are dead, what most matters about them is what they wrote.

Ostrovsky’s novel, like its Soviet cause, has decomposed nearly to irrelevance. Gladkov could write well enough. His portraits of hard-charging Communists in Cement make the mentality of that time vivid, comprehensible and even estimable whenever it is not abhorrent. Some of Heinlein’s science fictions are still ideologically coherent, but dating rapidly. Rand’s Atlas Shrugged retains its followers, some of whom just got their man back into the White House. Its mild racism, patriarchal gender norms, exaltation of luxury-loving tycoons and contempt for the poor remain in favor here in the United States.

Of all these, Quiet Flows the Don is the most alive. Like them, it is a political screed, an entertainment and a moving (horribly sad) depiction of people trying to survive within a whirlwind they barely understand. Yet unlike them, in its combination of specificity and universality, its unsentimental compassion and brilliant verisimilitude, the book deserves comparison with its sunnier cousin War and Peace.

In recent decades, there has been a backlash against the Great Man theory embodied in that Ancient Greek icon of Helios. Thomas Carlyle summed up this once prevailing view, claiming in a lecture on heroics, “The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.” The idea that societies are driven by the will, and virility, of exceptional (overwhelmingly male) individuals, rather than complex societal forces, is seen not just as reductive but anathema. The legend of the lone wolf genius has long been both a cloak and a cudgel. It has been employed to steal ideas, deny provenance, and bury the achievements of others. It has exploited women, under the guise of the muse, and justified the capricious venal desires of coddled elitist men. The built environment has been no exception, with the Shitty Architecture Men list being only the tip of the iceberg in terms of sexual misconduct, dubious morality, and toxic work culture.

If the discourse is anything to go by, then, the colossal Great Man has been toppled. A multitude of online articles say so, each a fragment of that fallen colossus. The only real differences are the vocabulary wielded against the heroic view of history and whether it’s casually disdainful or wildly alarmist. Yet just as there was hubris in the raising of such a statue on unstable foundations, there is, too, in celebrating its destruction. It has long been rumored that the Berlin Wall pieces sold to tourists are mostly manufactured. With a ripple of lamentations that Brady Corbet’s Oscar-nominated film The Brutalist, which tells the tale of a visionary architect, resurrects that idea of the Great Man, a thought recurred — what if these fragments were similar forgeries? What if the colossus never fell?

In 2012, I found myself in a godless tiki bar on the Gulf of Thailand shore. It was quiet, aside from one backpacking Patrick Bateman droning interminably on his phone. Suddenly, there was a commotion, and the bartenders vanished. Word spread there had been a massive earthquake off the Indonesian coast. Tsunami warnings were issued. Memories of the 2004 tsunami were raw. Lacking the wisdom of the locals, I took the idiot route and got hammered. All the while, facing mortality, that oblivious voice was babbling on the phone. He had been reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — the hero of which was an egotistic young architect. The book, now deemed synonymous with The Brutalist, had changed his life, he repeatedly insisted. This was to be the soundtrack to our impending deaths, the last words filling my ears before the flood.

We both lived, but I carried the grudge. Rand was, of course, persona non grata in nice liberal book circles, a petulant right-libertarian dogmatist who extolled excellence if only we could free ourselves from the shackles of ethics. She was fanatical in her zeal for laissez-faire capitalism, individualism and reason, collecting a cult following who were enthralled to at least two thirds of her formula. I was, though, eventually relieved of my anti-Rand bias by Slavoj Žižek. It was, he suggested, counter-revolutionary to throw her away. He compared her to Pascal, Kleist, Brecht… figures who are “over-orthodox”, who “spell out the secret premises of the ruling ideology in such [a] clear radical way that it’s unacceptable and embarrassing for the ruling ideology itself”. She is the paradigm of “enlightened egotism… no compassion for others… pure individualist brutal capitalism”. Rand, then, in his view, reveals not so much the inner workings of the elite but their internal mythos — the way they want to see themselves, as opposed to what they are (bankrolled by the state or asset-strippers of the High Street), something all too evident in the Musks and Bezos of the world. But while Rand’s The Fountainhead claims to be a portrait of an architect-genius Howard Roark and his adversaries, whether spiteful mediocrities or disingenuous ideologues, it inadvertently does something critics of the Great Men theory also do. It misattributes responsibility. The colossus it erects is as false as the one the critics decry.

The real colossus remains untoppled. For the architect was not the colossus. It was the client. It has always been the client. And they, whether market or state, have all the power, influence and money. The architects may receive the credit and blame but it is corporations who commission skyline monstrosities. It is institutions that block the advancement of female architects. It is board room meetings and government departments that bulldoze neighborhoods and vernacular architecture. Yet, partly due to the anonymity of the former, it is architects who pick up the check, in both senses.

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The Oracle of Delphi wisely forbade the rebuilding of the Colossus of Rhodes. Her view prevails today with The Brutalist coming in for flak for piecing together a “dangerous” archetype, comparisons with Rand’s egomaniac Roark abounding.

Beyond the vagaries of the discourse, The Brutalist offers truths or truisms. Conformity can be stifling, brilliance can be traumatized, vocation can mean sacrifice, and power can be sadistically cruel, raising the slippery question of who the Brutalist of the title actually is. The film certainly has elements of the unintentional mock heroism of The Fountainhead but the humanity it displays, at its best, is instructive. The main character László Tóth (an exceptional turn by Adrien Brody) is, however, fictional; a Hungarian-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, Bauhaus alumni, émigré to the US, and visionary architect. Tóth initially, superficially, seems based on Marcel Breuer but the differences between the cool-headed gregarious Breuer and the (forgivably) histrionic Tóth outweigh similarities.

The character, then, seems to be a composite, except none of the parts fits. The Brutalist is like The Fountainhead in the sense that their disjuncture between fiction and reality is as illuminating as their closeness. Tóth survives Buchenwald concentration camp. In our world, countless architects such as Alfred Grotte, Diana Reiter and Harry Elte never returned from the camps. Ignjat Fischer’s health was broken in a Fascist prison, and he died not long thereafter. The eccentric outsider architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser survived under an assumed identity for the war’s duration. Marcel Janco only got out when friends were butchered, while Oskar Kaufmann watched his wife die while trapped as refugees.

Life after escaping the Nazis could be relentless. Exiles were treated with suspicion as “enemy aliens”. Some, like the once-revered Bruno Ahrends, were interned. Many more like Pierre Chareau, creator of the innovative House of Glass, slid into destitution. The genuinely visionary Erich Mendelsohn ended up constructing replica German housing for the US air force to firebomb, as practice for the real thing. Last act coronations were rare, if they existed at all.

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Few of these lives embody the Great Man legend, except in the sense that greatness lies in resilience against hardships and the odds, the most redeeming aspect of The Brutalist, a quality hardly restricted to men. There were, after all, numerous female architect exiles. And there were success stories of architects who fled the Nazis — the Bauhaus maestro Gropius for instance became well-established and helped many émigrés — often as teachers rather than superstars. If anyone came close to the Great Man trope, it was Mies Van Der Rohe, who was not Jewish and who had been courted by the Nazis before migrating. Yet even he had masters, as well as essential collaborators — whether property developers, the government, or multinationals like Seagram and Bacardi. Even Rand’s inspiration, Frank Lloyd Wright, hid financial calamities (his unbuilt designs remain tantalizing) and personal tragedy (the Taliesin massacre) behind his egotism. Life is not as simple as constructing a colossus or obliterating one.

The Brutalist is raw and intense, for Hollywood at least, but suffers from many of that realm’s ills — for a film that so hysterically cares, it extends little consideration to the architectural schools, styles and eras it misrepresents and throws into disorder. Its script is a convoluted shambles which would be admirably refreshing, if it did not somehow belie the complexity of reality. Its knots are too neat, its loose ends too ragged.

Impressive in cinematography and acting, The Brutalist, like its more politicized critics, relies on historical inaccuracies, cliched dialogue, and character simplifications. This makes it more now than then. Whether superhuman or disgraced, individuals are forced into molds, so that our worldviews can be substantiated. It’s one thing to examine how factual a movie is, and another to consider how fictional our perspective is. Within architecture, professional concerns are legitimate. No one should work under the tyranny of an egotist. Yet wider societal control does not begin or end with such figures. For all the talk of the collective, there is a staggering inability to see how insidiously powerful the corporate has become. Instead, everything becomes an atomized morality tale, where rotten fruit is picked off while the rotten tree is ignored.

It is not the shattered face, then, of the overthrown egocentric colossus that’s the architectural symbol of our times or the fates of our cities. It’s something far harder but essential to rail against — the acronyms, the monopolies, the faceless. The colossus, then, is more of an effigy than a statue. Who commissioned it and why, The Brutalist suggests, is the real story.

As the mainly female group shared their despair at the new administration, the older grey-haired man sitting on my left — conservative suit, flamboyant tie — smiled quizzically, before calmly remarking in his Southern drawl: “Well then, I suppose I am the only one here who supports our new President?” He was.

I can’t reproduce my conversation with this doctor from Arizona as accurately as I wish. I wasn’t taking notes and his story did not seem as significant to me then as it does now. But this is the gist of it.

In his small hometown, he ran not only the abortion clinic but two gun stores; he was a member of both the National Abortion Federation and the National Rifle Association. He was, he explained, a man whose values were shaped by the writings of Ayn Rand, whom he had met as a student in the Sixties. He said, and this is the one bit I do remember verbatim: “My support for a woman’s choice about abortion comes from the same place as my support for her right to bear arms. An individual’s freedom matters.”

This is not a conventional view for today’s supporters of legal abortion, many of whom seem to believe personal freedom, autonomy and self-determination are the preserve of the neo-con Right. I am not sure my gun-trading friend would now be welcome in a similar meeting. Perhaps, given what I am about to say, I would not be either.

How we talk about, indeed how we think about, abortion has changed fundamentally since it was dragged from the dowdiness of shame and secrecy to the centre of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Access to abortion was clearly about self-determination and moral autonomy. Yes, abortion was — at least in early pregnancy — a simple medical procedure that was a benefit to personal and to public health. But to those campaigning for its legalisation, abortion was so much more than healthcare. It symbolised a choice for a woman when her life was in crisis; it symbolised a new sense of personal agency, the personal power to shape nature’s plan.

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Birth control gave us control of our reproductive destiny, freeing us from the socially constructed, imposed gender-role of mother and carer. It mattered not whether a woman actually used birth control — what mattered was that she could choose to do so if she wished. With contraception to prevent pregnancy and abortion to end it, the spectres of birth and motherhood were pushed away — unless we invited them to us. It’s hard to see what else could make a bigger contribution to a woman’s liberty.

Of course, not all who claim they’re committed to freedom and liberty believe that women should be free to choose to have an abortion. No doubt an abortion doctor would be as alone in a meeting of defenders of the Second Amendment as our gun-shop owner would now be among clinic staff. But when we go beyond the feelings and self-identification of different tribal members, there remains a consistency of a principle: that the state should step back and stay out of private personal decision-making.

Crucially, this foundation is not contingent on a woman’s situation or experience — her race, or class or privilege. We live intersectional lives but some beliefs and principles remain universal concerns because we are more than our own experience. Indeed, the pro-choice principles that won abortion access only did so because they united women beyond personal experience or need.

They mobilised those who would never become pregnant because they were older, or infertile, or expressed sexual feelings in a way that didn’t risk pregnancy. Men joined us in solidarity because they understood how an involuntary pregnancy is a living nightmare. The social movement was built on an idea of what was worth fighting for.

Today, the focus is different. The sails of the movement now seem to be buffeted by winds from a different continent. Freedom of choice, once our principle, has been thrown overboard — not to anchor us as it once did, but to cut the movement loose from a legacy of white supremacy. “Freedom”, as in the personal moral freedom that gives each of us command of life, is dismissed as a privilege of the advantaged, not to be extended to all but instead to be “checked”. “Choice”, in particular the choice between abortion and motherhood, is now dismissed as elitist or consumerist or too binary.

Today’s destination is no longer a world where we have freedom to decide what is right and wrong in the private personal domain. Instead, it is a world where self-determination, autonomy and personal freedom are dismissed as privileged and arcane and insufficiently inclusive. It is as though these ideas, by being anchored in a Western philosophical canon, are forever tainted with a stench of old, white patriarchs.

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Of course, how we experience reproductive rights and wrongs are woven with the rest of our lives. But, when every aspect of life is thrown into the pot of oppression and denial — racism, poverty, homelessness, educational disadvantage, disability, sexual marginalisation — it is unclear with whom solidarity can be won.

Does my older, white, male, privileged Republican abortion doctor have no place in this movement? Does the rich, white, conservative Texan woman with a $300 haircut and Gucci shoes not suffer the same degradation as her cleaner when she is told that the law no longer permits her to end an unwanted pregnancy? Where does privilege begin and end in this intersectional quagmire? Who is inside our tent, and who is outside it? Crucially, who decides?

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) grew out of Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League, changing its name in 1942. While its origins are tainted in eugenics (like every other mainstream medical organisation formed in the early 20^th Century), it has provided birth control and sexual health care for generations of women since, particularly poor women without insurance.

So what is a poor, white, woman — with no job, no education, no home to call her own — to believe when she reads the following statement given by the President of PPFA to the New York Times last April: “By privileging whiteness, we’ve contributed to America harming Black women and other women of colour. And when we focus too narrowly on ‘women’s health’ we have excluded trans and nonbinary people…”

Might not she herself feel excluded by the very organisation on which she relies no less than a poor, black woman? And when she reads that once-champion of women’s choice go on to say that “we’ve claimed the mantle of women’s rights to the exclusion of other causes that women of colour or trans people cannot afford to ignore”, might she not howl with despair that her own colour and absence of “queerness” casts her aside?

From the perspective of today’s reproductive justice warriors, pregnancy by its very nature is problematic. After all, it defies the progressive framing of every issue around social constructions, to the exclusion of hard-wired reality. Pregnancy is starkly binary: you either are, or you aren’t. It’s old-fashionedly objective and challenges self-definition: feeling and defining yourself pregnant or unpregnant won’t make it so. It relies on, and resides in, mature, female physiology — even if you don’t define yourself as “woman”.

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Is this why so many young activists insist that I cannot or should not talk about pregnant women when I talk about abortion? Because pregnancy makes it obvious that a woman is more than just “a body with a vagina” or “someone with a cervix”? Her woman-ness is so obviously, physically real that a world committed to social constructionism simply collapses.

And does the fact that pregnancy happens to an individual, not to a community — and so calls for a personal decision that speaks to an individual’s sense of right and wrong — disrupt a narrative that seeks to frame itself as communitarian? It is not a community’s womb that becomes pregnant. It is not a society’s belly that grows, or a people’s breasts that are made heavy as they fill. All of this happens to an individual.

There is something grimly ironic about the tendency among today’s activists to deny this: namely, that their retreat from an old-fashioned commitment to individual choice leads right back to the eugenicist basis from which those of us committed to individual freedom have tried to wrest the birth control movement. A personal choice must be personal — otherwise it isn’t a choice, but social engineering.

Already we see social movements insisting that personal choices are being made for the “wrong reasons”. Advances in antenatal screening, for instance, are blamed for allowing women to make the choice to terminate pregnancies affected by conditions that a pregnant woman understands as disability, but which justice warriors see as “difference”. They protest that women are making discriminatory choices, that the world will be less diverse. But why, a woman might ask, should they get to decide for her? When it comes to her body, choice isn’t something that a woman can simply abrogate: it’s what makes her her.

The freedom to make moral choices is the most important freedom we have; the freedom to act on those choices is the most important freedom we can claim. And while Trump may be gone, that freedom is still far from guaranteed. In the battles ahead over who decides about abortion, I know I can count on the pro-choice, gun shop-owning white Republican to have my flank. I wish I could feel so confident about the twenty-something activists shouting him down.

Ann Furedi’s latest book The Moral Case for Abortion: A Defence of Reproductive Choice is available for pre-order on Amazon or directly from the publisher, Palgrave Macmillan

This is certainly a new departure. As we have previously noted on UnHerd, the Left has strongly supported restrictive measures in the fight against the pandemic.

It argued that these restrictions, which clearly infringe on individual freedoms and rights, were nonetheless justified in the name of “the collective good” and “the collective right to life”. This allowed them to pre-empt any criticism of the new Covid consensus: if you’re against any of these measures, you’re against the collective interest. And so thinkers like us, who have always criticised neoliberal individualism and argued in favour of progressive state intervention, suddenly found ourselves accused of being libertarians or outright “Right-wingers”, just for taking a critical stance of governments’ response to the pandemic.

Indeed, it would appear that for many on the Left today, anything can be justified in the name of the “collective good”. It’s easy to see why Right-wing critics view this uncritical invoking of collective benefits as proof of the Left’s inclination towards authoritarian or “Stalinist” control. While such caricatural definitions are easy to laugh off, as leftists we can’t deny that there is something disturbing about the lack of critical commentary from the Left on how to reconcile the need for collective action with the importance of individual rights and freedoms in the response to Covid.

After all, the Left has historically championed civil rights and freedoms in society which are associated with individual liberties: the right to protest, the right to work, the right to sexual independence and freedom. Expanding the freedoms of men and women — while emphasising that this can only be achieved through collective action — has always been a central tenet of leftist, even socialist-democratic, ideology. So clearly something more complex than “default authoritarianism” is at work in the juxtaposition of the current Covid crisis and the Left’s broad response towards civil and individual liberties.

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The Left's Covid failure

By Thomas Fazi and Toby Green

Part of it has to do, we believe, with the Left’s criticism of the rise of desocialised individualism. The growing emphasis in economic and political thought on personal autonomy and the individual’s responsibility for their own fate, which has accompanied the rolling back of welfarism, has radicalised the ideological construction of the individual. We can see this in the renewed popularity of a figure such as Ayn Rand, with her message of enlightened egoism as the basis of civilised life. However, criticising modern individualism is one thing; laughing off the very idea that individual rights and freedoms matter is another, as is arguing that anything goes in the pursuit of “saving lives” and the “collective good”.

All of which has meant that, until the Observer’s interview with Mark Woolhouse, there has been painfully little critical analysis from the mainstream Left as to whether the raft of restrictive Covid measures we have seen over the past two years have indeed served the collective good — or saved lives for that matter. By definition, for something to be considered in the collective interest of a society, it has to be in the interest of at least a significant majority of its members. However, it’s hard to see how lockdowns (and other subsequent measures) meet this criterion.

Their psychological, social and economic impact might have been justified from a collective-interest and life-saving standpoint if Covid represented an equal threat to all citizens. Yet soon into the pandemic, it became clear that Covid-19 was almost exclusively a threat to the elderly (60+): in the last quarter of 2020, the mean age of those dying both with and of Covid-19 in the UK was 82.4, while by early 2020 the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) — the risk of actually dying if you catch Covid — in people under 60 was already known to be exceptionally low: 0.5 per cent or less. A paper written late in 2020 for the WHO by professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University, one of the world’s foremost epidemiologists, then estimated that the IFR for those under 70 was even lower: 0.05%. As Woolhouse points out in his interview “people over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15”.

Moreover, given the impacts on other aspects of medical care, the preservation (or prolonging) of life of the elderly was certainly being achieved at the expense of the life expectancies of younger sectors of the population — to say nothing of the catastrophic impacts in the Global South. This has indeed been confirmed by evidence which shows that excess deaths in younger age groups rose sharply in 2021, with very little of this attributable to Covid mortality.

If anything, Covid restrictions should have been framed in terms of solidarity: as measures which implied the overwhelming majority of the collective, which risked little or nothing from Covid, paying a price, and a heavy one at that, in order to protect, in theory at least, a minority (in Western countries people aged 60 or older represent on average around 25% of the population). Acknowledging this from the start would have avoided much loss of trust in public institutions down the road, and would have allowed for a rational discussion around important questions of intergenerational equity, proportionality and the balancing of rights and interests.

A possible counter-argument is that avoiding healthcare systems being overrun with Covid patients, regardless of their age, was in the interests of everyone. This might be true from a purely theoretical standpoint. However, both arguments hinge on the assumption that lockdowns were actually useful in reducing hospitalisations and deaths. But there’s hardly any evidence that this has been the case.

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In early 2021, John Ioannidis published a paper claiming that there was no practical difference in epidemiological terms between countries that had locked down and those that hadn’t. Several other studies have appeared since then that confirm Ioannidis’s initial findings: see, for example, here, here and here. Indeed, some of the countries that locked down the hardest are also those with the highest mortality figures and excess death rate. Peru is an obvious example, while Sweden’s excess mortality is below the European average for 2020.

Meanwhile in the US, the end of 2021 confirmed the reality that lockdown strategies had little or no impact on Covid mortality. The two neighbouring states of Michigan and Wisconsin followed very different Covid policies, with Michigan favouring severe restrictions while Wisconsin lifted them much earlier; yet at the start of this month, Michigan’s Covid mortality rate was far higher than Wisconsin’s, at 2,906 deaths per million compared to 1,919 per million in Wisconsin. Another stark example comes from comparing two other neighbouring states: North and South Dakota. South Dakota infamously imposed no Covid restrictions, while there were mask mandates in North Dakota during the second wave in Winter 2020/2021: yet as of January 1st 2022, the two states’ death rates are very similar, at 2,810 per million (South Dakota) and 2,640 (North Dakota).

Another case that is less talked about is that of Italy. Over the course of the past two years, Italy has implemented some of the strictest and longest lockdowns in the world (indeed, it is the country that “invented” the concept of national lockdown), topping every other Western country in terms of average stringency of anti-Covid measures. Yet Italy is also one of the countries with the highest mortality rate per capita — well above the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden and several other countries that adopted much less restrictive measures. And there’s evidence that this isn’t despite the lockdowns but, most likely, because of them.

As Piero Stanig and Gianmarco Daniele, two professors at Bocconi University, explain in their book Fallimento lockdown (“Lockdown Failure”), the worst possible thing you can do when dealing with a highly infectious disease that spreads almost exclusively indoors and targets the elderly is to lock old people up inside their homes with other family members, and ban citizens from spending time in arguably the safest place of all: outdoors. In other words, even from the narrow perspective of saving lives, not only were lockdowns not in the collective interest of society, they weren’t even in the interest of those whose lives were actually at risk.

Such an outcome was easily predictable. Indeed, the WHO’s 2019 report on pandemic preparedness states that the quarantine of exposed individuals — let alone of the entire population — “is not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure”.

The grotesquery of the global responses becomes even more apparent when we take into account the fact that while governments went out of their way to keep healthy people locked in, chasing runners down solitary beaches or checking shopping trolleys to make sure people were only buying essentials, they all but abandoned those most vulnerable: nursing home residents. According to a recent Collateral Global study, Covid deaths in nursing homes amount on average to a staggering 40% of all Covid deaths in Western countries, despite representing less than 1% of the population. In some countries (Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US), more than 5% of all care home residents were killed.

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In view of this, it seems obvious that the focused protection approach championed by the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) — based on “allow[ing] those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk” — was the right course of action. It would have avoided inflicting needless pain on workers, women and children through repeated lockdowns, while arguably saving countless lives, by focusing first and foremost on the elderly and especially on nursing homes.

Naturally, the way in which this worked would have been very different in different settings. While in richer countries the resources and infrastructure were certainly available to direct policy in this way, in poorer countries with high Covid mortality and weak healthcare systems — such as Latin America, India and South Africa — the capacity of governments to offer focused protection was limited. Nevertheless, funds could have been used for this purpose, rather than to fund schemes such as contact tracing, which the WHO had specifically disbarred in all circumstances as a pandemic response in its aforementioned 2019 report.

Instead, countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Peru and South Africa have faced the catastrophe of both severe Covid restrictions and high Covid mortality. What has followed is the destruction of the livelihoods and access to food of tens of millions of citizens; a recent report showed that after almost two years, Covid restrictions have completely shattered the world’s informal economies, with 40% of domestic workers, street vendors and waste pickers still earning less than 75% of their pre-Covid earnings.

And yet as we enter 2022, our openness to reassessing the paths not taken remains constrained. Not only has there been no acknowledgment of the missed opportunity of focused protection at the institutional level — and no apology to the authors of the statement, victims of a vicious smearing campaign — but even now the GBD is dismissed by academics and epidemiologists such as Woolhouse, even though the focused protection policy he advocates is drawn from it.

Meanwhile, throughout the past year, governments have actually upped the ante, coming up with even more invasive, oppressive and discriminatory measures — all in the name of public health and the collective interest. Yet surely the past two years have revealed the dangers of assuming that a “collective response” to the pandemic requires lockdown measures. Many other “collective responses” — such as focused protection and the GBD’s suggestions of free deliveries of groceries to the elderly and vulnerable, and frequent rapid testing of care home staff and visitors — would likely have been more effective.

It is time for the Left to look reality in the face and take stock of the fact that the prevailing Covid response of most Western governments has been an abysmal failure on all fronts —not least that of “saving lives”. An alternative approach is desperately needed. Fortunately, and tragically, it’s been hiding in plain sight all this time.

Sometimes, the derision is deserved; in the English-speaking world, the new “liberal” mania for political and ideological purity is causing ancient liberties to be sacrificed in the name of new “rights”. And the pursuit of liberal individualism is thought to be in conflict with ideas of community. These apparent failings of the liberal idea are leading some to gather together under the banner of “post-liberal”.

But the problem is not that liberalism has passed its sell-by date; rather, it has lost its moorings.

These can be traced back to the emergence of British Liberalism with the Glorious Revolution and the 1689 Bill of Rights — which enshrined many of the liberties that Parliament and the people had fought for during the previous century.

The Liberalism of 1689 was grounded, in particular, in the Christian (and more specifically) Protestant faith, born of the fight to produce an English translation of the Bible and to defend freedom of conscience.  There was much intolerance and more than a few beheadings along the way — William Tyndale died for the cause of publishing his translation — but the settlement of 1689 required and established a new understanding of tolerance and freedom.

In all the great struggles of the 17th century, the calls for freedom were inseparable from the deep Christian faith of the protagonists, whether we are talking about the Parliamentarians, the Levellers or Oliver Cromwell himself. John Milton, driven and defined by his faith, wrote what is probably the foundational text in defence of free speech Areopagitica at the peak of the Civil War. It contained an impassioned argument against the introduction of the new Licensing Order (1643), which required government approval for any published work. All these calls were anchored in a shared understanding of meaning, knowledge and virtue. Meaning came from God, knowledge from the Bible and virtue from following the teachings of the Old and New Testaments.

The importance of liberalism’s moorings were not lost on the American Founding Fathers, who shared the same inheritance. In First Principles, Thomas Ricks describes how dedicated they were to assessing the problem of “virtue” — of determining that their new Republic would be anchored in a shared understanding of morality so that civil society and freedom would be able to flourish. Adams and Jefferson looked as much to Ancient Rome for these virtues as they did to the Christian faith, but in practice American society was grounded overwhelmingly in the shared values of Christianity.

De Tocqueville understood this better than most. In Democracy in America, he plants the character of “Anglo-American civilisation” firmly in two elements: “the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty”. For him, religion and liberty were kindred spirits. In America, they were indeed kindred, arriving together with the pilgrims. But in England, religion was the parent of liberty rather than sibling. And in both cases, the flourishing of liberty would depend on the stability and strength of her Christian moorings.

In 19th-century Britain, Classical Liberalism carried all before it in the pursuit of great causes — widening the democratic franchise, opening the economy to free trade, educational reform, laying the foundations of the welfare state, eradicating the global slave trade. But just as it seemed to be all-conquering, its roots were being poisoned.

That poison stemmed from the Enlightenment itself. A new, anthropocentric way of thinking arrived in the 18th century, bringing with it an alternative understanding of human nature, a new theory of human knowledge and a new calculus of virtue. While Enlightenment Liberalism was aligned with the Christian worldview on certain principles of freedom, the two traditions diverge in key ways – and it is this divergence that is now proving toxic to liberalism as we know it.

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Traditional British liberalism rests on the Judaeo-Christian understanding that we are all, in moral terms, fallen creatures. The writings and speeches of the great heroes of liberty in the 16th and 17th centuries came with a deep sense of humility, of mankind’s brokenness and of the Fall.

Somewhere amid the arrogance of the Enlightenment, we lost this sense of fallenness. Ayn Rand embodies the new way of thinking with her theories of rational egoism and “the virtue of selfishness”. Encouraged, no doubt, by evidence of technological progress, she assumed moral progress would move in lockstep with technology. She has many modern disciples, wittingly or unwittingly, especially in California, with its strapline of “move fast and break things”. Her Libertarianism is very different from traditional British Liberalism, despite the tendency of many to confuse the two, because of her different assumptions about human fallibility (or lack of, in her case), and about virtue.

Allied to the Enlightenment sense of human perfectibility and rationality is the belief in Progress. The origins of this go all the way back to Thomas Macaulay and the Whig interpretation of history. But Macaulay saw progress essentially in political terms – in the extension of the franchise and other associated political freedoms such as freedom of conscience and freedom of the press. Sadly, the creed of Progress has now been pushed into every walk of life, ignoring the lessons of history and defying any biblical understanding of human nature. For Progressives, humankind’s moral progress is on a perpetual upward curve in parallel with technological progress. The history of the 20th century does not give much support to this conceit — it would be fairer to say that technology simply amplifies the expression of our moral fallibility.

Enlightenment liberals also built their own theories of morality, independent of a god, starting with Benthamite Utilitarianism, and extending all the way to John Rawls. Morality became a mathematical calculus, shorn of compassion or community, let alone repentance and forgiveness. According to Jeremy Bentham, “nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do.” No reference to morality here, just pain and pleasure. One of Bentham’s disciples, William Jevons, even went as far as to develop a “felicific calculus” whereby all pain and pleasure could be quantified.

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Enlightenment thinkers also developed their own theories of knowledge. One built on the empiricism of Hume and Adam Smith, the other built on the Rationalism of Descartes and Rousseau. The former, with its inherent modesty, is compatible with the Christian understanding of human fallibility, the latter is not.

Hayek describes the two schools of epistemology in The Constitution of Liberty. He warned that the latter, which he called the French tradition of liberty, with its “flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason” could lead to “totalitarian democracy”. His warnings were all too well-founded and it is the Rationalist version of epistemology which has taken particular hold with today’s cult of science.

Belief in the power of science has never been stronger. It has climaxed amid Covid, with politicians increasingly wrapping themselves in “the science” to justify ever more stringent intrusions on our freedom. Scientism, in the wrong hands, can become dangerous. And the worst hands are those of politicians and civil servants too easily tempted to use the authority of “experts” to infringe on our liberties.

This type of politician, Matt Hancock being the best example, fails to understand the limitations of science, fails to understand the nature of risk and uncertainty and fails to understand the difference between observable historical evidence and predictions of an uncertain and hypothetical future.

These different understandings of the theory of knowledge, of meaning and of virtue have led  to a corruption of liberalism at its source.

What we are seeing today being enacted in the name of liberalism is not liberal at all. Instead, let’s call it by the name which its proponents are prepared to use — progressivism. This is the creed which unites Tony Blair, Nick Clegg, most of the US Democratic Party, most of the British Labour Party and the New York Times. These are not traditional Liberals in any understanding of the term. They are Progressives. They believe humankind is on a permanent upward path of progress. They believe in the rule of experts and in the authority of “the science”.

So where do genuine classical liberals go, faced with the corruption of the creed? Ironically, the attacks on our most ancient freedoms such as freedom of speech, conscience and assembly, make it more important than ever to assert the foundational understanding of liberty. “Classical liberals” need to unite and stand up for their tradition. It has never been so relevant.

Meanwhile, to those who do embrace the term “post-liberal”, and believe it applies to our new era, I would just say this: be careful what you wish for.

Mr Johnson will not be unhappy with that. He’s very interested in the “great man” theory of history — that way of understanding the world that attributes grand events and trends to the actions of a few heroic individuals. He loves the classics with their heaven-born heroes smiting each other hip and thigh in defiance of gods and fate. His hero is Pericles, the “first citizen of Athens”. He chose politics over journalism “because no one puts up statues of journalists”. He wrote a biography of Winston Churchill, the best-known great man of British imagination: he won the war, didn’t he?

Provided he isn’t seen to have screwed up dramatically over the crisis once he’s recovered, it’s quite easy to see how the story of the prime minister who led the response to a deadly disease and nearly died from it himself will weave its way into the British imagination.

But the tale of Boris and the Virus can be told in two different ways. The way Conservatives, in particular, remember it will help decide whether the story unites or divides.

It all flows from a very basic question: why did Boris survive? How people answer that question will say a lot about politics and determine how Britain changes — or does not change — when we finally put coronavirus behind us.

Some will describe a battle of personal heroism, of grit and determination. Even when the PM was in the ICU and his fate was, frankly, uncertain, many people were talking of his toughness, his vigour, how his strong character and boundless appetite for life would equip him to “fight” the virus and win.

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I don’t much like that language, though I understand why people use it. I worry it overstates the role that character and personal choice play in medical outcomes. When I wrote elsewhere about this last week, I was slightly surprised by the vehemence and volume of responses. I know that Twitter isn’t Britain and all that but it’s still a bit striking to see people arguing that yes, some people die of various diseases because they just don’t want to live. That even life and death are ultimately a matter of choices made by individuals.

Others, though, will describe how he survived thanks to a huge infrastructure of medical support, provided and funded by many other people — as well as a bit of blind luck. To grossly over-simplify, some people will remember that Boris survived because he wanted to, because of things he did himself while others will say that it was because other people looked after him when he needed it.

The more weight you put on the first explanation, the more likely you are to be somewhere on the Right of the political spectrum. The idea that people choose their fate is popular among conservative-inclined voters. A very good study by the Bright Blue think tank in 2014 found that Tory voters were about twice as likely as Labour people to say that people in poverty are poor because of their own choices: they haven’t done enough to help themselves.

Similar evidence in the US suggests that people on the Right tend to believe that those who enjoy economic success do so largely or solely because of their own efforts.

As Bright Blue put it:

“One key conservative belief concerns the degree of power and responsibility individuals have over their own situation. Conservatives tend to see individuals as agents who can shape and determine their circumstances, and so see them as agents responsible for such circumstances.”

The other side of the old Left-Right binary is a familiar story, best articulated by Elizabeth Warren in 2012 talking about how people get rich:

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.”

(This is the speech that led Barack Obama to attempt the same argument with disastrous consequences in his “You didn’t build that” comments. He was talking about the social infrastructure that supports business, but he botched his lines and created a meme that helped elect Donald Trump. Words matter, folks.)

Whether Covid-19 changes politics depends on how conservatives chose to explain Boris’ recovery. If they cling to the idea of people as rugged individuals deciding their own fate, politics will remain divided on its current left-right binary. If they look beyond heroic individualism and accept that individuals exist in a network of social bonds and obligations, we might just see a real realignment and the start of genuine post-liberal politics in the UK.

For the Left, the coronavirus crisis offers little in the way of intellectual challenge. A national crisis revolving around the NHS and requiring collective social effort is likely to feel like validation instead. Jeremy Corbyn’s claim that the crisis proves him right over public spending will be the foundation-stone of a myth built by his devotees that if only he’d become PM, none of the bad things would have happens.

The equivalent retreat to the comfort-zone for conservatives would be to use the Boris story as a validation of individualism. But more interesting, challenging and profitable would be to learn from the obvious fact that the PM did not win his “battle” against the coronavirus alone.

In the modern history of ideas on the Right, some of the most prominent explanations of individual agency lead to an atomised view of society and a minimal state. Think of Ayn Rand (“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being”) or Friedrich Hayek, who said that “after creating formal equality of the rules applying in the same manner to all, we can leave each individual to find his own level.”

But more recent and more interesting thinkers have begun to test that heroic individualism. Think of John Gray’s Post-Liberalism. Gray, in turn, has paved the way for post-liberal political practitioners such as Nick Timothy, who has recently published his own book, Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism.

What makes Timothy intriguing and original is that he is a Conservative (and a conservative) who enthusiastically embraces the state — and rejects the idea of heroic individual success:

“Nobody, however successful they might be, has succeeded alone. They might have relied on their families to give them love and security. They might have a school, college or university to thank. They might have benefited from the kindness or wisdom of a mentor or employer. They might have been supported by the state, through the welfare system or … a Sure Start centre. Precisely because nobody has succeeded alone, we all have a debt to others. “

Which brings us, circuitously, back to Boris Johnson and how he — and by extension his party — will remember his recovery. It is notable that his short message briefed to the Sunday papers is all about the NHS and the debt that he incurred in illness. “I owe them my life,” Johnson said simply.

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That is an acknowledgment that even the most heroic individual does not rise — or fall — alone. But will that acknowledgement carry through into a wider revision of Conservative thinking around public services and collective provision? That would be no surprise: Tories have been trying to embrace the NHS since David Cameron became leader in 2005. A post-crisis settlement where the Tories seek to define themselves as the party of the NHS would be a logical, if extremely difficult, aim now.

Most contemporary Tories would have little trouble embracing the NHS: the number of ideologues who actually want to break it up or sell it off is vanishingly small. More novel and challenging would be a Tory rethink about welfare.

Even though some Tories have recently tried a new approach to welfare — think of Iain Duncan Smith and Universal Credit — they have stuck with the idea of rational, autonomous individuals deciding their own path. Universal Credit was premised on the idea that claimants were deciding not to work more because the financial return wasn’t there. Even Tory welfare reformers thought welfare was a question of choice.

We may well be about to see unemployment temporarily pass the three million mark, with hundreds of thousands of people now needing benefits to get by. And all through no fault or choice of their own: can you really hold people personally responsible for being sacked by employers whose business has been shut down by a pandemic? Those Conservative attitudes to claimants will surely be tested in the months ahead.

So far, post-liberalism is a fringe element on the British Right, so politics remains broadly familiar. The 2019 election opened up the possibility for these things to change, but then the virus hit and all the emergent thinking about “levelling up” and the Tory embrace of the state was thrown into the crucible.

Are we heroic individuals who decide our own fate, or social animals whose outcomes are inextricably bound up with — and partly dependent on — the actions of others? Boris will likely get his statues one day. And how the story of his illness and its happy ending are told by his friends might just determine the history of Britain after the virus.

Fleeing the clutches of an oppressive regime, a young woman emigrates to 1920s America. She struggles at first, but through sheer guts and determination, she establishes herself as one of the most famous intellectuals of the 20th century. A true original, she founds her own highly distinctive school of philosophy – as set out in a sequence of books that sell in their millions.

Decades after her death, her most famous works are still best sellers – and continue to exert an influence at the highest levels of politics and business.

And yet, today, academia all but ignores her – dismissing her philosophy and mocking her literary output. You’d think the woke left would be furious. How dare the patriarchal establishment ignore someone who ticks all the boxes: a woman, a refugee, a non-Christian (indeed, an outspoken atheist)!

So where are the campus protests? Where are the mobs of angry students with blue hair and nose rings?

This answer is nowhere, because the woman in question is a non-approved woman – in fact, she’s none other than Ayn Rand.

There are all sort of good reasons for disagreeing with Rand; but, as Skye C Cleary argues in an article for Aeon magazine, ignoring her won’t make her ideas go away:

“Philosophers love to hate Ayn Rand. It’s trendy to scoff at any mention of her. One philosopher told me that: ‘No one needs to be exposed to that monster.’ Many propose that she’s not a philosopher at all and should not be taken seriously. The problem is that people are taking her seriously. In some cases, very seriously.”

What is so monstrous about Randian thought (or Objectivism to give her philosophy its proper name)? Did Ayn Rand have Fascist or Communist sympathies, as so many other 20th century intellectuals did? No, quite the opposite in fact. She was a radical individualist – believing that the only thing that the state should restrict individuals from doing is restricting the freedom of other individuals.

She was, therefore, a libertarian – but not only that. She went much further than most libertarians do in developing an ethical basis for her political views. She didn’t just object to the state enforcing our moral obligations to help one another, she objected to the idea that any such moral obligations exist. Indeed, she considered the very concept of altruism to be evil:

“Her philosophy, she wrote in the novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), is ‘the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute’.”

Her ideas are transgressive to say the least, and these days the cultural establishment does love a spot of transgression – but only if it is of a permitted variety. If you’re going to come at conventional morality with a sharp object, make sure you do so from the left.

Academic disdain doesn’t stop Rand from being popular elsewhere. Decades after her death, her books achieve sales that most academics could only dream of. In the US, her prominent admirers include Paul Ryan, Peter Thiel and Alan Greenspan. In the UK, it is reported that Sajid Javid – a favourite to succeed Theresa May as leader of the Conservative Party – re-reads the courtroom speech from The Fountainhead twice a year.

Skye Cleary is right – Rand’s ideas can’t be opposed by pretending they don’t exist:

“Vilifying Rand without reading the detail, or demonising her without taking the trouble to refute her, is clearly the wrong approach. Making her work taboo is not going to help anyone to think critically about her ideas either.”

Cleary goes on to say that refuting Rand “should be straightforward”. She has a go herself – mainly by reference to the provision of shared infrastructure and the protection of shared environmental resources. It’s a strong argument, but ultimately one about practicalities rather than morality.

You can’t defeat Rand without dismantling her ethical framework. Cleary describes her ideas as cruel, but by what standard? If, like Rand, you believe that no person has a claim on another, then it is forcing (or at least morally obliging) one person to help another that is cruel.

One therefore has to explain why it is that we ought to transcend our selfish genes and love our neighbour. There is, of course, a tradition that provides the necessary arguments, but I doubt that academia wants to go there either.

Transport for London’s (TFL) decision to rescind Uber’s license to operate as a cab firm in London came as a shock to almost everyone on Friday. It discombobulated those people who wondered why a technology company – Uber has always claimed to be merely an app rather than a taxi firm – had a cab license in the first place. But it also surprised those of us who had come to assume Uber had grown too powerful to be challenged by regulatory authorities.

TFL have sanctioned Uber, which has around 40,000 drivers in London, for its apparent failure to satisfy public safety concerns. The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan (pictured above) has backed the move by TFL, while Uber has already launched an appeal against the decision and launched a petition (which has so far gathered over 500,000 signatures).

The decision has polarised opinion not only because a Labour mayor is in City Hall and some critics see this as a political move engineered by Sadiq Khan (though they seem reluctant to present any hard evidence to support the claim). But also because it seems to go against the prevailing tide: Uber has for the most part been given an easy ride by global regulators. There have been exceptions of course, such as in Italy where the app has been banned outright; but Uber’s model of ‘disruption’ has functioned quite successfully on the basis that the authorities will invariably back down if you stand your ground.

The decision to ban Uber from London will, I imagine, be overturned on appeal. For all the current hysteria on the part of Uber fans, this will result in an improved transport system for everyone. The broader case for or against Uber is a moot point in this respect: unless one believes in a completely unregulated transport system, there must come a point when the existing rules are enforced. I have not heard a persuasive argument as to why Uber should be exempt from rules which others must adhere to.

But even critics of Uber such as myself can admit that the decision to prohibit Uber from operating in London has potentially deleterious consequences. The livelihoods of 40,000 people, many of whom are already struggling financially, are under threat. This is another layer of insecurity heaped onto an already precarious existence. Many Uber drivers have taken out eye-watering finance deals on hybrid cars – deals which they assumed they could pay off by putting hours in on the road. The blasé dismissal of this precarity – ‘they ought to just get another job’ – by some liberal critics of Uber leaves a decidedly bad taste in the mouth.

But widespread reverence for Uber among affluent Londoners misunderstands the extreme model of capitalism on which the company is built. It is a business model that functions by offloading traditional business risk onto its drivers. It does so by promulgating the fiction that its drivers aren’t really its drivers at all, but are instead a mosaic of individual business people. By this move alone Uber avoids paying VAT[1. ‘Uber faces challenge on paying VAT’, Financial Times, 20 May 2017]; but it also dodges the tab for things like holiday pay and the minimum wage.

Uber’s aim, in the words of its former CEO Travis Kalanick, is to make transportation “as reliable as running water”[2. ‘Transportation that is as reliable as running water’, Uber Blog, 4 September 2015]. In order to do so, Uber requires a fleet of drivers constantly circling around London at all times. The result is that you, as a rider, can whip out your phone, fire up the app and summon a driver whose car will appear within seconds. This is why Uber puts no cap on the number of drivers it recruits (and foolishly, TFL hasn’t either).

In doing so Uber makes out that it can expand the market in perpetuity. More drivers can compete for cheaper fares while simultaneously making more money. The theory is based on the fact that drivers are tapping into unmet ‘liquidity’, as the jargon calls it. By dropping the price of a ride far below that of traditional cab companies, Uber is able to tap into all the pent-up demand which is out there.

Leaving aside whether or not it is desirable to add tens of thousands of extra cars to London’s roads, the problem with Uber’s polyanna business model is that it is built on junk economics. And I suspect the company knows it – Kalanick himself is a proponent of the cod-philosophy of Ayn Rand. There is of course truth to the theory of liquidity – but only up to a point. Once the supply of drivers had risen beyond a certain level, a system built on a point of liquidity that Uber could only ever estimate (how is it possible to know how many untapped future taxi passengers there are?) is liable to produce a huge amount of waste. At some point the number of drivers on the road invariably outstrips demand, especially in a city with a reasonably priced public transport system such as London.

In practical terms, this means choked up and congested roads as thousands of drivers criss-cross London waiting for the ping to sound on an app. This is a prerequisite of any system which truly aims to be ‘as reliable as running water’. When you switch the tap on at home, there must be something sitting in the pipe or the tank. When you request an Uber, someone has to be waiting in a car for you. Because drivers are not entitled to a minimum wage or other safeguards – and because they are incurring costs while they drive around – they shoulder the waste inherent to such a system. This is why almost any Uber driver you speak to will tell you that their earnings have gone down in recent years. Notably, Uber has also not published data on hourly earnings of its London-based drivers.

Were Uber drivers genuinely autonomous there might be an argument to be had here over the balance of rights versus freedoms. But for all the company’s rhetoric about ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’, Uber tightly controls the behaviour of its drivers. I drove for Uber for three months earlier this year. At one of my ‘Onboarding’ sessions (the training session Uber gives you before it sends you out on the road) I was informed that I was not allowed to “pick and choose” which jobs I accepted. “The reason you’re online is to accept any job that’s given to you,” the instructor warned us. I was also told that if my driver rating slipped below 4.6 I would be hauled into the office for a dressing down.

The reality was some distance from the slick PR about ‘being your own boss’. The whole thing felt like a giant con, and it is high time those with an interest in fair play stood up to Uber and its crew of Randian ‘disrupters’.