The choice of ephemeral, ideological, and genre fiction in the YA category for study in school isn’t rare. It plagued both of my kids throughout their private middle school educations. And it’s shutting down debate and turning kids away from authentic learning.

When my daughter started at a different New York City public school three years ago, the entire incoming freshman class was assigned a piece of transgender agitprop for young adults titled The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives. This book manipulatively told kids that their acceptance of transgender ideology was the key to preventing horrific crimes. Later that year, she was tasked with making serious exegesis on the differences between the Ursula K. Le Guin story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and a rejoinder by woke fantasy writer N.K. Jemsin. As if a dystopia designed to prove a particular point provides meaningful evidence on human societies. This summer, an informal polling of my son’s group chat found one teen assigned a different Shusterman book by his school, and everyone else independently reading classics and books for actual adults (David Copperfield, The Devil in the White City, Dracula, the last with the notation “highly recommend to y’all it’s quite disturbing though”).

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In an era of rapidly declining literacy and the decimation of education by artificial intelligence, schools that assign terrible YA literature are hastening the end of reading and critical thought. This isn’t just because of the obvious identity politics behind the choice of such books, though works like Punching the Air, from my son’s list, is stunningly anti-white for a book taught in a city public school. Even worse are the low quality and trite ideas, which actively repel kids from real learning.

To unpack these books a little: Shusterman’s Unwind, the best of the bunch, takes on the abortion issue. It’s set in a dystopian America, after a “second civil war,” called the Heartland War, in which Pro-Life and Pro-Choice forces have battled it out until reaching a terrible compromise: Abortion is illegal, but parents have the option to “unwind” their children when they reach their teens. What follows is a Hunger Games-ish adventure in which Connor, a young man whose parents have decided to unwind him, tries to escape his gruesome fate.

The book is fairly readable — Shusterman is a proficient mass market fiction writer — and might appear to offer some grist for intellectual discussion. One can imagine a classroom debate on the similarities and differences between ending a child’s life at 13 versus ending it in utero. But this is lazy, simplistic, and not fit for a classroom. We don’t kill and dismember our own children at 13; a world in which we did would be monstrous and unrecognizable. So how useful is the comparison, really, in shedding any light on the issues at play in the abortion debate? The book employs the same technique that’s currently degrading the public discourse, in which egregious analogies are used to win moral arguments. Ideally, kids in school would learn to not think this way.

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Shusterman may be intending to stir up controversy, but a pro-life message is not really his intention, either — if it were, the book likely wouldn’t be taught. His ultimate point is to suggest that both sides of the abortion issue are deranged, and that no one really knows the right or wrong of it. It’s an appropriately feel-good answer for a work of popular fiction but offensively bland and incurious for academia. A school would ideally have the history of human thought, scientific debate, and moral and religious philosophy to draw upon in addressing the complexities of abortion. Instead, they’re teaching kids that it doesn’t really matter and there’s nothing to learn here, using a clumsy analogy from a fantasy world as evidence.

The Epic Crush of Genie Lo is less ambitious — so unambitious, in fact, that Asian representation seems to be the only possible reason for its choice as a school book. This is a novel in the Harry Potter model, in which Genie, an ordinary overachieving Asian high schooler in the Bay Area, discovers that she is the reincarnation of Ruyi Jingu Bang, a demon-fighting entity from Chinese mythology. The demon-fighting plot is tedious, the love interest cliché (“He had the cheekbones and sharp jawline of a pop star…”), and to the extent that there’s a larger message, it’s about Genie’s personal development — she has to live up to her enormous powers, and accept the fact that even being a superhero might not get her into Harvard.

The book is boring and badly written, has no aesthetic value, and could easily give children tasked with it the impression that they don’t like to read. Its fantasy world also engages in a relentless, charmless flattening of human history and human experience, with deities whipping out cell phones and banter along the lines of “You died and then came back to life, get with the program.” Resurrection, Chinese gods, ho hum. How about introducing kids to some of the Chinese source material for these legends, or any of China’s wondrous and strange classics instead?

And then there’s Punching the Air, another deeply manipulative book lent moral authority through its affiliation with Yusef Salaam’s story. In it, a sweet, innocent, mother-loving black art student named Amal is falsely accused of beating a white teenager into a coma, and then is convicted and sent to juvenile prison. The free-verse construction allows it to be atmospheric and vague about the details — such as who actually beat up the white kid — yet rich in implication. Amal is an “old soul,” doomed before he was born by his skin color, and traveling a “Pipeline” (one of the poem names) from slave ship to prison. “White Space” and “Blind Justice” (two more poem names) are to blame. The level of the analysis of these incidents can be demonstrated by a representative poem: “All because/ we were in the wrong place/ we were in the wrong skins,” contrasting with “All because/ they were in the right place/ they were in the right skins.” And so on. The book ends with Amal meeting a prison abolitionist and hoping to be exonerated.

It’s difficult to determine whom the book wrongs more — black kids, being presented with this bleakly deterministic future, or their white peers, the monolithic enemy. It surely fails to represent the lively and interactive race climate in Gotham schools, in which blackness and black culture are the arbiters of cool, and it’s downright ludicrous to imagine a group of affluent white kids kicking a group of black kids off a playground, as is the case during the book’s inciting incident. It also freely traffics in the glamorization of prison life that’s popular with young readers of all races. Amal makes beats in prison — of course he does. The school should interrogate the mythology of the prison-to-rap-star pipeline, not promote it.

The real victim, however, is academic rigor. These books’ arguments are lazy, and they present sacred cows that kids know they can’t argue about anyway. There is nothing in them to inspire children or draw them into the world of reading. Most students assigned them will ChatGPT the summary instead — and honestly, they won’t be missing anything.

As for creative freedom, that might be the biggest joke of all. Two Jewish comedians, Rachel Creeger and Philip Simon, have had their shows canceled at two venues. One of these, Whistlebinkies, at first claimed that this was due to “safety concerns” — presumably it feared that activists from “the right side of history” might turn up to assault audiences and staff in the name of compassion. Creeger and Simon say they were told of “staff discomfort at hosting Jewish shows”.

Of course, any appeal to “safety” in the context of a comedy show is mere sleight-of-tongue, a specious justification for the curbing of artistic freedom. The Banshee Labyrinth has canceled Simon’s solo show after trawling through his social media posts in search of heretical views. Chillingly, its managers have compiled a “dossier” of tweets in which Simon criticizes the hypocrisy of those who attend and organize “humanitarian” marches for Palestine while turning a blind eye to the atrocities committed by Hamas. The venue was particularly outraged that Simon pointed out that Greta Thunberg had not been “kidnapped” by the IDF when she sailed her flotilla to Gaza in her ongoing mission to save the universe and chronicle it all on Instagram.

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One would hope that a comedy venue of all places might appreciate that creatives do not always agree, and that it is not their place to cancel performers who do not pledge fealty to the fashionable omni-cause of the middle-classes. Alas, as ever, conformity is now being demanded from those we should least expect it from. It is particularly dispiriting to see this kind of groupthink take hold at the Fringe. Since its inception in the late Forties, performers have been accustomed to protests and demands for censorship from the Christian Right, but such calls today are coming from within the industry itself.

The ideological capture is evident from critics who laud shows for conveying the “correct message” and comedy commissioners who evidently prefer propaganda to art. Ever since Nica Burns, the director of the Fringe comedy awards, launched the 2018 festival with a paean to “comedy’s future in the woke world” which will “establish a clear marker for what is unacceptable today”, most performers and industry doyens have been diligently following the decree. Genuinely subversive acts have been edged out to make space for the mediocre and the bland.

This is a trend that is now firmly established. Three years ago, the Pleasance Theatre — one of the Fringe’s main provider of venues — canceled a show by controversial comedian Jerry Sadowitz. According to the director of the Pleasance, Anthony Alderson, this was because “this type of material has no place on the festival”, and “opinions such as those displayed on stage by Sadowitz are not acceptable”. When a leading comedy promoter openly admits that he doesn’t understand the difference between opinions and jokes, we know the rot is entrenched.

Kate Copstick, one of the few comedy critics who has refused to kowtow to the new orthodoxy, wrote the following after the Sadowitz cancellation: “In all my years of covering the Fringe, there has never been a more joy-stranglingly censorious August. Councillor Moira Knox in her heyday seems like a libertine now, in comparison to today’s recreationally offended. When the blood-chilling phrase “unacceptable and does not align with our values” is bandied about, and by a venue like the Pleasance, then it is time to fear for the freedom of our funny. The point of a Fringe is that it does not align with anything.

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All of which would be depressing enough, but the situation has been exacerbated by the complicity of comedians themselves. Many acts at the Fringe now fall into the category of what the Spanish call “cuerpo oficial de cómicos del Estado” (official body of comedians of the state). These “regime comedians” are aware that success in their careers is dependent on echoing the dogma of our times, one that has been promoted consistently by successive Conservative and Labour governments. These are the fools at court who have forgotten that their job is to criticize the king.

It was not always this way. Back in 2006, when Tony Blair’s government attempted to oppose amendments passed by the House of Lords that limited the scope of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, comedians were outspoken in their dissent. Had the bill passed, any vexatious complaint about a show that mocked religious belief would have resulted in its suspension pending a police investigation. Acts have just over three weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe to recoup some of their losses; they simply can’t afford to waste time being interrogated by the Star Chamber.

But whereas there was near unanimity among comedians in 2006, by the time Markus Meechan (aka “Count Dankula”) was prosecuted for a joke video in 2018, there were few speaking out. Whereas they once understood that “the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended” — the phrase used by Rowan Atkinson during the 2006 campaign — they had now subscribed wholesale to the core woke belief that words and violence are synonymous and that suppression of free speech is essential for the preservation of a cohesive society. Where once comedians fought censorship, now they were defending it.

Up until relatively recently, punters would have been sorely disappointed at a fringe festival that offered a series of interchangeable comics all aiming their barbs at similar targets. When Scott Capurro took his show Islamohomophobia to the Fringe in 2013, and was depicted wearing a transparent burka in the publicity materials, nobody took offense or called for his deplatforming. A little over a decade later, and police are contacting a venue in London because of accusations that Capurro might be “homophobic”. Perhaps the investigating officers should have asked for evidence from his husband.

For the humourless and the doctrinaire, comedy will always be a dangerous phenomenon. Take George Monbiot, who recently produced a piece for the Guardian in which he argued that jokes are the equivalent of gateway drugs to the far-Right. “Dominant powers have for centuries used clowns to express their deepest, most unmentionable urges,” he writes, forgetting that the antics of clowns have always been the most effective tool to undermine authority. Citing jokes by Lewis Schaffer, a comedian whose every utterance is guaranteed to bewilder the congenitally literal-minded, Monbiot concludes that “Humorous suggestions of violence reveal and embolden real desires,” that they “soften us up for violence and misrule” and that “it’s the clowning that kills us”.

In this, Monbiot appears to be channelling the spirit of William Prynne, the puritanical firebrand who, in his Histrio-Mastix (1633), railed against the capacity of stage comedies to “empoison, endanger, and deprave” the audience. The elegance, wit and popular appeal of these shows, Prynne reasoned, had the effect of acclimatising the public to “adulteries, fornications, rapes, love-passions, meretricious, unchaste, and amorous practises, of lascivious wicked men or heathen idol-gods”. The claim that jokes lead to violence is often asserted but never proved. It is eternal cry of the sanctimonious and the philistine.

Monbiot’s logic is identical to that of the officers who last week arrested Jon Farley, a protester at a pro-Palestine rally in Leeds, who had been holding a placard bearing a cartoon from the satirical magazine Private Eye. The cartoon mocked the Government’s proscribing of Palestine Action as a terrorist group. Fully on board with the notion that comedy and satire are potentially toxic forces and can incite real-world harm, the police swiftly handcuffed Farley and detained him for nearly six hours. This is what happens when freedom of speech is no longer valued by the ruling class, and the ideology promoted by the likes of Monbiot becomes institutionalised.

No doubt this authoritarian attitude will persist at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Innately subversive comedians will continue to self-censor, and those who do risk the ire of the establishment will doubtless pay the price. We can expect increased conformity while activists insist that “nobody is being stifled”. Genuine fans of comedy would be advised to avoid the Fringe, at least until its gatekeepers learn that laughter is more satisfying than nodding along to the approved creed.

These two approaches to creativity for kids, the splatter and the craft kit, encapsulate two far broader lessons we deliver to children on how to live. On the one hand, unbounded self-expression coupled with absolute aesthetic relativism, in which we reject any imaginable constraint on a kind of “creativity” we imagine to come only from within ourselves. On the other, a rigid obedience to externally-imposed rules. And when I learned, earlier this week, that some secondary school children are now identifying as non-human creatures — or, in one case, as a cape-wearing moon — it left me wondering: do such absurdities apply the former lesson, rejecting every rule in the name of self-expression? Or are such youth in fact colouring inside the lines their teachers — which is to say us, the adults — have provided?

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Schoolchildren, we learn, are now identifying as dinosaurs, horses, cats, and even planetary bodies. One pupil at a secondary school in Wales reported that a fellow pupil “feels very discriminated against if you do not refer to them as ‘catself’”. She added: “When they answer questions, they meow rather than answer a question in English. And the teachers are not allowed to get annoyed about this because it’s seen as discriminating.”

When my own daughter was a toddler, an art-world friend and I used to send one another pictures of our kids’ splatter paintings, with solemn commentary in the style of a contemporary gallery. Such affectionate mum-jokes aside, though, it would be extremely bad form to greet your pre-schooler’s colourful smears with substantive artistic critique rather than unalloyed delight, simply as joyful self-expression.

But it’s one thing embracing a three-year-old’s poster-paint splodges with judgement-free rapture. It’s another altogether when secondary-school teachers embrace (or, perhaps in many cases, have imposed on them) an equivalent refusal to judge even the most unconstrained self-expression. Within this stance of unconditional acceptance, the teachers in question are left completely unable to impose boundaries, even when limiting their pupils’ self-expression would, in fact, be a basic precondition for conducting a functional, meow-free lesson.

But while the contrasting approach to creativity — lines to colour inside, or a pre-prepared kit for assembly, for example — seems to offer more structure, in practice it’s less different than you might imagine. Whether literally or metaphorically, the “craft kit” approach represents the other extreme to the splatter painting: a total or near-total relinquishing of skill, judgement, and agency, in favour of pre-prepared templates.

And we see this applied, too, in young people’s lives. Some parents are now heavily involved in their offspring’s university life, and others have even gone into their child’s place of work to help them confront an angry customer, or phoned their boss to ask for a pay rise. Adults are also pre-defining the forms that supposedly radical self-expression takes, and then inviting young people to discover their “authentic selves” by adopting such an identity wholesale: a “craft kit” version of selfhood, as it were, requiring only simple instructions and little in the way of accomplishment. This agency-free, pre-assembled approach to living is now so widely accepted that it commands a whole month-long summer celebration, complete with a pocketbook’s worth of off-the-peg selves from which to choose.

But what, in reality, does either approach offer as a set of moral precepts on how to live? Both work well enough, provided the locus of authority is elsewhere: that is, if you have an admiring mummy to coo at your splatter painting, or a teacher on hand with a kit or print-out for you to complete. But they leave something to be desired at the point where individual judgement and agency is required — which is to say, in theory at least, for the whole of life after childhood.

It’s far rarer to find artistic endeavours offered to children that emphasise imitation, practice, and mastery of a technical skill — for example drawing freehand rather than colouring in. This is unsurprising, in a way: even assuming you possess the skill in question, helping a child make something nice using a method that’s difficult to master is much more time-consuming than praising them for making a mess, or else giving them a kit to do while you catch up on emails.

But the trouble with such approaches to “creativity” is precisely this: they swerve the acquisition of skill. And this means, in the end, swerving the acquisition of agency. We used to understand this, and treat artistic education as the inculcation of skill and judgement through practice. In the studios of Renaissance sculptors, for example, would-be “creatives” could spend years imitating existing works, and mastering technical skill, artistic register, and the larger aesthetic framework, before they were allowed anywhere near a composition of their own. The resulting skill, in the hands of even an average sculptor, could produce good work; allied with an exceptional talent such as Michelangelo’s, the result was masterpieces still world-famous today.

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We might say: was Michelangelo not also expressing himself? Well, yes; but for all that his creations are exceptional in their vividness and exquisite execution, they also exist within a tradition of craftsmanship, as well as a visual register and shared religious and mythological framework. And creativity within such a demanding frame implies submission to what the philosopher-engineer Matthew Crawford calls the “affordances” of your chosen material and métier: not just your patiently-acquired skill, but also what stone can be persuaded to do, plus more broadly the topics and visual language that will make the result meaningful to others.

In place of this difficult-to-acquire matrix of skill and meaning, we’ve embraced the idea that “creativity” is a spontaneous property of individuals, drawn solely from within an individual without much need for training, practice, or imitation. So much so, in fact, that we’re running full-tilt into a new aesthetic age, that hands the aggregate treasure-trove of historic human visual and linguistic conventions wholesale to machines, treating it simply as a means of “training” programmes such as ChatGPT and Midjourney so that they may “create” new configurations of that cultural legacy on our behalf.

In doing so, we’ve sidelined that domain’s critical role as an enabler of creativity: providing the meanings to create with, and the skills to realise a vision. And again, we should not find it strange how easily this has been accepted, given that for decades now we’ve been treating the whole domain of skill, practice, and shared meaning as incidental to “creativity”.

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There are signs that this poverty of skill-based judgement has percolated upwards, into adults. At the most literal level, adult colouring books are wildly popular as a way of relaxing, a trend that first hit the headlines in 2015. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is also the year the American Dialect Society nominated, as most creative new coinage, the transformation of “adult” into a verb meaning “behave like a grownup” — or that the same year, too, the overall American Dialect Society winner for innovative dialect was the “nonbinary” singular “they”.

In other words, in 2015 adults embraced, en masse, a form of artistic endeavour that surrenders overall control to an outside force. The same year, self-created identities became so mainstream as to begin reshaping language. And that same year, adults began expressing, also en masse, a generalised ambivalent distance from their own capacity (or willingness) to behave as adults.

Custom identities, adult colouring books and semi-ironic clinging to childhood have not disappeared since 2015. You can even buy (possibly ironic, possibly not) “I Adulted!” reward stickers on Amazon.But being an adult implies having the skills and knowledge to take independent action: in other words, knowing how to make a Pietà, rather than colouring inside the lines or making a mess.

And what exactly are you to do, as a child, when the adults around you offer no opportunity to develop any skills or moral frameworks, refuse to acknowledge any objective moral or aesthetic standards? Under those circumstances, you will have grown up thinking the skills, norms and shared meanings that form the basis of independent creativity or moral judgement are so irrelevant as to be ceded wholesale to imitation machines.

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Then you get to the age of supposed autonomy, and find yourself without either a loving authority figure who will tell you your splatter art is wonderful, or even an authority to give you some lines to colour inside. We shouldn’t be surprised if many such adults feel nostalgia for the innocent age before anyone expected them to like being free.

If I have a measure of hope, it rests with the kids now riotously trolling this limitless-yet-rigid modern orthodoxy of value-free self-expression, by identifying as planets or dinosaurs and forcing their teachers to play along. If such absurdist stunts have little to offer on the artistic front, they nonetheless demonstrate an enduring truth. Human creativity will always meet and exceed its boundaries, even when it’s constrained only by the pretence that we can live without boundaries.

Those earnest promoters of the work ethic, Dominic Raab and Priti Patel, must be a bit worried. Are we actually enjoying lockdown? Are we enjoying doing less? Are we enjoying being masters of our own time? Maybe we won’t want to go back to work.

The government was expecting an outcry from the people when it extended lockdown. Please, open the factory gates and let me get back in there! Let me rise early again, and scrape the ice from the windscreen! Let me plod through the rain with my enormous jug of coffee and let me buy meal deals at lunchtime! Let me spend my hard-earned cash on after-work drinks with colleagues I hate! Let me never see my children and let me spend long hours standing on buses and trains!

Tories have long pushed the Puritan ideal of hard work for other people. Raab and Patel were among the five authors of a dismal Gradgrindian manifesto in 2012, pompously entitled Britannia Unchained:

The British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.

Football and pop music indeed! Around this time, some bright spark in the Tory party came up with the depressing notion of “hard-working families”, enthusiastically taken up by David Cameron, who, as has been noted many times, singularly fails to distinguish himself in that respect in his own daily life.

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Then there is former MP for Grantham, Nick Boles. Boles, like many MPs, studied PPE at Oxford, training ground for utilitarians. He is an enthusiastic opponent of the universal basic income, believing that if left alone, Brits will vegetate, or, worse, write poetry:

The main objection to the idea of a universal basic income is not practical but moral.

Its enthusiasts suggest that when intelligent machines make most of us redundant, we will all dispense with the idea of earning a living and find true fulfilment in writing poetry, playing music and nurturing plants. That is dangerous nonsense.

Mankind is hard-wired to work. We gain satisfaction from it.

This sort of thing, as Jeremy Bentham might have said, is nonsense on stilts. If mankind were hard-wired to work, then we would not be enjoying the autonomy of lockdown. Most people don’t gain satisfaction from work, they gain money from it. That’s why they do it.

In fact mankind is hard-wired to write poetry, play music and nurture plants — which is exactly what we have been doing in lockdown. The other day I found myself writing a short poem about the folk singer Sam Lee and his love for nightingales. And I sowed some seeds in a pot. That’s the sort of thing that happens when you have a bit more time.

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At the Idler we’ve seen take-up of our online courses quintupling over the past few weeks. When left alone, it appears, people do not do nothing. They take exercise, they read and they listen to learned lectures on Jane Austen and Plato.

PC Plod famously ticked off sunbathers that lockdown was not a holiday. But in some senses, it is a holiday. And the distinguishing characteristic of holidays is not that you do nothing. It is that you are in control of your own time. Holidays can be quite busy. So it is with lockdown. To a far greater extent than normal, we call the shots. We are not slaves. We take responsibility.

At this point the middle-class communists will pipe up: it’s all very well for you, with your 19^th-century novels and volumes of Keats’s letters. What about the key workers? Are they enjoying lockdown?

No one is saying that being a nurse is not a difficult and important job — now and at all times. And I am more grateful than ever that the dustmen come and take away our rubbish. But we cannot ignore the people for whom the crisis has led to a questioning of what a good life is all about. And a little less work all round would be good for key workers too.

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It is instructive as to the mutable nature of morality, that a few weeks ago, being very busy was considered morally good, and now we are being told to indulge in its precise opposite. Do nothing, save lives. This shows you that Nietzsche was right: morality, so-called, is merely a tool of control.

The truth is, as Chesterton said about lying in bed, there is nothing morally good about hard work, or bad about being lazy.

Instead of being regarded, as it ought to be, as a matter of personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning.
It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite.

After all, what could be more harmless than lying in bed? When lying in bed you are doing nothing to harm the planet. You are consuming nothing. You are bothering no one. And you are doing yourself a lot of good by giving yourself a rest.

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For many, many people, lockdown will beat working. My neighbour is using his furloughed time and the lovely weather to paint the outside of his house and spend some time in the garden. He says he is not particularly relishing the prospect of going back to work.

And on my daily bicycle rides around west London, an alien observer would be forgiven for thinking he’d landed in some sort of William Morrisesque utopia. There are no cars, the air is clean, birds sing, and smiling family groups cycle along the river.

The main issue here is the people actually enjoy the freedom. The right-wing view is that, left to our own devices, we’d just sit around in our underpants watching daytime TV, and I’m sure there are a few who do that.

But in fact, when people are left to their own devices, and have more free time, they get creative. They help each other. They form community groups. They do things not just for profit. We are seeing the anarchist principles of mutual aid in action, and we are disproving the old proverb, “the devil finds work for idle hands to do”. In fact, idle hands get on with a lot of fun stuff — it’s just not working for the boss.

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And maybe we won’t want to go back to work. Maybe the leisure society dreamed of by people like William Morris and later Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes will start to materialise. Morris believed in what he called “useful work” versus “useless toil”. Russell said that a civilised society would gradually reduce the hours of work, leaving time for poetry, nurturing plants and studying philosophy. And Keynes of course reckoned that technology would usher in a 15-hour working week.

I called my pal Professor Brendan Burchell of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has been studying working habits for over 30 years.

“I think lots of people are enjoying lockdown though they are afraid to say it for fear of being seen as lacking compassion,” he said.

He reckons that some people will undoubtedly want to work less when the crisis passes. “Whether that’s 1% or 10% or 30%, we don’t know.”

He also predicts that the crisis will lead people to question that other great pillar of contemporary society: consumerism.

“Empty nesters who are used to spending money are realising that they can be perfectly happy without expensive holidays and consumer objects. And if consumerism weakens its hold, so will the work ethic, because people cite ‘money’ as the main reason for working.”

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It’s not that Professor Burchell is against work. “Work is good — in small doses,” he says.

The work ethic is a relative recent invention. It has its roots in the Protestant Reformation — the Tudor authorities were, like Raab, hostile to idlers. Monks were considered to be lazy. It gathered force in the Industrial Revolution when the mill owners required a docile and punctual workforce to toil in the dark satanic mills. That’s when punctuality became a matter of essential morals. And most recently Silicon Valley has invented its own version: unless your side hustle has a side hustle, then you are going to fail in life.

Earlier societies, though, were not so work-oriented. The ancient Greek philosophers insisted on the ideal of “schole” or cultivated leisure, for a happy life, and even the brutal Romans believed that civilised people should enjoy a decent portion of otium. Life was not all about business: they called that negotium.

In the Middle Ages, the great creative projects of the cathedrals were carried out voluntarily in people’s spare time. Guilds were against overwork as it might give you an unfair advantage over your brother in the guild. And there were multiple holy days and feast days when working was prohibited.

Some are born idle, some achieve idleness and right now, a lot of people are having idleness thrust upon them. And many of them rather like it.