Each conversion has been accompanied by a heartfelt dedication to the integrity of the new cause. Having campaigned for Remain in 2016, Truss later affirmed the ardour of her devotion to the Brexit agenda. She now shares with prominent members of her Cabinet a zealous belief in the benefits of economic independence. But plain Brexit is clearly not enough. By now, only the most radical forms of separation count.

The problem here is not a show of allegiance to principle, but the stubborn adherence to principle come what may. This trait is not a feature of the Prime Minister’s personality alone. It also characterises the behaviour of Kwasi Kwarteng, her current Chancellor, as well as the mindset of senior members of the front bench — including ministers like Suella Braverman, Brandon Lewis and Jacob Rees-Mogg. As the conduct of these stalwarts of the Brexit debate makes clear, intransigence has become a mark of virtue.

In this climate, unflinching rectitude is perceived as an asset in British politics. But this stance has not been cultivated out of deference to the national good. Rather, it is a product of the Government’s antipathy towards its opponents. Along with the culture of ideological purity, a spirit of factionalism has taken hold. This state of affairs is hardly without historical precedent. It is often the case that self-belief is driven by contempt for real or imagined adversaries. According to a familiar trajectory, conflict breeds righteousness, righteousness fosters confidence, and confidence increases animosity. Take the worsening relations during the English Civil War, for instance, when what began as an attempt to impose limitations on the crown soon descended into a full-blown constitutional crisis.

Looking back on the disturbances of the 17th century, the great Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume argued that the bitter contests of the period had sacrificed both “the repose and safety of the people”. From the reign of Charles I to the restoration of Charles II, politics had repeatedly been unhinged. Correspondingly, public opinion grew progressively deranged. However, Hume’s purpose was not to question the legitimacy of a particular party, but to observe the deterioration that came with seismic shocks to the body politic.

First, in the 1630s, the monarchy had sought to overawe parliament and tamper with the religious establishment. Then, in the 1640s, the House of Commons battled with the ailing fortunes of Charles I, and religious fundamentalism thrived. With the execution of the king in 1649, a republic was proclaimed as a solution to the prevailing mayhem, but tranquillity was scarcely restored. While crisis enveloped proceedings at Westminster, volatility beset affairs in Scotland and Ireland. Each new emergency sparked yet another. Over time, parliament was purged, an “assembly of saints” appointed, and a protectorate instituted to manage the state and the Empire.

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As events progressed, successive governments declared the purity of their virtue. At the same time, incumbents strained to outbid the principles of their predecessors. As the search for accommodation was abandoned, compromise became a sign of weakness. The Restoration of 1660 failed to resolve outstanding quarrels. Even the Revolution of 1688 proved controversial for a generation. Viewing these changes in the round, it was again Hume who challenged the wisdom of sudden experimentation in the unpredictable medium of politics. Under conditions of upheaval, he contended, even an honest bid for improvement risked proving counterproductive: with routine shattered, extremes prospered. At that point, there was no route back to a moderate course of action.

There is nothing peculiar about British politics that disposes radical shifts in policy to lead to disruptive outcomes. The same inclination toward divisive partisanship overwhelmed the course of the French Revolution. Between 1789 and 1793, angry factions rapidly succeeded one another — the Monarchiens, the Feuillants, the Girondins, and the Jacobins. As divisions deepened, caution was discarded, institutional restraints were dismantled, and fundamentalist programmes succeeded one another.

Of course, historical analogies are of limited utility. To begin with, British politics is not facing imminent implosion. Nonetheless, there are medium-term threats to the equilibrium of the state. Most obviously, the Union is under increasing strain in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Yet, despite the existential danger, successive governments since 2016 have been haplessly careering towards a dissolution of the United Kingdom.

The explanation for this anomalous course is not difficult to find: a radical brand of conservatism is now prepared to gamble with the future. This reckless spirit has been sustained by a libertarian vision of Brexit. For the champions of this outlook, Britain’s departure from the European Union was never an end in itself. The goal has been securing the “opportunities” of Brexit. With that end in view, circumspection and moderation have been systematically discounted. In relentless pursuit of a low-tax, low-regulation economy, the costs of this journey have rarely been computed. This has long been a feature of self-appointed national liberation movements. Freedom from an unloved structure of authority is sought at any price.

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For instance, while Irish opinion has stood flabbergasted at the recent course of British affairs, the truth is that Ireland itself followed a similar path. The British Union from which it struggled to escape was hardly the apotheosis of tyranny, although subjection to unaccountable power obviously rankled. At the beginning of the 20th century, a measure of autonomy, packaged as “Home Rule”, seemed attractive to most citizens. But soon partisans of a more robust version of independence appeared. First, dominion status was pursued; then a free state; and, finally, a republic. In the meantime, British and Irish relations deteriorated. Partition was introduced, and a trade war ensued. The Irish economy did not recover until the Sixties.

None of this is intended to suggest that complete autonomy is not worth the effort. Interestingly, after joining the European Economic Community in 1973, Southern Ireland to some extent revised its earlier judgment. Fresh “opportunities” were anticipated under a new dispensation. But the important point is that constitutional upheaval inevitably comes at a cost. Opposing constituencies will differently evaluate what they are prepared to pay. But, either way, it is a basic duty of clear-sighted accounting to weigh up the calculus of benefits.

The fiasco surrounding Kwarteng’s recent “mini-budget” is just the latest in a line of collisions between expectation and reality. In its rush to make the world as it would like it to be, the government disregarded the facts on the ground. This arrogance is a consequence of a doggedly partisan spirit. The mentality is hitched to a neo-Thatcherite ambition to secure the imagined dividends of Britannia Unchained. But the approach has its roots in the Brexit referendum and its aftermath.

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By Will Lloyd

First, beginning in 2016, “experts” were disparaged. While it is true that the record of economic expertise is wanting, ignorance is hardly an adequate substitute. Since then, inconvenient orthodoxies have been dismissed by the Conservative Party. An array of institutions have been disdained. The Civil Service has been scorned, and the Treasury derided. Leading public servants have been whimsically dismissed. Parliament was summarily and unlawfully prorogued, and suspicion has been cast on various aspects of the judicial system.

At the same time, the BBC has been under attack, and the competence of the Bank of England questioned. Dissenting opinion in the governing party has been audaciously purged, with the threat of a repeat performance having been trailed at least one more time. Diplomacy has also suffered. An international agreement has been set aside under cover of the most spurious pretexts. Under Boris Johnson, the government was prepared to deny accepted facts. Since his departure, Liz Truss has felt at liberty to select her own preferred truths.

It is a venerable myth in public discourse that Conservatism aims to conserve. But the current government is exploding that myth with unprecedented alacrity. In this it is a fitting successor to its immediate forebear. It handles itself with the same unapologetic swagger. It is similarly determined to advance its doctrines without regard to consequences. Today’s Conservative Party is the child of a crisis which it helped to foment. There is little sign that it has any desire to return to a path of consensus. It is often the case with political upheavals that leaders corrupt their supporters. But in the current straits the government has run ahead of the public — and there is little evidence that it has any idea of how to change its course.

Along the way his identity parade (all guilty, m’lud) takes in hardened malefactors such as “false dichotomy”, “guilt by association” and “straw man”, in addition to more exotic wrong’uns like the “motte-and-bailey tactic” (a kind of medieval cousin to that old lag “moving the goalposts”) and — a new favourite of mine — the “Texas sharpshooter fallacy”. First you fire a bullet into the barn door. Then you paint a bull’s-eye neatly round the hole. Ta-da! Much investment “advice” comes right out of that Texan barn.

Almost any arena of opinion and argument offers the prospect of a full card at Pinker Bingo. Political knockabout of the sort you hear weekly either in Westminster or on Question Time gives you the chance to shout “House!” within minutes. Even public debate that should bow readily to evidence-based reasoning, such as the international response to climate change, will throw up fogs of rhetorical pollution. Look at the preliminary positions, from both drastic-action radicals and kick-the-can gradualists, staked out in advance of the imminent COP 26 conference in Glasgow. With the planet’s future at stake, advocacy groups still tend to smother the clear light of reason in a dense cloud of confirmation bias, special pleading, guilt-by-association — and so on. You could argue that the comforting litany of targets and initiatives intoned by governments and agencies also deepen the sleep of reason. 

Trust in technocratic fixes may also function as a kind of mind-numbing cult. A century ago, the pioneering sociologist Max Weber — whom Pinker cites much less than he should — saw that the “iron cage” of bureaucratic rationality that defined modern life would become an official religion, prone to heretical pushbacks in the form of mystic, charismatic or ecstatic movements. The stand-off between top-down climate-change bureaucracy and the gestural militancy of the radicals proves him correct.

As in eco-politics, so in media, education, culture and even (arguably) the social superstructures of science itself. Within modern institutions, and modern selves, the sphere of rationality Pinker toils to expand cohabits with what he calls the “mythology mindset”, immune to reason’s charms and claims. Behind the Pinker project lies a teleology of his own, the a priori conviction he permits himself. That is the belief in long-term human progress — measured in indices such as declining violence, improving health and longevity, expanding empathy and solidarity — set out in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and reinforced by Enlightenment Now (2018). 

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Critics dismiss this principle of incremental betterment as groundless optimism. He treats it as simple historical factuality. “Progressives don’t like progress,” he has quipped about his radical detractors. “Our picture of the future,” he insists in Rationality, “need not be a bot tweeting fake news forever. The arc of knowledge is a long one, and it bends towards rationality.” 

Pinker’s steadily advancing reason is no alien, Mr Spock-like logic machine or unfeeling calculus of personal advantage. He often cites David Hume, who claimed in his Treatise on Human Nature that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”. Take “slave” here to mean something like “operating system” and you approach the Pinker ambition to subject our goals and drives — some selfish, many others not — to a more reflective scrutiny of the mental processes that underlie our choices.

Pinker’s wide appeal rests partly on the self-help, how-to character of his arguments. Wherever your will and desire (those driving passions) make you want to travel, rationality’s toolkit will help you reach your destination. Thus rational-choice theory, which he expounds in the new book with typical brio and lucidity, may serve idealistic as much as self-interested ends even though it sounds “about as lovable as Ebenezer Scrooge”. It powers, for instance, the results-oriented philanthropy of the “effective altruism” movement ­— to the dismay of puritans who expect guilt and lamentation, sackcloth-and-ashes, from would-be social reformers . 

Pinker, though, also wants to uphold truth and morality according to his own liberal-secular lights. So he inflects his value-neutral account of the pitfalls on the road to reason with warnings against the dangers of populist irrationality in power. Enjoyably, he does point out the logical flaw in saying that “we’re living in a post-truth era” (if it’s true, it’s false, like that ancient Cretan liar). Still, the Trump years and their perceived assaults on reason have shaped this new work and — together with glancing allusions to the pandemic — given it a topical edge. He deplores the “myside bias” and skewed “motivated reasoning” of a polarised, them-against-us culture. And he rightly dislikes most forms of binary reasoning. 

In the end, however, Pinker himself reverts to a simple dualism between the “reality mindset” he endorses and the “mythology mindset” that underpins supernatural faith, elects frauds who tell 30,000 lies to the US presidency and — most recently — has killed thousands of conspiracy-prone anti-vaxxers. Near the end of Rationality, he reinvents the oldest wheel on the cart of sociology and anthropology when he states: “The function of these [mythological] beliefs is to construct a social reality that binds the tribe or sect and gives it a moral purpose.” Of course, but what then? How should we try to connect myth and reality? 

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The pandemic has shown us that, even in the best-informed societies, the spread of evidence-free “mythological” beliefs and the willingness of millions to act on them can cost lives on a battlefield scale. The task of building bridges between the magical thinker and the reasoning creature — both of whom coexist in every human mind — feels more urgent than ever. Can Pinker’s mental toolkit span the gap?  

Pinker has little sense of dialectic. His clean-cut antithesis between “reality” and “mythology” in human thinking belongs in the lab, or the lecture-room, rather than in the messier interpersonal spaces where we live most of the time. Even Nietzsche — whom, again, he could have profitably consulted more than he does — saw the eternal wrangle between the reason, order and control of Apollo and the frenzy, fury and bliss of Dionysus as a perpetual to-and fro rather than a winner-takes-all struggle. With Pinker, the cause of reason tends to look like a zero-sum game: the light advances and the darkness diminishes, or vice versa.

Pinker is above all a teacher — a professor of psychology at Harvard since 2003. And teachers — unless, perhaps, they teach literature, philosophy or even quantum physics – need truth to vanquish falsity. His career-defining mission to advocate and communicate the tools of reason draws its strength from a pedagogic model rooted in his home-ground disciplines of experimental psychology and psycholinguistics. He may have written an entire book to disprove the tabula rasa picture of the human mind — The Blank Slate in 2002 — but he does believe that sustained effort can help rewrite our pre-existing scripts.

Like any caring teacher, Pinker sometimes has to make us suffer — but it’s all for our own good. “Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence,” he warns, “is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.”  

It’s not all pain in the Pinker classroom, though. Much of the fun of Rationality comes in the counter-intuitive exercises that our keep-fit instructor sets his cerebrally flabby pupils. If these don’t make your brain (pleasurably) ache as dormant muscles flex into action, then they should. Few readers will forget in a hurry his probability work-outs, especially this one: “Suppose that the prevalence of breast cancer in the population of women is 1%.” A breast-cancer diagnostic test has a true-positive rate of 90% and a false-positive rate of 9%. A woman takes it and tests positive. What are the percentage chances she has the disease? Between 80 and 90%, a sample of doctors estimated. The correct answer is around 9%.

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“Bayesian reasoning” — a key component of Pinker’s procedure in Rationality — will direct our attention to the “base rate” of any phenomenon (that 1% prevalence) and avoid distraction by the surface noise of the foreground figures. Base-rate neglect, as he demonstrates, plagues much policy-making, as does the cognate vice of the “availability heuristic”. Rare plane crashes sway behaviour more than frequent car crashes, a blue-moon terror outrage outranks the long-haul attrition of air pollution, and so on. Our judgments, individual and collective, repeatedly succumb to “psychological amplifiers such as recency, vividness, or emotional poignancy”. Hard, or lurid, cases make bad laws — and bad decisions. 

And so on, as the skittles of error fall to reason’s conquering ball. Pinker disentangles our confusions of correlation and causation. He guides us through the moves of formal logic that let us unpick the assertions of advertisers and pundits (some of them deeply intuitive, as when we sceptically say “that’s a big if…”). He outlines game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma that asks us to choose between potential gains, or losses, with no knowledge of the other players’ actions.

As a primer for cognitive hygiene, and a booster pack for your powers of critical reflection, Rationality does what it says on the box — and lots more. Yet in Pinker’s pay-off chapter, cheekily titled “What’s wrong with people?”, his grasp falters. His recommendations for improving rationality in public affairs sound either self-evident or anodyne: those rule-governed contracts; scientific peer review; media fact-checking; “statistical and critical thinking” in education; “evidence-based evaluation” in health and social policy. Lamely, he suggests that “It would be nice to see people earn brownie points for acknowledging uncertainty in their beliefs”, or “questioning the dogmas of their political sect”. And who would bestow those coveted points on repentant zealots? Party activists rewarded for loyalty? Social-media corporations that profit from traffic-driving division? Although he throws harsh words against the blowhard simplifications of media commentators, Pinker’s own nostrums often hover around the op-ed level. The “mythology mindset” that flourishes both in party politics and social activism would find little advantage in his forms of deliberative doubt. Just now, polarisation pays.

A teacher to the last, Pinker knows, supremely well, how to lead willing students towards a greater light. What’s missing is a robust model of the “impartial” agencies – communal and political – that might enable people to learn, cherish and deploy the tools of rationality as citizens, not just as pupils or professionals. Correctly, Pinker regrets “the decline of class-crossing civil-society organisations”, like churches and clubs, where people meet for a shared, connective purpose – rather than gather virtually in “sociocultural tribes” made up of uniform but atomised opinion-consumers. But he can’t say much about how super-charged rationality alone would heal the rifts between “myside” and your side.

Curiously, just across the Harvard campus, a solution of sorts might await. The great Bengali-born philosopher-economist Amartya Sen fails to rate a single mention in Rationality. Yet Sen – a Harvard professor since 2004 – began his career as an analyst of “social choice theory”. He has devoted more than half a century of original work to the role of public reasoning in entrenching and enhancing democratic norms.

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Sen grew up in Rabindranath Tagore’s utopian community at Santiniketan: the Bengali polymath’s visionary scheme to ground practical reasoning in peaceful and productive daily life. From famine prevention to women’s empowerment and the codification of the UN’s human development index (which he co-created), Sen has argued that the collective pursuit of rationality can serve common goods and deepen the bonds of belonging and community. 

Sen, an admirer of the Adam Smith, believes that strong institutions of collective reasoning can mitigate self-seeking and that “It is the power of reason that allows us to consider our obligations and ideals as well as our interests and advantages” (Development as Freedom). From village councils in India to the building (however incomplete) of accountable global agencies, he has done a lifetime’s best to make democratic rationality work in the public square. Think of it as a project to make Pinker’s “reality mindset” yield the same sort of collective pleasures and rewards as his “mythology mindset”. 

Pinker notes that, on a private level, people to tend to make pretty good sense, and good choices, about their lives. Sen asks how co-operative politics may do that too. For now, Pinker’s Rationality can tell us with forensic verve and agility how to catch out those faith-driven diehards as they blunder through their faulty premises, false syllogisms, illusory correlations and so on. So far, he can’t show convincingly how — or why — they should play a better game.  

Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters by Steven Pinker (Allen Lane, £25)

It was not really until David Hume, writing during the Scottish Enlightenment, that an attempt was made to reconcile Scepticism with the real world. Frustrated at the “insipid raillery” of those who claimed mankind could know nothing, he dismissed their obscure thought experiments as “mere Philosophical Amusement”, and instead chose to reclaim Scepticism as a critical mindset. To put it simply, for Hume it was important to be “a philosopher; but, amidst all of your philosophy, be still a man”.

At the end of last year, Edinburgh University renamed its David Hume Tower because the philosopher — at least according to those who demanded the change — “wrote racist epithets”. Whether or not that is true is an argument for another day. But this erasure of Hume – the Enlightenment philosopher who reclaimed the meaning of scepticism more than 200 years ago – is symbolic of something far more significant. For it seems to me that the term “sceptic,” and the attitude it represents, is once again in urgent need of rehabilitation.

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On paper, that shouldn’t be too difficult. As Hume put in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, to be sceptical is “to begin with clear and self-evident principles, to advance by timorous and sure steps, to review frequently our conclusions, and examine accurately all their consequences”. At the time, this was radical. It encompassed everything progressive about the Enlightenment and the emergence of the scientific method. But it also seems eminently sensible. Who wouldn’t want to be a sceptic today?

Apparently, quite a lot of people. Scepticism is suddenly perilously out of fashion. More than that, it is now deemed dangerous. The reason? The rise of the “lockdown sceptics”, who in recent weeks have taken a battering for having made claims about the virus that turned out not to be true.

In a sense, this is what should happen in the scientific method — commentators and experts being held to account for predictions they make. But the ferocity of the attacks has left us at a place where all questioning groups are subjected to the same moral condemnation. Whether they are pundits peddling conspiracies, credentialed scientists recommending alternative approaches, or intellectuals worried about the political implications — “Lockdown sceptics” is used interchangeably for them all. Any dissent will mark you out as part of the global “anti-science” movement. So sceptic has become a dirty word.

In our own LockdownTV interview series, which kicked off early in the pandemic, we put the scientific method into action. We featured eminent scientists from all sides of the debate sharing their views: advocates for a stronger response such as Profs Neil Ferguson, Nathalie Dean, Devi Sridhar and Fredrik Elgh put forward their arguments alongside advocates of a more liberal approach such as Johan Giesecke, Anders Tegnell and the Great Barrington scientists. As you might expect, some statements aged better than others; some voices became more credible and others fell away, but it was all conducted in a spirit of civility and respectful enquiry.

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When Nobel prize-winner Michael Levitt’s prediction that the American epidemic would end in August failed to materialise, we had him back on the show to account for himself. Both Giesecke and Tegnell have also pledged to return to discuss their learnings later this year.

But the treatment of some of these scientists is troubling. Oxford Professor Sunetra Gupta is now bracketed with out-and-out cranks by MPs and columnists in national newspapers. I know her to be a kind, intelligent and accomplished person who cares deeply about saving lives. Perhaps she shouldn’t have speculated so specifically about the Infection Fatality Rate in her UnHerd interview so early in the pandemic; perhaps she should have caveated her theory that the epidemic was “on the way out” with the likelihood that it could come back again in the winter.

But she was a scientist giving her interpretation of the data at the time, not a trained politician stiffly parsing every word. The attacks on her fellow signatories of the “Great Barrington Declaration” by academic colleagues at Harvard and Stanford, as well as the “blood on their hands” rhetoric they regularly receive in the British press, sets a disturbing precedent for the next scientific controversy. Who would be a dissenting scientist now?

Creative thinking should be encouraged, not penalised. If new variants or developments extend this lockdown period beyond the spring, a more differentiated approach closer to the one the GBD posited — offering better protection to the vulnerable and letting others get on with their lives — may yet become relevant. At the briefing Boris Johnson received from Gupta, Carl Heneghan and Anders Tegnell, he rejected their proposals and continued with a lockdown strategy regardless — fair enough. But the Prime Minister should surely be praised rather than condemned for wanting to test and retest his assumptions?

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At the level of government policy, the effect of the pandemic on attitudes should also give us pause. In the relentless comparison of different countries’ outcomes, the recipe for success on Covid-19 policy appears to be something like: presume new risks are worst-case scenarios and act immediately, and dramatically, rather than waiting for more evidence. Countries which acted in the opposite way to David Hume’s “timorous and sure steps” and swiftly imposed border controls and restrictions have generally had the best Covid-19 outcomes; “dithering” Western nations are unfavourably compared to their more commanding Asian counterparts. But while this may have been effective in the context of the pandemic, as a general lesson for government it would represent a terrifying new direction.

Many people might feel that we are in a wartime situation with this virus, and that something closer to martial law is therefore appropriate for this exceptional period. But as human rights lawyer Adam Wagner made clear in yesterday’s UnHerd interview, if history is any guide, emergency measures have a way of becoming permanent — most of the powers taken by the government during 9/11 are still there. We have now been governed in a “Napoleonic” style for almost a year, with new updates coming by ministerial decree on average every four and a half days and with very little oversight. Can anyone confidently say that none of that attitude will stick?

When it comes to the inevitable next virus or pathogen to be identified somewhere around the world, the playbook has surely now been written. As Wagner told me, “the danger is that if Covid never leaves us, or it mutates or a different virus arrives with a similar dynamic we’ll be in a semi-permanent state of “this is what we do” — when this happens, we have lockdowns, we have emergency laws, we take away parliamentary niceties like scrutiny, debates, votes, that sort of thing… And I think that is a danger that doesn’t come out of the fringes of the lockdown sceptic movement. That’s the real deal as a worry.”

At times of crisis, scepticism can be unnerving and the temptation to try to silence dissenting voices is understandable. But which is the bigger danger? That people are allowed to question the orthodoxy and potentially get things wrong but are held accountable in an open debate? Or that sceptical voices are censored for  “misinformation”, and no one dares dissent? Everyone loses when doubt becomes a vice once more.

But with the decision of Edinburgh University to rename the Hume Tower, the ever widening gyre of cancel culture has once again extended its search for moral deplorables. Like some gutter journalist going through our bins to seek out evidence of our hidden and secret short-fallings, this new style of moral persecution seeks out the minor footnote and throw away comment to bring down those who have been at the bedrock of Western culture. Make no mistake, more will follow as this new industry of blame keeps on sniffing around after other people’s sins. Darwin will be next, I suspect. No one will be exempt from this merry-go-round of gleeful condemnation.

It seems impossible to imagine that anyone was seriously troubled by David Hume’s unreconstructed views about the superiority of white people. His views were those shared by most of his society. Blaming him for them is to blame him for reflecting back something of the time and place into which he was born. And, yes, thank God we don’t think like this anymore. But it is not Hume that is really on trial here, it is England in the 18th century. Almost any number of people could be had up on the same charge — but show trials need their high profile figures.

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Of course, this is not the first time Hume has been cancelled. In his own day, his gentle scepticism about religion was seen by the academic authorities as reason enough to thwart his university career. These days, this is one of the reasons that he is taught and valued. His famous expression of the problem of evil has become the go-to statement of its logic: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then from whence comes evil?”

But what Hume did not consider was how this question would be answered when God was no longer around to take the blame. And the answer, of course, is that, without some heavenly master-planner to carry the can, the accusatory finger would now point directly towards human beings themselves. From whence comes evil, Hume asks? From you, comes the reply.

Yet however much we think of ourselves as having escaped from the sort of ancient superstitions that Hume did so much to dismantle, the kind of moral thinking by which he now stands accused carries more than a whiff of the religious world-view. For what the Black Lives Matter movement looks to be attempting is some sort of binary separation of the sheep from the goats, a division of the world into those who a racist and those who are not. Does anyone ever get accused of being a little bit racist? No, of course not. A poorly judged quip, or even a simple preference for familiar food or styles of dress, can be used as reason enough to judge that someone is a racist — which immediately places them in a category alongside people who have perpetrated some of the most heinous moral crimes in all of human history.

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The trouble with dualism is that leads its proponents to abandon any sense of proportion about moral failure. Because if people are to be fundamentally divided into two groups, the virtuous and the damned, then all that is needed to situate a person amongst the damned is the faintest scrap of evidence. Even a throw away comment can be decisive evidence for a person’s position in the great moral order of things. With this modern-day Manichaeism, there is no ‘a little bit damned’, just as there is no ‘a little bit racist’.

A person who knew quite a lot about human evil was the Russian dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His famous passage in The Gulag Archipelago encapsulates perfectly why all this moral dualism is such a mistake.

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. … And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”

And so, even those who are overwhelmingly virtuous contain within themselves pockets of moral failure. No one wants to use the phrase “a little bit racist” because it feels like it downplays what is so clearly a serious moral fault. But if Solzhenitsyn is right, then it cannot come as any surprise that the human capacity for racism lurks within us all to some greater or lesser degree. The division between good and evil runs “through all human hearts”. And so those who make it their business to go around seeking out other people’s sins will probably always find some evidence of it, in your life and in mine.

That is why it is not misguided to be afraid of the grand inquisitors of this new moral movement. They have abandoned any sense of proportion about our moral faults. And once they have discovered what they are they wave them about for others to jeer at – and so we all jeer the louder because we are terrified to be counted amongst their number. The more we condemn, the more we hope our own failings will go undetected.

David Hume wasn’t perfect. He said a number of racist things for which he is inevitably going to be condemned. But what has been lost in the present maelstrom of accusation is a sense of the relative weight that should be ascribed to these scattered comments. Hume was a good natured, convivial and inquiring mind. He was one of the greatest thinkers of the enlightenment. That is why the building was named after him. It wasn’t anything to do with celebrating his views of race. And the feeble university authorities clearly understood that. They just wanted to make a show of their virtue. Which is why they are the ones to have come out of this whole thing with their reputations damaged.

“Testing is a double-edged sword,” he began, “we’ve done more testing than anybody else. Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down please! They test and they test… we’ve got another one over here! The young man’s ten years old, he’s got the sniffles, he’ll recover in about 15 minutes. It’s a case!”

Here's Trump at his Tulsa Rally downplaying the coronavirus as the "sniffles," and admitting: "I told my people, slow the testing down!"pic.twitter.com/VOy6jsFAYI

— Bill Maxwell (@Bill_Maxwell_) June 21, 2020

It drew laughs from the audience, but condemnation from commentators, conservative and Democrat alike. Can you imagine saying something so stupid? Having already played down the need to wear a mask at his non-socially-distanced rally, at a time when multiple states are seeing alarming surges in Covid-19 case numbers, he appears both to diminish the importance of testing (which we know correlates with fewer deaths) and equate the disease with a case of “the sniffles”. Cynical. Reckless. Anti-science.

This apparent embrace of full-on Covid denialism doesn’t even seem to make sense as a political strategy. The percentage of American voters who describe themselves as “not worried at all” by coronavirus, the hard-cores, is stable at around 13% — and only 24% of Trump voters. That’s around 26 million adults: enough to half-fill a lot of stadiums over the campaign but nowhere near enough to win a general election. Add in the fact that Republican states are only now starting to get hit hard by the virus, and it seems distinctly like, having already shattered any remaining reputation he had for competence, Covid-19 will finally consign Donald Trump to electoral oblivion.

Except… what if it doesn’t? Is there a way that Covid-19 could become a net positive for Donald Trump — one that could even help carry him to re-election in November?

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By Justin Webb

To find out, let’s go back four years ago to Philadelphia, when Hillary Clinton formally accepted the Democratic nomination. One line of her speech, part of a central credo section setting out what she believed, was received with a particularly rapturous cheer, both in the hall and online, for days afterwards: “I believe in science,” she declared, drawing a key distinction with her opponent, who on climate and much else, apparently didn’t.

Those four words encapsulate what many Democrats passionately believe is their mission in 2020, even more so than in 2016: to keep alive the flame of Enlightenment rationality and science against the threat of fake news and a dangerous post-truth President. It is a core part of what they will be campaigning for in this election.

In 2016, of course, this framing back-fired. The internal epistemology of the Clinton campaign, with all its data and ‘evidence-led’ policy plans, was almost unfalsifiable: to reject it was to be provably either bad or stupid. But, as the eventual defeat made painfully evident, that account of truth, and the world-order that went along with it, fell short on issues like culture and identity and meaning that are just as real to many voters as economics or science. In his intuitive, brazen way, Trump targeted this weakness and gleefully promised to bring the whole tilting edifice crashing down.

In the four years since that crash, the Democrats’ claim to be the sole keepers of the flame of Enlightenment rationality has got weaker, not stronger. The intersectional identity politics that animates their activist wing — gender pronouns, cancel culture, statue-toppling — seems even less rational than in 2016. The foot-washing and genuflection accompanying the recent BLM protests (not to mention the free pass given to protestors ignoring social distancing) has only added to the atmosphere of religious fervour surrounding the progressive movement.

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By John Gray

If anything, the language of Enlightenment rationality is now more commonly invoked by those fighting on the other side of the culture wars — in 2018 Jordan Peterson and his ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ group famously claimed it as a defence against progressive tendencies towards humbug and censorship. Last week, Peterson’s friend and fellow IDW thinker the evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad made the argument in an interview with me that in a choice between Trump and Biden, he considers Trump to be the rational choice, on the grounds of resisting the fundamentalism of social justice warriors with something like low common sense. Whether or not you like his argument, the fact that he has arrived at that point is notable.

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How Covid-19 could get Trump re-elected

By Gad Saad

It might seem overgenerous to associate Donald Trump with any coherent philosophy. Elements of Paranoid Narcissism and Nietzschean will-to-power have been detected. But alongside these we should include Scepticism: a tendency to question things that orthodoxy holds to be unquestionably true. This is itself a key strand of Enlightenment thought, and represents an allegiance to doubt that progressive idealists are distinctly less interested in, with their righteous certainties and plans to remake the world from first principles. Of course you can have too much Scepticism – some climate-sceptics, Euro-sceptics, Covid-sceptics are no longer rationally scrutinising and are simply following a different faith — but you can also have too little, and the progressive side of recent culture wars is vulnerable to that charge. Trump’s Scepticism has been politically effective.

So we entered this weird election cycle with both sides, if not necessarily the candidates themselves, already making different claims to be the defenders of common sense, keepers of the flame of Enlightenment rationality in a world gone mad.

Against this background, Covid-19 erupted. The different attitudes quickly started aligning with the political parties: Democratic governors were much more activist in response, issuing blanket stay at home orders (although it was primarily Democratic states that were initially hit), while Republican governors took their lead from a sceptical and chaotic President and have generally tried to minimise restrictions.

It is not yet clear exactly where, between these two poles, wisdom lies. While it is right to accuse the President and some Republicans of nonchalance and inconsistency, the progressives have been guilty of the same didacticism and lack of humility that put voters off last time. The official IHME models and forecasts, produced with all the spurious precision and data-richness that graduate progressives find so enthralling, have been woefully wide of the mark; arguments in favour of a more moderate policy response have been dismissed as irresponsible anti-science (with censorship duly enforced by the tech platforms); and states have rushed to close schools and other parts of society before evidence has proved them to be vectors of the disease (even the Norwegian prime minister now says she regrets closing schools). On these points and many more, while claiming the language of science, progressives have shown a shortage of, even hostility to, scientific scepticism.

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How Covid-19 could get Trump re-elected

By Camilla Stoltenberg

So although Trump’s speech in Tulsa was typically free-wheeling and borderline incoherent, the target of his lampooning was well chosen. He is right that the emphasis on case numbers is misleading, as they are entirely contingent on testing (Oxford’s Prof Sunetra Gupta made the same complaint to us) so while many states have seen surges in case numbers, we have not generally seen surges in numbers of deaths (and the overall daily deaths continue to fall nationwide). He’s also right that for children Covid-19 is a very minor disease and often symptomless — and that the relative safety of anyone under retirement age has been bizarrely downplayed by the liberal media which sees its responsibility as only reinforcing the risks. This is fertile territory for Trump, even more so for its capability to outrage everybody.

If (and, yes, it’s a big if) the apparent second surges of Covid-19 turn out to be not too bad and overall deaths continue to decline over the summer, and if there is no big second spike in October, then Donald Trump’s scepticism would likely become more acceptable — and popular — as the months go by. Right now, only 13% of Americans are ‘not worried at all’ by the virus. But, equally, only 21% are ‘very worried’: that’s a lot of people in between, and they would surely become more relaxed if the pandemic dwindles.

An election campaign culminating in September and October in which Democrat voices are endlessly finger-wagging and calling for further restrictions, six months after the peak and with deaths right down, while Trump is promising freedom and a return to the ‘old normal’, sounds like a fight he is aching to have. Not even Make America Great Again – just Make America Normal Again.

As it stands, Trump sounds increasingly unhinged, is facing a tanking economy and couldn’t look less like a president who is about to be re-elected. But it’s worth bearing in mind that if the pandemic goes his way, Covid-19 could just about turn from being the thing that killed off his presidency into a re-animating mission that goes to the heart of Democrat epistemological overreach and puts him squarely back in the game.

It was the defining event for a generation of Enlightenment-inspired philosophers who began to put into words questions that had been circulating as far back as the ancient Greeks about the relationship between God’s benevolence and the senseless suffering that exists in the world. They called it “the problem of evil”.

In 1779, David Hume gave it its classic formulation:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is be both able and willing? Then from whence comes evil?”

For a certain sort of atheist of the Enlightenment school, this argument is the slam-dunk against God’s existence. And, inevitably, the question has returned, as it always does at moments of crisis and fear. How can religious minded people go on asserting God’s existence at a time when thousands of people around the world are dying from this hideous virus? Where is God in all this horror?

Indeed, in the battle between God and the virus, the virus seems to be winning. It has shut down the churches, and shifted the centre of spiritual gravity to the hospital. It is the NHS, not God, that heals. This is our religion now. The old religion of God has become an archaic irrelevance.

“God is dead”, Nietzsche famously proclaimed. Though he was theologically savvy enough to know that this phrase would play tricks with people. And that many wouldn’t understand the in-joke. As a child of a long line of Lutheran pastors, Nietzsche would probably have sung the Lutheran hymn “O sorrow, O suffering” (Johannes Rist, 1641) many times as a child. “O great distress! God himself lies dead. On the cross he died and by doing so has won for us the realm of heaven.”

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By Douglas Murray

God’s death is not something that Christians cannot imagine. Indeed, it is at the core of their proclamation. Atheists who wave this banner, beware. For the phrase “God is dead” plays squarely into the hands of the Christian evangelist. It recalls an event that is at the very heart of their narrative.

So how would I answer David Hume? I would say there is no such thing as an omnipotent God. Omnipotence is not a word in the Bible. And the idea of omnipotence comes from a completely different tradition of intellectual thought from that of the Hebrew scriptures. The idea of God as a human being hanging helpless on a Roman instrument of torture is not an image of omnipotence. In this sense, Hume’s challenge is not one that has ever detained me very much.

But I also have a far deeper problem with the way in which this question is posed. For a while, I taught philosophy at Oxford University. I also have a PhD in the subject. But in the end I gave up philosophy as an unsatisfactory discipline; not least because it seemed to me to be fundamentally unserious about many of the sorts of things it argues about, and particularly when it comes to suffering.

As a priest, dealing with death and loss all the time, no one has ever asked me the Hume type question, and certainly not in his measured tones. Never. Yes, many have been fantastically angry, spitting out the question “why?” as an accusation against anyone and everything. Many have been broken by their experience of pain and loss, alone in a dark room, unable to make themselves food or get out of bed. Perhaps it is unfair of me to call philosophy an unserious discipline when it comes to human suffering, but it has never helped me respond to people in such a state as this.

But the Bible has. When Job spits verbal fire at God for the death of his family, he manifests a sort of rage that feels far more realistic than the calm and studied logic of the dispassionate Enlightenment atheist. Job’s invective against God is so fierce that one can imagine Job thinking that non-existence would be too good for Him. Indeed, for the psychotherapist Carl Jung, the suffering of Job cries out for an answer, and pushes the divine into a kind of psychological development that ends up with the death of Jesus on the cross as a supreme act of identification of God with human suffering. According to Jung, the cross is — as the title of his book makes plain — “The Answer to Job”.

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By Giles Fraser

At the very least, then, it is not that the so-called “problem of evil” is something Christianity runs away from. Indeed, it is the very point of Christianity to find a way of responding to human suffering in such way that has the sort of existential gravitas required by the challenge. That God — even understood symbolically as the sum total of human meaning — is also consumed by horrendous suffering and death, is a way to express of monumentality of what is at stake here. It’s not a “problem”. It’s far more than a mere “problem”.

That’s why the church feels like the right place for many of us to go and cry. The church is not an argument. It’s not a place for Socratic disputation. It’s a place where we can be broken, presided over by a man hanging broken on a wooden cross. And it formats our brokenness with a story that speaks of love as being ultimately greater that death, and as a triumph over even the most purposeless of human pain.

This is why human suffering does the exact opposite of what the Enlightenment atheist imagines it should do: it fills our churches, it doesn’t empty them. And not because it offers some cheap consolation that all will be ok. But for the opposite reason that it takes seriously the full weight and horror of human suffering. Indeed, church remains one of the few spaces in our culture in which we are allowed to acknowledge the existence of futile suffering without someone feeling so uncomfortable about it that they need to reassure us all that everything is going to be OK.

I have sat in church on my own quite a bit these last few weeks. I have a large wooden cross set up in the aisle. I am sitting with a dying man, keeping him company. And this feels like the proper place for me to express some sort of solidarity with those on ventilators, alone, struggling for breath; those receiving the news of the death of a mother, father, child; those being buried by men in protective clothing, no mourners there to say goodbye. I call it prayer. Atheists call it foolishness. And perhaps it is. But foolishness feels like the least of my worries these days.