Carter’s pollster Pat Caddell had been pressing the book on the White House for months. So its author came to dinner at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, seated beside First Lady Rosalynn Carter, in company that included the sociologist Daniel Bell, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the broadcaster Bill Moyers, and other diagnosticians of the American soul. Caddell briefed the room on the nation’s darkening mood. By July, Carter would deliver his “Crisis of Confidence” address from Camp David, remembered ever after as the “Malaise” speech. Its most quotable lines echoed Lasch.

The address worked, and Carter’s approval briefly jumped before collapsing along with his Cabinet. Carter had kept Lasch’s diagnosis of a self-absorbed consumer culture and discarded everything that gave Lasch’s diagnosis its power: above all, his focus on corporate concentration and the degradation of work. The analysis, in short, of who holds power and what they do with it.

Lasch protested afterward, in a letter to Caddell, that his target had been the managerial and professional elite, not the ordinary Americans Carter’s speech scolded. It did not matter. The first politician to govern with Lasch in hand had used the book the way a preacher uses a text, for the sermon it could yield rather than the argument it made. Carter was a Democrat. Ronald Reagan, a Republican, mocked the sermon all the way to the White House, and the party of the New Deal has flinched from the word “malaise” ever since.

Forty-seven years later, the borrowing from Lasch continues — only, from the other direction, the Right, and it has become a genre. The conservative writer William Voegeli’s essay in a recent issue of the Claremont Review of Books, “The Political Contradictions of Trumpism,” is an important entry: a patient reading of Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites, published posthumously in 1995, as a book important for understanding Trumpism as an ideological movement, its demonology and its idiom. (Sure enough, a copy of Revolt reportedly once sat on the desk of JD Vance’s speechwriter.) Voegeli, though, is honest enough to concede what he calls the “hard parts,” meaning Lasch’s complete analysis of class power and political economy, which the Trumpians generally decline to inherit.

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But these developments raise a question, largely unaddressed by those, on the Right and the Left, who claim ownership of Lasch’s legacy: how does the work of a man formed on the Marxist Left, a historian who spent the 1960s explaining why American socialism died, become devotional reading for the party of the so-called New Right? The answer, in good part, has to do with Lasch’s own refusal to address modern political economy as it actually exists, and the Jeffersonian romanticism he substituted for proper class analysis.

Lasch trained at Columbia under the liberal historian William Leuchtenburg and made his name in 1965 with The New Radicalism in America, which treated intellectuals not as free-floating minds, but as a social type with interests of its own. By the time he published The Agony of the American Left, in 1969, Lasch was working the same seam as the revisionist historians of his generation: the argument, built by C. Wright Mills and elaborated by Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein, that 20th-century liberalism was not capitalism’s adversary, but its administrative wing, and that the professionals who staffed the wing constituted a power formation in their own right.

Lasch’s lifelong villain — the credentialed stratum he would later call the “thinking classes” — descends in a direct line from that critique. This matters, because the genealogy has been quietly repossessed. The anti-elite bludgeon that the Right now brandishes at every university and newsroom was Leftist property first, forged to explain why corporate liberalism absorbed every Left challenge thrown at it.

The Left, in short, held the patent on the villain that now obsessed the Right. In 1977, the year Lasch published his book on the family, Haven in a Heartless World, Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined the term “professional-managerial class” in Radical America, a New Left journal, to explain their own movement’s uncomfortable social base. The phrase the online Right now wields as a slur was minted by socialists as an instrument of self-examination, a fact Barbara Ehrenreich was still patiently explaining four decades later.

The two analyses were siblings with different tempers. The Ehrenreich critique kept the professional class inside a theory of capitalism, a stratum living off the surplus that workers produced. For Lasch, however, the critique of the liberal professionals increasingly took on a moral cast: in his telling, they were a stratum living off the deference that ordinary people no longer owed.

What happened next is that the academic and professional Left became, demographically, the very class that the professional-managerial concept described. And the professionals, it turned out, didn’t like to question their own class origins and function in the system. They had sinecures to protect. Lasch didn’t stop his probing, however. He carried the analysis forward, almost alone through the 1980s, which is one reason he sounded increasingly like a man without a party. He was one.

Meanwhile, the Left began writing his obituaries early. Haven, for example, argued that the helping professions had colonized the family. And that the radical anti-family ideas of the Left really supplied after-the-fact alibis for the market’s corrosion of the traditional family. Likewise, in Narcissism, Lasch diagnosed the supposedly emancipated American personality as a product of consumer capitalism. He was, in other words, poking at his own side.

The fights that followed were almost entirely intramural, and the fiercest were with feminists who heard in his defense of the besieged family a defense of its hierarchies and said so at length; in the Village Voice and the feminist journals, his name became shorthand for nostalgia. By the time his critical history of progressivism, The True and Only Heaven, appeared, in 1991, Left critics treated him as a moralist in exile from his own side, while conservative ones circled his body of work with wary interest. That book assembled his counter-tradition, the social forces he would celebrate: the producers, the farmer and the artisan, the small proprietor, the petty-bourgeois lineage whose ethic of “competence” and limits he upheld against the technocratic religion of progress.

The Revolt of the Elites, completed with his daughter Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, the Syracuse University historian, as leukemia killed him at 61, arrived a year after his death with the inversion of Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses that everyone now quotes. Harper’s ran the title essay months before publication, so the professional classes got to read their indictment in one of their own house organs.

The Right began claiming him before the estate was settled. In his last years, Lasch himself published in First Things, telling conservatives in a 1990 essay headlined “Conservatism Against Itself” that the market they worshiped devours the traditions they mourn; the essay reads today like a warning label the New Right has declined to heed. Then, conservative thinkers set about completing the adoption process, to make Lasch one of their own. Roger Kimball gave Revolt a long, respectful accounting in The New Criterion in 1995, disagreements included. Patrick Deneen wrote an admiring essay in 2004.

Through the Bush years, while the academic Left remembered Lasch mainly for what progressives saw as his retreat, the paleoconservatives kept him in circulation: Jeremy Beer’s “The Radical Lasch” in The American Conservative in 2007; the Front Porch Republic circle; the Intercollegiate Studies Institute reading lists; and, in 2010, the standard biography, Eric Miller’s Hope in a Scattering Time, issued not by a university press or Big Five imprint, but by Eerdmans, an evangelical house. In short, the Right — or the faction of it that would become today’s New Right — had completed its ownership claim to Lasch a decade before Donald Trump’s fateful ride down the escalator.

The Trump era only underscored Lasch’s significance to the Right. Ross Douthat put Revolt on his reading list for the incoming era in December 2016. Two months later, Axios reported that Steve Bannon counted it among his favorite books, which drew a furious rebuttal in The Baffler from Chris Lehmann, a former graduate student of Lasch’s, who insisted that Trumpism would have appalled his teacher.

Josh Hawley’s keynote to the first National Conservatism conference in 2019 foregrounded Laschian themes: an American middle betrayed by a leadership class loyal to the globe. By the time Compact, co-founded by UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari, launched in 2022, the formula was recognizably Lasch’s: a strong social state, a conservative culture. Law & Liberty convened an anniversary forum in 2021. With a few honorable exceptions, these conservative adopters of the Lasch legacy dropped his anti-capitalist political economy.

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Why is the operation so easy? The problem is that Lasch’s populism has no workplace in it. For a writer whose great subject was the fate of ordinary people under corporate capitalism, the employment relation is almost entirely absent from his books. Read The Culture of Narcissism beside any book about workers of its decade, and the silence becomes glaring: the book anatomizes the manipulated consumer and the therapized client on every page. But the supervised employee barely appears. The workplace as a domain of social domination finds little place in the Laschian corpus.

His moral exemplars are owners in miniature, the freeholder and the master craftsman, members of a class that had, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist before he was born. Compare Lasch to another Left academic who studies the same issue, C. Wright Mills. The latter’s white-collar Americans were employees to the bone, people whose class position consisted precisely in having a boss. Lasch, by contrast, barely noticed the boss.

When wage earners do appear in The True and Only Heaven — a rare exception — they arrive as 19th-century labor republicans and syndicalists, men who wanted the trade to make them proprietors of their own craft; they matter to Lasch, that is, exactly insofar as they resemble owners. Lasch elided, however, the 20th-century employee: the person who clocks in at somebody else’s firm and will retire, or be discarded, from somebody else’s firm. Unions in their 20th-century form figure as one more bureaucracy, a managerial stratum administering workers, rather than as vehicles that allowed workers to pool their bargaining power and thus improve their wages and working conditions.

His defenders will answer that the omission was the argument; that in the Jeffersonian tradition Lasch championed, permanent wage labor is the disease and proprietorship the cure. It follows, the thinking runs, that organizing on the employment relation would only ratify the disease. Perhaps. But a serious politics cannot be based upon the idea that everyone will one day become an owner. The history of political economy in the 19th and 20th centuries, on the contrary, is a story of capital separating the Jeffersonian yeoman and artisan from his land and his tools.

To be sure, Lasch wasn’t wrong in his critique of unions as sclerotic and bureaucratic. But he took this true observation as a permission slip for neglecting the wage relation almost entirely. Which, as it happened, made him congenial to the elements of the Right which were happy to have his critique of the globalist professionals at a cultural level, but which remained averse to collective bargaining and the redistribution of power within the firm.

A class politics anchored in ownership and Jeffersonian virtue carries none of this. It asks only that you resent the credentialed, and that is an appetite the American Right has never lacked. The Right could adopt Lasch’s villain whole, the arrogant professional stratum, without having to consider what defending the villain’s victim would mean on a material plane: at the level of wages and labor law. Ultimately, nothing in The Revolt of the Elites is unassimilable by a party of capital.

Yet the Right’s near-full adoption of Lasch doesn’t do justice to the Left position he actually held, its shortcomings notwithstanding: a Left that could distrust the professional stratum without falling in love with the market; a Left that took the moral world of working people seriously as something other than false consciousness.

Conservatives, who’ve long bemoaned single parenthood, have scant reason to cheer this outcome. It’s not that people are waiting to have kids until after marriage. Rather, they’re increasingly opting out of committing to partnership and parenthood altogether. And as new research shows, progressives, especially, are less likely to find either marriage or parenthood worth pursuing. This, even as Americans on the Right of center remain committed to both.

Two centuries ago, Jane Austen could safely assume her readers would find it “a truth universally acknowledged” that a young man with means would be in pursuit of a match. Today, marriage is just one life path among many. And in a new poll commissioned by my think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and conducted by YouGov, we find a massive partisan divide on whether the traditional milestones of marriage and parenthood are even desirable. 

We asked never-married adults between the ages of 18 and 45 whether they “would like to get married someday.” Three-quarters of young people who supported President Trump in the 2024 election agreed; but only 60% of those who supported former Vice President Kamala Harris said the same. That share is not far from the 61% of 12th-grade girls who told the Pew Research Center that they are likely to choose to get married — a sign that marriage, once a near-universal norm, is now on an unmistakable downward trajectory. 

For parenthood, the partisan divide was even starker: Nearly 70% of young-adult Trump voters without children, including two-thirds of women, said they want to be a parent someday. Among young adults who voted for Harris, only 46% said the same. 

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There are underlying demographic factors at play here. For starters, Harris voters are more likely to be college-educated, urban, and secular compared to their peers. The politics of gender, particularly around the charged election of 2024, might also have made poll respondents highly attuned to the messages they were sending, and more reluctant to be seen as “endorsing” life scripts associated with the other side of the aisle. 

But that itself — the polarization of marriage around a partisan axis — is part of the problem. Marriage, as social scientists continue to point out, is the cornerstone of a healthy society. It’s more likely to produce happier, more grounded adults, and kids who do better on any number of social indicators than those raised in less stable environments. It’s also, increasingly, the most likely social arrangement to produce any kids at all. 

In 2007, America hit “peak baby,” with the most infants born that year than any other year in US history — about 69 births per 1,000 women; last year, the figure fell to 54. Yet decline isn’t the same across the board. The fertility rate among married women is down only about 7.5 percentage points from where it stood in 2007. This recent stability in married women’s fertility is in part a consequence of a post-Covid bump in remote work: With newfound flexibility to work from home or in hybrid arrangements, women, particularly those with a college degree, were able to better balance the demands of both the job and a newborn.

For unmarried women, however, birth rates have plunged, down almost 30% since the high-water mark of 2007. 

Over that same period, the annual marriage rate dropped by more than 12%. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that if everything else remained the same, but marriage rates had stayed where they stood in 2007, the United States could have seen an additional 1.6 million babies born by now. If Americans want more babies, in other words, we’ll need more marriages. 

That starts with turning down the political heat: The Right needs to stop using marriage as a stick with which to pummel the Left; the Left, meanwhile, simply needs to embrace the centrality of marriage to the common good.

Too many conservative commentators, for example, openly prescribe marriage as a political cheat code, with the goal of flipping female voters red. The assumption is that married women are more likely to pull for Republican nominees. It’s true, but the picture is complicated by the fact that older women are more likely to get married. Control for age, and the relationship between marriage and voting GOP weakens considerably. And the loudest cheerleaders of this hypothesis too often rely on highly polarizing definitions and archetypes of marriage, designed more to inflame their base than to actually make the positive case for family — and of the GOP as the party of the family.

For example, online Right-wingers openly fantasize about repealing the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. Social-media “tradwife” fantasies and “your body, my choice” provocations are likely to turn off many women. Then, too, they frame marriage as a means for restoring older gender hierarchies, also likely to be found unappealing. If the goal is to restore marriage, not just polarize an electorate to pursue political victory, the Right needs to disavow goonish political rhetoric around gender. 

Why shouldn’t we let the other side fade away demographically? I can hear the too-online voices retort. After all, if conservatives are the only ones marrying and reproducing, won’t the demographic solution to politics eventually present itself in dwindling numbers of liberal babies growing into fewer future liberal adults? 

Not really. For one thing, not all babies inherit their parents’ political orientation. For another, greeting your political opposition’s path towards loneliness and alienation with a shrug borders on the inhumane. More profoundly, a political culture that can’t depolarize around that most basic of human instincts — the impulse to be fruitful and multiply — will face a future of zero-sum conflict, stagnation, and decay. 

Meanwhile, a Left concerned about America’s demographic trajectory and the long-term well-being of its coalition also needs to make peace with marriage. The Left’s successful legal redefinition of marriage to accommodate same-sex couples was one of the most effective social movements of the past half-century, largely because it tapped into the belief that marriage was an institution worth aspiring to. 

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Now, marriage is presented by too many on the Left as, at best, one possible path among many; and, at worst, a trap of domestic drudgery. In our survey, 57% of women who voted for Harris said they thought the institution of marriage benefited men more than women, far higher than the 35% of Trump-supporting women or the 19% of Harris-supporting men who said the same. Among all women under 45, just 42% agreed with the idea that marriage presents more benefits than drawbacks for women. With narratives like that, is it any wonder a recent Pew survey finds the share of female high-school seniors who say they will likely choose marriage fell by over a third over the past three decades?

For the Left, then, a new political approach to marriage might mean a more frank acknowledgment that marriage should be a goal. Yes, there are many paths to individual fulfillment, but for most people, it will most reliably include finding ways to give of oneself to a spouse and potential children.

If we can’t solve the companionship crisis, birth rates will continue to slump in the United States and globally. The consequences are fairly straightforward. Economists can easily forecast the greater fiscal strain from an aging population whose promised old-age entitlements are expected to be upheld by a shrinking base of workers. Demographers warn about the pressures of great-power competition and managing mass migration in an age of declining fertility. Sociologists might foresee a creeping crisis of loneliness, and the alienation that presents itself in closing schools, thinner family trees, and the empty corridors of nursing homes with fewer visitors. 

Ideas from across the political spectrum could make it easier to form families and raise kids. Economic and social policy steps could make blue-collar men more marriageable, soften tradeoffs between home and work, make our public spaces more kid-friendly, or make it more affordable to buy a home. None is a silver bullet, but all could help. 

America won’t have a more dynamic and optimistic future without more children. The nation won’t have higher birth rates if it can’t restore marriage. And it won’t be able to accomplish that unless the Right is able to stop thinking about marriage in crass political terms, and the Left gets over its aversion to normative claims about human flourishing. If they don’t, or can’t, the increasingly visible partisan valence around family and parenthood will only worsen.

And it seems I’m not alone. We learned this week from a survey of British players that full-blown rows during board games are an occupational hazard, with bending the rules a particular flashpoint. This probably reveals more about family dynamics than the devious British Character, though. Cheating is so often in the eye of the beholder; and especially after a few drinks, repeated outbreaks of petty bickering, and several failed attempts to name the capital of the Ivory Coast. Or so I hear anyway.

Despite posing such dangers, games are having a cultural moment. Tabletop games, we also learned this week, are all the rage at chichi dinner parties arranged by the sort of person whose job title is “founder of a fashionable condiment brand”. There’s a board-game café in East London (obviously) and an artsy magazine devoted to the pursuit called Senet, tackling such pressing issues as “the tabletop theme of high-seas piracy” and — hinting at discord here too — “dealing with Alpha Players in your gaming group”.

Literally thousands of new titles are released every year, it seems, with something for progressives ( “in Biome, players aim to build diverse ecosystems and raise baby animals”) as well as conservatives (“Wokelandia is an educational, fun-with-friends battle between the Oppressors and the Oppressed. The first person with 100 oppression points wins!”). Fifty million people now play Dungeons and Dragons, apparently. Those without a Dungeon Master in their life to consult might well wonder: what is going on?

A feelgood answer — sort of — is that living in a dispersed digital world has left us “hungry” for “real-world connection and community”, something that’s provided by tangible boards, counters, and cards. A more jaundiced answer is that board games help you avoid talking in any depth to others, where you are all forced to be in the same room together and are nervous about being canceled for your opinions. At least this way, your arguments can be about really important matters — like whether a helmet really counts as a weapon, or how long a burning cart would take to immolate the walls of a castle, given the viscosity of tar.

Another explanation — not necessarily competing with the last — says that online gaming has been growing in popularity for decades, Covid lockdowns intensified the trend and brought in new cohorts of users; and now the vibe has finally spilled over into real world spaces as well. On this interpretation, we are not so much getting away from the online world as enacting it more vividly with the help of physical props.

Sometimes it seems like the lines between game and life are blurring — not helped by the gamification of everything, occurring in parallel. This is the application of game design to ordinary life, in order to better incentivize some desired outcome. Educational programs send school pupils on virtual quests and give them progress badges; dating apps encourage users to proliferate “matches” as a fun end in itself; workplace training schemes make cute emoji faces at you for meeting particular challenges.

Only this week I received an email from Adidas, telling me that I had “gone down a level” in their club. Reassuringly though, it also said I could regain my previous status by “earning 2,900 points” — otherwise known as buying more stuff from Adidas.

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Occasionally a company gets carried away and blatantly starts to treat employees like soulless avatars driven by blind competition: as when Disney Hotels disastrously introduced an electronic leader board to rank workers’ speeds loading laundry into machines. But even if gamification is more benevolent than this — all dopamine hits and no cortisol, so to speak — it still has significant downsides.

In his funny, clever book The Grasshopper, written in 1978, philosopher Bernard Suits used the fable of the playful grasshopper and diligent ant to make the provocative claim that in Utopia we would all be grasshoppers, for game-playing would be the only activity carried out there. Along the way — and picking up the famous gauntlet thrown by Wittgenstein, who said it couldn’t be done — he offered a persuasive definition of a game as an activity with three necessary and sufficient aspects.

First, he said, a game must have a “prelusory goal” which can be specified independently of playing, and is usually something trivial: getting a ball into a hole, say, or picking up a king-shaped counter. Then there are the rules, which must by definition introduce unnecessary complications to achieving the prelusory goal, so that the most efficient means of doing it are disallowed: you can’t just manually drop the ball into the hole, or grab the King on your second go. And finally there is the “lusory attitude” required of a player: to accept the rules voluntarily because otherwise there is no game. In a memorable summation, Suits wrote that “playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. Rule-benders can’t win, technically speaking, because in cheating, they have literally stopped playing the game.

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Ultimately, I think it’s false that in Utopia everyone would be a grasshopper. Other intrinsically valuable lifestyles are also available. But more to the point, the worry about the rapid rise of both games and gamification is that they turn ants into grasshoppers, right here on earth. This is not a worry about productivity; on the contrary, gamification is supposed to increase it. It’s more about the solipsistic habit of eyeing up real-world tasks and collaborators as things to be weaved into fictional quests and challenges; to view them primarily as sources of short-term personal reward.

It is sometimes observed that games put a player in a metaphorical “magic circle”: an imaginary space where striking at an opponent, say, is not just equivalent to pushing a piece of plastic from one square to another, or piling up bits of colored cardboard. Fictional and symbolic dimensions of such actions are the primary focus instead, and consciousness of the real world mostly drops out. Equally, gamification takes as a goal something highly important to a corporation or government, rather than something silly or trivial, but then distracts the “player” from that fact by introducing circuitous intermediate steps involving jeopardy, thrill, or virtual head pats. A desire to replicate the subjective feelings produced, rather than paying attention to the goal itself or to how you are objectively achieving it, is the whole idea.

In an ideal gamified context, you would sleepwalk towards the end planned out for you almost by accident, driven onward by jolts to the dopamine system. The internet is full of business gurus trying to explain why Gen Z are relatively demanding in the workplace, uncritically telling us that this generation above others “expects reward” and is full of “affirmation addicts”. Yet this is also the generation that grew up with the cultural dominance of gaming, and I don’t think it is too farfetched to make a connection. For their sake, we probably shouldn’t indulge the trend.

Which is not to say I won’t be throwing a die or two this December, fortified by a few margaritas to increase the jeopardy for all concerned. Distracting yourself from a rainy afternoon or an unpleasant chore — or indeed, a difficult dinner party — by turning proceedings into a literal points-scoring exercise is always tempting. Games, though, only have their proper place in life because life is not one.

A few weeks later and another line from the English canon sprang to mind. At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the TV audience watched Gus Walz, Tim Walz’s 17-year-old son, who has a non-verbal learning disorder, turn frantically around, overstimulated, anxiety and uncertainty on his face. Tears ran down his cheeks as he clearly mouthed the words “That’s my Dad!” to his father, who stood on the stage accepting the nomination as Kamala Harris’s running mate. I have an experience of people with non-verbal learning disorders. Involuntarily, out of the depths, Milton’s immortal line from “Lycidas” came into my mind: “Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.” Politicians are fond of quoting Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature”, especially Obama, whose almost obsessive identification with Lincoln is provocative, to put it mildly. But the angel America needs is not an admonitory angel. It is an angel whose gaze starts from the mortal core of being human, groupless, as it were, and irreducibly particular, and guides society from that place.

The media distracted itself with some vicious MAGA types, who mocked Gus Walz’s display of vulnerability. Right-wing agitator Ann Coulter posted a picture of Gus with the comment: “Talk about weird.” It was good to expose these social atrocities, if only to give a glimpse of the moral atmosphere that will prevail should Trump clamber once again to the top.

Other people have written about their own experiences with children who, as Tina Brown movingly put it in The New York Times, “struggle with being different”. Brown did not use the term “neurodivergent”. That was admirable. “Neurodivergent” is a precious replacement for some blind, ugly slur. At the same time, why should people who are unquantifiably different be quantified with a clinical term that establishes their “difference” irrefutably, narrowly, scientifically, for all time and on every occasion? Brown ended by gratifyingly calling for national attention to be paid to human beings like her son.

There was also another way to regard the revelation of Tim Walz’s son. He is what progressives have desperately needed. Gus was not vulnerable because he belonged to a racial, or biological, or sexual group; he wasn’t vulnerable because the planet is in jeopardy; he wasn’t vulnerable because history had been unfair to people like him. He was vulnerable because he was entirely, specifically, uniquely human. Cyril Connolly once quipped that imprisoned in every fat man is a thin one wildly signaling to be let out. Well, imprisoned in every supposedly “normal” person is a person like Gus. Mortality and circumstance guarantee that inner person’s eventual emergence.

At the heart of the “caring” society put forward by Harris is a long tradition of moral imagination, beginning with Christ’s injunction to do unto others what you would have them do unto you. That runs through Kant’s precept of acting as though what you did everyone should do, to John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”. Rawls’s concept is a thought experiment in which you imagine that you know nothing about yourself: your abilities, your class, your race, your sex, your nationality, even your taste. What you do know is that all those qualities are distributed unequally in the hard, brutal world. The experiment requires you to create a society based on your ignorance of your situation, and on your knowledge of the cold, cruel world. Of course, any rational person would create a society based both on Christ’s injunction, and Kant’s precept.

It’s a thought experiment that the MAGA tough guys, the sophisticated conservative liberal-eye-pokers, and the hillbilly elegists would do well to perform. They should not fear the onset of national weakness as a result. On the contrary, the protection of that figure of Gus deep within every person requires a powerful, protective state that seeks rational, peaceful authority among the world of nations in order to guarantee the safety of its citizens. A strong, stable society builds itself out from the image of Gus Walz, along the lines of a million strategies, some soft, some hard.

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The progressive practitioners of piety politics would benefit from performing the experiment as well. Maybe the next time they hold a convention, they’ll discourage splintering the human experience into a thousand tales told by a thousand different identities.

“Caring” is a big word in America today, overtaking “empathy” as the concept du jour. But societies often publicly emphasise the very qualities they lack. The ancient Greeks, who were given to rages of unreason, celebrated the Golden Rule. “Indians” were sentimentalised as noble savages just as Native Americans were being exterminated. The state where I live, New Jersey, hit on the official moniker “Garden State” for itself at the very moment sufficient space for garbage disposal had become a crisis. “Caring” has become a war-cry just when people, withdrawn into screens, emotionally numbed by psychiatric drugs and carapaced in rebarbative ideologies, seem to care less about other people than ever before.

The fact is that in America, both Left and Right has forgotten how to care. Therefore, let both sides gaze upon Gus Walz’s face at the convention, reflect on his exclamation, “That’s my Dad!” and melt with ruth. In a time where God is absent, we are all, whether we know it or not, searching for that moment of grace.

Lost in the days of press attacks that followed was the fact that both Trump and his critics were stuck in an outdated American electoral calculus of identity politics grounded in race. In fact, the key to a Harris win in November won’t be the support of black Americans or Indian Americans or even “brown Americans” — though she has identified at various points in her political life as all three. Rather, Harris is a flesh-and-blood avatar of a much more numerous, powerful, and radically dissatisfied demographic: never-married and childless American women between the ages of 20 and 45.

Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these Brides Of The State (BOTS) support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72-24%, providing the Party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections. Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50-45, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic. Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.

The Democratic Party’s political engineers first sensed the centrality of BOTS to the Party’s power base during Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. The Obama campaign then duly rolled out a storybook ad called “the Life of Julia”, which explained how Obama’s policies, from Head Start to Obamacare to contraception coverage to Medicare reform, would care for Julia from graduation through motherhood and finally to the grave without her needing to form a human relationship with anyone outside the government.

Julia’s life was defined by her interactions with the state, with each step of her life tied to a particular government programme. She is able to pursue her chosen career as a web designer because, at age 27, “her health insurance is required to cover birth control and preventive care, letting Julia focus on her work rather than worry about her health”. At age 31, Julia changes her mind about birth control and “decides to have a child” — a decision that apparently involves no partner aside from the state. The resulting progeny, Zachary, attends a Race to the Top Federally-funded public school — which allows Julia to start her own business. At age 67, Julia retires with the financial support of Social Security and Medicare, and spends her partner-less golden years volunteering in a community garden.

While the Julia campaign was a subject of some mockery in 2012, the Obama campaign was in fact ahead of the curve. When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, he made the fictional “Linda” the avatar of his “Build Back Better” campaign. More blue-collar than Julia, in keeping with Biden’s lunch-pail Democrat persona, Linda earned $40,000 annually working at a manufacturing facility in Peoria, Illinois — an income that was a little more than $10,000 short of the city’s median salary. However, Linda had no need for a second income in her home, thanks to the government — which gave her $3,600 annually in the form of a Build Back Better tax credit. Her son, Leo, who like Zachary appears to have been fathered by an anonymous bureaucratic sperm donor, began universal pre-K by age three and enjoyed a free educational ride subsidised by the state — all of which enabled Linda to keep working and Zachary to obtain a “good-paying, union job as a wind turbine technician”. The saga wistfully concludes by describing how, later in life, Linda needs home and hearing care. But fortunately, help is at hand: “Thanks to President Biden’s plan,” it adds, “Linda can access affordable health care through Medicare, and Leo is able to afford at-home elder care for his mom.”

Kamala Harris can fairly be seen as the flesh-and-blood electoral successor to Julia and Linda. Childless, she remained unmarried throughout her professional career until a decade ago, when, aged 49, she tied the knot with a lawyer named Doug Emhoff while preparing her run for the US Senate.

Both Harris’s demographic profile and electoral appeal are, therefore, arguably quite different from the last woman that the Democratic Party nominated to take on Trump. For all those who derided Bill and Hillary Clinton’s marriage as a business deal, it was hard to question the reality that Hillary Clinton was a classic Seventies feminist who was entirely serious about the idea of having it all: she stayed married to her law-school sweetheart through very public ups and downs for nearly a half-century while raising a child and enjoying a notable public career. By contrast, Harris first attracted public notice as the mistress of flamboyant San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, a married man more than twice her age who rewarded her with an expensive car and public office — a relationship which in turn became a stepping-stone to other public jobs. Julia and Linda, take note.

Harris’s life and career are, therefore, clearly representative of a demographic shift that is remaking the Democratic Party and American society as a whole. An astonishing 22% of women aged 40 or higher in America have never been married, which is the highest percentage since data was collected in 1900. The rise in these numbers is both recent and startling. Throughout the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, the percentage of American women who remained unmarried by age 40, as Harris was, had remained constant at around 6%. The percentage of black women who have never married by 40 is markedly higher, hovering at 46%. The overwhelming majority of these women vote for Democrats.

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The ballot box is hardly the only place that this new demographic is making its unique preferences felt. BOTS have demanded and received not only the female-targeted government grants, educational and jobs programmes, and social safety nets that benefited Julia and Linda and their singular progeny, but also a much broader set of social engineering measures that are fundamentally reshaping American mores. Since the Nineties, young American women have been positioned as the primary beneficiaries of neo-Victorian speech and conduct codes that have fundamentally transformed the behaviour of men and women everywhere from classrooms to workplaces to bars.

BOTS are also the primary beneficiaries of government affirmative action programmes in education and hiring. In fact, in the roughly 60 years since Civil Rights programmes to reduce racial and gender discrimination were introduced in higher education, women have surpassed men in earning four-year degrees, while black and Latino students remain underrepresented.

But have these efforts made BOTS happy? The answer, according to young women, is no. In fact, the demographic that has been the most highly socialised into core progressive values and would seem to benefit most directly from bureaucratic intervention in their lives is also the most miserable group in America. A startling 56% of liberal American women aged 18-29 have been diagnosed with a mental-health condition (the percentage for conservative women is 21%).

What is even more striking is that the enormous happiness gap between liberal BOTS and their conservative peers has only existed for the past decade or so. Analysing an NIH dataset of high school seniors, the researchers Catherine Gimbrone, Lisa Bates, Seth Prins, and Katherine Keyes found that, prior to 2012, when the Obama campaign rolled out Julia, there was no meaningful difference between male or female or liberal and conservative high-school students in internalising symptoms (depressive affect). “We hypothesise that increasing exposure to politicised events has contributed to these trends in adolescent internalising symptoms, and that effects may be differential by political beliefs and sociodemographic characteristics,” the researchers concluded. Noting that liberal female adolescents were by far the most depressed, they suggested that the new ideological lenses through which adolescents were viewing the political climate were affecting their mental well-being.

When the Gimbone study came out, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg rejected that view. “Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights,” she wrote, concluding: “It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.” The real culprit, Goldberg suggested, was social media and iPhones. Yet she didn’t explain why social media would have such disparate effects on young women and young men, or why its effects would differ according to political viewpoints.

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By blaming technology, Goldberg was clearly avoiding the implication that the victory of liberal ideas itself was helping to make young women miserable — a point made by the feminist writer Jill Filipovic: “Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life… are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimisation, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response.”

If Filipovic’s point is persuasive, the Democratic Party’s message for the past decade has been exactly the opposite. Instead of promoting the goal of mental health in young women, and using unbiased research to determine what in fact makes women happy, progressives have instead been bent on implementing a set of evermore-intrusive top-down social policies that substitute state intervention and protection for the fellowship of human partners of whatever gender.

From the Party’s point of view, at least, the unhappiness and depression of younger, never-married women, which produces outcomes like never getting married or having children, may be less of a bug than a feature: that BOTS are both unhappy and dependent is what makes them a uniquely valuable energy source for the party. Conversely, adopting policies and encouraging social attitudes and outlooks that make women happier and less depressed and anxious would in fact negate the Party’s most significant electoral advantage, and thereby undermine its power — depriving the Party of its most loyal voters and foot-soldiers.

Paradoxically, then, the Party’s interest is in telling young women that they are miserable and alone without providing solutions that promote personal happiness, and then transmuting the resultant depression and anxiety into anger, which it then utilises as political fuel for empathy-based social justice campaigns from Ferguson to Gaza. This strategy, whether cunning or simply ad hoc, hardly benefits women, though — either individually or as a class. Instead, it undermines their sense of personal agency, while denying them the tools that any human needs to make themselves happy. That humans find happiness and satisfaction in community is as true for women as it is for men, if not more so. Yet only 35% of American liberals report being a member of a church or place of worship, and 37% of American liberals are currently married — a social arrangement that has been shown to have broad benefits for the mental and physical health of both adults and children at all stages of life (56% of conservatives are married). The idea that the state can make up this apparent happiness gap with Build Back Better grants and assertions of false consciousness on the part of conservative women is a chimera.

These numbers are also likely to get worse. According to Gallup, nearly 40% of young liberal women now identify as LGBTQ — a startling rise in a demographic that was presumed to be relatively constant across most societies over time, regardless of what people told pollsters. Partly as a result, fertility rates in the US, which had long hovered around replacement level (2.1 lifetime births per woman), have plummeted since 2008, to a new European-style low of 1.61. However, this sudden demographic sea-change does not appear to be the result of Americans not wanting to have children. Last year, the share of Americans who said that having three or more kids is the ideal hit its highest point since 1971, at 45%. In the simplest sense, young American women want what their mothers had — but have no idea how to get it.

Why is that? While one might blame everything from the internet to plastics in the water to the exploitation of female misery by the Democratic Party (even if some real share of that misery is caused by anti-family conservative social policy), a more concrete answer may be the impact of not having fathers, particularly on young girls. Here, too, Kamala Harris’s biography — she was raised largely by her mother, who moved her to Montreal from California, where her father still bitterly complains about being separated from his daughters — maps directly onto the larger social turmoil.

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When Americans do have children, they now do so out of wedlock more often than ever before in American history, with 69% of black children being born outside of marriage, 52% of Hispanics (up from 34% in 1990), and 28% of whites (up from 15% in 1990). What this means in practice is that an increasingly large percentage of American children are now growing up without regular contact with their fathers — thanks in some large part to the persistence of the “tender years” doctrine that gives mothers custody of young children.

The numbers here, too, are startling. In 1960, 89% of minor children lived with their fathers. The number in today’s America is 73%, with nearly half of African American fathers — like Kamala’s father Donald Harris, an economics professor at Stanford — living apart from their children. There is a plethora of studies that show that children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems, with boys more likely to become involved in crime and girls more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression.

One under-appreciated reason why increasing numbers of young American women are confused and miserable, and failing to make choices that promote happiness later in life, may therefore be that increasing numbers of American children grow up without regular contact with their fathers. And contrary to popular stereotypes, the effects of paternal absence, especially in early childhood, are particularly negative for young girls. “In both self-reported and parent-reported data, we found a three-way interaction of gender, age, and parental divorce, indicating that with increasing age, parental divorce became more strongly associated with depressive symptoms among girls, but not boys,” one Dutch study has found. “These results suggest that girls with divorced parents are at particularly high risk to develop depressive symptoms during adolescence.” Subsequent studies have further localised the negative effects on girls to paternal absence in early childhood.

If governments want to stem the tide of misery among young women, which is affecting everything from voting to birth rates, they may wish to do more to keep fathers around — both inside marriages and also in cases of divorce. On the other hand, the Democrats might not win as many elections.

I was three months pregnant, in March 2022, when midwife Donna Ockenden’s government-commissioned report was published, detailing the extreme failings in maternity care in Shrewsbury and Telford. Thinking about giving birth in these circumstances was more than a little nerve-wracking. 

For many women, pregnancy and childbirth is a means to an end — something you have to do to get the baby you and your family so desire. And yet, a picture is being painted in the NHS of a custom-made journey of self-discovery that allows women to realise their true biological and spiritual potential. I remember an appointment, late in pregnancy — when I was trying to keep the weight off my swollen ankles — during which I was asked by my midwife whether I had filled out the playlist requirements in my NHS-issued birth plan (the “blue book”). It is only now, a year later, that the contrast between this moment and the reality of the neglect I suffered during my son’s actual birth can raise a hollow laugh.

Few investigations into the UK’s dire maternity care seem to want to explore the emergence of a natural or holistic ideal. Most focus on funding and staffing — which almost everyone agrees the NHS is lacking. But in every scandal, the same problems arise: delayed interventions for babies with low oxygen or slow heart rates, caesarean sections being refused and women’s concerns being ignored.

For many of those women whose children have died, poor funding or staff morale were not the cause. “Beatrice died with three midwives and two doctors in the room,” the interminably brave Emily Barley tells me. “There was not a lack of staffing, that was not the problem. The cultural issues, the attitude issues, the lack of leadership — these are way more important.” Beatrice died in May 2022 due to medical negligence after staff at Barnsley Hospital failed to monitor her heart rate and missed signs that she was in danger. Like many of the mothers and babies who have lost their lives to poor maternity care, Beatrice’s death was wholly avoidable — proper and timely medical intervention would have delivered her safely into Emily’s arms.

These appalling fatalities only tell part of the maternity care horror story. There are all those children born with serious brain injuries due to complications in long labour, or the women left with severe injuries which are rarely reported. I had the good fortune to leave with a healthy baby after an unjustifiably terrible ordeal and women like me often clam up — partly not wanting to relive the trauma, partly from guilt at not feeling joyful during those first few days of a child’s life. Perhaps worse than being denied pain relief, left in soiled sheets and ignored by midwives was the shame I felt for having not enjoyed the experience. Photos of his arrival show me pushing him away. For months, midwives had lectured about how beautiful, wonderful and natural this moment would be; how I would bond with him during skin-to-skin contact and breast-feed him immediately. Those words rang in my ears as I realised my first meeting with him — after surgery and a haemorrhage — would be one of nausea and pain.

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But unlike our mothers and grandmothers, those of us giving birth today have Twitter, where an informal group of women digging into the background of NHS policy and practices have become something of a lighthouse in the storm of maternity scandals. “I have the receipts,” maternity safety campaigner Catherine Roy tells me, describing how care has been shaped and influenced by a push towards “natural” childbirth. Her feed is full of the “complimentary therapies” offered during childbirth in NHS trusts: things such as “sterile water injections” for pain relief or “mindful relaxation techniques” such as hypnobirthing for £30 a pop. She points out that such practices are no longer kept to the fringes. Staff working at Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical Centre and City Hospital’s maternity departments, both mired in scandal, were found to have “been using aromatherapy to treat infections, ‘hysteria’ and help prevent labour complications”.

How did we get here? How has it become acceptable for women to be neglected during labour, refused pain relief, and to be encouraged to delay — or even be denied — medical intervention? Throughout the mid to late-20th century, feminist movements interested in reclaiming women’s bodies began to have influence on midwifery. Books such as Our Bodies, Ourselves (1970) sought to challenge a sexist culture by encouraging women to take ownership of their bodies’ functions. This was an era when unnecessary interventions — from shaving to enemas — were common in maternity care, making many women feel like livestock instead of mothers. But the new emphasis on women’s bodily autonomy also began to view childbirth as a part of women’s identity — and, as such, something that should be entirely dictated by a woman’s natural processes. 

Catherine tells me that, in the Nineties, the views of non-medical organisations such as the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) were given almost as much weight as the Royal College of Midwives and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. The idea that “pregnancy was not an illness” and therefore didn’t necessarily require medical intervention, became prevalent. Targets for vaginal (or “natural”) childbirth rates were introduced. Much like the recent furore over NHS guidelines being tweaked by external organisations such as Stonewall, part of the ethos of maternity care has been shaped by external organisations with their own agendas and views of how women should be treated. As such, the idea of having a baby as a means to an end diminished, and the view of childbirth as an authentic experience for women at home, free from interfering doctors, proliferated.

Worse still, this move towards a hands-off approach was at least partly the result of a cold, cost-benefit analysis by the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the early 2000s. A remarkable document from the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology in 2002 discusses the problem of high caesarean rates, stating that women requesting c-sections are “unlikely to be determined simply on the basis of ethics and evidence, but is also a question of resources and cost effectiveness”. The same document notes how some hospitals have a “culture that takes pride in low CS rates”. It seems that a cash-strapped NHS had allowed a “nature-knows-best” approach to flourish in order to conceal their inability to meet the needs of women’s medical care. 

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What has not changed is the fact that childbirth is often unpredictable and complicated. Women who sail through pregnancy with no problems can swiftly find themselves in life-or-death situations. Mary (not her real name) had expected a normal birth after a healthy pregnancy, but developed sepsis and complications as her daughter’s heart rate dipped. Eventually, after being unable to provide an epidural because of the sepsis and unable to monitor the baby’s heart rate properly, staff approached Mary with a choice. “They told me we can give you the option of having an emergency section, or wait an hour just to see how it goes,” she tells me. “But why give me the option to go for an emergency section? Why would I risk waiting? It confused me, I was worried — is it an emergency, or isn’t it?” Hopped up on gas and air, after hours of painful labour, Mary was asked to make a decision that could mean life or death for her baby — a decision that staff should have had the authority to make.

The NHS “fell in love with a certain idea, that birth could be this beautiful, peaceful experience”, Ruth Ann Harper from the Infant Feeding Alliance tells me. “If you breathe your baby into the world, there will be oxytocin and perfect bonding, you’ll breastfeed with ease, create a perfect microbiome, tackle poverty and be an activist against unethical practices by the formula industry in developing countries,” she says. “All of that is a very enticing fantasy — but it’s nothing more than a fantasy.” 

Harper, along with Sue Haddon, set up the feeding organisation to challenge thinking around a breast-is-best mentality. They believe that overcomplicated, overbearing medical advice — such as how to “bond” with your child after birth — has been forced on women when it is unnecessary. In contrast, what should be the realm of medical expertise (such as delivering a baby safely) seems to be focused on natural processes. “I respect women who want lavender oil and home births and want to breastfeed well into childhood — do whatever you like,” says Harper. “But that does not mean the NHS needs to produce a leaflet about it and change what it knows to be true — that quite a lot of us have complications and need help.” 

In some ways, not much has changed for women giving birth. My mother tells a story of midwives in the hospital laughing at her for asking for the TENS machine — an instrument which did little more than tickle her back. But from hypnobirthing to antenatal classes and breathing techniques, Catherine argues that a focus on “natural childbirth” has become the norm, while “giving pharmaceutical pain relief to women” is seen as a failure — what she describes as “a denial that childbirth is painful”. 

For Professor Ellie Lee, director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent, part of the problem is that women have been told birth has to be “meaningful, that it has to say something about who you are as a woman”. This pressure on women, to brave it out on their own, reflects a wider change in relations between patients and the NHS, she tells me. “There has also been a shift towards embracing alternative medicines, and a belief that if we do the right things for our bodies, our bodies should be able to do the right thing for us.”

As a result, we have ended up with a maternity system that seems to think doing very little for women and their babies is the preferable form of treatment. And while there is nothing wrong with wanting a natural childbirth, this is difficult territory. For not only are we risking women and babies’ lives by pretending that childbirth is not dangerous, but we are also failing women in the most basic aspects of care and common sense. For Sue, whose daughter was hospitalised with serious problems, including dehydration, after she was told not to supplement her milk supply for fear of affecting her ability to breastfeed, the needless harm of poor care cannot continue. “I know that I’m one of the lucky ones. I know that there can be more devastating harms than this. And I know that if that had happened, I wouldn’t be here talking about it.”

The baby groups and stay-and-plays I have attended are full of women whispering similar stories of mistreatment to one another, vowing not to return to that hospital again. But for maternity staff to rediscover their medical authority, and do what they were trained to do — deliver healthy babies and keep mother’s safe — more of us have to speak up and prove that this fetishisation of a “natural” fantasy was not done with our consent. 

It is fashionable to blame parents for being “too anxious” which has created a generation of kids too fragile for public life. But these anxieties haven’t come from nowhere. This is how we were told we were supposed to be. For decades, so-called “experts” peddled pseudoscientific theories and magic bullets in the form of parental behaviour management to cure all manner of social ills. The good parent was beatified as one who is aware of every risk and acts accordingly. And woe betide the “lazy” parent who does not. In doing so, they pointed the finger squarely at parents for nearly everything that goes wrong.

Since at least the Seventies, this is how generations have learned to think about problems, both personal and social: “What did the parents do?” At the inaugural conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) held last month, even critics of our over-fragile culture could not resist delineating all the ways parenthood has contributed to our censorious and illiberal culture. Phoning in from New York, Jonathan Haidt criticised the rise of the “phone-based childhood” and alluded to its roots in the Nineties when “free play” dwindled and paranoid parents started to think “everyone’s a child molester or rapist”. He was echoing his and Greg Lukianoff’s Coddling of the American Mind, published in 2018, in which they warn about the rise of “helicopter parents”.

Speaking like bewildered farmers whose chickens have come home to roost, they find it difficult to imagine that their own profession, psychology, might have something to do with our age of fragility. Over the years, a voluminous academic literature has mined the minutiae of childhood experience to find the sources of personal and social problems in everything from how parents feed their children (bottle or breast, spoon or “baby-led weaning”) to how many words they say before an ever-lowering crucial age.

In countless self-help books and on endless daytime talk show segments, they educated people in their emotional vulnerability and invited them to scan their childhoods for the sources of their troubles. A litany of minor behaviours became linked to metaphors of toxicity and a swathe of wicked personal and public problems. These experts preached a gospel of emotional vulnerability and now appear shocked that people believed them.

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Consider the widespread policy application of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences). Drawn from a questionnaire devised in 1998, it tallies up adverse experiences in childhood to produce a score said to be predictive of future life outcomes. Under the veil of scientific calculation, it pinpoints the cause of so many issues that had proven resistant to change. And instead of dealing with the tough business of things such as poverty and poor housing, it implied that governments could simply intervene to change the way parents behave. Even Haidt and Lukianoff draw on ACEs in their manifesto for a more robust public life, concluding:

“… there are two very different ways to damage [children’s] development. One is to neglect and underprotect them, exposing them early to severe and chronic adversity… The other is to overmonitor and overprotect them, denying them the thousands of small challenges, risks, and adversities that they need to face on their own in order to become strong and resilient adults.”

So whether you over-protect them or under-protect them, the problem is you. Moreover, besides being criticised for, among other things, downplaying the role of poverty and conflating severe experiences such as childhood sex abuse and not feeling anyone thought you were “special”, it was precisely devices such as the ACE questionnaire that led to the overuse of concepts such as “trauma”. Sure, you might have never lived in a war zone, but add up your bad experiences in childhood and you too can have a coveted claim to emotional damage.

This is a tough narrative to shake. From the speeches of politicians underscoring the importance of the “first three years” to popular books such as Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family, there is one point of agreement across the spectrum: Larkin was right. This is the ethos of parental determinism: the notion that what parents do is a key cause determining our personal and societal fate.

Not only does it fail to capture the complexity of the problems that face us, it also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, reducing the control people feel they hold over their lives. This is by design. The rise of parenting expertise happened in concert with the overall proliferation of other forms of pseudo-expertise, a large part of which involved the denigration of the ordinary, uninitiated individual’s ability to adequately manage his affairs. It is an expertise that arose hand in hand with a generalised pessimism about the ability of human beings to manage their fate.

Already by the middle of the 19th century, the enormous optimism about man’s ability to control the course of history that had characterised the “age of Enlightenment” had begun to wane. Optimistic figures of the Enlightenment such as Godwin and Condorcet had pointed to societal impediments to the “future progress of mankind”, and looked forward to the day when, once rooted out, problems would be a distant memory. Yet as many social problems appeared stubbornly resistant to change, a certainty grew that the answers lay not in the external world but in the internal world of the human subject. Society wasn’t the problem. The problem was you and me.

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As Christopher Lasch observed, by the 20th century, social reformers increasingly came to see the family as an obstacle to the social changes they desired. If behaviours and beliefs were now an impediment to progress, it was logical to look to their source — the family and the leading role that parents played therein. Accordingly, once-banal aspects of everyday life came to be referred to as an “art”, communicating a “conception of marriage and the family that derived not so much from aesthetics as from science and technology… When marriage experts said that marriage represented the art of personal ‘interaction,’ they meant that marriage, like everything else, rested on proper technique.” Progressives, Lasch continued, envisaged a day when parenting would be professionalised and “licensed” and the “unfit of the human species” would “cease to reproduce their kind”.

While obviously not everyone took their conclusions to such eugenicist extremes, many members of a new and growing “knowledge class” expressed a similar exasperation with the ordinary individual’s inability to manage his life. Hence even a figure such as Bronisław Malinowski, critical of Freud’s excessive focus on the nuclear family, could see “only one way out” of the “cultural crisis” of his time, the Thirties, as “the establishment of a… scientific control of human affairs.” Since that time, this class has only grown, both responding to such “crises” and, implicitly, responding to its own failure to really solve them.

Part of the difficulty, then, is that ordinary people don’t realise just how stupid they are. They have to be convinced of their incapacity, lest they have no idea that they are going about their lives all wrong. Hence at the beginning of nearly every new psychotherapeutic fad, advocates emerge informing audiences of their perilous inability to do things correctly. And so, a key part of the gospel of emotional vulnerability is the constant preaching that the uninitiated “layperson” is sorely ill-equipped to manage the tough business of living. They need the growing piles of books, apps, and even “wellbeing curriculum” produced by proliferating therapeutic entrepreneurs whose business it is to make a problem of the minutiae of everyday life. In all this, vulnerability has become a sacred ethos, preached to young people and their parents at every turn.

All of which means that we parents are told we cannot simply rely on our own experiences and those of generations before us. After all, that’s where all the problems started — with people who just didn’t know what “we know now”. The result is a complete denial of agency: parents are constantly enjoined to doubt themselves and to “listen to the experts” — and yet, paradoxically, no one seems to look to the experts when things go wrong.

Originally entitled Les Particules Élementaires, the book’s first appearance sent the French literary scene into a frenzy; selling thousands of copies, sparking many an op-ed, and causing the owner of a literary prize awarded to the book to withdraw his patronage. International publishers scented a transferable succès de scandale. The designer of the UK translation put a skeletal nymphet on the cover, insolently facing the camera dressed only in her knickers.

The implication to the reader was that he was purchasing a combination of hot sex and cool Gallic hipsterism in literary form. No greater joke has ever been played on the British novel-buying male. In fact, Atomised presents a sexual wasteland full of neurotics, narcissists, and malformed losers. And, much like its anorak-wearing author, no character in the book possesses any cool whatsoever.

Atomised is the story of two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno. Michel is a robotic rationalist, constitutionally unable to form meaningful human relationships. In his professional life as a biologist, he searches for a way to eliminate the mess of concupiscence from the human condition. Bruno, on the other hand, is a monomaniacal sexual obsessive, restlessly questing through brothels, orgies and naturist colonies for a degree of satiation he never finds.

For Bruno, there are only two kinds of women: the enticing unavailable ones that make him feel inadequate and tormented; or the ones he can have, that make him feel bored and detached. For both brothers, moments of tender love and compassion from women are fleeting, and each is psychologically unfit to receive them. The immediate cause of all this is their monstrous hippy mother who — “believing that maternity was something every woman should experience” — decides to keep the accidental human by-products of her trysts, but leaves the nurture of them to inadequate others. The distal cause, meanwhile, is the fall of Western civilisation.

The book is replete with failed parenting relationships, failed marriages and failed erections. Humans are animals upon whom nature has played a cruel trick, bestowing them with socially malleable cravings that endlessly distress them and which capitalism exploits. Suffering is everywhere and, in the absence of the Judeo-Christian framework, has no meaning. Death is feared pathologically. Sexual promiscuity is the only permissible way left for males to engage in competition with peers, but the prizes are ultimately terrible. Pneumatic young women gain tenuous social capital from acting like sex objects. Ageing female bodies literally have no point anymore, and their owners know it.

Since the book’s publication in 1998, patterns of critical evaluation have had plenty of time to settle. And many of these have tended to treat it, along with the wider oeuvre within which it sits, as containing a serious political message, or as otherwise having something to teach readers.

Understandably, conservative and “post-liberal” thinkers often relate enthusiastically to the Houellebecquian universe as one that tests post-1968 liberal values to complete destruction. In this reading, Houellebecq is primarily demonstrating the awful downsides of the intrusion of the capitalist market into the realm of sexual reproduction. It’s certainly true that some passages — describing the advent of abortion and the pill, the rise of individualism, and the collapse of the family against the predations of the market — might have come straight from the pen of a post-liberal polemicist (at least, if he was a bit drunk).

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But still, Houellebecq is not proselytising for a return to the values of the past. He doesn’t want us to go back to some prelapsarian age — partly because he thinks it is too late anyway, but also because it all sounds absolutely terrible. In Atomised, he lampoons the alternative:

“You are at one with nature, have plenty of fresh air and a couple of fields to plough (the number and size of which are strictly fixed by hereditary principle). Now and then you kill a boar; you fuck occasionally, mostly with your wife, whose role is to give birth to children; said children grow up to take their place in the same ecosystem. Eventually, you catch something serious and you’re history.”

The extent to which Houellebecq is personally invested in the hyper-liberalised society he describes in his novels was illustrated recently by the revelation that he inadvertently participated in a Dutch porn film (his stated excuse being that he was “depressed at the time of signing the agreement and had drunk several glasses of wine”). This version of Houellebecq is no austere conservative reactionary, but rather a sad-eyed, impulse-driven Mr Bean figure — drunkenly importuning female interviewers, making extravagant public shrines to his dead corgi, and starring as himself in a comic film about his own fictional kidnap. Liberalism, like love, makes fools of us all eventually.

Even so, there is clearly something right about the conservative critical approach. Progressive responses to Houellebecq are much less convincing. The most predictable of these would diminish the work simply on the grounds that it doesn’t sufficiently distance itself from the misogyny, homophobia, and Islamophobia it often represents. On this view, the reader can still perhaps learn something from Atomised, but only as a cautionary tale — showing us the origins and outlook of the much-reviled incel mindset, for instance. In the same vein we are told that Houellebecq’s subsequent works act as prophylactics against Right-populism and Islamophobia, since they understand these things from the inside, and are thus useful to the Left-liberal who wishes to know how his enemy thinks.

Atomised is indeed often misogynistic, though much of the time it seems to stem from a more general misanthropy than from any specially targeted animus against women. In any case, with a mother as poisonous as Houellebecq’s — on whom the character in Atomised is loosely based — surely the man should be let off the hook a bit. In 2008, aged 83, she gave a gloriously disinhibited interview describing her son as an “evil, stupid little bastard”, “a liar, an imposter, a parasite” and “a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame”. (She also offered future biographers an epigraph laconically summing up Houellebecq’s output as a whole: “What’s all this stuff about an old chemist who wonders if his secretary is having a wank?”)

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A more charitable — in fact, quite hilariously optimistic — approach, also coming from progressive critics has been to try and recuperate Houellebecq as a previously unrecognised ally to Left-liberal causes. For instance, it has been speculated that he is actually offering a useful critique of hegemonic masculinity or even “queering” heterosexuality outright. Touching as it is to see the keenness of the academic to reconcile the demands of his two perennial masters — a love of edgy transgression, and the desire to write only what a Guardian reader might approve of — this strategy is doomed. The same writer who describes a commune dedicated to personal development as full of “deranged old lefties who were probably all HIV positive” is no secret friend of Judith Butler.

There are always things to learn from as multifaceted a novelist as this, whether or not he intends to teach you anything. Still, I prefer to treat a book like Atomised, not (only) as a rich seam of information to be mined about the zeitgeist, but more as an enveloping mood. And Christ, that mood is bleak.

Houellebecq invites you to wallow in despair at the state of society; to sink to the depths with no hope of air. He is in the tradition of great pessimistic writers: Beckett, Baudelaire, Sartre. He may have a diagnosis for social malaise but there is no hint of a cure here. All you can do is face the darkness, laugh occasionally at the absurdity of it all, and distract yourself by having appalling sex with people who vaguely revolt you.

Some censorious types worry that incels might be reading Houellebecq, but I tend to think he is exactly who incels should be reading. For when you suspect that your life is sapped of all prospects of success, sexual or otherwise, it can be reassuring to read a book that confirms your experience. As Schopenhauer — another pessimist with a terrible relationship with his mother, and a stated inspiration for Houellebecq — once wrote: “Life is a business which does not cover the costs.” For those men who have found that the sexual revolution did not cover their costs, reading Atomised must come as a relatively harmless salve to the anguished mind.

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The term “hopeless” covers two possible emotional states: one where specific hopes suddenly die, to your great disappointment, or one where you haven’t experienced anything as proactive as hope for a long time. The first involves mental turmoil; the second can feel grimly peaceful and reassuring. As another great philosopher, Michael Frayn, makes his headmaster character say in the film Clockwise: “It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.” Pessimist writers such as Houellebecq can take us to this second place. Depending on how churned up you originally felt, the trip can sometimes feel like a holiday.

But there’s another more positive function that pessimistic writing also serves. In ordinary life, it’s easy to confuse a temporary mood with a fact about the world, and vice versa. Feelings of hopelessness tend to settle like dust on social landscapes, seeming as if they have always lived there, and infusing present and future with heaviness and gloom. Trying to avoid this impression by denying it or distracting oneself doesn’t necessarily make it go away.

There’s a lot of doomsaying in the air at the moment, and it seems to be catching. But sometimes, with despair, you have to go down to come up. Sometimes, as if in a Buddhist death meditation, you have to imaginatively inhabit your miserable vision to its utmost, without deviation. For me, this is primarily what Atomised does. It confronts you with the purest synthesis of a despairing take on liberal society, and make you live there for a while, drinking it in. And after a while, the feelings of despair start to lose their power, and you start to realise that hopelessness is only a mood after all. It’s not the world — it’s you.

Women, as they see it, are losing in our overly casualised, hook-up-oriented sexual marketplace because it is not how natural selection meant us to be. We were sold a lie that promiscuity was empowering, and we have come up against the constraints of an evolved psychology that tells us to lock down a man and have a baby. As a result, women are single, childless and unhappy. The solution? Variations on abandoning contraception, practising abstinence, embracing marriage and prioritising traditional family structures. The illiberalism of “there are no differences between men and women” is met with the illiberalism of “these differences are insurmountable”.

The evolutionary logic behind human behavioural sex differences, first theorised by the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers in 1972, goes like this: because men can hypothetically father as many children as women they could sleep with, whereas women are limited in the maximum number of children they can have, men have evolved to be promiscuous, competing among themselves for a limited number of women. It also led men to become jealous, and in some instances violent, to avoid being cuckolded.

Women, by contrast, who are at risk of being left holding a demanding and vulnerable baby, have evolved to be picky and to prefer monogamy. This package of behaviours is sometimes called “sociosexuality” (high = promiscuous, low = chaste), and is borne out by our experience that men tend to desire more sexual partners and seek out casual sex to a greater degree than women.

But then we get to the question of the size of this difference — and in a debate about the sexual revolution, size matters. Is the disparity really that big? Is it even biological? Or does it vary between cultures?

In The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and Feminism Against Progress, Louise Perry and Mary Harrington both lean on Trivers’s theory, with Perry citing research that shows large sex differences in sociosexuality across 48 countries. The study, carried out in 2005 by a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois, asked university students how many sexual partners they had had in the last year, how many of these were one-night stands, and whether they thought sex without love was acceptable, among other things. Putting aside that the sex lives of students are wholly unrepresentative of the general population and are unlikely to reflect how older individuals approach sex, and, in the words of the author of the research himself, that to extrapolate from this data to populations as a whole “would be inappropriate”, the research also showed that the sociosexuality gap varied a lot between these same 48 modern states, narrowing considerably in more gender-equal countries. If you keep in mind that men tend to overstate their promiscuity while women tend to understate theirs, then these differences are likely to get significantly smaller. They will still exist, but presenting them as entirely biologically caused, universally large and culturally invariable is a misleading first step in a logic that is defeatist about social change. If we were to look a little wider, outside of our rich and industrialised countries, we would find that the story of male and female sexuality gets a lot more complicated.

Consider the following statement: “I don’t like it when her boyfriend is here in the morning when I come back from being away.” This line might seem plucked from a conversation about sexual jealousy in a polyamorous chatroom, but in fact it comes from a Himba man, a semi-nomadic pastoralist group from Northwest Namibia.

With an estimated population of 50,000, the Himba still “marry”, in the sense that there are socially recognised unions between two or more individuals. There is also widespread acceptance of infidelity for men and women, leading to the highest rate of extra-marital children ever recorded, with 48% of all children fathered by someone other than the husband. It’s no secret when this happens, and parents tend to know with high accuracy whose child is whose. Moreover, Himba men place great value on being good fathers, even when they suspect the child is not biologically theirs. Jealousy still exists, as the above quote demonstrates, as does violence, and there is a degree of informal concealment around these affairs: to reduce the risk of run-ins, husbands are expected not to come home if they are out after dark, while lovers should leave before they hear the roosters crowing.

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The Himba are an extreme example, but stories of relationship fluidity and female promiscuity crop up again and again in the anthropological record. As Paul Riesman has observed, among the Fulani of West Africa, a man knows that a woman has lovers and that “if he is away, whether on a trip… or out looking for women himself, ineluctably his wife will have visitors and that it depends on her wishes alone whether she will go into the bush with them or not”. Meanwhile, many lowland indigenous populations of South America believe in partible paternity, whereby multiple men “contribute” semen to the gestation of a child, leading to most children having several fathers. In the Maqu region of Tibet, trial marriage is practised, where men and women live together before formal marriage, and prior to this cohabitation, may have multiple sexual partners. For the Mosuo and Zhaba farmers of China, husband and wife don’t ever cohabit, instead practising a “walking” marriage in which husbands visit at night, and help raise their sisters’ children during the day. In many traditional hunter-gatherer societies, the environment in which we have spent most of our evolutionary history, there is little stopping lovers from wandering into the forest together.

These examples are not meant to disprove the “naturalness” of long-term monogamous relationships, nor are they “better” ways of being. Many of them are also evidence of the essential existence of “pair bonding” in human relationships, where most individuals do form long-term monogamous relationships. But what they are meant to disprove is a notion of women as inherently chaste and of men as inherently promiscuous. If the elaborate cultural constraints and shame we usually put on women’s sexual behaviour are proof of anything, it is that, without them, women will, and often do, engage in promiscuous behaviour. If the predominance of pair-bonding in humans is proof of anything, it is that men will, and often do, stick around to raise the kids.

But are these examples, interesting as they are, relevant to those of us who departed down a different cultural route a long time ago? Well, is Tibetan “trial marriage” so different from a young couple living together but deciding to part ways? Is a Himba father investing in children he knows are not his, so different from the love and care that many receive from stepparents? Is Donald Trump marrying three times, albeit consecutively, so different from a rich polygamous pastoralist having three wives? We may no longer legally allow polygamous marriage, but the evolutionary nuts and bolts of having a man rich enough that he is able to support multiple wives and children is the same whether it is Trump or a Kipsigi man. We may not require that a man raises a stepchild under his own name like the Himba, but we would still expect him to treat them with kindness and care. There are, of course, still differences, but they are differences of degree, not kind, and much like the gaps in sociosexuality, they are often considered to be larger than they are.

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So, what are the commonalities among the environments in which we find the Himba, the Maqu, the Mosuo, the Fulani, one of the 53 South American societies with partible paternity beliefs, or indeed our own society, where sexual behaviour is more relaxed, where women are freer, and where children are still raised to become happy and healthy adults? Often, women live close to their extended family members, who can help her raise her children and come to her defence if mistreated. Women inherit, and they also control some means of wealth generation. Most crucially, women are less dependent on their husband.

It is in these situations where research has shown that male jealousy is lower, as men are less concerned with becoming a “cuck” whose resources are unwittingly going to non-biological children, since wealth is instead passed through women. As Perry and Harrington note, this does weaken marriage bonds, because both men and women are able to walk away more easily. But compare this with societies where men control all the wealth, or where women make a lesser contribution to the economy, and male jealousy becomes high, the sexual culture less permissive, and strict controls emerge over women’s behaviour as paternity once again becomes an issue. Socially imposed monogamous marriage did not emerge in the West because it was better for society (though it might well be), as Perry states. It emerged to protect the wealth of a man being inherited by a non-biological son. Virginity and chasteness became highly valued, and women traded their promiscuity in exchange for their sons to be the sole heirs of a man’s estate, for they had no estate of their own.

Despite this, many “feminists” today propose solutions that would return women to once again being highly reliant on husbands. “Get married and do your best to stay married” is Perry’s parting advice. Harrington tells us to reject the contraceptive pill. Both propose that women wait to have sex, possibly until after marriage. “There was a wisdom to the traditional model in which the father was primarily responsible for earning money while the mother was primarily responsible for caring for children at home,” Perry states. All of these solutions are aimed at controlling the two male evolutionary strategies that Perry describes — cad and dad — as by being chaste you force men to make themselves marriageable. Yet, she denies women the same multitude of sexual strategies, instead reducing the female evolutionary story to a battlefield of male-on-male competition where our only active role is one of containing male promiscuity.

But can any of this tell us how to live? I’m not convinced. Natural selection doesn’t care much for your long-term happiness and doesn’t provide us with the means to build a moral and sexual ethics. The dissatisfaction individuals express about our contemporary sexual culture is more complicated and individualised than the sweeping conclusions provided by evolutionary theory. We should acknowledge that weakening monogamy leaves some women vulnerable, particularly if they cannot replace support from husbands with family or the state; just as we should also acknowledge that reinstating a forceful emphasis on monogamous marriage with sexual divisions of labour would limit women’s freedom. What we should not do, however, is use evolutionary theory to make superficially convincing narratives of gender stereotypes, which are a distraction, and do a disservice to the multitude of ways that humans can and have evolved to live.

The plasticity imperative was aimed at everyone, but some were quicker to adapt than others. Women, we were reminded, had been multitasking for years — and suddenly this made us marvellous. “Plastic Woman” was the protagonist of Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book, The End of Men: and the Rise of Women: during the past century, Rosin wrote, Plastic Woman has “performed superhuman feats of flexibility”, going from “barely working at all to working while married and then working with children, even babies”. She has embraced her liberation from “ladylike standards” to engage in everything from sexual adventurousness to demanding better salaries. Trailing far behind her was “Cardboard Man”, who “hardly changes at all”. Men have “lost the old architecture of manliness”, argued Rosin, without replacing it with anything more solid than “’mancessories’ — jeans and pickup trucks and designer switchblades, superheroes and thugs who rant and rave on TV”. Welcome to Kendom.

Rosin’s book expressed the insights of academic “crisis of masculinity” literature, and for all its oversimplifications, it had a point. Deindustrialisation had not only made the skills demanded by traditionally “male” jobs redundant by the late 20th century, but it had set the scene for a new kind of worker role that women seemed to glide into. This had less to do with a specific type of work, and more to do with a type of worker prized by the new deindustrialised economy. People have often assumed that women are better suited to service-sector jobs and care work than they are to the factory floor, but this doesn’t stack up; women for centuries have engaged in back-breaking physical labour in the fields, the home, and indeed in factories. Instead, in all sorts of workplaces, women fulfilled the criteria of the new model employee: one with a host of generic skills, whose expectations of continuity and stability were less firmly rooted than for the “job for lifers” of old, and whose workplace demands were tempered by gratitude that we were encouraged to be there at all.

For women in the Nineties and 2000s, working was seen as a privilege that our mothers had fought so hard to win. If work didn’t allow us to self-actualise to the degree Betty Friedan had promised, it was still better to be out in the world than suffocating in the “comfortable concentration camp” of the home. Or was it?

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We are no longer so sure. Now perimenopausal and dreaming of retirement, the archetypal Nineties Plastic Woman finds herself “just so tired” by the demands of everything, everywhere, all at once that she has begun to wonder if it was all a bit of a con. Meanwhile, younger women are opting out of various aspects of the game, boasting of “lazy girl jobs” or deciding to remain childless. A new breed of “conservative feminist” argues that (other) women should re-focus their attention and affection back on the family and the home, reclaiming the fulfilment of motherhood from the bad press given to it by the Women’s Liberation Movement.

But amid this furious backlash against Girlboss feminism, the deeper problem with the cult of plasticity is obscured. It’s not about all the things we have to do, but about who we think we are. The promotion of Plastic Woman did not come at the expense of men — who, as many pointed out when Rosin’s book was published, were already well on their way to being plasticised. It came at the expense of the ideal of self-determination, which lay at the core of both the labour movement and the campaign for women’s liberation. What drove both movements, albeit often in different directions, was the desire for more control over one’s life: you might have to do a lot of hard and boring stuff, at work or at home, but that did not define who you were.

In paid work, the authority of the boss stopped at the end of the working day, and your personal “well-being” was your own bloody business. For stay-at-home mothers, it was more complicated: the boundaries between the work of childcare and the role of motherhood had been mashed together, such that women often struggled to work out where the role ended and “I” began. That’s why feminists demanded social childcare: not because they thought all mothers should get a paid job, but because it placed a conceptual boundary between the understanding of oneself as a woman and mother, and the tasks involved in caring for children.

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The cult of plasticity turns this boundary-setting on its head. Constantly “juggling” a range of tasks and commitments is prized, because it keeps people on their toes and weakens the stubborn pride that comes with doing one thing properly. People who are confident about what they are doing — whether that is raising children, or being skilled in a particular kind of work — are less amenable to being pushed around than those who find themselves constantly unsettled by demands to do things in a new way. So, on one level at least, the promotion of plasticity allows Human Resources departments and parenting “experts” alike to manufacture a culture of compliance.

In this vein, diminishing the boundaries between home and work — a trend shamelessly accelerated during the pandemic, via the embrace of “hybrid working” — may not be doing great things for productivity, but it sends an effective signal that even when we are not at work, the company is still with us. Yet the hybrid working fiasco points to a contradiction: it seems pretty obvious that surveillance and micro-management do not encourage people to work more efficiently or effectively. When ticking boxes and jumping through hoops become the job description, employees end up bewildered, defensive, and distracted from the task at hand.

The sensible course of action would be to back off. Instead, HR departments seem to be doubling down in their quest to create the new model employee, by further breaching the boundary between work and our internal lives. The latest incursion on self-determination is the growing demand to declare our pronouns. The symbolic replacement of “I am” with “refer to me as” represents far more than a clarification of office etiquette. Gender-critical feminists have rightly pointed to the obliteration of “woman” or “man” as meaningful categories, once anyone can claim to be either (or neither, or both). Once these categories become free-floating flourishes in an email signature, the pretence that “we” are the ones choosing them will be short-lived. In practice, this is already being revealed — the use of gender-neutral language to avoid misgendering means that we are all rapidly becoming “they”: non-binary, non-specific, generic, plastic.

At least to this, fantastically, Plastic Woman seems to be kicking back. In the untidy coalition of Terfs, Hags, conservative feminists, and colleagues muttering quietly in corners, we see the holding of one important line: the desire to determine oneself, rather than submit to being endlessly moulded. It’s a reminder that people will bend only so far; as Weird Barbie shows us, we can be played with “too hard”.

The good news is they want us to have lots and lots of sex. The bad news is they also want us to be heterosexual, married to the person we’re having sex with and avoiding contraception while we do it. Working motherhood, free childcare, and quickie divorces are out. Babies and the “normative family held together by marriage” are in.

For some liberal conservatives, it apparently all came as a bit of a shock. Meanwhile, for those looking for any excuse to call the Conservative Party “fascist”, it was a field day. Once the stuff on reproduction was judiciously combined with material from migrant-averse Tory speakers such as Suella Braverman and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the whole package started to look to many like a cover version of Viktor Orbán’s greatest hits — including to Orbán’s own political director. Not that this would have necessarily dismayed the speakers in question.

As I watched the conference unfold, I started to think that having a name that starts with “National” and ends with “ism” might be the least of National Conservatism’s image problems. When I first read about the event, I vaguely imagined that it would be a mostly cerebral affair, conducted behind closed doors — a thrashing out of disputed intellectual territory, with the aim of forming a shared, reinvigorated vision for the direction of conservatism, currently languishing in near-terminal decline. I didn’t realise it would be done in the full glare of the media and the voting public.

I didn’t anticipate there would be a film of MP Danny Kruger coming across like a slightly sinister vicar, lecturing the British public about what many naively assume are private romantic relationships (“Marriage is not all about you … It’s not just a private arrangement, it’s a public act by which you undertake to live for someone else, for their sake, and the sake of your children, and the sake of wider society!”). I didn’t think they would let Miriam Cates say, out loud and in full view of The Guardian’s deputy political editor, that “cultural Marxism… is systematically destroying our children’s souls”. In short, I didn’t expect them to go full Back to Basics, having barely arrived on the scene. I thought they might take a bit of a run-up first.

Some of the consequent hostile reaction is just opportunist histrionics from enemies seeking political advantage. There’s nothing fascist, or even particularly Right-wing, about policies attempting to stabilise families for the good of children’s welfare, or to redress declining birth rates with an eye to protecting future pensions and the welfare state. It’s perfectly fine to consider how present socioeconomic models, often focused upon treating the sexes equally, badly serve some distinctive needs of mothers and their children. And it’s appropriate to worry about the way in which personal development curricula in schools have been outsourced to companies thronging with sexual libertarians, self-identifying as moral saints. Indeed, if Keir Starmer doesn’t also think critically about these things, he will be missing a vote-winning trick.

Still, like many a gimlet-eyed revolutionary before them, there is a sense that these ideologues are skipping to the end too fast. Immersed in a bubble of like-minded think tanks, podcasts, and blogposts, it is easy to think that certain background assumptions go without saying. But strategically at least, there’s a need to take those you want to persuade on a journey — to meet them where they are, as opposed to where you think they should be.

And though Cates, Kruger and friends prosecute their arguments in the name of “ordinary British people”, many OBPs are much more liberal than they are. After all, Britain has been a highly liberalised society for decades. Unlike those neoliberal thinkers who conceptualise the individual as metaphysically unencumbered and entirely self-made, post-liberals are supposed to understand the powerful effects of socialisation on personality and preference. Cumulative exposure to the policies of Thatcher, Blair, and Cameron has left its formative mark. We’re intensely relaxed about most things, often to the point of inertia. Equally, whereas Cates and Kruger are both devout Christians, most OBPs lack any religious faith to help underpin the communitarian values being argued for.

This means that, in order to win people over to their cause, post-liberals are going to have to be extra savvy. It would help if, along the way, they didn’t provide soundbites that are easily trolled. For instance, it is very unlikely that Cates expected her use of the phrase “cultural Marxism” would be construed as antisemitic — but even so, it sounded conspiratorial, reminiscent of a caricatural McCarthyite talking about reds under the bed. In fact, there’s nothing Marxist about the identity politics embedded in so many of our national institutions and organisations. Some of its principal disseminators are HR professionals, for god’s sake.

The nearest thing to a justification for the claim would involve a reference to the neo-Marxist idea of a “long march through the institutions”, and the goal of infiltrating existing organisations to build alternative anti-capitalist cultures, or “counterinstitutions”, as Herbert Marcuse put it. But if this is what counts as culturally Marxist then, ironically, the National Conservative conference itself qualifies as such — set up by its founder Yoram Hazony to counter the dominant neoliberal, free-marketeer culture within Conservatism.

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There’s another thing post-liberals have in common with Marxists, too. Each wants to fundamentally restructure society in far-reaching ways. Post-liberals will likely frame this as going “back” to a better time; Marxists would present it as moving “forward”. Temporal metaphors aside, however, each holds that existing social arrangements are ripe for dismantling. And like Marxists, some post-liberals seem blithe to the potential costs of their revolutionary policies for those whose lives don’t fit their preferred vision of the future.

Most obviously, this issue affects those who are not in so-called “normative families”. There are 3 million lone parent families in the UK currently, while millions more are the offspring of single mothers. And 1.5 million people in England and Wales are not heterosexual, while some lesbians and gay men are also parents. In valorising the traditional nuclear family, post-liberals need to avoid stigmatising those who aren’t in one — particularly if they want to avoid social division, as most say that they do.

It is not that wielding social stigma as a weapon is never useful. When a newly destructive social trend first heaves into view, stigmatising it by means of ridicule or outrage can be an effective defence. But there’s a difference between stigmatising what has yet to take hold, and what is already here. In the second case, there’s an increased responsibility to tread carefully. There’s also a difference between stigmatising a discrete activity unattached to any particular identity group, and stigmatising a behaviour which tends to define an entire group in the public mind. There’s a difference between criticising smartphones for kids and criticising single motherhood, for instance.

Perhaps it will be objected that the post-liberals are not stigmatising anyone at all — they are merely describing existing social patterns, documenting harms, and arguing for better alternatives, with evidence. I agree that they are doing that; but I still think this response would be naïve. For most, it is a short walk from “marriage is a public act for the sake of your children and wider society” to “society should think less of you for being an unmarried parent”. Anyone trying to motivate the masses into a comfortingly principled Fifties mindset also needs to remember what used to happen to single mothers and gay people in the Fifties.

This doesn’t mean that the solution is to helplessly accede to existing progressive cultural forces, which at times looks like they are unconsciously focused on converting everybody in the UK to lesbian single motherhood, including the blokes. Rather, it means reconciling the desire to radically reshape the social fabric with recognising the value and dignity of those groups caught in cultural crossfire. It also involves noticing that in any free society, there will always be such people; and that the further towards the margins they are placed, culturally speaking, the more they will become vulnerable and isolated.

In short, post-liberals need to find a sincerely sympathetic narrative that stops those nearer the edges of their preferred social fabric from becoming outcasts. Fidel Castro once observed that a revolution is a struggle between the future and the past. If they really have to go back in time in order to stabilise a world flying apart under liberalism, then let the new revolutionaries take some liberal tolerance with them as they go.

It would be easy enough to retort that Marx is hardly the first great thinker to have feet of clay. But in truth, his repudiation of paternal obligation wasn’t much of a departure from the utopian political vision he and Engels outlined. For since The Communist Manifesto was published, three years before the birth of Freddy DeMuth, perhaps its most controversial doctrine has been family abolition. In proposing this, the architects of socialism unleashed a vision that has since inspired many feminists and utopians — but that fails even more completely as a delivery-mechanism for heaven on earth than the flawed and fractious families we have.

The architects of communism took aim particularly at the bourgeois family. In Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels argued that the bourgeois family was a recent invention, rationalised as eternal, that served as a means of perpetuating inequality. The Communist Manifesto denounced this con-trick as a fake universal that, for the proletariat, didn’t even deliver joy or intimacy. Instead, it served as a machine for manufacturing new factory operatives: a cynical enterprise in which proletarian children were “transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour”.

More recent critics of the family take this even further. It’s not just the bourgeois family that has to go. It’s every family — even those of the poor, vulnerable, oppressed and helpless, for whom the alternative to relying on blood kin is destitution. This is the argument made by anti-family theorist Sophie Lewis in Abolish the Family: that the revolution must come for everyone. The family, she says, “is to be abolished even when it is aspired to, mythologised, valued, and embodied by people who are neither white nor heterosexual, neither bourgeois nor colonisers”. For it’s only in “collectively letting go of this technology of privatisation, the family, that our species will truly prosper”.

She echoes Marx and Engels in viewing such affective bonds not as a space of respite from the market, but as inextricable from it and a crucial site of its reproduction. For Lewis, though, the harm done by particularistic love within families goes further than perpetuating economic injustice. Families are not just delivery-mechanisms for violence and cruelty. They are sexism, racism, chauvinism writ small: “a microcosm of the nation-state”. As such, they are a tool of white cis-heteronormative oppression, employed to entrench wickedness of every kind.

This draws on a long tradition of Marxist feminism, for which family isn’t just a vehicle for reproducing capitalism but also a key means of oppressing women. Alexandra Kollontai, the earliest and most influential Marxist feminist, decried the particularistic affection granted to family members as “property love”. In Kollontai’s view, this love imposed profound negative consequences on women: the inconvenient calls such love of dependents can make on our time and resources is an impediment to women’s equal participation in public life. To solve this, she suggested, under communism children would be cared for by “society” in general, while “material and moral support” would be forthcoming for mothers.

For Kollontai, this could be attained by expanding the affective stinginess of “property love”. This “narrow and exclusive affection” should bathe not just our particular children but “all the children of the great, proletarian family”, a proposal Lewis views as “magnificent”. Subsequent feminists in the same tradition, such as the radical Shulamith Firestone, envisioned modern technologies helping to bring this about, resulting in “the diffusion of the childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a whole, men as well as women”.

In reviving these arguments, Lewis cements her position as perhaps the most eloquent contemporary exponent of a doctrine that views itself as socialist, but is more accurately understood as the utopian face of neoliberalism: one that sets itself against every given, arbitrary, particularistic and so-called “natural” feature of individual and social human life, in the name of radical liberation.

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This includes attachment bonds, especially those between a mother and baby, where these are an obstacle to self-actualisation. And, in Abolish the Family, this includes all special social or political value accorded to family life. This revolutionary war on relationships must proceed even if, as Lewis accepts, it’s resisted by those for whom there is no protection from the world’s cruelty save the bonds of family. And it can, and should, come at the cost of our selfhood itself: “If the world is to be remade utterly, then a person must be willing to be remade also.”

I’ve written plenty about the transformative nature of motherhood, the value of interdependence and care, and the political importance of grounding what we do in the truths of our bodies and human nature. Lewis, meanwhile, has previously argued that feminism requires us to de-nature motherhood, to view all human reproduction as a kind of surrogacy, and abolish oppressive constructs of “nature” and love. Everything I’ve already said about those arguments also applies to their extension in Abolish The Family.

The title, though, merits comment. It’s subtitled A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. But the reality is that wanting both care and liberation is a bit like wanting somewhere to be both a nature reserve and a golf course. It’s no coincidence that the modern world sincerely believes we can have both; we can, somehow, have all the good things at once, with no contradictions. For “care” has two common meanings: an emotional one, in which we care about someone and a practical one in which we may need to care for them. This is the practical, often intimate, and sometimes gross work of nurturing, nursing and healing — work that usually falls to mothers where babies are concerned, and in general has historically been more the domain of women than men.

A central pillar of much feminist critique is the extent to which this ancient pattern is exploited today by a rapacious market society that takes the socially essential work of carers for granted even as it treats them as second-class. From Kollontai through Firestone to Lewis, the dream is of a world in which this aspect of “care” — the drudgery — is taken over by machines, or perhaps something abstract called “society”. This, the hope is, would free the emotional aspect of “care” to float free instead of being shackled to dull duty.

Firestone dreamed of a “home” where “all relationships would be based on love alone”. Lewis takes this further: instead of the arbitrary, unjust, asymmetrical distribution of love-resources (and also the material kind) within families, she suggests, we should devise “consensus-based modes of transgenerational cohabitation”.

This does, I suppose, sound utopian. But the flip side of socialising the work of care, so that the emotional one may be liberated, is that opt-in affection is also opt-out affection. What does “consensus-based” even mean where the care of a baby is concerned? It’s not “consensus” that gets a breastfeeding mother out of bed to her crying child at 3am after a few hours’ broken sleep. It’s an animal compulsion to care for our particular baby, which has a biological component and which we share with many other species.

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Good thing, too. Humans are imperfect and often unreliable. The pre-rational devotion that underwrites practical care of a baby is sometimes all that stands between a normally loving mother and the dark thoughts that can bubble up when we’re woken from deep sleep, by a screaming baby, for the twentieth time in a single night. Yes, it’s true: families can be a bit shit. But if we truly treated the care of babies as amenable to “liberation” (which is also to say, voluntaristic), a great many more infants would die.

Why even try? One of my rules of thumb for understanding both family politics, and the large-scale sort, is that what people say motivates them may be sincere, while also not being the whole picture. Utopians are, well, utopian — and often not wholly conscious of their own blind spots, to say nothing of the lurking goblins of self-interest. I have no doubt that many of those who have historically argued for family abolition, in the name of the greater human good, were sincere in their aspirations. When you map that onto how those individuals behaved, though, a more nuanced picture comes into view.

Alexandra Kollontai, for example, clearly had little appetite for dull domesticity: she left her first husband and abandoned their son to pursue public life as a socialist campaigner. And Marx certainly walked the walk on family abolition when it came to leaving the care of Freddy DeMuth to “society” — for all that this decision hardly looks like something anyone would wish to aspire to. Some might retort that Freddy was the fortunate one to have his family thus “abolished”; neither of Marx’s acknowledged daughters grew up to be happy adults, and both committed suicide.

Perhaps all we may learn from this is that (as the philosopher R.H. Tawney put it) freedom for the pike is death for the minnow. That is, not everyone is equally well-equipped to make the most of liberation. And freeing care from care doesn’t just liberate the overburdened. As the story of Freddy DeMuth illustrates, it also frees the irresponsible, the lascivious, the selfish or the morally cowardly from their obligations to even radically dependent others.

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Worse still, it “frees” those who need care from any hope that social pressure will be brought to bear on those who might otherwise be under pressure to provide it. All that’s left in the gap is what Firestone dreamed of: relationships “based on love alone”. But love in the absence of duty, social pressure, or raw animal attachment is a weak foundation — especially in those situations where providing care is a gruelling long-term slog. Firestone herself battled schizophrenia for decades as she aged, during which period her “sisterhood” fell away one by one, leaving her to die alone and impoverished. Her body wasn’t found for several days.

It is, of course, demonstrably true that the existence of families is no sure-fire guarantee that this will never happen. No one should ever rejoice in such suffering and alienation or suggest that Firestone in any way “deserved” it. But it’s far from clear that decoupling care from care does anything to make it less likely; quite the opposite, in fact. For the truth is that “care” in the practical sense will always be at odds with “liberation”. And as long as you pretend otherwise, and insist that it must coexist with absolute freedom, you’ll be cheerleading for a world where “caring for” someone needn’t involve ever having to care for them.

The suicide note left by Laura Marx, Karl’s second daughter, in 1911 is a chilling foretaste of what the prospects are, in a world where care is uncoupled from care, for those who find themselves to be a “burden”. She writes:

“Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyse my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others.”

Today, the practical effect of such liberation can be seen in the growing push for legal euthanasia, as a final remedy for anyone who perceives their position as Laura Marx did. In Canada, site of the world’s most permissive euthanasia regime, a growing body of evidence suggests that medically-assisted voluntary self-deletion is increasingly the option of choice for those so poor, friendless or defeated by obdurate bureaucracies of state “care” that continuing with their atomised (sorry, liberated) life no longer feels tenable.

To escape this trap, we need to think of relationships in terms of both obligation and love, rather than treating the two as mutually exclusive. Lewis’s inability (or refusal) to do this is clear in her reference to families as a place where “care is privatised”: a casual conflation of how families function with how businesses do, as though there’s no meaningful distinction between the permanent, unconditional relatedness of kinship and the transactional, deal-based kind that characterises the business world. In the book, she denounces Emily Oster’s explicit call to treat family life as a business, but seems herself unable to imagine anyone ever seeing it otherwise.

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Those self-styled “radicals” who seek to liberate love from obligation should not delude themselves that what they proposed is in any way meaningfully distinct from what the cold logic of the market already offers. The only difference is the insistence that if we wish hard enough, if only we can abolish human frailty, we might yet devise a system in which freedom for the strong will never result in the weak falling through the cracks. That the loneliness, selfishness, abandonment and cruelty which inevitably accompanies freedom for the pike could be transformed into cuddly abundance for all, including the most helpless or difficult-to-care-for minnow.

But this insistence is just that: a pipe dream that serves to advance the selfish interests of the market. For no other order is as perfectly designed to prioritising individual desires, or as averse to imposing coercive moral frameworks, as the heartless, lonely, atomised world of technocapital we already have. Liberating care from care delivers utopia only in theory. In practice, it’s mostly freedom for the biggest fish with the sharpest teeth. And at the end of life, as at the start, we’re all minnows.

Play it cool, I thought, as I passed the guards on my way to the elevators. Upstairs, a friendly producer explained that Gross recorded from a different location before leaving me alone in the room. My friend and co-author Roy Scranton sat in a third studio, in a different city. Since getting back from Iraq in 2007, I’d been pursued by the kind of cryptic, persistent mood that can sometimes foreshadow a profound insight or a mental breakdown. I was trying to adjust the headphones, which seemed to be getting tighter, when the interview started.

Gross asked which books we took with us overseas and I mentioned Dostoevsky, a few detective novelists, and then the French writer Michel Houellebecq and his novel Atomised, published in America under the title, The Elementary Particles. Appearing in France in 1998, the book caused an immediate sensation and generated a second wave of press in 2001 when the English translation came out. Years later, I read it at night inside a corrugated metal shipping container that had been converted into what the US army calls a containerised housing unit, pronounced “choo”, where I lived on a forward operating base in Southern Iraq for roughly nine months in 2007. It was, I told Gross, “a deliriously misanthropic, very interesting novel about the dead-end of modern existence”.

For Houellebecq, life is made up of a few actual events surrounded by a glacial immensity of mitochondria and other microscopic insects, and the distant spooky action of space. Wherever consciousness and sentiment appear like gnats in the cosmos, they are likely to register in feelings of sadness, desperation, and loss.

A previous generation’s French novelist of ideas, Albert Camus, opened his 1942 book The Stranger with a line meant to illustrate the numbness and alienation at the heart of contemporary man’s existential condition: “Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.” Houellebecq might have followed this with a long paragraph narrated like a nature documentary about mother’s corpse undergoing a process of cellular decomposition and how the laws of quantum physics make it impossible to determine the exact moment of her death. At which point, switching back to the protagonist’s point of view, he might consider that having never been loved by his mother, he would never feel true love himself. He would then experience a momentary impulse to weep, stifled yet impossible to ignore, before attempting to masturbate.

“I’d like to believe that the self is an illusion,” says Bruno, the older of the two half-brothers who are the protagonists of Atomised, “but if it is, it’s a pretty painful one.” It is an undignified view of life, often funnier than this passage indicates, but still utterly lacking in the qualities that allow critics to honour certain books as “humane” and “empathetic”. Yet it captured something essential about the experience of living through the end of the 20th century. The romance of Houellebecq’s writing lies in its author’s willingness to go past decency into pornographic wretchedness, where, in his character’s ultimate disappointments, he captures a convincing sentimentality.

He was already well-known when I mentioned him to Gross: both as a writer and as a provocateur who said terrible things about women, defended the patriarchy, sneered at liberalism, made drunken passes at interviewers, and launched glib insults at Muslims. Yet it was still possible in the long-ago world of the second Obama administration to comment on the literary qualities of Houellebecq’s novels without saying anything about their author’s political impact. It even seemed reasonable at the time to assume that he did not have a political impact.

That soon changed. In 2015, Houellebecq published a new novel, Submission, that depicted the Muslim Brotherhood taking power in France and remaking the republic as the centre of a new Islamic world civilisation. The book was released on the same day that jihadists murdered 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and became an instant bestseller. Its author was crowned the defining novelist of his time. A triumph, and yet, in the course of his ascension, Houellebecq has ceased to be regarded principally as a writer and come to be seen instead as a prophet. The author whose work anticipated or channelled the Bali bombings, Brexit, the alt-Right, the Gilet Jaunes, and other characteristic developments of the new millennium was assumed to be acting more as a medium than as a crafter of fiction.

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Yet Houellebecq’s prophetic streak seems to be a direct result of his disinterest in politics. “The idea that political history could play any part in my own life was still disconcerting, and slightly repellent,” says the narrator of Submission. By ignoring politics and focusing instead on the intersection of sex and metaphysics in the seething inner lives of middle-class men, Houellebecq mapped out the ultimate concerns that — precisely because they had been systematically excluded from the politics of modern Western nations — ended up becoming the vectors of violent rebellion and populist revolt. Above all, he saw how despair and sexual resentment would be at the heart of any political challenge to liberal democracy.

Along with politics, Houellebecq has ignored the standard markers of literary seriousness. His books lack subtlety and roundedness. They eschew both social realism and formal inventiveness, while fixedly pursuing the stunted emotional logic of their characters. They are novels of ideas that treat history as a drama in which individuals and civilisations act out the gestalt of their age, at most half-aware of it. The rise and fall of civilisations are driven by what the narrator of Atomised calls “metaphysical mutations”. These are “radical, global transformations, such as the shift from antiquity to Christendom and from Christendom to rational materialism”. Such shifts manifest in the creation of historically representative people and institutions, such as, for instance, the writer Michel Houellebecq in France or National Public Radio in America.

While other writers have explored nihilism through the prism of violence and death, Houellebecq’s unique vision sees it as an infestation of sex and desire. Each of his books — with the exception of his most recent — dramatises a connection between unrestricted sexual freedom, the rationalistic secular worldview, and civilisational suicide.

Facing man’s guilt for killing God, Nietzsche asked: “How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves?” Houellebecq’s answer is that individuals in the throes of deterministic, rationalist materialism become pleasure-maximising objects by dissolving all human bonds. The most desirable reward themselves with orgies while the rest seek consolation in whatever kinds of sex they can get until those dry up, at which point there’s no more reason to live. In the name of freedom and self-realisation, mothers abandon their children (according to legend, this is the very tragedy that spawned the writing career of Houellebecq). Ordinary people who would once have raised families in the state of mild contentment that sustained generations before them instead waste their years pursuing novel sexual techniques that end in the most appalling sterility. The blitzed-out flower child was good marketing material for the generation of 1968, but when the mask is ripped off, the true face of free love is revealed to be the Manson family painting the walls with blood.

The death of God ends up clearing the field for the conquest of the marketplace. Starting with his first novel, 1994’s Extension du Domaine de la Lutte (“extension of the domain of the struggle”, but translated as Whatever), Houellebecq attacked unfettered capitalism: “In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.” Once the early promises of globalisation were crushed, he would later write: “Whole social classes fell through the net and joined the ranks of the unemployed. But the savage sexual competition did not abate as a result — quite the reverse.”

The combined attack on liberal social values and the subjugation of interpersonal relations to market forces led many to label Houellebecq a reactionary. There are various ways to be a political reactionary but all share the belief that we live in a fallen period caused by some terrible human invention and that there was a better time when people lived by the right laws of God or nature, or both.

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But reactionaries face an unresolvable problem. It is never clear how much of modernity has to be rejected to restore the world to its rightful order. A moderate conservative who starts by wanting to roll back the excesses of sixth-wave gender-ideology feminism finds that, upon inspection, the first wave is equally incompatible with their interpretation of the Bible. The temptation is always to go further in search of the lost innocence — behind the French Revolution lies the invention of fire — and is thus always prone to seeing the world’s complete undoing as the only means to its redemption.

Houellebecq often seems to fall into this trap. In one book, he rails against the dehumanising wages of neoliberalism, then in his next the problem seems to go deeper, back into the heart of the Enlightenment, before finally it is Christianity itself, which, the narrator of Submission, echoing Nietzsche, says is, “at the end of the day, a feminine religion”. The next step would seem to be to look to nature itself and worship in pagan fashion what the poet Wallace Stevens called that “old chaos of the sun”. But Houellebecq is not really a common reactionary, and he despises nature even more intensely than he does hippies. “All in all, nature deserved to be wiped out in a holocaust — and man’s mission on earth was probably to do just that,” observes Bruno’s younger half-brother Michel.

“We could perhaps attack the sun, deprive the universe of it, or use it to set fire to the world — those would be real crimes,” wrote the imprisoned Marquis de Sade in the mid-18th century. For de Sade, according to Camus’s study of him in The Rebel, “nature is sex; his logic leads him to a lawless universe where the only master is the inordinate energy of desire.” The opposite has been true for Houellebecq, who once wrote that: “The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles… And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movements of the elementary particles.” Unlike de Sade, who exalted in crime as the only true freedom, Houellebecq is too much of a moralist to enjoy being a libertine. If human actions are free, as he once claimed, then he knows this is only because they are meaningless.

Where does that leave Houellebecq? Like the man standing in the back of the line at the brothel who howls about the immorality of it all while waiting for his turn and then weeps when it is over. He comes to see religion as the only workable answer to modernity. But try as he might, he cannot imagine actually believing in the stuff. Religion may be essential to preserving what little grace life is capable of offering, but that is not the same as believing the commandments of God are true. As Micah Meadowcroft noted in an insightful essay on Houellebecq: “The shared preoccupation of author and characters with sex is revealed upon reflection to not be the dreary gratification of a pervert novelist but the heart of the matter. In the absence of a voice speaking loudly to this world of the next in words comprehensible to those who live here, this-world satisfaction re-emerges as the only motive force giving coherence to life.” Nearly destroyed by secularism, only a God can rescue the holy power of sex.

More like a God-haunted nihilist than a believer, Houellebecq talks a great deal about religion but sees it only through abstractions. Thus, for instance, there is nothing made in his work of the fact that the Hebrew Bible already covered much of the same ground when God destroyed humanity with the flood, in what the great Medieval rabbinic scholar Rashi judged to be a punishment for rampant sexual immorality.

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Rather than worry about the flood, Houellebecq dreams of metaphysical mutations, the only means through which he can imagine the world changing. In the Nineties, when he was writing Atomised, he found Western civilisation so thoroughly exhausted that its salvation could only come through transhumanist genetic technologies. Twenty years later in Submission, still consumed by the sexual apocalypse, he offered the Islamic takeover of France as an ironic solution to Western decadence. In the end, the novel’s protagonist, who has lost all pleasure in sex and thus his will to live, submits to Islam because it promises a harem. Polygamy is as close as he can get to the possibility of having a normal loving family life, which is what he really wants in spite of himself.

More recently, Houellebecq has appeared caught between religious and romantic impulses. In Serotonin, published in 2019, the world is as bleak as ever, yet the author is beginning to believe that there may be something more to the universe than atoms and chance. In the book’s final chapter, its protagonist reflects on, “those surges of love that flow into our chests and take our breath away — those illuminations, those ecstasies, inexplicable if we consider our biological nature”. The 19th-century Romantic movement, which birthed the modern belief in love as an overpowering passion began as a movement of religious reawakening emphasising man’s personal relationship to God. In his own unhurried way, Houellebecq is retracing those steps, starting with the personal tragedy of sexual disappointment and finding its ultimate source in the loss of the sacred.

Only a few months before my appearance on the radio, I met my wife. Now that I have children, I hardly think about the end of the world anymore. Houellebecq, who once imagined that love, even familial love, had been so thoroughly desecrated by modernity that the only escape was to reengineer human nature at the molecular level, was reportedly married for the third time in 2018 at the age of 62. It is not too late for him to put down the books and start a family.

 ***

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My first instinct is to cheer along. This is a woman who cites Roger Scruton among her influences: what’s not to like? But things are not as they seem. For me, Meloni says all the right things. And yet she means by them almost the opposite of what they should mean. This is a very dangerous woman.

On the very same day that Italians were going to the polls to give Meloni a thumping victory, the Vatican was celebrating the church’s “World Day of Migrants and Refugees”. The Holy Father and the new Prime Minister would have a very awkward Bible study session. Where Meloni calls for a full naval blockade of Africa to stop migrants coming to Europe, Jesus says, in St Matthew’s Gospel: “Come unto me all ye that are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.”

Pope Francis explained it thus: “Migrants are to be welcomed, accompanied, promoted and integrated.” This is the Pope whose first official trip outside of Rome, back in July 2013, was to the island of Lampedusa, the southernmost point of Italy, where he met refugees and prayed with them. A few months later, off Lampedusa’s coast, a small boat carrying 500 people seeking sanctuary in Europe caught fire; 311 of them died. Local people came to the help of those who survived. A carpenter named Francesco Tuccio decided to make small crosses out of the boat’s splintered wreckage and give them to the survivors. These Lampedusa Crosses have come to symbolise a very different sort of Christianity from that being espoused by Meloni. She says she “doesn’t understand” the Pope.

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And just as Meloni wants to twist Christianity against migrants and those of other faiths — “No to the violence of Islam,” she has said — she also twists the concepts of family and nation to suit her own cruel ideology. I advocate for the family because it is the most successful and versatile nest for mutual support and the nurture of children, regardless of its specific structure. Family doesn’t signify some heteronormative Fifties prison, but — for most of us — a place of love and inclusion, where difference is more successfully tolerated than anywhere else. There are blended families, adopted families, families in which parents have different religions, families where parents are of the same sex. But Meloni would reject many of them. “Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby,” she says.

To add the caveat “natural” to the word “family” is to diminish the potential that the family has for generous re-invention. One of Meloni’s colleagues recently called for an episode of Peppa Pig to be banned because it depicts co-parenting lesbian polar bears sitting down to eat spaghetti together while a little polar bear explains: “I live with my mummy and my other mummy.” This is precisely what it means to be family for some people. Ironically, that episode is called: “Families”. It is not an attack on families but a celebration of them.

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And then there’s Meloni’s twisted idea of nation. Even the Labour Party is singing “God save the King” these days, with only the magic grandpa grumbling away that this is “excessively nationalist”. Not that he would think that the NHS is “excessively nationalist”, nor an extensive programme of nationalisation. The concept of nation and its extensions is not the preserve of retired army colonels longing to bring back the days of flogging and national service. But when Meloni mentions the nation, it is hard not to notice its darker undertones. She talks of the threat of “ethnic substitution”, and of the need to defend our “genetic code”.

Here is where things turn nasty. For while the nation is a good thing and, I believe, the epitome of democratic legitimacy, ethnic nationalism is the very essence of fascism. And Meloni knows this: she comes from the birthplace of fascism. Her party grew out of Mussolini’s. And while a party’s past cannot be allowed to determine its present — the Democrats were the most enthusiastic supporters of slavery — such a past should make a political party all the more scrupulous about what it says, especially when discussing race. And especially Jews.

When Meloni repeatedly denounces George Soros as the enemy, and speaks of her resistance to becoming a “perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators”, she is not just attacking capitalism, she is subtly eliding financial oppression and Jews. The idea of financial speculators preying upon good Christian men and women is one of the oldest antisemitic themes in the book. Saying she supports Israel means little when she’s spouting stuff like this.

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At the end of her 2019 speech, Meloni quotes from one of her heroes, G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton called himself a Zionist because he thought getting Jews to go to Israel was a good way of ridding them from Europe. He believed that “19th-century capitalism was essentially usury, hence anti-Christian, and the prominence of Jews in high finance merely underlined that capitalism was alien to Christian culture,” as leading Chesterton expert Professor Colin Holmes explains. Like Chesterton, Meloni still sees Jews as the merchants of Venice, seeking their pound of flesh from decent, hard-working Christians.

As someone who passionately believes in family, faith and flag, it saddens me to see these concepts used as dog-whistles for some sort of racial and cultural superiority. Properly understood, these are all inclusive virtues, but they have been twisted out of all recognition by the unscrupulous addressing the fearful. Which is why it is all the more important that family, faith and flag are defended — and not just from the sneering Left. They need to be defended just as much from the divisive fixations of the ideological Right.

For Home Counties reactionaries, there have been absences from key votes on gay equality and gay adoption, and scepticism expressed in print about gay marriage: “If gay marriage was ok — and I was uncertain on the issue — then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men; or indeed three men and a dog.” There are also suggestions that some in Johnson’s camp falsely represented a rival for his Henley seat as gay, in order to present Johnson as the more palatable candidate.

For the liberal metrosexual Londoner, meanwhile, there was eventual backing for gay marriage, highly publicised appearances at Stonewall award ceremony presentations, the return of the rainbow flag above the Foreign Office after a ban by Philip Hammond, and the frankly terrifying sight of Johnson in a pink Stetson at a Pride parade. And for the ever-present peanut gallery in Johnson’s head, there have been plenty of gags on the way to some other political target: “tank-topped bum boys” as a means of lampooning Peter Mandelson in 1998, or describing Polly Toynbee in 2007 as “the defender and friend of… every gay and lesbian outreach worker, every clipboard-toter and pen-pusher and form-filler whose function has been generated by mindless regulation”.

For most of his career, these lurches in attitude have occupied roughly distinct phases with occasional overlap, depending on who he was trying hardest to impress at the time. The inconsistency has perhaps been somewhat masked by Johnson’s capacity to induce selective amnesia in those susceptible to him. Recently, though, the wild haymaking on LGBT+ issues has become more obvious and more incoherent — forced into the light because of the surrounding political fuss about gender identity policies and their effects.

For when properly understood — as most MPs still do not — this controversy exposes a tension between, on the one hand, the goals of official organisations claiming to speak for gays and lesbians, and on the other the interests of many gays and lesbians as they themselves conceive of them. And clearly, Johnson — and perhaps the Tory party more generally — does not know which way to jump.

In this antagonistic context, the usual lazy progressive gestures from politicians are not going to get the crowd-pleasing results they once might have done. Put a rainbow flag up on a government building and the grassroots automatically see it as captured by Stonewall — as indeed, it often is. A politician may parrot what looks like a safe and indeed utterly vacuous tautology on Twitter — “trans rights are human rights”, say, or “love means love” — and yet the grassroots still will respond furiously, not because they disagree with the sentiment, but because they know exactly which organisation told the politician to express it and why.

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By Robert Saunders

Into this conflict, Johnson appears to have wandered either unaware or indifferent, banking on his usual strategy of being all things to all Tory voters and hoping that nobody notices the mismatch. For instance, at the beginning of October last year, he attended a Stonewall-organised event at the Conservative Party conference, listening to his wife give a supportive on-message speech in familiar Stonewall-approved jargon, and waxing expansively, if not entirely accurately, that “being LGBT+” is “still a crime in 71 countries” and in 11 countries is “punishable by death, just because of who you love” (er.. Carrie, I think you might mean homosexual people). A mere two weeks later he was publicly backing the LGB Alliance — an organisation of which I was then a trustee, whose aim is to protect the rights of same sex-attracted people, specifically. The fact that the aims of these two organisations are diametrically opposed to one another seemed to pass him by.

Since then, his government has lurched abruptly from, first, pushing for a Stonewall-favoured ban on “conversion therapy” for non-standard gender identities — a ban which, experts feared, would criminalise talking therapies for young people confused about their gender identity, including many gay and lesbian youths — to backtracking on the proposal, thereby pleasing practically nobody in the process, and precipitating the collapse of a flagship international LGBT+ conference the government was supposed to be hosting. And at no point during this turbulent period has Johnson indicated any real grasp on why any of this might matter, or moved much beyond spouting with great enthusiasm whatever script an adviser just hastily handed him.

And yet I think there is perhaps a deeper and more interesting problem here than the short-term priorities of career politicians, bad as that is for politics generally. For the cynical prevarication of their leader is at least partly facilitated by a genuine lack of clarity at the conceptual level about how modern conservatism should view gay and lesbian people, and their political interests.

On the one hand, there are the sexual libertarians in the Tory party, prioritising personal freedom above all else. In this, they take themselves to be broadly in line with liberalism generally, though perhaps unlike them, most sensible liberals are willing at least to have a conversation about what happens when the desired freedoms of particular individuals or groups clash. For sexual libertarians, there is a clear and simple line to be taken on sex and gender if at all possible: let the people be free, to sleep with who they want, wear what they want, do what they want to their bodies surgically or medically, and go where they want to in physical and social space.

Their stance seems well represented by MP Crispin Blunt, who recently wrote in favour of the conversion therapy ban for gender identity, and against his own government, by connecting the issue with freedom: “We have no choice but to work to sustain our personal freedoms, to continue to make the case that these freedoms are good for all, economically and socially, in our societies and help those who languish under discrimination and criminalisation win their freedom to the benefit of all”. The present iteration of Stonewall bureaucrats apparently agrees, broadly speaking, though they seem completely unwilling to examine how the constant drive to legislate to protect the freedoms of one particular group (e.g. trans people) might curtail freedoms for those in other groups (e.g. gays and lesbians, or women).

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On the other hand, there are those conservatives more concerned with preserving social order and building a cohesive society than with pursuing personal freedom. Whether these self-describe as One Nation Conservatives or Red Tories or something else, they stress continuity with past traditions and the importance of producing laws and policies grounded in people’s existing values, rather than trying to impose certain elite values only from above.

They also tend to be concerned with preserving traditional family structures in the name of social stability. Though they may not admit it, for this kind of conservative, gays and lesbians — and indeed trans people too — pose a philosophical and political problem, because it’s unclear on what grounds their specific interests should be promoted, over and above the provision of basic human rights. Aside from liberal appeals to personal freedom, there is no pre-existing cultural norm in the UK that you might appeal to in order to justify two women marrying, or two men adopting a child.

On the contrary, what you will tend to find, and particularly in more cohesive traditional communities, is strong suspicion of any such arrangements, and even disgust and fear. And in fact, it’s worse than this, because from the perspective of the traditionalist, appealing to personal freedom in order to justify gay and lesbian rights is likely to open the door to the destruction of other traditional social values and norms in the name of freedom too. And in that, they in fact seem to be right. Put comically, this was presumably Johnson’s point when he discussed the perceived slippery slope from marrying two men to marrying three men and a dog.

This tension within conservatism is rarely confronted in this context — the temptation is often just to stick a rainbow on it and cross the fingers — but I think it is felt keenly by some lesbians and gays left in the middle, between crazy liberalising ambitions of others on their behalf, and the disapproving stares of traditionalists. The modern Left can’t help them either, because it too contains within itself a version of this tension — between the Left-liberals, focused on breaking down traditional cultural norms in the name of progress, and the older socialist Left, comfortable with traditional family structures and so uncomfortable with homosexuality.

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At the grassroots, many gays and lesbians can see clearly what damage is being done by sexual libertarians in the name of freedom around sex and gender identity: medicalising gay children, ruining women’s sport, and bringing inappropriately sexualised materials into schools, for instance. But equally, gay people can’t take solace in pretending that they seamlessly fit into a mostly heterosexual society, even when they try very hard to do so — or that they don’t need a positive political argument to justify their place there. And since they do need an argument, the argument from personal freedom looks to many like the best they’ve got.

A different possibility is to mimic an idealised form of heterosexual lifestyle, differently filled out — that is, to go for the marriage and the kids in a stable home, but with same-sex parents. But equally, there’s no overcoming the difference homosexuality makes to the traditional possibilities of reproduction. And when gays and lesbians attempt to get what they need from the opposite sex in order to “fit in” in this way, whether via sperm donation or surrogacy or something else, they quickly run up against a confrontation with tradition once again. Here too, they need an argument to justify themselves, and here too, the appeal to personal freedom comes calling once again as an apparently compelling option.

Stuck between dangerously unconstrained freedom on the one hand, and dangerously hostile tradition on the other, what the situation of lesbians and gays arguably exposes is the deep ideological fault-lines within modern British conservatism — and even within modern politics generally — hiding within plain sight all along. No wonder the politicians stick to meaninglessly trite mantras. Trans rights are human rights. Love is love.

Contemporary conservatives are especially inclined to embrace this image of the family, although it is not entirely clear why. The “nuclear family” is not the same as the traditional Christian or Jewish family that existed before the two World Wars. On the contrary, the nuclear family is closer to being an invention of industrialisation and the 20th century.

And there are good reasons to think that this form of family is, in fact, a failed experiment, one that has done immeasurable harm to almost everyone: to women and men, children and grandparents. The time has come for us to consider retiring the ideal of the nuclear family, and replacing it with something that looks more like the family of Christian and Jewish tradition.

What is the traditional family? I’d like to propose five principles by which the traditions descended from the Bible channelled the natural tendencies of men and women to establish what I’m calling the traditional family:

1. The lifelong bond of a man and a woman.

The traditional family is built upon the lifelong bond of a man and a woman. Contrary to what is often said, such a bond is not the dictate of untamed nature. Indeed, there is nothing that is more contrary to human nature, and in particular to male nature, than a man marrying a woman with the intention of foregoing all other sexual interests for the rest of his life. But by this artifice, biblical religion summons up the forces of loyalty, honour, and the urge toward purity and holiness, turning these against the urge to seek sexual gratification outside of marriage; and harnessing them to the project of establishing a strong household and giving it permanence and life. In this way, marriage brings peace to the broader society, which no longer tolerates barbaric scenes of men shedding blood over women, and of loose children who know nothing of their father. Instead, these competitive energies are turned to the building up of the household and all its members. This institution of lifelong marriage is indeed the first pillar of what we consider a civilised life.

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2. The lifelong bond between a father and mother and their children.

Similarly, the traditional family is built upon the lifelong bond between a father and mother and their children. Many suppose that this bond is natural as well, but this is not the case either. Children are by nature in awe of their parents in early childhood, but as their body and spirit grow to adult proportions, they are often filled with self-regard and treat their parents with defiance and contempt. In this way, nature prepares children to leave their parents and lead an independent life. Yet in the traditional family, the principle of honouring one’s father and mother establishes a lifelong relationship between parents and children that is much like marriage. By this artifice, the forces of honour and loyalty are turned against the natural tendency of adolescents to grow contemptuous and abandon their parents. This permits children to continue learning from their parents throughout life, forming a permanent community of interlocking generations; and barbaric scenes of the elderly cast aside with none to care for them, and of children preying on their parents to advance themselves, are banished.

3. The traditional family is a business enterprise.

Because liberal society considers one’s “career” to be the defining characteristic of the individual, we have largely forgotten that the traditional family was usually a business enterprise. The average family was engaged in farming, commerce, light manufacture, or a profession; and the family business was usually conducted close to the home, if not within the home itself. Often both parents were deeply involved with the family business, a custom that is vividly described in the Bible. Parents taught their children their business, and children gained self-esteem as well as practical skills by contributing actively to the family livelihood. Where children went to school, this was balanced against responsibilities to the family business. And the family itself was often extended by the informal adoption of unmarried relations, or of young men and women who were hired to help with the business and had no other home.

4. The traditional family consists of multiple generations in daily contact.

The traditional family often consisted of three generations (or even four) in daily contact with one another. The bond between parents and children was not yet imagined as something that undergoes a rupture when a child turns 18 or 21, and so the relationship of parents to children continued throughout life. And where there is no rupture between adult children and their parents, grandchildren grow up with grandparents and perhaps great-grandparents. Thus young children were able to learn the skill of honouring their father and mother by watching their parents do it. It also meant that in raising children, grandparents were often a crucial presence, providing stores of wisdom and attention to children who learned to honour earlier generations as an integral part of growing up.

5. The traditional family is part of a broader congregation.

The traditional family was part of a broader loyalty group — the clan, which in later versions became the community or congregation — with which it was concerned on a daily basis. Such communities or congregations often included adult siblings and cousins who had chosen to live in proximity to one another, assisting one another. But many members of the clan, community, or congregation were not kin relations in this sense. Rather, they were members of an alliance of families, who together formed a kind of adopted and extended family, which came together to celebrate sabbaths and festivals, to teach and train the community’s children, to provide relief to those in distress, to improve their communal economic assets, and, where needed, to establish security and justice as well.

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Of course, not every family was successful along all five of these dimensions. Nevertheless, once these principles are examined together, it becomes clear that the traditional Jewish or Christian family was a far more active, extensive, and powerful organisation than the family as it exists today.

As anyone who has lived among such families can immediately see, the nuclear family is a weakened and much diminished version of the traditional family, one that is lacking most of the resources needed effectively to pursue the purposes of the traditional family. When this conception of the family became normative in America and elsewhere after the Second World War, it gave birth to a world of detached suburban homes connected to distant places of employment and schools by trains, automobiles, and buses. In other words, the physical design of large portions of the country reflected a newly rationalised conception of what a family is.

In this new reality, there were no longer any business enterprises in the home for the family to pursue together. Instead, fathers would “go to work”, seceding from their families during their productive hours each day. Children were required to “go to school”, seceding from the family during their own productive hours. Young adults would then “go away to college”, cutting themselves off from family influence during the critical years in which they were supposed to reach maturity. Similarly, grandparents were excised from this vision of the home, being “retired” to “retirement communities” or “nursing homes”.

Under this new division of labour, mothers were assigned the task of remaining by themselves in the house each day, attempting to “make a home” using the minimalist ingredients that the structure of the nuclear family had left them. Much of this involved increasingly desperate efforts to keep adolescents somehow attached to the family — even though they now shared virtually no productive purposes with their parents, grandparents, and broader community or congregation; and instead spent their days seeking honour among other adolescents. The resulting rupture between parents and their children was poignantly described in numerous books and films beginning in the Fifties. But these works rarely touched upon the reconstruction of the family, which had done so much to inflame the natural tendency of adolescents toward agonised rebellion, while depriving parents of the tools necessary to emerge from these years with the family hierarchy strengthened.

But mothers had the worst of this new family life. Some did succeed in maintaining the cohesion of their families in a world in which grandparents and other family relations had grown impossibly distant, the family business had disappeared from the home, and the congregation or community with its sabbaths and festivals had likewise been reduced to something accessed by automobile once each week, like a drive-in movie. However, many other “housewives” despaired and turned to the feminist movement, which, not without reason, declared the nuclear family to be a tomb for women.

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Feminist writers were mistaken in supposing that the reconstructed household of the post-War era was itself the traditional family. But they were right that the life of a woman spending most of her productive hours in an empty house, which had been stripped of most of the human relationships, activities, and purposes that had filled the life of the traditional family, was one that many women found too painful and difficult to bear. Many of these mothers quickly joined their husbands and children in leaving the home during the day — thus completing the final transformation of the post-traditional “nuclear family” into a hollowed out shell, a failed imitation of the traditional institution of the family.

Much has been said about the dissolution of the family in liberal societies. Both scholarship and polemical treatments tend to focus on a number of important symptoms of this dissolution: marriage now happens later in life or not at all; the birth rate has declined; divorce, childbirth outside marriage and fatherless households are now all common.

These and many other indicators reflect a widespread failure to hand down the traditional institution of the family to future generations. But very little is said about the disease itself, which is the removal from the physical household of much of what the family was a little more than a century ago. Now that the household is no longer the location of a common business enterprise, of devotion to God and the study of Scripture, of a direct responsibility for the education of the young, of a direct responsibility for honouring and caring for the old, and of significant responsibilities for the establishment and growth of the community and congregation, why should anyone be surprised that what remains is neither terribly sturdy nor especially attractive to the young?

If I had been writing this a few years ago, I would have assumed that most of my readers would have had few experiences that confirm my argument. But the Covid-19 pandemic has changed this. The extended closings of businesses and schools, churches and synagogues, have offered many people some insight into the potential power of the traditional family. Suddenly, they have found themselves conducting their business at home, their schooling at home, and their religious life at home. Suddenly, many young adults have found themselves returning, over great distances, to live with older and younger family members or to be in close proximity to them. Suddenly, many families have discovered the healing joys of preparing and eating meals together according to a regular routine, and the unparalleled riches that conversations in such contexts can bring into our lives.

I know that in many cases, these experiences were not always pleasant. Not everyone lives in a physical home that was built for such an experiment, and having to make a living and educate one’s children under such conditions has often been a genuine hardship. Yet in spite of these challenges, or rather, because of them, many have had their first glimpse of what a family, thrown together and having to rely on its own resources, is capable of achieving when it takes on a more extensive array of common purposes. In particular, many have experienced the kind of heightened cohesion that can come of it. In other words, many have had their first glimpse of what the family was like when it was a strong political institution, in which generations worked together to create a permanent community, very much resembling a little tribe or nation.

Perhaps this difficult event has paved the way for us to think more carefully about what has been lost — and about what each of us can do to make restoration a reality.

***

This essay is adapted from Yoram Hazony’s new book Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery).

Two things. As these are not philosophies but tricks, they are less likely to affront; one can always say of a trick (and what are techniques but elaborated tricks?), “I just learned this last week…”

First: when the baby gets you up in the middle of the night, do not look at the clock. Anyone who’s had children will nod in understanding — you’re up anyway, why pay twice?

The second trick is The Designated Criminal.

My notion of hell is the cross-country road trip with the whole damn family. Here everything, of course, is always going wrong. Some kid is complaining, spouses are feuding about directions, and all is misery. Now this traveler and now that offends against reason and good order and everyone ends up blaming Father, who, as the sole voice of reason, will now turn belligerent. Hot, tired, weary, angry, thirsty and lost, the car rolls on.

How to get from Coast to Coast? Appeals for calm (from Mother), obedience (that’s right), fellow-feeling, and so on will not avail. But a technique (trick) may. It is The Designated Criminal.

On setting out the family must establish a rotation. Each car member, then, on his appointed day, will be The Designated Criminal. On his lucky day, everything that goes wrong in the car is his fault. The affronted family are happily then leagued against the diabolical offender in their midst.

It works like a charm.

But The Designated Criminal may also be practised as oppression. For there are families and other organisms which employ the technique not as a means of maintaining esprit-de-corps, but of exercising control. Here the criminal is designated once and for all time, and will live and die in his chains.

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In the co-dependant family one child or parent is always in the wrong. We have all seen it and some have been taxed with participating in the loathsome farce: that Dad is a fool, Mom is a dunderhead, Little Bob is a lazy good-for-nothing, Little Suzy is a pre-pubescent whore and if she doesn’t wear more modest clothes she will end on the street, and so on.

And we know of the continual indictment of The Jews, the Witch Trials of Salem and McCarthy, the chattel slavery of Black Americans, and the continuation of that vile racism as the indictment of Whites.

The mechanism of the Designated Criminal can be used both for social equilibrium, in the car, or, politically, for disruption of the body politic. The first case, The Orderly Rotation of Blame, is the essential engine of democracy. The Game’s Rules (The Constitution) are designed to ensure the periodic exchange of power. The Ins and the Outs, and their adherents and dupes, may not understand the transfer of power as a game; but they are involved in one as much as the folks in the station wagon.

The motorists enjoy a process which elevates family unity over individual discomfort; the voters, the self-importance of saving the world from mindless fools. But it’s the same game.

If played according to the rules the rotation of power promotes the health and longevity of the organism. The Ins are allowed to tax the limits of legitimate incumbency, the Outs to misuse the permitted latitudes of opposition. And then, as in a football game, offense and defence shift.

But what if the game is not played according to Hoyle?

What if a player or contingent takes advantage of the rules themselves to achieve a goal other than balance? What if put-upon Dad, for example, says, “I know which Young Traveller is today’s Designated Criminal, but Samantha has just done something so egregious that I am going to suspend the rules and humiliate her”.

Readers will feel the affront of the interjection. As will not only young Samantha, but the whole family. For they had agreed to suspend their individual feelings in favour of group unity. And Dad has just proclaimed that they were fools to do so — that they had made a bargain which, it seems, the car’s driver reserved the right to abrogate, and, thus, that anyone may be the next-accused.

Now, the once-happy car, all occupants free to enjoy not only the trip but the game, are forced into co-dependence. The game is over, and the Ref (of whose existence the car was previously unaware) has ruled that actual indictment of the other is now the order of the day and those not supporting the new rule will suffer. The enjoyment of Free Speech has been superseded by the necessity of obedience to power. The car has just experienced Terror.

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The occupants, now, do not know what the new rules are, but only that they, having been changed once, may continue to be changed at will, by those possessing or bidding for power. Now, rather than the joy of improvisation (of the communal comedy), the rule of silence, obedience and denunciation is in force.

This is the state of the sick, co-dependant family. Here it is not that some things may be false, but that all things must be false. For if the subordinate members do not know what is and what is not permitted, they must devote themselves, in preference to any productive activity, to protection from power.

Far worse than the frowns of the car which does not know The Designated Criminal we now have the false smiles and the sad head shakings of the sick family, which is to say, of the Left.

When we know that it’s our turn on the electoral ducking stool tomorrow, we, when in power, may moderate our behaviour. In a crumbling Democracy, the power-mad, like Dad taking the reins, have come to the Dictator’s realisation. That is, “Wait a second. All I have to do is rig it so I can hold my seat indefinitely”. This, of course, is the aperçu of most every politician from dogcatcher to President, down through time. (George III said of Washington that if he chose to relinquish the Presidency he would be the greatest man who ever lived.)

***

One cannot credit the Politicians of the Left with even the delusion that they are Doing Good. And, if they do, then what? They did not take an oath to do good, but to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

Must they come to bend and break the rules in favour of 1) their good ideas, 2) the necessity of staying in office, 3) theft? Of course. That’s why we have elections. To roll the dice. The co-dependant, terrified society comes to think that, having achieved the perfection of leadership, it’s a grand idea to call it quits, abolish the electoral college, mail ballots to everyone on earth, require no voter identification, import new voters, and so on.

Just as the inspired politicians see that perpetual hegemony might be had by mere suspension of their Oath; their dupes, the electorate, learn to suspend their reason, and substitute hatred of the indicted for their new-found fear of power — a fear so powerful it must be relegated to the unconscious.

Just like the children in the car.

When Dad trashes the rules he changes the whole point of the exercise. The building of family happiness and unity (which, we assume, was, after all, the whole purpose of the trip) becomes an indoctrination; and, the child sees, safety must now be his primary concern. He may keep silent, or join in the condemnation of Little Trevor, but should he object, “what about the Game?” he is, most certainly, now the new Criminal.

Our electorate is split into the affronted Right and the supine Left. Those who wish to preserve our Constitutional Republic, its rules, and the culture from which they spring, are indicted by those in momentary power (both political and asserted) ad-lib.

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There is no merit in supporting various contemporary blasphemies (“Birthing Parent”, and so on). Unless they are untrue. The merit comes from the affiant’s vocal sacrifice of his reason, and, so, of his self-respect, in support of The Cause.

This is the contemporary terror. Not that we’re faced with the enormities, the crimes, delusions, and lies of a Politician (when were we not?), but that we are now frightened of whomever was screaming last.

From “New Business Item 39” posted on the National Education Association’s website on July 5, 2021: “The N.E.A. will provide an already-created, in-depth study that criticises empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeniety, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarcy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of oppression at the intersections of society.”

This is the country’s largest Teachers Union. What do these words mean? That the teachers will be put in charge of criticising. Whom? Whomever the N.E.A. designates.

And how might one, however convinced, ensure that he will not transgress the rules? There are no rules, for the categories are infinitely expansible. (Larry Elder, an African American running for Governor of California, and a lifelong champion of America and of his race, was called “the Black Face of White Supremacy,” L.A. Times, August 20, 2021.) And what in the world are “the intersections of society”?

In Woody Allen’s film Sleeper (1973) he is transported to the future. There he learns that the world he knew came to grief in 1989. He asks how and is told: “A man called Albert Shanker got his hands on a nuclear warhead.” Albert Shanker was the head of the United Foundation of Teachers, and then the American Federation of Teachers.

This may be the rock on which the Left comes to grief: the insistence on infecting one’s children with hatred. Young parents four generations away from The New Deal are insisting that they will not abandon their children to the blasphemies of the N.E.A. and its servitors, the Democratic Party. They are finding that there is a mechanism created to protect them from a despotic government, and that it is The Constitution and the organisations derived therefrom.

It is not incumbent on us Jews to prove we do not drink the blood of Christian Children, nor of white American citizens to apologise, nor of citizens to assert their loyalty to various confederations of thugs, and shriek heresies and treason or risk blacklisting as “of insufficient zeal”.

What does it mean to be “cancelled”?

It seems to mean that some group asserting power has mobilised its forces in social media and that their indictments have, in turn, been echoed and endorsed by multitudes. But we all know, or should know, that the controllers of the algorithms are constantly aware of and manipulate our prejudices through their presentation of that called information.

Fear of the heretic is spread through social media, but who knows, and how could one know, that the numbers and the tweets are real? One cannot. They are pixels on a screen which stampede the fearful into actual action against the indicted.

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Would the controllers of the blogosphere stoop to such subterfuge as cooking the numbers? They limit access to their outlets ad lib, banning any person or idea they do not endorse. Why would they not also warp the number or content of the blogs to suit or, indeed, confect them? (I worked, for a year, as a Contributing Editor (utility man) at a very prominent national publication. One of my duties was Letters to the Editor. This involved not only answering but writing them. I assume the practice was universal and that it continues in the new media.)

I live in a liberal neighbourhood outside of Los Angeles. The residents here are miserable. Traditionally it was Not Done to acknowledge each other’s presence on the streets. A “good morning” uttered to a fellow dogwalker was considered as if one had exposed oneself. (This latter, in fact, now accepted as a permitted practice of the Homeless.)

Since Covid, the masked or the unmasked cross the street to avoid each other, glaring.  Signs on the homes proclaim that Love Is Love, but the residents hate and fear each other. Nancy Mitford wrote of the Liberals, “they are all so unhappy, and all of their plans fail so miserably.”

I was elected a non-person by the Left many years ago. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s costly and sad to see the happy fields in which I played all those decades — Broadway, book publishing, TV and film — fold up and Hail Caesar, but there it is.

The question for the young is: what kind of country do you want for your children? The question for the aged (myself) is: “what did you do in the War, Daddy?”

I’ve been involved for near 50 years in dealing with folks in the mass. It was not a social experiment for me, but a game: The Theatre. I learned very young that the correct study of the dramatist was neither his own feelings, nor those of the actors, but the attention of the audience. I understood that it was not my job to teach them anything, nor to induce a feeling in them, but to perform a sort of magic trick — to understand their behaviour in order to control their concentration. Why? In order to give them a treat. Just like a magician.

I sat with them night by night and year by year, and it was a joy to feel their conjoined attention, and to learn from it and its absence how to improve the play. As Billy Wilder said, “individually, they’re idiots, but together they’re a genius”.

The horror of the last year’s slide into despotism has showed me the reverse of the medal.

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Watching the good play, the audience suspends its reason in order to be entertained — at Hamlet, as much and identically with watching a woman be sawed in half. The audience enjoys the trick while knowing, and because they know she is not going to be harmed. Just as they know Hamlet’s Dad is not coming back from the dead.

But just as the techniques of stage magic are identical with those of the confidence game, the understanding of the dramatist — that the mass can be suggested, and, so controlled —is the same as that of the Dictator. Here fear replaces happy anticipation; and, as we see, outrage at the indicted masks an unavowable fear.

The children in the car must immediately come to support the new regime or risk abandonment. The protection it offers is illusory (as who knows who will be next), but the illusion, to them, is preferable to knowledge of their powerlessness.

In the mass the alternative to submission is blacklisting, poverty, censure, et cetera. Finally, this is the same alternative offered to the children. They may court protection from fear only by remaining submissive. Just like the Electorate.

© David Mamet 2021

This piece was originally published in November.

Two things. As these are not philosophies but tricks, they are less likely to affront; one can always say of a trick (and what are techniques but elaborated tricks?), “I just learned this last week…”

First: when the baby gets you up in the middle of the night, do not look at the clock. Anyone who’s had children will nod in understanding — you’re up anyway, why pay twice?

The second trick is The Designated Criminal.

My notion of hell is the cross-country road trip with the whole damn family. Here everything, of course, is always going wrong. Some kid is complaining, spouses are feuding about directions, and all is misery. Now this traveler and now that offends against reason and good order and everyone ends up blaming Father, who, as the sole voice of reason, will now turn belligerent. Hot, tired, weary, angry, thirsty and lost, the car rolls on.

How to get from Coast to Coast? Appeals for calm (from Mother), obedience (that’s right), fellow-feeling, and so on will not avail. But a technique (trick) may. It is The Designated Criminal.

On setting out the family must establish a rotation. Each car member, then, on his appointed day, will be The Designated Criminal. On his lucky day, everything that goes wrong in the car is his fault. The affronted family are happily then leagued against the diabolical offender in their midst.

It works like a charm.

But The Designated Criminal may also be practised as oppression. For there are families and other organisms which employ the technique not as a means of maintaining esprit-de-corps, but of exercising control. Here the criminal is designated once and for all time, and will live and die in his chains.

Suggested reading

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By Michel Houellebecq

In the co-dependant family one child or parent is always in the wrong. We have all seen it and some have been taxed with participating in the loathsome farce: that Dad is a fool, Mom is a dunderhead, Little Bob is a lazy good-for-nothing, Little Suzy is a pre-pubescent whore and if she doesn’t wear more modest clothes she will end on the street, and so on.

And we know of the continual indictment of The Jews, the Witch Trials of Salem and McCarthy, the chattel slavery of Black Americans, and the continuation of that vile racism as the indictment of Whites.

The mechanism of the Designated Criminal can be used both for social equilibrium, in the car, or, politically, for disruption of the body politic. The first case, The Orderly Rotation of Blame, is the essential engine of democracy. The Game’s Rules (The Constitution) are designed to ensure the periodic exchange of power. The Ins and the Outs, and their adherents and dupes, may not understand the transfer of power as a game; but they are involved in one as much as the folks in the station wagon.

The motorists enjoy a process which elevates family unity over individual discomfort; the voters, the self-importance of saving the world from mindless fools. But it’s the same game.

If played according to the rules the rotation of power promotes the health and longevity of the organism. The Ins are allowed to tax the limits of legitimate incumbency, the Outs to misuse the permitted latitudes of opposition. And then, as in a football game, offense and defence shift.

But what if the game is not played according to Hoyle?

What if a player or contingent takes advantage of the rules themselves to achieve a goal other than balance? What if put-upon Dad, for example, says, “I know which Young Traveller is today’s Designated Criminal, but Samantha has just done something so egregious that I am going to suspend the rules and humiliate her”.

Readers will feel the affront of the interjection. As will not only young Samantha, but the whole family. For they had agreed to suspend their individual feelings in favour of group unity. And Dad has just proclaimed that they were fools to do so — that they had made a bargain which, it seems, the car’s driver reserved the right to abrogate, and, thus, that anyone may be the next-accused.

Now, the once-happy car, all occupants free to enjoy not only the trip but the game, are forced into co-dependence. The game is over, and the Ref (of whose existence the car was previously unaware) has ruled that actual indictment of the other is now the order of the day and those not supporting the new rule will suffer. The enjoyment of Free Speech has been superseded by the necessity of obedience to power. The car has just experienced Terror.

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The occupants, now, do not know what the new rules are, but only that they, having been changed once, may continue to be changed at will, by those possessing or bidding for power. Now, rather than the joy of improvisation (of the communal comedy), the rule of silence, obedience and denunciation is in force.

This is the state of the sick, co-dependant family. Here it is not that some things may be false, but that all things must be false. For if the subordinate members do not know what is and what is not permitted, they must devote themselves, in preference to any productive activity, to protection from power.

Far worse than the frowns of the car which does not know The Designated Criminal we now have the false smiles and the sad head shakings of the sick family, which is to say, of the Left.

When we know that it’s our turn on the electoral ducking stool tomorrow, we, when in power, may moderate our behaviour. In a crumbling Democracy, the power-mad, like Dad taking the reins, have come to the Dictator’s realisation. That is, “Wait a second. All I have to do is rig it so I can hold my seat indefinitely”. This, of course, is the aperçu of most every politician from dogcatcher to President, down through time. (George III said of Washington that if he chose to relinquish the Presidency he would be the greatest man who ever lived.)

***

One cannot credit the Politicians of the Left with even the delusion that they are Doing Good. And, if they do, then what? They did not take an oath to do good, but to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

Must they come to bend and break the rules in favour of 1) their good ideas, 2) the necessity of staying in office, 3) theft? Of course. That’s why we have elections. To roll the dice. The co-dependant, terrified society comes to think that, having achieved the perfection of leadership, it’s a grand idea to call it quits, abolish the electoral college, mail ballots to everyone on earth, require no voter identification, import new voters, and so on.

Just as the inspired politicians see that perpetual hegemony might be had by mere suspension of their Oath; their dupes, the electorate, learn to suspend their reason, and substitute hatred of the indicted for their new-found fear of power — a fear so powerful it must be relegated to the unconscious.

Just like the children in the car.

When Dad trashes the rules he changes the whole point of the exercise. The building of family happiness and unity (which, we assume, was, after all, the whole purpose of the trip) becomes an indoctrination; and, the child sees, safety must now be his primary concern. He may keep silent, or join in the condemnation of Little Trevor, but should he object, “what about the Game?” he is, most certainly, now the new Criminal.

Our electorate is split into the affronted Right and the supine Left. Those who wish to preserve our Constitutional Republic, its rules, and the culture from which they spring, are indicted by those in momentary power (both political and asserted) ad-lib.

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There is no merit in supporting various contemporary blasphemies (“Birthing Parent”, and so on). Unless they are untrue. The merit comes from the affiant’s vocal sacrifice of his reason, and, so, of his self-respect, in support of The Cause.

This is the contemporary terror. Not that we’re faced with the enormities, the crimes, delusions, and lies of a Politician (when were we not?), but that we are now frightened of whomever was screaming last.

From “New Business Item 39” posted on the National Education Association’s website on July 5, 2021: “The N.E.A. will provide an already-created, in-depth study that criticises empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeniety, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarcy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of oppression at the intersections of society.”

This is the country’s largest Teachers Union. What do these words mean? That the teachers will be put in charge of criticising. Whom? Whomever the N.E.A. designates.

And how might one, however convinced, ensure that he will not transgress the rules? There are no rules, for the categories are infinitely expansible. (Larry Elder, an African American running for Governor of California, and a lifelong champion of America and of his race, was called “the Black Face of White Supremacy,” L.A. Times, August 20, 2021.) And what in the world are “the intersections of society”?

In Woody Allen’s film Sleeper (1973) he is transported to the future. There he learns that the world he knew came to grief in 1989. He asks how and is told: “A man called Albert Shanker got his hands on a nuclear warhead.” Albert Shanker was the head of the United Foundation of Teachers, and then the American Federation of Teachers.

This may be the rock on which the Left comes to grief: the insistence on infecting one’s children with hatred. Young parents four generations away from The New Deal are insisting that they will not abandon their children to the blasphemies of the N.E.A. and its servitors, the Democratic Party. They are finding that there is a mechanism created to protect them from a despotic government, and that it is The Constitution and the organisations derived therefrom.

It is not incumbent on us Jews to prove we do not drink the blood of Christian Children, nor of white American citizens to apologise, nor of citizens to assert their loyalty to various confederations of thugs, and shriek heresies and treason or risk blacklisting as “of insufficient zeal”.

What does it mean to be “cancelled”?

It seems to mean that some group asserting power has mobilised its forces in social media and that their indictments have, in turn, been echoed and endorsed by multitudes. But we all know, or should know, that the controllers of the algorithms are constantly aware of and manipulate our prejudices through their presentation of that called information.

Fear of the heretic is spread through social media, but who knows, and how could one know, that the numbers and the tweets are real? One cannot. They are pixels on a screen which stampede the fearful into actual action against the indicted.

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Would the controllers of the blogosphere stoop to such subterfuge as cooking the numbers? They limit access to their outlets ad lib, banning any person or idea they do not endorse. Why would they not also warp the number or content of the blogs to suit or, indeed, confect them? (I worked, for a year, as a Contributing Editor (utility man) at a very prominent national publication. One of my duties was Letters to the Editor. This involved not only answering but writing them. I assume the practice was universal and that it continues in the new media.)

I live in a liberal neighbourhood outside of Los Angeles. The residents here are miserable. Traditionally it was Not Done to acknowledge each other’s presence on the streets. A “good morning” uttered to a fellow dogwalker was considered as if one had exposed oneself. (This latter, in fact, now accepted as a permitted practice of the Homeless.)

Since Covid, the masked or the unmasked cross the street to avoid each other, glaring.  Signs on the homes proclaim that Love Is Love, but the residents hate and fear each other. Nancy Mitford wrote of the Liberals, “they are all so unhappy, and all of their plans fail so miserably.”

I was elected a non-person by the Left many years ago. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s costly and sad to see the happy fields in which I played all those decades — Broadway, book publishing, TV and film — fold up and Hail Caesar, but there it is.

The question for the young is: what kind of country do you want for your children? The question for the aged (myself) is: “what did you do in the War, Daddy?”

I’ve been involved for near 50 years in dealing with folks in the mass. It was not a social experiment for me, but a game: The Theatre. I learned very young that the correct study of the dramatist was neither his own feelings, nor those of the actors, but the attention of the audience. I understood that it was not my job to teach them anything, nor to induce a feeling in them, but to perform a sort of magic trick — to understand their behaviour in order to control their concentration. Why? In order to give them a treat. Just like a magician.

I sat with them night by night and year by year, and it was a joy to feel their conjoined attention, and to learn from it and its absence how to improve the play. As Billy Wilder said, “individually, they’re idiots, but together they’re a genius”.

The horror of the last year’s slide into despotism has showed me the reverse of the medal.

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Watching the good play, the audience suspends its reason in order to be entertained — at Hamlet, as much and identically with watching a woman be sawed in half. The audience enjoys the trick while knowing, and because they know she is not going to be harmed. Just as they know Hamlet’s Dad is not coming back from the dead.

But just as the techniques of stage magic are identical with those of the confidence game, the understanding of the dramatist — that the mass can be suggested, and, so controlled —is the same as that of the Dictator. Here fear replaces happy anticipation; and, as we see, outrage at the indicted masks an unavowable fear.

The children in the car must immediately come to support the new regime or risk abandonment. The protection it offers is illusory (as who knows who will be next), but the illusion, to them, is preferable to knowledge of their powerlessness.

In the mass the alternative to submission is blacklisting, poverty, censure, et cetera. Finally, this is the same alternative offered to the children. They may court protection from fear only by remaining submissive. Just like the Electorate.

© David Mamet 2021

I didn’t expect excitable millennials to quote Hunter S. Thompson at me, at a conservative event. But at the National Conservatism II conference in Orlando last week, Fear And Loathging In Las Vegas was everywhere: the mood the night before kickoff had that exact sense of giddy incipient lunacy.

For my adult life, being both young and a conservative has been deeply, irretrievably cringe. Not so here, where the modal attendee was a bearded, trim, often tattooed male Hunter S. Thompson fan, under the age of 25. NatCon II was where Conservatism Inc. met Conservatism Ink.

The Conservatism Ink guys sported blue blazers and Richard Spencer haircuts. They made the bar noisy and excitable, added youth and buzz to events — and were notably absent from the centrepiece panel, in which the event’s organisers attempted to craft a ‘new fusionism’.

Here, conference organiser and Burke Foundation chairman Yoram Hazony took to the stage alongside the Catholic integralist writer Sohrab Ahmari, whose 2019 article ‘Against David French-Ism’ saw the first full-scale battle within the American Right, between the liberals and the then still emerging ‘post-liberal’ strand.

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For Ahmari, David French epitomised a Right-liberal thinking that conceded too much territory. By accepting the liberal idea that moral values should be kept out of the public square, the argument goes, conservatism merely becomes a strategy for losing more slowly. Instead, Ahmari states that the Right should aim for “defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good”.

It’s hard to see, though, how this stance can easily be made to square particularly with Ahmari’s co-panellists Dave Rubin, a noted libertarian, and Douglas Murray, the ne plus ultra of anti-woke right-liberalism.

For me, this event encapsulated the NatCon’s quandary: what kind of alliance, if any, is possible between liberals and post-liberals? And, crucially, ordered to which values? Everyone on the panel was unenthusiastic about wokeness, at pains to stress that they weren’t rabid authoritarians, and seemingly unsure about how to resolve the question of how state power could align with moral values, without treading on at least some of their friends’ toes.

Hazony argued that America could and should re-Christianise its public square, and simply manage some kind of ‘carve-out’ for groups such as gay people and orthodox Jews. Murray, meanwhile, argued that the Church only had itself to blame for mass secularisation. (He didn’t quite say they were all nonces but it was heavily implied.) Ahmari, perhaps the lone post-liberal on the stage, was surprisingly conciliatory.

Afterwards, Conservatism Inc. raved about the discussion. At the bar, though, where they were ignoring the whole event, the Conservatism Ink bros were less sure. They drank bourbon and muttered that with anti-woke liberals such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali on-board, nothing would ever change. Too big a tent means a lack of focus. 

It wasn’t just the Gen-Z raw-eggs-and-dank-memes boys. “I was into this before it was cool” is the abiding cry of hipsters the world over, and it was (more or less explicitly) everywhere over the three days of conference. But if the the purists of NatCon I were complaining about liberal entryism, this isn’t just about new money coming into the movement. It’s also an effect of how radically the political backdrop has changed since 2019.

Between Brexit/Trump in 2016 and the pandemic in 2020, there was a widespread feeling that something new was needed to replace the technocratic ‘double liberal’ consensus. And indeed, since then something new has emerged, in the wake of Covid-19. It’s just not what was envisaged.

Back in 2019, people were dreaming about ordering Western state power to a more substantive moral programme than that of empty individual freedom and consumerism; a new, human-scale politics of meaning and necessary limits.

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And behold, the pandemic state of emergency did indeed shatter the consensus about individual freedom. Across the developed world, the liberal privileging of individual freedom has been replaced by a de facto acceptance that state power absolutely must be ordered to the common good, up to and including coercive measures where necessary. In other words: all politics is now post-liberal. 

But inasmuch as we have achieved consensus on what ‘the common good’ means, it doesn’t extend much beyond ‘public health’, understood in bare terms as the preservation of physical life: lockdowns, masks, vaccinations and so on. The new Western normal is one of authoritarian regimes now visibly reluctant to relinquish their grip on a state of emergency.

But these regimes are more, not less, technocratic — and there’s been no new politics of meaning. Instead, the last year and a half have felt like a relentless assault on everything that makes us human: interpersonal bonds, organic social organisations, in-person contact.

This situation has confused the hell out of the loosely post-liberal caucus who made up the intellectual backbone of NatCon I in 2019. It aimed to revive a more substantial nationalism capable of incorporating realist foreign policy; industrial policy; patriotism beyond divisive racial politics. There was a Republican in the White House; I’m told policy debates were detailed and impassioned. You never knew what might trickle up to actual centres of power. 

And the liberal mainstream was sincerely shocked by their suggestion that maybe state power and moral values should be aligned. Now, though, there’s no longer any need to make that case: in response to the pandemic, states across the West have enthusiastically seized power.

The pre-pandemic post-lib pipe-dream was of a revived human-scale politics of meaning, to challenge the bloodless grip of technocracy and its mantra of never-ending progress. Post-liberals were happy to talk about limits and state power as means of pursuing such a politics of meaning. Now, plot twist: existing post-liberalism has ordered state power to a set of moral values that 2019’s national conservatives really don’t like.

So the ‘state power’ bit is settled in principle. (Though for conservatives under Biden, the question of how to obtain it for themselves is both open and, they’d argue, urgent.) The ‘moral values’ bit is a bitter battlefield — even within the national conservative caucus.

With that in mind, it was perhaps inevitable that the programme trended negative: toward focusing on what we can all agree we don’t want. Along with Hazony’s sincere but inconclusive panel effort at shaping a ‘new fusionism’, this meant plenty of speakers whose primary argument was not for anything particular so much as against wokeness. Playing conference bingo with a friend, we were obliged to delete ‘cultural Marxism’ from our cards a few hours in because it came up too often. 

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To my eye the most interesting attendees were those who sought to address the how of power, or the what of values — without simply relapsing into complaints about wokeness. Informally, perhaps the neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin (also known as Mencius Moldbug) qualifies here. He ran a kind of three-day mobile conference plenary, in which (seemingly without ever needing to draw breath) he addressed a little flock of the Conservatism Ink bros who followed him like ducklings.

Elsewhere, New Founding’s Matt Peterson outlined a plan for a commercial and cultural startup, aimed at propagating a positive lifestyle vision for the American Right. It was a for-profit entrepreneurial approach to moral renewal that felt both very American and somewhat baffling to a Bongland ex-Lefty.

More intelligible from my perspective was the session on ‘Worker Power’. Here, Oren Cass of American Compass joined Brian Dijkema of Cardus and Sean McGarvey of NABTU to discuss the sometimes vexed relationship between conservatism and trade unions. There’s been a lot of noise from the American Right about how the Republicans are now a multi-ethnic, working-class party, and Marco Rubio did endorse Amazon unionisation efforts in Alabama back in March. 

Even so, the souvenir conference mugs were, somewhat ironically, made in China; and attendance at the ‘Worker Power’ session was sparse. This spoke to one of the conference’s real tensions: what relation does this would-be counter-elite actually have to the masses? One approach to this question came from Hungary’s soft-power outreach team, who were present in force at NatCon. Balázs Orbán, Minister of State to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s office (no relation), gave a presentation that positioned Hungary as a successful model for actually existing national conservatism.

Orbán boasted of Hungarian growth, lack of anti-semitic violence, church and synagogue renovation and improving birth rates. These, he argued, demonstrate that national conservatism with Hungarian characteristics is not, as Western liberals like to claim, a totalitarian dictatorship but in fact a popular regime that’s delivering what the Hungarian people want and need.

Whether you nod along with this framing of Fidesz probably depends on your political commitments. But from this perspective, an elite whose values are aligned with those of the masses can use authority to implement those values responsibly throughout the regime. What’s unclear, though, even among sympathetic conservatives, is how applicable the Orbánist model might be in the West — and particularly in America. 

It’s relatively easy for a reigning elite to align values to state power in a homogeneous nation of 10 million people. It’s far from obvious how this might be achieved in a deliberately decentralised, pluralistic nation of 300 million people, with a highly individualistic founding ideology that’s constitutionally allergic to state-mandated values.

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Chris Rufo’s Leninist strategy for ‘counterrevolution’, which I’ve discussed here, offered part of the answer, in the playbook he proposed for getting American conservatives to win the culture wars. In Rufo’s view, the aim of such a counter-elite should be galvanising and providing language and representation for a mass that Rufo sees as subjected to the top-down imposition of alien values by a narcissistic, nihilistic Left-authoritarian state. 

Meanwhile, the writer Mary Eberstadt looked straight past Conservatism Inc., instead making a heartfelt address to Conservatism Ink in the name of shared values as such. She argued that the young have been robbed by ‘zero-sum progressivism’ of everything that gives life a ‘higher purpose’: family connections, faith, belonging, a cultural patrimony.

Taken together, Rufo’s right-Leninism and Eberstadt’s empathetic politics of meaningful relationships felt like the public and private facets of this movement’s better part. Eberstadt brought a deeply matriarchal quality to proceedings. 

She’s emerging as a compassionate figure in a sometimes dour or combative 21st-century American conservatism, and I hope her voice continues to be heard — especially by the Conservatism Inkers her talk addressed. After all, Rufo’s Right-Leninist vanguardism in the name of shared conservative values will make little sense if it’s pursued in the name of a people who don’t actually have any shared values.

But if Rufo and Eberstadt together comprise top-down and bottom-up facets of something approaching a workable, effective and ethically-grounded conservatism, there are plenty of other visions for where this version of the right goes next: Thielite space fascism, Bitcoin exitism, libertarian anti-wokeism, hard-edged nationalism, doctrinaire Catholic integralism or simply reabsorption by the neocon blob. 

It’s a heady and at many points self-contradictory brew, in which the central question — whose values? — remains undecided, a dilemma that will either prove the movement’s greatest strength or weakness.

After three days in bat country, I stumbled to bed on the last night past a swarm of Conservatism Ink chanting ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’ in the hotel bar. I left with an abiding sense that national conservatism has money behind it, but also plenty of punk energy and belligerence.

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As ever, money will play a huge part in what happens next. And there are plenty of boomercons with fat chequebooks, who would like to see room on the ark for at least ‘our’ kind of liberal. In particular, as far as the neocons are concerned, it’s noteworthy that there’s been some debate over whether foreign-policy realists were well enough represented on the roster — especially given how central debates over US military obligations have been to shifts on the Right since Trump.

There are probably plenty as well who would like to see the more punk end of this movement defanged, and Conservatism Ink toned right down. Meanwhile, the Gen-Z right-wingers now flocking to this corner of politics have altogether wilder and stranger ideas, that often owe more to the fringes of the Weird Online Right than the Founding Fathers. And they’re the ones with the energy: they still got up at 6am to lift. Even after all that bourbon. 

Who will win? My best guess is that in the short term we’ll see this movement re-absorbed by the DC blob. Then there’ll be full-scale revolt by Conservatism Ink when they are, in aggregate, old enough to wield power. And then we really will be in bat country.

I have sympathy with some critiques advanced by friends on the Right, of the excesses and uncounted costs of feminism. I have made a number of those critiques myself.

But I’m often frustrated by conservatives’ refusal to engage with feminist arguments or history much beyond the ‘pop’ versions you might find in the pages of Vox. The result is, regrettably, a Right-wing treatment of the women’s movement that is often as ignorant of what it decries as modern liberal feminists are of the conservative case against abortion.

We can do better. And we must, because today defending women’s interests is properly, and rightly, a defence of the family. Which is to say of all humans  including men – understood as relational beings.

This isn’t easy to see from a conservative vantage-point that blames feminism for many modern societal ills. Some of this critique is not without justice. But nor is the women’s movement without justice.

I don’t believe in progress, in the ‘arc of history’ sense. Nor do I believe that there exists an eternal conspiracy against women, called ‘patriarchy’. Worked free of these fairy tales, what we think of today as ‘feminism’ is a story of economic transitions.

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Specifically, it’s a story of how men and women re-negotiated life in common, in response first to the transition into the industrial era, then into twentieth-century market society. If everyone today seems to be arguing about men and women again, it’s because we’re in the throes of another economic transition.

To illustrate, I’ll take a short detour through that story. Of course this is complex, and varied by factors such as class, race and geography. But since what we think of as ‘feminism’ today is mainly driven by bourgeois white American women, and serves their class interests, I’ll focus on their story.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century America was mostly agrarian. The typical American matron was a disciplined, skilled, devout individual who worked alongside her husband in a productive household. She processed raw materials and foodstuffs produced by male family members into meals, clothing and so on, usually while caring for multiple children.The patriarchal legal system of ‘coverture’, which subsumed her legal personhood and property into that of her husband, rendered her technically a subordinate class of citizen. It also served to shield her from market pressures.

By the end of the nineteenth century, though, America was more industrial than agrarian. Families were smaller. Work took place outside the home, forcing a much sharper split between sex roles. In the new private household, the bourgeois woman was more economically dependent than her agrarian grandmother. Her main activities were the education of children, the management of servants and the consumption of goods produced elsewhere. She may have been more materially comfortable. But this woman had in many respects less agency than her foremothers.

This prompted a frenzy of debate about sex roles. Some women moralised the new feminine role. They framed the home as sanctuary from competitive life in America’s capitalist economy, and the non-working bourgeois housewife as its guardian. Her task was to tend this sanctuary, and to shape the children whose ability to flourish in industrial society depended on having the right moral and intellectual education. This was the so-called ‘cult of domesticity’.

But it takes a while for social norms to catch up with changing material conditions. The old legal system of ‘coverture’ still existed. Women had lost their agency in the agrarian productive household, and as yet acquired no other kind. The result was an economic and political helplessness that resulted in some deep injustices. It was this imbalance that drove the first feminist campaigns for property ownership and enfranchisement.

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Fast forward a century. Labour-saving devices and booming consumerism have shifted society once again. This set off another round of re-negotiation between the sexes as to the proper division of roles. Phyllis Schlafly observed that women were liberated more by the washing machine than feminism. And for bourgeois twentieth-century housewives, labour-saving devices combined with an increasingly atomised, individualistic social world to trigger a renewed search for agency, this time within the workplace.

I take this detour into women’s history to illustrate a core underlying argument. In each case, sex roles have been re-negotiated not by some abstract process of moral advancement but in response to changing material conditions. And in each case, this has been necessary because social and legal norms change more slowly.

So what about the central event in twentieth-century feminism: the sexual revolution? I come to this separately because in my view the sexual revolution was not the start but the end of feminism.

In its nineteenth and early twentieth-century incarnations, the women’s movement sought a positive negotiation of sex roles for prevailing material conditions, in the interests of life in common. But feminism in this sense ended in the 1960s. It was killed by the twin technology shocks of contraception and abortion.

Up to that point, the women’s movement encompassed both women who understood personhood in the context of family life – women as relational beings – and those who argued for women to be treated primarily as individuals, irrespective of the givens of sex or relational obligations. Medical control of fertility constituted a fundamental material change to this debate: it enabled the final victory of the individualist side.

As my friend Erika Bachiochi has argued, treating access to legal abortion as a necessary precondition for personhood implies a liberal male-centric understanding of what a person is: a radically separate individual. Within that framework there’s no conceptual language, for example, to describe the ‘more than one but less than two’ nature of pregnancy, or the radical sense of merged selfhood that comes with mothering a newborn baby.

For women to be human on this model, we must have total ownership over all these aspects of our bodies that differ from those of males. Even a conflict between total autonomy and an unborn human life must be resolved for autonomy.

There exist feminist thinkers who contest this, but they have been marginal since the 1960s. For the mainstream, the entrenchment of this radical bodily autonomy in law as a baseline for human personhood signalled a conclusive defeat of relational feminism.

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Instead of calling for both men and women to embrace a human duty to be dependent others, we embraced a supposedly empowering pursuit of universal, de-sexed radical individualism, and outsourced care to the welfare state.

Received opinion today frames this shift as a victory. Conservative critiques of feminism usually boil down to enumerations of its uncounted costs: the meltdown of family life, the tiny infants in daycare, the degradation of sexual intimacy, the collapsing fertility rate, and so on.

But we need to understand that what we’re fighting is not feminism, properly understood, but something I’ve characterised elsewhere as bio-libertarianism. A worldview that for fifty years now has claimed to act in women’s interests but is increasingly obviously at odds with those interests. It’s a worldview that believes human freedom necessitates radical unmooring from the givens of our bodies.

The transgender writer Jennifer Finney Boylan recently observed that the campaigns for medical abortion and transgender surgeries have a great deal in common. This is correct. Both causes champion the right of atomised individuals to exert absolute mastery over their bodies. They are not feminist but bio-libertarian.

I disagree with Boylan only on whether this is desirable. Because conditions have now changed again. And our norms and laws haven’t caught up yet.

Bio-libertarian causes may have appeared in women’s emancipatory interests, in a broadly democratic consumer society. That era retained some shared social and cultural norms, along with a sincere belief that things could go on getting better, richer, freer, more comfortable forever. As such, working loose those old-fashioned social norms and physiological givens seemed an unalloyed good.

That world is gone. There are no shared norms. We’re past peak oil. Living standards are falling. So is life expectancy. Variously in the name of economic progress, digital disintermediation, Covid, net zero or the Great Reset, the middle class is being methodically cannibalised to shore up the 1%. Pluralism has birthed a Hobbesian moral anarchy, held together only by the technologies that mediate our meme wars.

This is the new normal and it’s not going away. Against this backdrop, the interests of men and women no longer align with the bio-libertarian agenda of mastery over the body. And this brings me to the three main types of response I notice to the new tension between emerging conditions and our legacy social and cultural frameworks: trads, cads and radfems.

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Very reductively, these three positions break down as follows. The Trads say: all this could be fixed if only we could put second-wave feminism back in its box, and return to something more like the cult of domesticity. This has the appeal of both familiarity and nostalgia.

But we no longer live in the industrial society that produced those roles. The economic landscape has changed beyond all recognition. Arguing over the merits of those changes won’t reverse them. And today’s reality is that the ‘Trad’ argument is pure fantasy fiction, for the millions of twentysomethings who can barely make rent, let alone support an unwaged carer for little kids.

Nor is the sexual revolution going back in its box, a fact that today produces ‘Cads’ of both sexes. Men and women who have internalised the radically individualist, bio-libertarian belief that sex is merely a fun leisure activity that can be managed via contract theory.

Among high-status men, this looks like Tinder hookups summoned as casually as a Deliveroo pizza. For the less fortunate it looks like the embittered life of a porn-sick ‘incel’. Among women, the same dynamic looks like classes for college freshmen on how to launch yourself on OnlyFans; like consenting reluctantly to violent or degrading sexual practices in the hope that it will make a boy like you enough to hold your hand in public.

For both sexes, it means an interpersonal landscape marinaded in pornography, actively hostile to intimacy, and governed by a false belief that male and female sexuality are the same. Under its rubric the pursuit of pleasure becomes a degraded search for thrills: one which leaves both sexes numb and jaded, scarred by having traded in love for violence.

The cads have accepted this situation and resigned themselves to just scavenging whatever kicks they can get. Others revolt against this nihilistic nightmare by calling for the re-imposition of power, in the interests of a final victory for one sex over the other. In this sense, ‘radfems’ in fact encompass both feminists and anti-feminists. They have a surprising amount in common.

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Radical feminism is a rich and fractious tradition that I clearly can’t do justice to here. But its contemporary inheritors take for granted the individualistic liberal anthropology I have described. The anti-feminism that opposes this view is just as individualist. It simply prefers not to extend selfhood to women.

Both believe in the same patriarchy. They differ only on its merits. Both are similarly hostile to interdependence. Both these groups, in different ways, argue for the use of power to settle the war between the sexes, in either for or against the “patriarchy”.

These groups are both wrong. Because patriarchy doesn’t exist, either as a good thing or a bad. What does exist, has always existed, is the ongoing negotiation between men and women, over how we can best live together in the world as it is.

And we are in the throes of renegotiating now. For the age of abundance is over. Neo-feudalism is already here. It’s underwritten by an emerging bio-security state that disciplines and surveils our bodies even as it proposes to terraform our souls. It would de-regulate human nature itself. Open up our bodies as markets for biotech. Applaud males for embracing a surgically feminised ‘gender identity’, while re-branding females as ‘gestators’, chestfeeders’, ‘birthing bodies’ or just ‘uterus-havers’.

Men and women face this disunited; no longer sure how to live together. Family formation is collapsing. Anti-natalism is hip. Millions of young people are trapped in a hell of transactional sexuality ordered not to love, or meaning, or the future, but to bare, squalid, hyper-mediated commerce.

The pursuit of freedom is not just delivering diminishing returns. It has long since turned against women. It is now turning against life itself. What we need to face this challenge is not more freedom. It’s more and better obligations. That means, for feminists, a reckoning with some of the unpaid debts of the age of emancipation. It also means that we’ve run out of road for the kind of movement that seeks to pry women free of our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons.

To respond, first and foremost we must stop treating the question of family as a women’s issue. It’s a human one. And we need to accept that men and women are equal in dignity and personhood but different in physiology. The core question is how we reconcile our interests.

At the centre of this is how we understand marriage. The twentieth-century consumer society trivialised and individualised marriage, as a vehicle for personal fulfilment. That no longer works. But marriage does, if we pry it free of the ‘patriarchy’ baggage and treat it as the first and most crucial step in a fightback against radical atomisation, and for life in common.

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At the bigger scale we must fight for policies that support this. That defend the human body against enclosure by biotech, human interiority against enclosure by digital transparency, human desire against enclosure by the sex industry. That defend children against enclosure by ‘reproductive healthcare’ or identity medicine. That support family formation, incentivise solidarity in marriage, and proactively seek to shield the domain of human intimacy from the market.

To those of my feminist friends about to denounce me as a reactionary, I say: under current conditions, defending women means defending the human. And if you do that, people are going to call you reactionary. A feminism fighting back against the bio-libertarian nightmare must centre embodied care and dependency. Marriage has the power to convene radical loyalty, in the interests of life in common. For a feminism that centres care, this is self-evidently a good thing. So here the interests of twenty-first century feminism converge with those of conservatives.

Such a feminism also defends human nature and the body, against technologies that would remodel us in the name of utopia. Commercial surrogacy, transgender ‘medicine’ and experimental human-animal chimeras are just the start. Resistance requires a willingness to re-open the question of those embodied ways in which men and women are different. Here too the interests of feminism converge with those of conservatives.

To those well-meaning progressives who argue “you can’t be a feminist and not be for freedom”, I say: wake up. The agenda you ushered in is now the stuff of nightmares. To those on the Right who say “feminism got us here; you’ve made your bed ladies, now lie in it” I say: I get where you’re coming from, but don’t be stupid. You might enjoy watching trans activism abolish sex dimorphism, to own the feminists, but the ideology is coming for your kids too.

At its best, conservatism has always been pragmatic. It seeks the eternal Good, not from nostalgia for bygone days but from where we are. We can’t go back, but the future doesn’t have to look like a nihilistic hell, or like the final victory of one sex over the other.

In terms of how men and women live together, there may be nothing left to conserve. But that means there is everything to build. What we have is the rubble. Our bodies. Each other. And our willingness to try. It’s time to begin.

This is a version of a speech delivered at NatCon 2. 

In 1979, they imposed a one-child policy on their citizens. It was brutally implemented. There were forced sterilisations, forced abortions and crippling financial penalties on families with unauthorised children. In some areas, family planning officials — effectively a secret police force — punished non-complying parents by demolishing homes and kidnapping excess children.

It was all for nothing. The long-term population trends would have been similar without Beijing’s campaign of anti-natal terror. Birth rates across East Asia have plummeted, despite the fact that only China had a one-child policy. 

Furthermore, Chinese birth rates have stayed low despite the end of the policy. Worryingly low, in fact. In recent years, the Government hasn’t just eased up on population control, but now wants families to have more children. There was the shift to a two-child policy in 2015 and, earlier this year, to a three-child policy. 

But the biggest sign of panic came this week, when the State Council announced a ban on abortions for non-medical purposes. It was the clearest proof yet that China is hurtling towards a demographic disaster that the Government is desperate to stop.

We can tell that they’re worried because the official figures are so misleading. This is what usually happens when a communist regime has something it wants to hide: whether it’s a poor harvest, inadequate production or mass murder.

Based on government statistics, the World Bank puts the Chinese total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to each woman over her lifetime — at 1.7. The rate required to maintain population stability is 2 (plus a bit more to compensate for child mortality).

So a TFR of 1.7 is well below the “replacement rate”. However, according to demographers like Lyman Stone, China’s real fertility rate is probably much lower — perhaps as low as 1.1. This matters, because the mathematics of demographics are merciless. 

To see how important these numbers are, think about a sequence of three generations. If the TFR falls below replacement, then each new generation will be smaller than its predecessor. For instance, a constant TFR of 1.7 means that your children’s generation will be only 85% as big as your own, and your grandkid’s generation 72%. That’s a significant decline, but manageable. 

Now try a TFR of 1.4 — this brings down the generation size to 70% of the starting point within just one generation and to less than 50% within two generations. We’re talking about proper depopulation here: schools closing down; businesses struggling to find workers; villages and towns inhabited by no one but the elderly — and, in time, only by ghosts. 

It’s already happening in some places. The village of Nagoro in Japan is famous not because its population decline is unique (sadly, it isn’t), but because its departed residents have been replaced by life-sized dolls. Created by Tsukimi Ayano, the effigies work in fields, wait at bus stops and fill the classroom of a school that closed a decade ago. Whether one finds the display poignant or eerie, it’s a haunting reminder of what’s happening right now in left-behind communities across the developed world — and what might happen to the rest of us in the decades ahead.

At a TFR of close to 1 — the goal of the one-child policy — we enter into the realm of country-wide demographic collapse. Each generation is roughly half the size of its predecessor. Over several generations, a nation basically disappears. If you want to know what that future would be like, don’t read Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World, but P.D. James’s The Children of Men.  

And this is a prospect that is already hitting some countries. According to the latest figures, the TFR in Singapore is 1.14, in Hong Kong it is 1.07 and in South Korea a terrifying 0.86. North Korea doesn’t have to nuke its southern rival — just wait for it to empty out. 

If China’s real TFR is in this ballpark, then the apparent panic of its government is no surprise. Xi, after all, will be well aware of what happened to Japan thirty years ago. In the 1980s, the Land of the Rising Sun was where China is now — the emerging economic superpower and number one threat to America’s pre-eminence. Back then, Japan was at the cutting edge of modernity — a neon-lit vision of the future that the West could only aspire to. 

The buzz — or, more accurately, the hype — was reflected in Japanese share and property prices. By 1989, the Japanese stock market accounted for over 40% of all the stock market values in the world. The country’s real estate was worth more than all the land in the US (despite America being 26 times bigger). 

Then there was the most mind-blowing statistic of them all. The Imperial Palace in Tokyo sits on a plot less than one square mile in area. Yet, at the peak of the property bubble, the grounds were valued at more than the entire US state of California. 

Of course, it couldn’t last — and it didn’t. In the early 1990s, land and share values collapsed, plunging Japan into its “Lost Decade” (more like two or three decades) of economic stagnation. 

It’s significant that the peak of the bubble — 1989 — coincided with the “1.57 shock“. This wasn’t an earthquake, at least not literally, but the news that Japan’s total fertility rate had declined to a record low of 1.57. By today’s standards, that’s really not that low; but at the time it caused national dismay. Might it also have contributed to the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble?

The decision to have children is an expression of faith in the future. Without that faith — and certainly without a rising generation of producers and consumers — it’s hard for a country to sustain a rapid rate of economic growth. It’s even harder to sustain a bubble economy, especially one based on a property boom. What is the point of building all those new homes if there aren’t enough people to live in them? Sooner or later, investors look beyond the hype and ask the obvious question.

It’s the question that Xi Jinping will be fretting about right now. The immediate worry is Evergrande, China’s second biggest property developer, which is teetering on the edge of collapse. But it’s not just one company in peril, but the entire economy. Over the last decade, Chinese property prices have doubled. The country is building five times as many new homes each year as in Europe and America combined. And despite China’s prowess in manufacturing, the real estate sector now accounts for more than a quarter of the country’s GDP. The whole thing is built on a mountain of debt — including the $300 billion borrowed by Evergrande. 

Xi will be pulling on every lever to stabilise the situation, but what he really needs is for his people to go forth and multiply — and fill all those empty homes. 

Can he persuade them to do so? Other countries, including Japan, have tried to reverse declining birth rates — offering parents tax breaks, benefits and other forms of support. But, at best, these pro-natal inducements have had limited success.   

Of course, Japan is a democracy. China is not. Where he sees fit, Xi Jinping has no trouble interfering in the private lives of his citizens. His party once compelled Chinese families to have fewer children, so might it now compel them to have more? In place of forced sterilisation, could we see the state pursue a policy of forced fertilisation? 

If its survival depended upon it, this is a regime that would bring back its two-child policy — only this time as a minimum. 

Before Covid, few believed that the British people would accept population-wide restrictions for over a year. Yet official concerns over whether we would obey the rules swiftly dissipated as it became clear that a national lockdown was not only the most effective way forward, but also the most popular one.

You don’t have to buy into fusty caricatures of the plucky, liberty-loving Brit to find something rather troubling in this. It is one thing for people to run for cover when confronted with a terrifying new disease. It is completely another to become so cautious of each other that we look to the Government to tell us when we can hug our Grandma or let our children play freely.

It is not that we have suddenly become a nation of introverts; nor, given all the low-level rule-flouting that has been going on, does it appear that we have actually stopped seeing our nearest and dearest. Instead, we seem to have tacitly embraced loneliness as a way of life.

In 1950, when the project of sociology was more about developing big ideas than deconstructing them, David Riesman published his bestselling book The Lonely Crowd. Riesman’s central thesis was that the typical American had transformed from being “inner-directed”, with norms and values passed down through the generations and internalised at an early age, to “other-directed”: trained to be continually responsive to present-day influences — and, therefore, better suited to a bureaucratic era dominated by advertising, television and HR departments.

It spoke to an unease about the tension between the individual and “mass society”. But while Riesman’s insights fell on fertile ground, particularly in Richard Yates’s bleak 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, his diagnosis of conformity has continued to be misunderstood. Indeed, his depiction of an atomised society attuned to the “radar” of other-direction, as opposed to the “gyroscope” of inner-direction, continues to chime with prejudices about mass society; the cover of the book’s 2001 edition predictably features a flock of sheep.

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Riesman, however, insisted that he was not pointing to an increase in conformity, but rather a change in how people came to conform. “Other-directed” people were not behaving as an undifferentiated mass, but as individuated souls searching for cues about how to act from those around them. Critics who interpreted Riesman’s insights as a problem of the conformist “crowd” missed the bigger point about loneliness.

This is where his discussion has most relevance today. In a similar manner, some lockdown critics choose to deride the public as misguided “sheeple”, mindlessly conforming to Government diktat; at the other extreme, some lockdown proponents assume that people are incapable of making sensible decisions and need to be banned from thinking for themselves. By constructing their claims around caricatures of “the individual”, they fail to engage with the kind of people we have become.

A quarter of a century after Riesman theorised about the changing American character, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism diagnosed post-war American society as suffering from a pathological insecurity, brought about by the long corrosion of family and community bonds in the face of increasingly intrusive cultural forces.

But it is Lasch’s far less well-known book The Minimal Self, published in 1984, that contains the most prescient warning for today. In it, he describes how the belief that political action can create a better world has given way to an inward-looking focus on personal survival, with the primary ambition being “to hold one’s own life together in the face of mounting pressures.” Crucially, he says, the result is a self that is “beleaguered”. And like today, one consequence of this beleaguered selfhood was “a kind of emotional retreat from the long-term commitments that presuppose a stable, secure, and orderly world”.

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Fast forward to the 1990s, and the kind of personality that was valued by Western societies was already shaping up to be both “other-directed” (as Reisman warned) and “beleaguered” (per Lasch). As the end of the Cold War finally brought about the collapse of political institutions and grand ideologies, this minimal self stood exposed and increasingly alone: as if to vindicate Thatcher’s famous claim that “there is no such thing as society”. There was, in essence, no such thing resembling a crowd.

Of course, both Lasch and Riesman have their critics, who correctly point to the differences between constructed “ideal types” and people in real life, who, as the past twelve months have shown, get on with living, loving, and taking responsibility for their families and communities. But our response to lockdown indicates that their theories are not as abstract as they might appear. Indeed, the past year seems to reveal a character type that is not merely other-directed or beleaguered, but what we might call other-deflected: yearning for contact and intimacy with others, while attuned to pulling back at the whiff of potential danger.

Other-deflection has been around for some time. We see it in the hesitant character of public speech, shot through with fear of causing offence; in the ambiguous value attached to sexual relationships, where people are continually encouraged to approach commitment with caution. And we have seen it, writ large, with the pandemic. For frightening and deadly though Covid has been as a disease, the enforced cessation of all spontaneous human contact has been as much about our quest to balance our desire for social contact with fear of its consequences.

When public health officials claim that we have got used to certain social distancing practices so they might as well persist, or psychologists advise people that they should “just say no” to family and friends who break lockdown rules, they are tapping into this sensibility. And even though people in real life may be bending The Rules, the absence of a public validation for physical interaction has given social life a nervy, provisional quality. For example, hugging Grandma in secret becomes a risky act that we choose to do even though it’s wrong, rather than something that is taken for granted that we ought to do because it’s right.

And so as we slowly emerge from lockdown, with our radars constantly scanning for dangers that we might pose to others and that others might pose to us, a grim truth is slowly coming into focus: that, in this age of the “New Normal”, we are loneliest when we are together.

This runs counter to the long-held and entrenched narrative that in Britain family is in decline. Its preservation was a cause for moral conservatives from Mary Whitehouse to Margaret Thatcher in the final three decades of the 20th century, worried that the permissive 1960s had triggered a loosening of values and the breakdown of the family, with rising levels of divorce and teen pregnancy.

But tell anyone under 25 of the moral battles of the Eighties and they may well switch off, so alien is it to their experience. In fact, contrary to fears that the family would wither, the opposite has happened over the past 20 years, with a quiet revolution taking place within Britain’s homes. Not only has there been a massive decrease in teenage pregnancy, as prayed for by social conservatives, and a drop in divorce rates, but a more fundamental strengthening of the family has taken place, too.

As the state has withdrawn and the housing market has become dysfunctional, more and more of us have invested in the family, creating a new culture of dependency between parent and offspring.

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Britain has often been contrasted with our Mediterranean counterparts, with their trestle tables full of family. We Anglo-Saxons, supposedly, are inherently more individualistic — more likely to strike out on our own, move far from home. Historically that has been the case, but in fact, 40% of children starting primary school live fewer than 15 minutes away from their maternal grandparents. And as the cost of nursery and childminding has rocketed, grandparents have become increasingly valuable, saving parents an estimated £16 billion by providing informal childcare. During lockdown, thousands of dual-income couples struggled to care for their children without the support of now-isolated grandparents, revealing how increasingly dependent we are on our relatives.

In recent years, Britain has mirrored the rest of the Western world in shifting its economic model from the nuclear to the extended family. A third of UK households — around nine million in total — are now multi-generational (classified as more than one adult generation living under one roof). “Grannexes”, to use the neologism, are increasingly popular; some 5% of UK households are already equipped with such a space, and an additional 7% say they plan to add one. The reciprocal benefits are obvious, and if you had space for a pram, why not a wheelchair?

For an ageing society, filial responsibility is vital; in a pandemic, of course it may prove fatal. One thread of research by demographers at Oxford suggests that early death rates were much higher in those countries that have a large proportion of multi-generational homes. It is thought to be one reason why we have seen higher than average infection rates among Asian communities.

Politicians have been scratching their heads for the past decade trying to fix the social care crisis, and the scale of the cost is daunting, but most elderly care comes not from private or state organisations but from families themselves — worth an estimated £57 billion of their time and money. The majority of these carers are of course women — daughters and daughters-in-law — and one-fifth expect to have to leave their jobs to care for an adult relative. Some companies have started offering paid leave for those with such responsibilities, and eventually the state will begrudingly have to catch up.

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But the contemporary boom in family values is better understood in our treatment of the young rather than the old. The “boomerang” children phenomenon — in which adult offspring remain in the family home well into adulthood — may reflect 30-something economic woes, but it is also testimony to the strength of familial relations. Britain is not unique in this respect. In Italy, 73% of male 18-34-year-olds still live at home, known as mammoni (“mama’s boys”), while in South Korea they are called “kangaroos”, forever in their parents’ pocket.

That younger generation are also proving far more conventional than their predecessors. According to the ONS, divorce rates for young people are at their lowest rate since 1973, while divorce is increasing for older people. And although young people also have lower marriage rates to start with, it remains a popular institution, nowhere more so than among same sex-couples.

The children of those marriages also see a lot more of their parents, especially their fathers, reflecting the changing nature of parental commitment over the past 40 years. As the fertility rate has halved since 1960, this has meant greater investment in our children. In 2012, mothers spent nearly an hour more each day looking after their kids than they did in 1965, despite the fact that the majority was now working. Fathers’ time with their children rose from 16 minutes a day to 59. A 2015 study by the University of Texas found that same-sex couples actually spent the most time with their kids, with gay dads spending as much time parenting as straight mums, and twice as much time as heterosexual fathers.

We are giving our kids not only more time, but more money. To have a child today is a 30-year financial commitment, as many older people are now learning: and parents now expect to be supporting their kids until they’re 29 (and even that might be optimistic). Parents are putting twice as much into their kids’ living costs as they are their own future retirement fund, perhaps assuming that it will all be paid back, one way or another.

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These days, university open days are populated with over-excited parents, and tutors direct their “sales pitch” mostly at the grown-ups (unis know who their real customers are). Even employers are being forced to engage with mum and dad.; in 2018, over 20,000 parents took part in LinkedIn’s “Take your parents to work day” initiative, a strange modern twist on an older tradition.

What is most strikingly conservative is how well all the generations get along. Teenage rebellion is no more: Generation Z are more likely to see their parents as friends than as enemies, while a quarter of girls have been clubbing with their mums, something that would have been the stuff of nightmares to children of the 1980s. And although the 18-30 holiday market has struggled, the 18-70 market is booming: 79% of 20-30 year olds in the UK have taken a multi-generational holiday while one-fifth say they prefer holidaying with their parents than their mates.

But how many would go on such holidays with their parents if they were the ones paying? Families may enjoy hanging out more than they used to, but the trigger for this shift is changing economics, not changing values. Affluent millennials have been financially dependent on their parents like no other generation before them — for an education, a house deposit, a wedding, support with childcare and the family crash pad if it all goes wrong. The “Bank of Mum and Dad” is now the sixth largest mortgage lender in the UK. But how long can parents keep giving their kids so much? The next generation doesn’t have anything like their parents’ wealth.

The real divide within the under-40s demographic lies not between graduates and non-graduates but between those who can rely on the parental safety net and those who can’t. This is the new dependency culture: one where aspiration and opportunity is conditional on family support and there is little the market or the state can do to level the playing field.

Much of what the social conservatives of the 1980s craved has happened; and yet everything they said about the family was wrong. The reinvestment in the family unit is not down to the reinforcement of moral or religious responsibilities, but economic interdependence. Family values, especially for the young, means more parental support than ever — with the expectation that they’ll take filial responsibilities seriously, as our society ages. Both now and in the future, relatives simply cannot afford to live apart. The family has become society’s guarantor, which even in a global pandemic, is both a curse and a source of relief.

Welcome to New London, we have three rules:
No privacy
No family
No monogamy

Everyone is very happy.

Or are they? 80 years on, few viewers will be unaware that, for the citizens of Aldous Huxley’s New London, true happiness is far from assured. In this totalitarian society, babies are all born outside of the human body in a state-controlled  ‘hatchery’, and a biological caste system determines the social role individuals are permitted to play: Alphas are leaders; Betas are elite workers; Gammas and Deltas are servants; and Epsilons form a drone-like underclass. All are kept docile through the ready availability of pleasure: endless parties, casual sex, an immersive form of cinema called the ‘feelies’, and the regular administration of the drug soma, available in pill or liquid form.

In this version, the protagonist Bernard Marx doesn’t work at the Central London Hatchery, but is instead employed as a soma peddler for the Bureau of Stability. His job is to keep everyone in a consistent state of contentment, topping up their soma dose as necessary with pretty multicoloured pills (“how about a yellow?”). Citizens carry with them a clicking soma dispenser, the same shape and size as a fountain pen.

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The prop allows the filmmakers to signal characters’ emotional distress with canny simplicity. Social anxiety? Click. Interpersonal conflict? Click. When the restless Bernard gets into an argument on a bus with a young Alpha, the other passengers are left disconcerted, unsure how to respond to an unusual display of social tension. Bernard the candy man dutifully proceeds around the bus, dropping pills into their trembling hands: click, click, click.

The true drama begins when Bernard and his sexpot Beta companion Lenina take a rocket across the Atlantic and return with John the Savage, a man born to New London parents, but raised in the ‘Savage Lands’. More like an Indian reservation in the novel, the Savage Lands are here cleverly reimagined as a theme park devoted to 21^st Century American decline. New London visitors load onto a tour bus and gawp at the ‘house of correction’ (a prison), the ‘house of monogamy’ (a church), and witness a reenactment of what is presented as the most important event in the savages’ calendar, ‘the annual day of black’ (Black Friday), in which shoppers tear each other to pieces in their lust for bargains.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen such a barbed attack on late capitalism on primetime TV.  A tour guide informs visitors cheerfully that the key elements of savage culture included “jealousy, competition, greed, and strife.” She’s not wrong, of course. The Savage Lands theme park is designed to demonstrate to New Londoners the perils of the old way of life, while its inclusion in the drama is designed to show us how tempting the 26th century could seem when set beside the 21st.

Unlike the other properly “conditioned” characters, John the Savage is burdened by unrestrained and unmedicated human emotion. He gets jealous, he hits people, he smashes things, and he feels grief and sorrow. His entry into New London proves destabilising because, for all of its emotional sterility, the restrictions placed on this society do work, in that they have managed to successfully rid themselves of conflict.

The lack of privacy ensures a lack of crime; the lack of family ensures a lack of in-group preference; and the lack of monogamy ensures a lack of sexual jealousy. The cost that citizens pay for all this stability is an emptiness that they find hard to put into words: a longing for meaning that soma can’t touch. And although we don’t see New London citizens pining especially for children, religion, or family – all of which are banned by the state – they do pine terribly for monogamous love, and sometimes attempt it, despite the state’s best efforts to stop them. With John the Savage on the scene, trouble is inevitable.

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Certain elements of the story been emphasised — and others down-played — for a 2020 audience. Of course, we have our Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, all carrying out their various allocated jobs. But the new series represents the hierarchy as just a more explicit version of our existing class structure. The characters of this adaptation are more rebellious than those in the novel, and we see little evidence that they are innately biologically suited to their positions.

The series doesn’t engage with Huxley’s much more disturbing vision, in which people really are designed for either drudge or leadership, and really won’t resist, no matter how lowly their status. “We like cleaning up” chant the epsilons in the 2020 adaption, but we know they don’t really mean it. In the 1932 novel, they actually do. And at a time when technologies like CRISPR gene editing bring Huxley’s dystopia uncomfortably close to reality, it is curious to see how little interest the filmmakers take in this theme.

Instead, the element of the novel that’s drawn out – and effectively – is the numbing consequences of endless pleasure. In 1932, the culture of casual sex that Huxley described was a long way from reality in a Britain in which contraception was still primitive and abortion criminalised, meaning that sex and reproduction remained inseparable. Even elite eccentrics like the Bloomsbury Set, who famously “lived in squares and loved in triangles”, weren’t able to have truly consequence-free sex, given how many illegitimate children they produced.

But in Brave New World, Huxley had the foresight to imagine a society in which sex could be just one more consumable product among a host of other delights. The citizens of New London love novelty: no one wears the same outfit twice, new trends flash and fizzle within a matter of days, and sexual partners are just one more source of fleeting excitement, to be immediately forgotten.

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The censors who attempted to ban the novel soon after its publication could hardly have imagined that sections of the 21^st century elite would soon be openly enjoying soma-infused orgies and proudly tearing down bourgeois sexual norms, just like the Alphas and Betas of Brave New World. As Emily Chang puts it in a Vanity Fair piece on Silicon Valley sex and drugs parties:

“Many participants don’t seem the least bit embarrassed, much less ashamed. On the contrary, they speak proudly about how they’re overturning traditions and paradigms in their private lives, just as they do in the technology world they rule.”

Media references to Brave New World are often misapplied, typically used to refer to the arrival of new reproductive technologies. But what’s interesting about Huxley’s story is not so much the prospect of babies grown in bottles — still a long way off — but instead the far more immediate prospect of a population that has been stupefied by limbic capitalism: that is, the skilfully designed and addictive forms of entertainment that drip-feed us dopamine.

Porn, junk food, celebrity media, gambling, gaming, smoking, opioids: all of these products tap into our longing for nourishment, excitement, and pleasure, but do so while draining the consumer of health, happiness, and – most importantly – money. If there’s one thing that Huxley got wrong, it was in assuming that soma would need to be coercively administered by the state. As it turns out, private corporations are more than up to the job.

In his delightfully titled 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman recognised Huxley’s prescience:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”

In this adaptation, a designer of New London’s social structure speaks at one point of the ease with which the population were persuaded to adopt her new regime. These people embraced passivity, irrelevance, and trivia because they couldn’t bear to experience normal human emotion: “they would have done anything to avoid those agonising moments when there’s nowhere else to look but inside.” The designer offered consumers short-term pleasure over long-term happiness. Centuries later, and far too late, she regrets what she’s done.

The phrase is not original to Marx, nor is the idea exclusive to Marxism. Yet, with remarkable economy, it captures the essence of the idealised communist society.

Of course, the reality of communism was best summed-up in the old Soviet-era quip — “the bosses pretend to pay us and we pretend to work,” but let’s stick with the ideal — and what makes it so attractive.

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Are you ready for 'fully automated luxury communism'?

By Peter Franklin

The first half of the slogan suggests a society in which everyone does their bit; and the second half, that there’s always enough to go round. It all seems so fair, so reasonable — until, that is, you notice that what you put into the system (“from each…”) is unrelated to what you get out of it (“to each…”). That’s a problem because “ability” isn’t the only determinant of productivity. In fact, the real difference is made by effort, determination, creativity and risk-taking — all of which respond to reward. So if people don’t get rewarded for the all-important extras they put in, what happens to the economy? Nothing good.

In any case, who decides what each person’s needs are — or, for that matter, what their abilities are?

If you look at Marx’s use of the phrase in context, you’ll see that he was applying it to the “higher phase of communist society” — a socialist wonderland in which material wealth flows abundantly and labour has become “life’s prime want” (because it’s all such fun). So no need for some oppressive state to direct your efforts and distribute the product, you just do what you want and take what you need.

Unfortunately, the path to this “higher phase” has never been clear and the radical Left has struggled with it ever since.

At this point, I ought to say that capitalism, though evidently more successful than communism, has also fallen short. It may be less overtly utopian, but free market economics has its own unrealistic assumptions — rational actors, perfect information, level playing fields etc. All too often, the reality is one in which asymmetries of knowledge and power allow the few to exploit the many.

Hence the enduring appeal of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”: twelve words which describe a clear alternative to a deeply-flawed capitalist system. The interesting thing, though, is that they present as much of a challenge to the contemporary Left as they do to the free-market Right.

*

Leftwingery is not, and has never been, a monolith. In the 20th century, communism achieved a position of dominance on the far Left, but had to overcome rival ideologies, like anarchism. In the 21st century, it is just one of many strands of radical thought. It struggles to stand out from and is sometimes co-opted by its rivals.

The old primarily class-based analysis of society now has to contend with other kinds of identity and inequality. A non-exhaustive list includes sex, sexuality, gender, disability (problematic word), race (ditto), religion, language, culture, lifestyle, age, body shape, and all the intersections thereof. It’s all so multidimensional that it’s difficult to decant into neat ideological categories like ‘Leninism’, ‘Trotskyism’, etc. Thus, we have to rely on informalities like ‘Woke’. Yes, it’s a word that been sucked-dry by continual mockery, but it’s useful nonetheless.

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Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

The Woke Left dominates today’s radical politics — yet it is also neutralising it. For a start, we’ve seen the culture wars alienate the Left’s traditional working-class support. I’ll say no more about that, because it’s been extensively documented and debated already. Less appreciated, though, is the failure of the radicals to mobilise mass support along other dimensions of identity.

Look at what happened to the Presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Their failure to enthuse the kind of voters the Democrats need to win back from Trump was bad enough. Worse was the disconnect with black voters — who swung firmly behind Joe Biden, the candidate of the centrist establishment. Neither Warren, nor Sanders, were able to extend their appeal much beyond a fanbase of young, mostly white, college-educated activists. In fact, compared to his 2016 run, Sanders went backwards.

It’s the same story across the Western world. With capitalism in crisis, the radical Left gets a hearing, but the establishment stays in power.

In the 20th century, the Left was able to build history-changing movements because their class-based politics had a clear economic programme. The identity-based politics of the contemporary Left does not. Yes, there are promises of lavish state spending — on free broadband and the like. But it doesn’t add up to a transformation of the economic order.

The old Left had the advantage of having a much simpler and clearer model of the society it wanted to change — i.e. the class system. Furthermore, the components of that system can be concretely defined by their economic relationships to one another — workers and management, labour and capital, etc.

The Woke model of society provides no such clarity. There are many more components, most which are not defined by their economic relationships to one another. The Woke Left has plenty to say about inequality, of course — but it’s expressed in terms of concepts like ‘privilege’ and ‘voice’, instead of the solid language of wages and ownership. The proposal that everyone should be paid the same, though lunacy, is at least comprehensible — but what the heck does ‘check your privilege’ mean?

Further reading

Bernie's failure is a lesson for the Left

By James Bloodworth

Inequalities of whatever kind can have economic causes and/or consequences, but unlike orthodox Marxism, the Woke Left is not underpinned by a unifying economic theory. While Marxist economics is a major school of economic thought, there’s no such thing as Wokenomics.

Or is there?

*

While, as I say, there’s no defining economic platform — we have seen ideas emerge from various corners of the contemporary Left that would re-order economic relationships across society.

One example is the proposal that reparations should be paid to the descendants of slaves. It’s the subject of an ongoing debate that’s especially current in the United States. Those opposed say that requiring some Americans to compensate other Americans for something that was abolished in the 19th century is deeply unjust — and, indeed, racist. Those in favour argue that the injustice of slavery is not “all in the past”, but can be seen in racialised patterns of advantage and disadvantage that persist to the present day.

And yet it’s hard to think of anything in the modern world that hasn’t been influenced by some past injustice. The principle of reparations, if seriously and consistently implemented, would certainly reorder economic relationships in a pretty fundamental, if immensely complicated, way.

There’s another branch of Wokenomics that is also about compensating people — only not for some historical legacy, but for unpaid labour carried out in the present.

For instance, there’s the idea that mothers should be paid for the work of mothering. It’s a case made in the New York Times by Kim Brooks:

“…if garbage collectors and grocery store workers and hedge fund managers expect to be paid for their labor, why not those who create and sustain the human race? Why can’t we imagine some form of universal basic caretakers income to support the work mothers (or fathers or other extended kin) do at home?”

To be clear, Brooks is not merely asking for a more generous social security system — she’s demanding to be paid as a worker:

“This work, despite bringing joy and meaning to my life, shared many of the qualities of the menial jobs I’d done before… But there was one important difference: The work I’ve done as a mother I’ve done for free.”

Brooks is far from alone in seeing the world in this way. For instance, she mentions the Wages for Housework movement that dates back to the early 1970s. Then there’s the splash made by Sophie Lewis’s 2019 book, Full Surrogacy Now — which advocates a radically different view of family relationships. If I understand her correctly, all pregnancy in the capitalist system is ‘womb-work’ (though, for the most part, unpaid).

Further reading

The unhappy truth about surrogacy

By Julie Bindel

The issue here is that if the activities undertaken by a paid surrogate, childminder or cleaner are defined as work, then why is what parents do for themselves considered to be something else?

An answer is provided by Oren Cass in a counterblast for American Compass:

“Suppose we grant the premise that child-rearing is work and that by definition work should be paid. The next question would be: paid by whom? Presumably, by the child’s parents. So if Ms. Brooks wishes to charge Ms. Brooks for Ms. Brooks’s work, she is welcome to do so. But she will find the credits and debits in her account cancel out.”

(Also, think of the paperwork — would one have to pay oneself for that too?)

I presume that Kim Brooks thinks that she should be paid by the state, not by herself — on the grounds that mothers “create and sustain the human race”, which indeed they do. But as Cass points out, the state, in taking responsibility for payment, would thereby take control. That, after all, is the thing about getting paid — your employer decides what you do and how you do it. They also get to own what you produce. Is this really an arrangement we want to apply to motherhood?

Even more than the reparations argument, what is being proposed here is a fundamentally different social and economic order. Firstly, there’s the expansion of the state into private life. Secondly, there’s the transformation of family relationships into transactional relationships. And thirdly, there’s the redefinition of voluntary action as work.

One has to ask, where will it end?

One of the tenets of the Woke Left is that “sex work is work” — and therefore must not be stigmatised or criminalised in any way, but rather regulated and unionised just like the older professions. But I wonder if they’re missing a trick. Why not also argue that “sex is sex work” — and, therefore, should be remunerated in all circumstances. If parents should be paid for looking after their own children, and mothers for gestating them, then shouldn’t we apply the same logic to the start of production line?

*

OK, leaving aside the reductio ad absurdum, the fact remains that eroding the distinctions between public and private life, and between work and voluntary action, gets you into all sorts of nonsense.

In a celebrated essay for Buzzfeed last year, Anne Helen Petersen writes about the causes of “Millennial burnout”. She repeatedly uses the word “labour” (or rather “labor”) to describe the never-ending demands made on young people trying to survive in a hyper-competitive economy. She makes a lot of powerful points — for instance, having to respond to out-of-hours work emails is indeed labour, not to mention an intrusion into home life. But she also uses the word inappropriately, for instance referring to self-promotion on Instagram as “the labor of performing the self for public consumption.”

Further reading

The bitter truth about Millennial burnout

By Peter Franklin

Except it very clearly isn’t labour, it’s posting on social media — and you don’t have to do it. I don’t think Petersen is demanding ‘wages for selfies’ or anything like that, but she does go on to ask what can be done “until or in lieu of a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system.” Deleting your apps would be a good start.

The concept of ‘emotional labour’ is another example of seeing everything as work. It was originally used to describe the undervalued emotional content of what a lot of employees (often in female-dominated occupations) do in the workplace — for instance the compassion of a nurse or the friendliness of a receptionist. However, it’s been extended to describe what happens in private life too — not only in caring for children and elderly relatives, but also things like consoling a friend or mediating between feuding flatmates.

Caring for others is not cost-free. Nor is the burden always equally shared — and certainly not between men and women. But there is something deeply dehumanising about applying the language of work to something that should be freely given. Moreover, if it is coerced then that should be treated as the domestic abuse that it is, not a breakdown in industrial relations.

*

What a volunteer does for a good cause is, by definition, freely given. But even here we see confusions between voluntary action and the world of work. For instance, well-meant schemes to provide incentives for volunteering — such as discount cards — introduce an element of payment. Other line-blurring elements include the dangled possibility of a paid job with the organisation one volunteers for — or merely the opportunity to embellish a CV. There’s not much difference between that and the exploitative practice of unpaid internships.

Further reading

Which is worse, work or no work?

By Peter Franklin

It may sound corny and clichéd, but the idea of virtue being its own reward is a life-enhancing one. The things in life that don’t get dragged into the transactional sphere of economics are literally and figuratively priceless.

But Wokenomics takes the opposite view, which is that if we do value something then we must value it economically.

In a recent article (also in the New York Times) the Australian economist Justin Wolfers argues that GDP figures should record “the immense value of the sacrifices being made by millions of people who have stayed at home to stop the spread of the coronavirus”. He says that the GDP figures include the “defense services” produced by soldiers going off to fight wars, so why not also put a direct value on the contribution made by those staying at home to fight Covid-19? Why do we include soldiers’ pay in GDP, but not the support payments made to those who can’t work because of the lockdown?

The answer is straightforward: soldiers are doing a job; people staying at home are not (indeed they are supported by the state precisely because they can’t work). They are, of course, doing the right thing — by not engaging in risky behaviours that would cause themselves and others harm. But if we were to consider that as part of economic production, then why not also include what people ‘do’ by not speeding on the roads, not getting addicted to crack cocaine or not eating junk food all day? There’d be no end to it.

*

This is the trouble with Wokenomics — it turns absolutely everything into a series of politicised, administrative value judgements. As such it goes even further in its ambitions than Marxist economics. Arbitrarily putting a price on a tonne of wheat or a tractor factory is economic insanity, but doing the same for motherhood, friendship, volunteering or personal responsibility is moral madness.

That people take care of their families, respect the law, show consideration for others — and do so without incentive or recognition — is what makes a society great. We should very much value it, but not within any kind of economic paradigm.

To resort to another clichéd but true sentiment, the best things in life really are free.

As soon as it safe I will be boarding a train to North East England where I will rush to my mum and dad and wrap my arms around them both. We would have been going on holiday next month and spending precious days together.

I moved away from home when I was just 16 years old, looking for jobs and opportunities to get involved in feminism. It meant sacrificing time with my beautiful mother and missing out on so much that we could have done together as I approached adulthood. But Maureen, my mum, encouraged me to live life to the full, partly because so many opportunities, as a working-class woman, had been denied to her.

Over the years I haven’t seen my family as much as I have wanted. We are all very close, and everybody but me and my niece still live in the North East. Not only did my mum encourage me, despite the sacrifice to her, to fly the nest, she also started to bring my niece Jo to London to visit every year from the age of seven. Maureen knew it would mean eventually saying goodbye to Jo, but she wanted her to have better opportunities than the North East can offer.

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The Yorkshire Ripper fired up my feminism

By Julie Bindel

The last two years we have spent Christmas together in London, but my dad is disabled and travel is difficult for him. I have long been wanting to spend more time with them, but something always got in the way. Whether it’s a long-haul trip to investigate violence against women, or another book that takes up my time and energy, that time was often on hold. It won’t ever be again.

I don’t mean this to be sentimental, but if I have any regrets it is not spending as much time with my mum in particular. We have had some wonderful times though: I took her to Paris for lunch for her 79th birthday. It was her first ever trip to the city. For another birthday I treated her to a trolley dash around TK Maxx and afterwards a tapas lunch where we examined her swag.

I already knew how much I love my family well before the pandemic, but it has made me realise how precious time is. In the future, my work trips and book deadlines will come second to my family.

Go to a restaurant
Sam Leith

“When this lousy plague is over,” to adapt the First World War song of complaint, “No more lockdown food for me./ When the restaurants re-open, oh, how happy I shall be!/ For bland, thrice weekly pesto pasta, coronavirus thanks a bunch./ As soon as real life makes a comeback, friends, I’m going out to lunch.”

Already, only three weeks into lockdown, the diet is grinding me down. We’re eating hearty whole-family stews of panic-bought pulses and bland, thrifty, carb-heavy meals made of easily available ingredients and designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, aka my culinary fusspot of a six-year-old.

The house is a miasma of sloth and fart gas, table manners are chimp-style and the conversation — mostly centering around the weekly appearance of the Beano — makes up in volume for what it lacks in interest. And the cooking, the wiping, the clingfilming, the drying, the hoovering…

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The joyful anachronism of kid lit

By Sam Leith

I shall never again take for granted the utter pleasure of choosing your own meal, in an environment where someone else does all the work: a meal where deep frying is expertly done and won’t burn down your house, interesting spices and unusual flavour combinations abound, and where you can linger past three o’clock, if you’re on the skive, in good company and with a glass of something in your hand.

Imagine a sushi splurge at Nobu! A plate of mince on dripping toast from the Quality Chop House, garnished with peppery watercress! A battery of crispy duck or salty chilli rice in a Chinese joint! A bellyful of K-Pop burger and Sichuan aubergine at Chick n’ Sours! Hell, at this stage I’d gratefully settle for a ginger chicken udon from Wagamama or an American Hot from Pizza Express.

With the likely and probably irrecoverable collapse of much of the restaurant industry, I realise with a pang that many of those places simply won’t be there when we emerge. To extend the analogy, it’ll be like coming home from war to find that your wife has run off with the postman while you were at the front, and that your mistress got bombed to bits in the Blitz. How I regret, now, every Pret sandwich drearily munched al desko: a never-to-return opportunity missed.

But as a matter of morale maintenance and selfless service to the recovery of the economy, I intend to lunch like mad. Friends — sorry, important business contacts…. — who’s up for it?

Return to Venice
Tanya Gold

When it is over, I want to go to Venice, to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, near San Toma vaporetto stop. I would like to go the whole way by water, from Penzance to Venice. I have been going to Venice since I was 17, at least once every two years, and I am enthralled by it, probably because it is preposterous, as people are preposterous. It’s a stupid place to build a city, especially a city filled with great art, and I find that touching. We make wars and genocides and plagues, but we also make this. We are strange.

Venice is a mistake: the people who became the Venetians ran away from the tribes pouring into Italy when the Empire collapsed, hid on sandbanks and, due to luck and situation, grew rich.

And, in this city of wonder — this paradigm, this error — the Scuola is the loveliest thing I have found. It is an early sixteenth century building of two stories in the classical style. It was a meeting place for wealthy Venetians, built in gratitude for surviving plague, and dedicated to Saint Roch, who offered protection from plague.  It is small for a Venetian public building and quite remote. Most tourists, stuck on the track from St Mark’s to the Rialto Bridge, do not find it.

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Woody Allen's brilliant betrayal

By Tanya Gold

They should: it is filled with paintings by Jacopo Tintoretto. If you have not heard of him — for me, the painter of the Italian Renaissance — it is because his masterpiece is a room in an idle corner of Venice and cannot be moved to Paris or New York for exhibition. Most people call Titian the master — Charles V once knelt to pick up his paintbrush — and Tintoretto was apprenticed to him for a few days, then left to teach himself. Titian’s Assumption is in the Basilica dei Frari next door, and it is perfect. It is too perfect. Tintoretto is more grandiose and thrilling. His nickname was The Furious.

You walk up the stairs, and they are here, on every wall and ceiling. The room is shuttered and dim; the floor is polished. They seem to glow and throb, as if the bright paint is still wet: Jacob’s Ladder; God Appears to Moses; The Pillar of Fire.

There cannot be a more astounding room anywhere. If art is consolation — and this is consolation specifically from plague — there cannot be more of it than this.

Stay at home
Justin Webb

Well I’m not going near the Maldives, I can tell you that for free. The world — When This Thing Is Over — is going to be doing, with knobs on, all the things we currently read are gone forever. My kids are already fretting about the purchase of new phone cases from Wuhan so all that piffle about No More World Trade will probably amount to not much, and of course for all the talk of hearth and home travel to exotic places will spike.

Not for me. I may go to Bath for the day and watch a rugby match under the floodlights at the Recreation Ground, with the Abbey for backdrop and the smell of wood-smoke and beery breath on the air. But otherwise actually I quite like this life.

Not, of course, the sadness, the fear about relatives and the knowledge that so many are suffering so much. But as a (lapsed) Quaker I am completely at home with silence and the simple life in which online groceries provide the only clue that we progressed beyond the Neolithic. Well, that and Netflix I suppose.

Anyway: travel is what I do not miss and do not want to do. I shall go nowhere when it is over, and thoroughly enjoy it.

Introduce my children to Old England
Niall Gooch

I can’t wait to get back to dragging my children round old stones in fields.

One chilly afternoon in January, in those far-off days when a disease outbreak in provincial China was the third-listed story in the foreign news section, I was sitting amid the ruins of St Augustine’s Priory in Canterbury with my two small children, trying to explain the Dissolution of the Monasteries. My account must have made some impact: on the train home my three-year-old daughter announced that on Monday she would tell her nursery teacher that Henry VIII was bad because he wouldn’t let people go to Mass.

I don’t know how much they took in at St Augustine’s. They liked the clever animation showing its centuries-long development from simple Romanesque chapel c.600 to vast medieval monastic complex with huge Gothic priory church and one of the finest scriptoriums in Europe. However, they did not seem to share my excitement about the graves of the early archbishops of Canterbury. Perhaps that will come.

Before coronavirus, I had intended the Priory to be the first instalment of a busy year of historical visiting. Having fulfilled the middle-class stereotype and left London for rural Kent in my mid-30s, last autumn I leaned into early middle age and bought an English Heritage membership.

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It's time to reverse the Beeching Axe

By Niall Gooch

We are now within striking range of several important sites, including a Roman fort, and my children are of an age where they can begin to understand Our Island Story. One of the gifts I‘ve always wanted to give them is to know that they are, so to speak, from Somewhere.

I’d like to help them to understand that this is an old country; to know that to be born in England is to be born into a magnificent, sprawling, globally important saga, and a rich heritage of art, architecture, language and landscape. I want them to be able to look at Dover Castle or HMS Victory or a Jacobean manor house and to know that it is in some sense theirs, a part of who they are.

When I tweeted pictures of the children at St Augustine’s, a Twitter friend commented “What a privilege to grow up and play in the midst of such deep history”. That captures my feelings exactly, and I’m looking forward to showing them Old England up close when the current unpleasantness has passed.

Play cricket
Tom Holland

To love cricket is to be as alert to the rhythms of the season as any ancient pagan. The year is divided into two halves: the months of darkness, of grey rain, when leaves lie thick on the outfield, and satellite television, with its sun-baked images of Australia or India, serves the cricket lover as a bonfire once did the celebrants of the winter solstice.

Then, of course, there is summer: six months when the patterning provided by a good fixture list can make life itself seem rich, and vivid, and dappled. To anticipate a match that has been played at the same ground, against the same opposition, on the same date, over many years, is to embrace the joys both of familiarity and the unknown: the reassurance that an English summer will always be an English summer; the promise that this year, rather than getting out for a duck or being hit humiliatingly out of the attack, everything will come together, and all shall be well.

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Plague and the comforts of history

By Tom Holland

Except that this year, of course, things are not going to be well. This year, everything that normally serves to herald the coming season — the warmth of spring sunshine, the song of returning birds, the back pages of a newspaper — serves as a kind of mockery. Authors CC, the team I play for, will not be heading to Wiltshire to play what for years now has been our season’s curtain raiser. Fixtures lovingly inscribed in diaries back in January will slip by unplayed. Our cricket bags will lie untouched in attics. Bats will remain unsheathed, whites unworn, scorebooks unfilled.

Of course, there are palliatives. Authors CC are currently in the midst of a virtual tournament, the Rathbones Cup, organised by the distinguished sportswriter David Owen, which has seen our various teams pitted against each other on WhatsApp.

The matches — which are determined by complex rules that nobody aside from David quite understands, but seem to feature a Gallimard edition of Proust, and can generally be done and dusted in 20 minutes — have us all properly gripped.

Yesterday, I am proud to report, my team of Anglo-Saxons triumphed over a 1990s Hollywood XI. Hengist took five wickets, and Alfred the Great, after catching Winona Ryder in the deep, then sealed victory with a quickfire 87.

It is not cricket — but it gives us a flavour of cricket. This, as clear blue skies look down on empty pitches, is the best we can hope for. A reminder of what has been — and a promise of what, when this hellish time is over, will be all the more precious for having been so very desperately missed.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
Louise Perry 

When lockdown finally ends, we will presumably be returned to normal life in dribs and drabs, with the most essential activities prioritised over the least. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) classes will, quite rightly, be at the very bottom of the list. This is a form of martial arts that demands intimate physical contact with your opponent — more than once, I’ve had another person’s sweat drip directly into my eyes or mouth — and right now it’s hard to imagine even shaking a stranger’s hand. Nevertheless I’m desperate to get back to a sport that is entirely incompatible with social distancing.

Full disclosure: I am terrible at BJJ. Six months in, I’ve learnt the hard way that strength and fitness will only get you so far. This is less a sport and more a mechanical engineering problem. The task is to work out how to use your strong muscles against your opponent’s weak muscles, and to do so both quickly and surreptitiously, with the goal of making them submit via a chokehold or a joint lock. Every session I get slightly better, but every session I’m humbled by how inept I am.

While I’ve been able to cobble together home gym sessions by taking HIIT classes on Zoom and squatting my grudging 36kg German Shepherd, there really is no way of replicating a BJJ class at home. Other people on my BJJ WhatsApp group (yes, there is such a thing) are desperate enough that they’ve been making ‘grappling dummies’ by stuffing an old gi with rolled up towels and jumpers. But thrashing around with a mannequin is a poor substitute for the real thing, in all its exhausting, joyful, disgusting glory.

Have some time to myself
Polly MacKenzie

I want to be alone. It seems churlish of me, when I know millions of people are struggling with loneliness right now. But loneliness is the one thing I know I’m safe from. There are six people in my household, three of whom are children and therefore have no concept of personal boundaries. The closest I get to isolation is the two metre separation in the queue at the supermarket.

So when this is over I want to go away for a whole weekend and climb in the hills, all by myself. Nothing challenging; I’ll be content wandering through the Malvern Hills I roamed as a child. Even the Worcestershire Beacon, the highest point, stretches to only 425m above sea level. But it’s not the climb that I crave. It’s the silence. The bracken and the trees and the gentle slopes.

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A Covid death is not a good death

By Polly Mackenzie

I will be staying away from popular places and well-trodden paths. I shall get up early to avoid even the hint of a crowd. I shall climb, and rest, and climb and rest, never fearful for a moment that a police officer will complain that I am not exercising hard enough and should stop relaxing. I shall roam the iron age earthworks at British Camp and feel the eternal presence of history. Totally alone and therefore able to hear the echo of thousands of years of humanity and our neverending battle to protect ourselves and survive.

I shall run down the steep slope of Happy Valley into the wooded pathways below, hurtling as I did thirty years ago at a pace just a tiny bit too fast to be confident of stopping safely. I shall remember the way my father used to catch us, arms open, at the bottom. And I shall remember that other people are not, really, a pain to be tolerated, but a blessing. One that I shall be ready to return to, after just one more night of solitary peace.

Go to my local second-hand book shop
Daniel Kalder

Here in Texas there is a large chain of second-hand bookshops called Half Price Books, and I am fortunate enough to live within a short drive of not one, not two, but three of these stores. I visit them all regularly, too regularly in fact, and often swing by one of the stores in the evenings after work. But the typical half-price discount is not enough for me; I like to trawl their book clearance shelves, $1 CD racks, junk vinyl and “quarter bin” comic boxes.

Many are the strange and wonderful books I have found going for a song, such as James Ballou’s Arming for the Apocalypse, Sukarno’s autobiography, a super-rare album of photographs by a Stalin-era Uzbek photographer, and George Chapman’s translation of The Odyssey. The $1 CD racks contain lots of pop/rock dross — U2, Coldplay, Sting, Garth Brooks etc. — but I can usually find some exceptional recordings of classical music on prestigious labels; I discovered Mahler, Bartok and a great deal of other amazing music through HPB’s clearance shelves.

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Nineties Russia prepared me for coronageddon

By Daniel Kalder

As for comics, I once found a complete run of Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! for 25 cents a pop in the quarter bins, not to mention a 3-D Steve Ditko comic, and some rare Richard Corben undergrounds that were worth a lot more than what I paid for them. Those are probably not names that mean a lot to many UnHerd readers, but if they do, you will understand the excitement I felt.

HPB tried to stay open when the shutdowns were getting into gear, but eventually had to close the doors of its physical stores. Currently they bombard me with discount vouchers for their online shop, but it’s not the same.

Successful browsing in a second-hand bookstore first requires the bookstore to be physical, and in addition is a skill that takes time to acquire and which must be practised often. It requires time, and patience, and knowledge of which types of things turn up in different neighborhoods. And I would like to get back to it, please.

Have a pint
Ed West

I had a dream I was in the pub the other night. It was like an old gin palace and crowded with people, drinking, laughing and way within the government-approved distance of 2metres away from each other. It was so beautiful, when I woke up I wanted to cry. It was like that episode of Black Mirror where people suffering from dementia are allowed to head into a virtual reality world where they’re young and healthy again.

I imagine when I first head back into a pub I’ll feel the need to get down on my knees and kiss the ground, tears in my eyes.

I’ve spent a lot of time this past week wondering about where I’d like to go when this is all over, assuming anywhere is open and we haven’t resorted to barter or descended into a Mad Max-like dystopia. I fear I’m not very well-adapted to the 21st century digital economy but I imagine I’d be even less useful in a 5th century skull-based economy.

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Coronavirus coverage is making me feel ill

By Ed West

In a parallel universe somewhere, one in which mother nature didn’t strike us down with this disease, I was supposed to be in west Cork this week, close to the heavenly Gougane Barra national park.

It is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever set eyes on, and the most spiritual; it’s associated with early Christian holy men and women. I’ve also promised myself I’ll take the kids to Italy again, but strangely the lockdown has also given me a real desire to explore England more.

I was tempted to join a friend in an insane-sounding bike ride from the Cumbria coast over to Whitby this month, and although I might not do the cycle, there is so much of my own country I haven’t seen. The thought of a walk around some Pennine villages followed by a pint, without having to steer into the road to avoid people or obsessively wipe down every surface like I’m Howard Hughes, sounds like heaven right now.

Having little historical imagination, the moral majority movement of the Eighties fetishised this very particular notion of the family — one that only flourished within some very particular economic conditions during the post-war period. But this iteration was only a blip during the long transition from large, extended kinship groups to the ‘chosen’, ‘blended’ family that begun to emerge within the gay community at precisely same the time Jerry Falwell and Ronald Regan were insisting that nuclear was the only proper way for families to be. For these two reactionaries, the nuclear family was the all-American redoubt against the twin threats of communism and homosexuality. The family was nuclear not just in the sense of being a nucleus, but also, as the premier expression of resistance to the nuclear threat of Communism. Family, God and country became “the holy trinity of American traditionalism”.

It is rather awkward for Christian conservatives, then, that among the most difficult to conscript into this cosy celebration of the bounded little family unit is Jesus of Nazareth himself. For again and again, throughout the Gospel accounts of his life and teaching, Jesus is portrayed as a thorough-going enemy of the exclusively narrow biological unit. Let one example stand for many:

^“While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matthew 12. 46-50)

One way of telling the story of the Biblical narrative about the family is as an arc that begins with the association of family life – and particularly procreation – with patriotic duty, and then gradually subjects this position to ever increasing scepticism. For a fledgling community intent on nation building, the production of children was essential to communal survival. Thus the suspicion of all those who do not contribute to the expansion of the population – eunuchs, homosexuals, unfertile “barren” women. The problem here is not about sex, it’s about children. This is what modern sex-obsessed conservatives miss about the argument that is going on within the pages of the Bible. The charge against homosexuality is not that people shouldn’t have sex this way, the charge is a lack of patriotism.

But even this gets challenged and broken down. Consider the following from Isaiah, 56:

“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters”

This is radical stuff. Keeping Sabbath is “better than sons and daughters”. And Isaiah is Jesus’s favourite book of the Hebrew scriptures — he quotes from it more than any other text. Jesus’s “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” line is a clear extension of this tradition. He takes it beyond anything even Isaiah could have imagined. Membership of this new family is not premised on biological kinship but on baptism — water is thicker than blood.

It is very peculiar how religious conservatives have sought to construct an apologia for the nuclear family from the Bible. Broadly speaking, the Old Testament is perfectly relaxed about its heroes having multiple wives — Solomon had 700 of them. In contrast, the heroes of the New Testament are mostly single men, with little interest in the domestic duties and pleasures of a settled family life. St Paul even advised that it was “good for a man not to marry” (1 Corinthians, 7). To say the least, it is very hard work indeed to try and find a secure theological model of the nuclear family within the pages of Holy Scripture.

Nuclear family, no; but family, yes. The final passage of Brooks piece is a stirring cri de coeur for a return to something both “new and ancient”:

“We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time. This is a significant opportunity, a chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms. For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin.

It’s time to find ways to bring back the big tables.”

My first thought, as I read it, was of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, with a dozen single men sat around a large table at one of the decisive moments of the Christian story. It was on this occasion that Jesus invited his followers to “do this in remembrance of me” — an invitation that over two billion of us regularly respond to by gathering around the Eucharistic table in a recreation of that founding meal.

Those who share this meal together describe each other as family. It is, to use the sociological jargon, a fictive kinship — in so far as it is not grounded in a biological connection, but a chosen identity. If there is such a thing as a Christian family, it is this. A place where, at best, “adults and children live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms”. Gay and straight, rich and poor, black and white — this is the ultimate extended family.

Yes, like the nuclear family, this family has also been thinned out by the community dissolving properties of contemporary capitalism. But as a model, it is far more deeply rooted in the Christian witness than the nuclear family ever has been. Which makes the church’s continued obsession with policing the biological mechanics of love-making so thoroughly depressing.

For what Brooks reminds us is that if we compare and contrast the moral majority nuclear family position with the forged families that sprung up within the gay community in the Eighties — often forms of collective solidarity and mutual care in response to the darkness of AIDS — it is the forged family that more closely resembles the sort of arrangement that Jesus was calling his followers into.

Throughout Christian history, whether it be the big table of the monastic refectory, the Eucharistic table (yes, an altar too) set as the central focus of the church, or even the big table of parish lunch clubs, it is who you eat with (and not so much who you sleep with) that defines the religious family. The blindness of many religious conservatives is to have set the small little Ikea table of the nuclear family against that of the large, inclusive table of the extended family, with always space for one more seat.

Yes, fidelity and faithfulness are important in all family structures. But when Jesus said do this in remembrance of me, he really didn’t have in mind a stay-at-home Mum in a flowery apron providing meatloaf for the table and only straight sex in the bedroom.

That’s right, of all the teenagers on the planet, ours are among the least likely to agree with the idea that “my life has clear meaning or purpose”.

And yet, this unsettling news was pretty much ignored. The focus in the media was on the survey’s news about ‘modest improvements’ in reading and maths. The meaning of life stuff was left well alone.

The same survey suggested that the UK’s young people, while being in the middle of the pack in terms of happiness, also rank near the very bottom in terms of life satisfaction. Of all the countries surveyed, only the children of Turkey and the Macao region of China rate their life less highly than the British do.

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The rise of the hippie conservatives

By Freddie Sayers

It seems that what the researchers themselves refer to as eudaimonia, the philosophical concept of human flourishing that the ancient Greeks considered to be the highest and most worthy, is in short supply among British young people. This feels like it might be worth thinking about.

Perhaps the commentariat ignored the research because these big philosophical questions don’t make easy news stories. The whole question of meaning is now considered entirely private — it’s almost rude to mention in public.

It is also interwoven with religion, which makes it an even less appetising subject for liberal-minded debate. The top of the OECD rankings are filled with more religious countries, and the UK is now one of the most secular countries in the world. Many people would no doubt think that a dose of existential lostness in your teens is a price worth paying for being liberated from arbitrary superstition. Where would you rather bring up your children, after all: Catholic Panama and Muslim Albania, at the top of the ‘meaning in life’ index, or secular Sweden and the Netherlands, towards the bottom?

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By Giles Fraser

Others might argue that the real reasons for juvenile emptiness might be related to practical concerns about what the future holds for them: difficulties of getting on the housing ladder, surviving in the gig economy and anxiety about Brexit.

But while all these may be contributing factors, it is hard to avoid the sense that there is a wider crisis of meaning in our late modern society, and that the UK is particularly exposed. Already since the Brexit vote, hard-to-pin-down abstract nouns like identity, culture, community and belonging have forced their way into the political debate. If this report is right, ‘meaning in life’ could be next.

There are already energetic movements such as Extinction Rebellion which advocate thinking radically differently about how to organise our society, with less focus on economic growth and a greater attention on the Common Good and overall human flourishing.

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Why the Greens should stop playing God

By John Gray

Even to refer to the Good in this way is still considered edgy. A central premise of Aristotle’s ethics was that eudaimonia is the highest good, the end point that needs no secondary justification. But it’s telling that the OECD report’s authors felt they had justify this area of questioning with reference to secondary effects: kids who have a greater sense of meaning in life are apparently less likely to play truant and more likely to succeed in reading and maths. As if they were the more important goals.

I think there’s a similar leap that has yet to be made in our politics. Part of the reason that the response to the Brexit vote has been so woeful is that politicians lacked the understanding or vocabulary to respond to the deeper, more inchoate aspects of people’s motivation. It takes a rare kind of leader who has the vision, and moral authority, to address these questions convincingly — clearly, none of our current crop of politicians are interested.

To give them their due, both Labour and the Conservatives have at least understood the need to bolster regional and local culture and empowerment in the UK, which is a good start. Looking down the ‘meaning in life’ rankings, once you get past the predominantly Catholic and Muslim-majority countries at the top of the list, you soon arrive at Switzerland and Austria. These are both European countries comparable to ours, which are only slightly more religious, and yet 71% of their 15-year-olds say they have discovered a satisfactory meaning in life, compared with just 52% of ours. It seems fair to speculate that their famously strong national, regional and local cultures play a part in giving their children a strong sense of place as they grow into adulthood.

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If only we could be more like Bavaria

By David Goodhart

Strong culture doesn’t necessarily mean homogenous — Austria has a higher level of immigration than the UK, but rather like neighbouring Bavaria, its prominent local customs can make it easier rather than harder to assimilate newcomers. The OECD report actually singles out the UK as a country in which “students with an immigrant background were much more likely to report a greater sense of meaning in life than their native-born counterparts”. A combination of greater religiosity and stronger immigrant cultures seems a likely explanation.

Beyond religion and culture, there are other, equally controversial, areas that we should look at if we think this is a problem worth addressing: the damaging impact of technology and the internet, how values are taught in our schools, and how to better support families. Labour have now actively signalled their opposition to pro-family policies, and Boris Johnson steers well clear of family values, for his own delicate reasons. But absent religious faith or a stronger wider culture, the family is still the primary provider of meaning in life, and Britain has a high level of family breakdown: 28.5% of British 12-17 year olds live with only one parent, the third highest in Europe and nearly twice that of Switzerland.

Aristotle thought that eudaimonia was intimately connected to arete, or virtue — another word I don’t think we’ve heard once in this election campaign. Don’t hold your breath. Whoever wins on Thursday, the small matter of the meaning of life looks set, for now, to remain off limits.

In a previous article, I mentioned a series of graphs – based on the American Time Use Survey – which shows the number of hours the average American spends each day with different categories of people, for instance, their friends, partners, co-workers and so on. The final graph is for time they spend alone.

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This last measure is at its lowest level in childhood. It hits a minor peak in early adulthood, then dips a bit as people start jobs, form stable relationships and have children of their own. In middle age, however, the line turns upward and keeps climbing as the impact of divorce, retirement, bereavement and infirmity sever the links that keep people together. Only death interrupts the inexorable upward trend (after which, one way or another, you’ll never be alone again).

Of course, solitude and loneliness are not the same thing. Indeed, as Brian Resnick reports for Vox, those most likely to say they feel lonely are not who one might expect:

“Today, members of the millennial generation are ages 23 to 38. These ought to be prime years of careers taking off and starting families, before joints really begin to ache. Yet as a recent poll and some corresponding research indicate, there’s something missing for many in this generation: companionship.

“A recent poll from YouGov, a polling firm and market research company, found that 30 percent of millennials say they feel lonely. This is the highest percentage of all the generations surveyed.”

As Resnick reminds us, the Millennial generation is now composed of twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings. It’s a phase in life in which time spent with friends falls away rapidly. The responsibilities of adulthood displace the easy companionship of one’s youth – and suddenly life seems like you alone against the world.

Was ever thus? Resnick mentions a study from 1990 which found that loneliness was highest among the young adults of that era. And yet, returning to the recent YouGov poll, there are hints that the Millennials have it especially bad:

“22 percent of millennials in the poll said they had zero friends. Twenty-seven percent said they had ‘no close friends,’ 30 percent said they have ‘no best friends’…

“In comparison, just 16 percent of Gen Xers and 9 percent of baby boomers say they have no friends.”

As the internet meme has it, ‘the miracle that no one talks about is that Jesus had 12 close friends in his thirties’.

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The bitter truth about Millennial burnout

By Peter Franklin

One might have thought that the social media age would have made it easier to make and keep friends. Perhaps it has for some people, but as tends to be the way with digital, the rewards are unequally distributed. Social media amplifies the advantages that the most socially adept and superficially attractive individuals already possess. The competition for peer group popularity is further sharpened by the fact that ‘friend’ and ‘follower’ counts have become monetisable commodities.

In a 2015 essay on friendship for The Atlantic, Julie Beck points out another double-edged effect of social media:

“Social media makes it possible to maintain more friendships, but more shallowly. And it can also keep relationships on life support that would (and maybe should) otherwise have died out.”

This is an under-appreciated point. In the pre-modern world most people stayed in the same place for most of the time, making friends (and enemies) that would stay in their lives until the grim reaper intervened. With the coming of modernity, life became more complex, more mobile – people moving on from one social context to another, making new friends, but then losing touch. In the absence of proximity, it took a real effort to maintain a friendship over time and distance.

Not anymore. Our lives are as complicated as ever, but for digital natives, staying ‘in touch’ has become much easier – in fact, practically automatic. These may be the flimsiest of relationships, but a life lived in part through social media is cluttered with these online revenants. “Auld acquaintance” that would have once been “forgot and never brought to mind”, now lingers on, scrabbling for attention.

No human capacity is unlimited – and that includes our capacity for friendship. I wonder if social media isn’t imposing a parasitic load on our social lives and getting in the way of maintaining real friendship, which gets harder as one gets older.

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Who are you calling a snowflake?

By Tom Chivers

Of course, it can’t all be blamed on technology. Friendship requires proximity and continuity in the real world – and modern life has many ways of disrupting that. For instance, there’s the regular upheaval of moving from job to job, city to city, country to country in search of economic opportunity. Then there’s the increasing numbers of people who stay single and/or childless – either later into life than previous generations or permanently. This has been identified as the cause of the so-called ‘sex recession’ among Millennials; but as well inhibiting romantic and family relationships, there is the loss of the platonic friendships that depend on the wider connections forged when you settle down and have children.

It would be nice to think that this is all a matter of choice – and that such freedom provides opportunities for different kinds of friendship and social connection. As the old saying goes, you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your relatives.

Then again, the reality may be that friendship and freedom are in tension – and that, in some way, one needs to be stuck in a situation with others to connect to them. Biology does the trick when it comes to family, but to nurture friendship in today’s world of unlimited choice, we need to commit ourselves to enduring communities and institutions.

These are increasingly thin on the ground – especially for a generation that’s been taught to mock and distrust them.

Suggested reading

Why cities are no place for kids

By Peter Franklin

Different cultures, colours, creeds, classes, languages and identities of every kind: all are included. Except for one group of people who find themselves increasingly excluded from the urban milieu: children.

Further reading

Can you afford parenthood?

By Peter Franklin

It’s a phenomenon explored by Derek Thompson in a must-read piece for The Atlantic:

“In high-density cities… no group is growing faster than rich college-educated whites without children, according to Census analysis by the economist Jed Kolko. By contrast, families with children older than 6 are in outright decline in these places. In the biggest picture, it turns out that America’s urban rebirth is missing a key element: births.”

Consider the statistics for New York:

“Since 2011, the number of babies born in New York has declined 9 percent in the five boroughs and 15 percent in Manhattan.”

Or Washington DC:

“…the overall population has grown more than 20 percent this century, but the number of children under the age of 18 has declined.”

Or the tech capital of the world:

“San Francisco has the lowest share of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.”

The great global cities are portrayed as places of youth and vibrancy. They certainly attract ambitious, highly educated twenty-somethings – which is why big companies base themselves there: so that they can take their pick of the brightest young minds. This is especially true of the tech sector.

In 2007, it was reported that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, told a conference that “young people are just smarter.” Zuckerberg himself was only 24 at the time and well on the way to global domination – and thus could be excused for thinking such a thing (which, in any case, is correct in some respects).

He’s also reported as saying that “Young people just have simpler lives. We may not have a car. We may not have a family.” In a long-hours working culture, that’s something that adds to their employability – and another reason why top employers love big cities.

The heaving metropolis doesn’t just concentrate bright young things in one place, it also ensures that they can be worked without distraction. The sky-high property prices that put city-centre family homes beyond the reach of most young workers are a feature not a bug. They stop reproduction from getting in the way of productivity.

Further reading

The world's most successful* people get enough sleep

By Peter Franklin

Family life isn’t solely about having children of our own, of course. It’s also about continued participation in the families we were born into – and, beyond that, a wider circle of friends and neighbours. To take one’s place in a community, to learn from others so that responsibilities can be handed from one generation to the next, is (or was) part of becoming an adult – as much as getting a job or getting married.

The concentration of young talent in big cities severs these connections too; distance weakens established old family ties just as property prices discourage new ones.

But does this matter? There’s plenty of time in one’s thirties and forties to quit the city and do the whole family and community thing somewhere less frenetic. So why shouldn’t twenty-somethings – excuse me while I vomit – ‘work hard and play hard’?

It’s a neat idea, but collapsing birthrates around the world suggest that many people never make up for lost time. I wonder where the big employers hope to find the next generation of eager recruits if they’re not even being born? Immigration is only a stop-gap because western demographic trends are spreading to developing countries.

There are political consequences too. Derek Thompson describes America’s great divide:

“With its rich blue cities and red rural plains, the U.S. has an economy biased toward high-density areas but an electoral system biased toward low-density areas. The discrepancy has the trappings of a constitutional crisis.  The richest cities have become magnets for redundant masses of young rich liberals, making them electorally impotent.”

Any group of voters (e.g. college educated urban liberals) who concentrate themselves in a few locations are not only likely to lose elections – but also to be shocked when they do. After all, almost everyone they know thinks and votes the way they do – so, how does the ‘other side’ keep winning? It must be some kind of trick!

The sense of bewilderment is accentuated by one of resentment. If the cities are generating most of the money and thus ‘subsidising’ other parts of the country, then suburban and provincial voting preferences are perceived as ingratitude if not outright stupidity.

Of course, if you’re relying on other parts of the country to supply most of the people – it shouldn’t be so surprising if they perceive you as dependent on them.

Thompson sums it all up as a “division of labour”:

“America’s rich cities specialize in the young, rich, and childless; America’s suburbs specialize in parents.”

But while a division of labour may work in a factory – different workers specialising in only one part of the job – it can’t work in a country. Each component community, whether urban, suburban or rural, has to do the whole job of being a community, finding a place for people at every stage of life.

A truly flourishing community is an extended family, joining together the generations. The childless city, however, is something quite different: an extended workplace. For all its diversity, it is fundamentally incomplete.

Further reading

How WEIRD are you?

By Peter Franklin