That is because it has always been a crossroads, the rocky harbor in the heart of the Mediterranean. The Arabs bequeathed the islands their distinctive language, while the Normans began fortifying their harbor. It is said that Ottoman troops, taken hostage after the Siege of Malta, furnished the locals with coffee before even Venetian traders knew of its pleasures. Later still, Malta was French and British. Both contributed to the national character, yet it was the last which endowed Malta with its legal system, a fondness for beer, and red phone boxes.

If foreign influence was one constant in Malta, grinding poverty was another. Even after an Axis siege brought the country close to famine, a lack of opportunities also saw thousands of Maltese men — including my wife’s grandfather — taking their families to the furthest reaches of the Commonwealth in search of work. The maritime heritage of their homeland meant they often found employment in the docks of Australia, Britain and Canada: something which also explains why, when the Maltese came to Britain, they gathered in places like London and Portsmouth. Independence in 1964 brought sovereignty but not prosperity, much as the new state tried to embrace tourism and logistics. So, like Ireland before it, Malta became defined by emigration. Between 1948 and 1967 almost a third of the population left.

Today that history, of economic stagnation and depopulation, is a fading memory. EU membership, and an increasingly globalized economy, means the country has become a hub for not only tourism, but financial services and online gambling too. By one measure Malta’s output per person is now higher than that of Britain, France or Sweden. Of even greater cultural significance, though, is the comparison with Italy. As recently as 1990, Malta’s neighbor to the north boasted a GDP per capita almost 50% higher. But where Italian television, radio and football once offered the island a window onto modernity, today it is young Italians who cross the Maltese Channel in search of work. If you are an ambitious young person in Catania or Palermo, you might hear advice that nobody has proffered for a millennium: go south and get ahead.

Indeed, this economic revolution has been mirrored demographically. The nation that once watched its sons and daughters depart by ship for distant shores now draws workers from across the globe. Today, 41% of Malta’s labor force is foreign-born. First are the young workers filling labor shortages in lower-regulation sectors, from Italian hospitality staff to Indian workers in construction. Then there are wealthy foreigners, drawn by Malta’s favorable tax environment; the country’s millionaire population grew by 74% between 2013 and 2023. Finally there are the internationally mobile companies choosing warmer climes and 5% corporation tax. Last year SkyBet moved to the country, and it won’t be the last British firm to do so.

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All this is doubly noticeable given Malta’s compact size. At the turn of the millennium, the islands were already home to 400,000 people, squeezed into little more than 100 square miles. Since then, Malta’s population has risen by almost half, with one recent projection suggesting it could reach 630,000 by 2030. For all the claims that Britain is overcrowded, an equivalent surge would mean our population approaching 90 million. Nor does this extraordinary trajectory show any sign of slowing. In June 2023, finance minister Clyde Caruana even said the country’s population should rise to 800,000 by 2040.

Combine that with record-breaking tourist numbers — last year saw around seven tourists for every resident, the equivalent of almost half a billion visitors to Britain — and property prices are soaring. The average asking price for an apartment now stands at €414,000: almost 10% higher than a year ago and roughly 16 times the average wage (in England this ratio is seven-to-one). Because this transformation is relatively recent, Malta still enjoys high rates of home ownership. But for younger citizens, the ladder has effectively been pulled up; buying a home, and with it the prospect of starting a family, is increasingly impossible.

That is also new. Just a few decades ago, my mother-in-law and her husband could buy a two-bedroom holiday flat in St Paul’s Bay — Jesus’ favorite disciple is said to have been shipwrecked on a nearby island — despite being a seamstress and bus driver in Portsmouth. Today, such a purchase sounds fantastical, not least for blue-collar workers. Amid all this, the remarkable thing is that Maltese leaders don’t seem too concerned. As far back as 2014, Joseph Muscat, the then-Prime Minister, spoke of Malta emulating Dubai — where 92% of the population is foreign-born — through absorbing unprecedented amounts of overseas labor.

Almost universally, of course, this model has led to adverse social and political consequences. And if, for the moment, the Maltese economy continues to motor, some locals now have doubts. What, they ask, was all of it for? Does the average Maltese family now enjoy a better quality of life? The answer is far from clear — and their worries go beyond just surging house prices.

One of the things the Maltese are most proud of is their language. A Semitic tongue, it remains somewhat intelligible to people in Tunis or Benghazi. Centuries of contact have left their mark in other ways: the Latin script, for one thing, even as Italian words like ciao, allora (‘well then’) and kuċina (‘kitchen’) sit alongside the term “Al Madonna”, cried in moments of anguish. In other words Malta boasts a linguistic jewel arguably unique in Europe: ancient, resilient and deeply bound to the identity of the islands.

It’s ironic, then, that it wasn’t a millennium of colonialism that posed the greatest threat to the idiom — but self-government in an age of globalization. For while Maltese remains widely spoken, and is taught as the country’s official language, it is quickly being replaced by both English and Italian, with the internet and Sicilian baristas succeeding where Mussolini and the Luftwaffe failed. On more than one occasion I’ve gone to a restaurant with my wife — who speaks some Maltese — only to find that the staff can converse only in Italian.

Nor are such moments limited to the tourist traps of Valletta. Ghajn Tuffeiha — you say it “ayn tufiya” — is a stunning beach at the top of Malta and utterly unpronounceable to anyone north of Syracuse. Perhaps that’s why the beach has come to be known as “Singita Miracle Beach“: part of an Italian-owned chain of luxury beach clubs. Once again, all the staff there appear to be Italian. That’s no bad thing if you want a good espresso, but it’s another vivid example of how Malta’s unique culture is being overwhelmed by the forces of global capitalism. Is this how languages die in the 21st century? Not at the end of a Gatling gun, but because of hippy entrepreneurs performing “sunset rituals” using words you don’t understand.

Of course, one could argue that Malta has embraced the Promethean promise of modern capitalism: unleash growth first, solve problems later. Isn’t that the path China has followed for decades — a model that many on the Left, including myself, have praised? Yet Malta presents a more complicated picture. Unlike China, or the USSR, this is a tiny island rather than a continental landmass, boasting a fragile culture and delicate ecosystem. What’s more, despite its economic boom, the island’s infrastructure remains underwhelming. Simply put, the average Maltese has shockingly little to show for decades of development, besides a loss of tranquility and a spot on the beach.

Take public transport. Once upon a time, Malta had a railway. Built under British rule, it operated until the early Thirties and connected Valletta with nearby Floriana. But it would be abandoned as the combustion engine redefined island mobility. Presumably, however, nobody expected that, a century on, Malta would be home to almost half-a-million registered vehicles, making it the world’s most congested country.

What was once a tranquil pearl in the Mediterranean increasingly feels like a giant car park. Perhaps a Maltese Tony Soprano is involved in the highway construction business — because, failing that, the lack of alternative explanations is baffling. Either way, this moment of national prosperity increasingly feels strangely regressive, with growth becoming an end in itself rather than the means to a larger national purpose. As one Maltese commentator lately put it about language, the country spends “huge amounts of money protecting species and biodiversity, so why should it be that the one thing that makes us singularly human should not be similarly nourished and protected?”

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A good question. Being in hock to a certain idea of capitalism, where GDP charts in the back pages of The Economist matter more than a sense of local place, is clearly part of the answer. Another is the European Union, and specifically the Eurozone. Whatever the accomplishments of both, not least for the Maltese exchequer, they have served to fuel a politics of inadequacy in Europe’s south: where being a “normal” country came to mean adhering to the policy prescriptions of the Dutch and Germans. Eurozone membership itself became synonymous with escaping Mediterranean backwardness. As a result, and in order to overcome an absurd inferiority complex, the likes of Greece, Italy and Spain — to say nothing of Malta — sought to do neoliberal modernity better than their northern cousins. The idea of an identity and culture peculiar to the region became either secondary, or something to be actively assailed.

Step back and all this is arguably connected to the tsunami of falling birthrates right across the Greco-Roman basin. Where Maltese families were once large, today they are distinctly East Asian in scale, with the country ranked 224th when it comes to making babies. Perhaps, collectively, the national consciousness has come to regard the future as being tied with economic “development”, and infinity annual growth of 4%, rather than stewarding a sustainable future for Malta’s children and grandchildren.

It would be unwise to say Malta has clear lessons for other, larger countries — least of all on migration (it’s a nation the size of Edinburgh). But it’s also undeniable that Malta has taken certain global trends, visible across the West and beyond, to their logical conclusion. Unlike Maltese, English has hugely benefited from globalization, becoming the indomitable lingua franca of the 21st century. But the obsession with economic growth as an end in itself, and a flattening of cultural difference in the name of a consumerist cosmopolitanism, is just as visible in small-town England as in Melliha or Bugibba.

Indeed, if anything, Britain is further down the line than its one-time Mediterranean redoubt. Here, the boom years have faded, and we are coming to terms with failing to spend our treasure wisely. Despite the economic bonanza of the Thatcher and Blair years, and the jackpot of North Sea oil, we boast barely any high-speed rail or trams, and have failed for decades to build new homes or reservoirs. But Malta also shows how a critique of growth, and recognizing some things are worth more than money, can bridge conventional assumptions of Left and Right. Political scientists call these “post-material” concerns. They are anything but. Issues of identity, collective meaning and spiritual nourishment pre-date capitalism by millennia. They are perennial questions.

As for Malta, it has been blessed by nature and history. And yet, speaking personally, there’s a fascination that lies beyond its monuments and beaches, for Malta exhibits the defining contradiction of our age. Never before have the islands been so prosperous, even as young Maltese feel less able than ever to buy a home or raise a family. And while, after centuries of foreign rule, the country is finally free, its fortunes are ever-more determined by global capital and the European Central Bank. Capitalism wants to flatten what is unique about any place; in the words of Karl Marx, making all that is solid melt into air. But the islands bring to mind the call by Aimé Césaire for a different kind of cosmopolitanism, a “universal rich with all that is particular”. Call it rooted cosmopolitanism, if you like.

Then one day, late last year, the bikes disappeared. The bloke still lives there but the road is now clear. No one remembers an argument, there was no scandal, no crackdown. The man’s presence was suddenly intolerable to someone.

This is something I’ve noticed a lot in London — in Britain— in recent months and years. For just as the Railton Road bike man has gone, there is less room for such eccentrics nationwide, not because they’re explicitly discouraged, but because the conditions that once allowed them to flourish have quietly disappeared. And as annoying as they might sometimes be, their demise should give us pause. For when a country loses its eccentrics, it is also losing something else: its ability to tolerate difference.

When people talk about eccentricity, they tend to reach for caricature: the bow tie, the tatty tweed jacket, the outlandish hobby. But British eccentricity, at least in its pre-digital form, was never about whimsy or self-display, and certainly not about being noticed. If anything, it depended on the opposite: the right to be left alone. Eccentricity meant being deeply, obsessively into something without having to explain why, or seeking approval, or converting it into a story about yourself. It meant taking up space, physical and social, sometimes psychic too, and assuming the world would adapt around you. It was unselfconscious, often impractical and almost entirely offline.

There are BBC archive clips from the middle of last century that capture this perfectly: grainy footage of men explaining why they spent every weekend racing pigeons, or cataloging train numbers, or building elaborate model villages in sheds that have swallowed entire gardens. There were women, too, who religiously swam in freezing reservoirs or organized WI sub-groups for competitive jam-making or would catalog local wildflowers.

The tone of these interviews is crucial, because nobody asked these people what it said about who they were, or whether they worried if it looked strange. The camera observed, a bit bemused, then moved on. Eccentricity, in other words, once sat alongside fair play and self-deprecation as a cliché of the English character. Like all clichés, it pointed to something real: a social contract in which oddness was tolerated, even cherished, provided it did not demand attention or recognition.

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This “live-and-let-live” attitude didn’t come from nowhere. Rather, it sat in the English liberal tradition that treated privacy and nonconformity as basic civic goods. As John Stuart Mill put it in On Liberty, “the tyranny of opinion” makes eccentricity a reproach, and that a society in which “few now dare to be eccentric” is in cultural danger. Postwar outsiders said something similar. The Hungarian writer George Mikes, after making Britain his home, made a running joke of how his adopted country seemed to run on the right to be a bit odd without explanation.

This broad societal and political culture has been fertile ground for eccentricity in practice. For much of the 20th century, London possessed both an artistic, global population and the kind of slack in which eccentricity could flourish: lock-ups, squats, empty sheds, permissive pubs, and landlords who didn’t much care what you got up to so long as the police weren’t involved. Informal arrangements flourished. You could be known without being managed, tolerated without being processed.

The city was full of small, semi-hidden worlds like this. Railway modelers, for instance, often built vast, painstaking layouts in the back rooms of pubs, hauling their trestle tables out once a week. Economics mattered here as well. For much of the 20th century, London was not just culturally permissive but materially forgiving. In the Fifties and Sixties, a room in an inner London bedsit might cost a few pounds a week — cheap enough to be covered by casual work or a small stipend. That affordability created time, the essential precondition of eccentricity. When your rent did not demand total optimization of your life, you could literally afford to be odd.

Over the past 30 years, however, London has undergone a near-total elimination of this slack, with every square foot expected to perform, to generate predictable value, to make sense to someone who has never stood in it and never will. Rooms are monetized; lock-ups become storage units, pubs turn into developments — since 2001, the capital has lost over a quarter of its boozers — and anything that cannot justify itself economically is considered a problem to be addressed.

This process is usually described as regeneration, a word that carries an implicit promise of improvement while carefully avoiding the awkward question of what, exactly, is being economized out of existence. The death of eccentricity is a story about space: who owns it, who controls it, and what kinds of behavior are now considered acceptable within it.

Private equity, rumored to own over 10% of all London real estate, has played its part in this transformation. Not because it harbors any particular hostility to oddness, but because its logic is fundamentally incompatible with it. When housing blocks, shopping parades and entire neighborhoods are owned by distant entities, whose primary relationship to place is financial rather than lived, the public space around them becomes something that must be managed and smoothed of irregularities. Anything that might unsettle a potential buyer, deter a tenant or complicate a valuation is ironed out.

The eccentric, with his rusty bikes and muttered conversations, becomes a liability. He isn’t dangerous or even especially disruptive; he is unquantifiable. London once had room, both physically and psychologically, to absorb these people. Now it does not. Or rather, it has chosen not to.

You can see this most clearly in London’s spread of privately managed space. Places like Paternoster Square may look open, but they operate more like shopping centers, patrolled by private security with the power to move on anything out of the ordinary. Photographers, skateboarders, street performers, even people lingering without purpose — all have been challenged or removed.

There is also a deeper cultural unease at work, one that has less to do with economics than with how we now understand difference itself. Britain has become oddly uncomfortable with unlabelled strangeness. In theory, we live in an age of radical individualism, an unprecedented freedom to be oneself. In practice, we are far more tolerant of difference that comes with a narrative attached. You can be different, provided you explain yourself. You can be strange, provided you reassure everyone that you are harmless and intentional. What you cannot easily be is odd without commentary, absorbed in something that makes little sense to anyone else.

This is also where the Americanization of British culture comes in. Identity politics, imported wholesale from across the Atlantic, is organized around what people are rather than what they do: fixed categories of race, sexuality, or background, rather than the eccentric, often inexplicable pursuits that once defined a person socially. Difference is no longer something that emerges accidentally through habits and hobbies, but something that must be declared.

A true eccentric, though, does not announce himself as such. He does not perform his oddness for an audience or curate it into something shareable. He simply goes about his day, often oblivious to how he appears to others, which is precisely what makes him unsettling in a culture that expects every deviation from the norm to come with a press release.

There is a related shift in how society imagines itself. Since the Nineties, Britain has increasingly been described not as a shared civic culture but as a collection of “communities” — a language borrowed from American multiculturalism and now ubiquitous in politics and public life. The paradox is that while this has expanded recognition at the group level, it has narrowed the margin for individuality within it. When everyone is encouraged to speak as something, there is less room to simply be odd on one’s own terms.

Eccentrics are often described as outsiders, but that isn’t quite right. An outsider knows he is outside. An eccentric rarely thinks about his position at all. In one BBC clip from the Sixties, a middle-aged man stands beside his pigeon loft, calmly explaining that he spends every spare hour training birds to race long distances. Asked why, he looks briefly puzzled, then shrugs: he enjoys it; that is explanation enough.

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Today, people learn early to smooth their own edges, to translate interests into identities, hobbies into side hustles, curiosity into content. The modern cult of individuality has produced so few true eccentrics. To call yourself an eccentric, to present it as an identity, is already to misunderstand the thing itself. The internet has accelerated this misunderstanding to the point of extinction. Online, every interest is instantly contextualized, aestheticized and monetized. There are no obscure fascinations, only underdeveloped niches.

This is why so much contemporary “weirdness” feels hollow, all surface and no substance, a series of costumes and gestures designed to signal difference without ever actually testing the limits of tolerance. Trilby hats and barefoot running and astrology, reactionary affectations worn with a self-conscious Shoreditch wink. This is not eccentricity but its imitation, a way of looking different without risking the social consequences of actually being so.

And so Britain can now tolerate tattoos, lifestyle signaling, curated weirdness, endless micro-aesthetics and self-descriptions, while struggling profoundly with strange routines, uncommercial obsessions and people who occupy public space in odd ways.

But a culture that cannot tolerate such oddness risks becoming narrower, more brittle, more obsessed with control. It may be more efficient, more predictable, more easily navigated by those who already understand its rules, but it is also less forgiving, less surprising and ultimately less interesting.

You can feel this narrowing in small ways. In the officiousness of public places: the endless announcements telling you to mind the gap, mind your step, stand behind the yellow line. In policing that increasingly prioritizes order and compliance over discretion, and treats mild oddness as a potential risk rather than a harmless quirk. In politics, too, where cultural taste has become something to be focus-grouped rather than confessed, and where even ministers seem wary of admitting to liking the wrong book, the wrong band, the wrong thing altogether.

London still produces creative people, strange characters, oddballs of every description. But they are increasingly forced to sanitize themselves, perform themselves, or leave. Railton Road is easier to walk down now. It is cleaner and quieter. But something inarticulable has been lost.

When people talk about the death of eccentricity, they imagine the characters disappearing one by one, fading out like figures in an old photograph. But what actually vanished first was the space around them.

The prenuptial agreement is also a container of sorts, the kind you preemptively clap over a bomb before it explodes, to minimize the blast radius. When I got married in 2008, signing one of these would not have occurred to me. Prenups were for people who were coming to their marriages with something to lose, a fortune either made or inherited before the spouse came along. The rich divorcee, looking out for the interests of children from his first marriage; the heiress with family money and anxious parents; the elderly billionaire who wanted to hedge his bets against having a tragic accident while on honeymoon with his 25-year-old trophy wife. (The protagonist of my upcoming novel, a wealthy tech founder, has a prenup with an adultery clause: if her husband cheats on her, he won’t see a dime.)

But now the prenup is getting a glow-up, especially among Millennials and Zoomers who are signing them in droves. Brooklyn Beckham famously has one, as do Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian; Taylor Swift, after her fairytale engagement, reportedly brushed the stars out of her eyes and got busy with a contract to protect her fortune. But it’s not celebrities, who’ve always signed these agreements, who are responsible for their sudden popularity; it’s everyone. A recent poll found that 41% of engaged or married Zoomers, and 47% of Millennials, have entered into one.

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The advent of the digital economy is no doubt a factor here; an article from The New Yorker notes the proliferation in recent years of “new apps such as HelloPrenup, Wenup, and Neptune that fast-track the process; the latter has couples discuss their finances with an AI chatbot before being matched, by algorithm, with a lawyer”. Surely, though, it isn’t only this. Algorithms and apps represent the supply; the demand, on the other hand, is cultural. The money quote comes from a 38-year-old consultant named Kaylin Dillon: “This generation just doesn’t trust marriage.” In other words, signing a prenup isn’t about protecting your assets. It’s about guarding your heart.

Perhaps this was predictable. What more inevitable fate for a generation raised on a steady diet of safetyism, complete with the notion that every interaction should have an escape hatch to protect one from emotional harm? A generation so hell-bent on litigating disappointment that they invented the concept of “nonconsensual ghosting”; whose playdates were arranged by their parents and whose messy breakups were mediated by deans; in whom has been inculcated such a horror of failing at anything, ever, that they have learned to live in a state of perpetual caution while eschewing vulnerability at all costs?

For 10 years in the 2010s, I wrote a teen advice column; about halfway through that decade, I started to notice a disturbing uptick in the number of letters, usually from girls, asking how a person might pursue romance “without getting hurt.” My answer, which invariably horrified them, was that this was impossible — that getting hurt is table stakes for getting to fall in love, which is why it’s lucky for us that falling in love is so terrific.

But the contemporary young person doesn’t necessarily see it that way. The decline of social trust — not just in marriage, but in other people; the rise of online communities where women gather to annihilate the reputations of the men who disappoint them; the lingering sense, in the wake of the MeToo movement, that men are so predatory and heterosexual relationships so fraught with danger that they’re hardly worth the trouble: these, to quote one Jon Bon Jovi, give love a bad name. And having been encouraged to gamify everything from their workout routines to their sexual encounters in search of safety and predictability, of course young people remain drawn to the friction-reducing promise of prenups, to the suggestion that we might never get our hearts broken at all if we just find the perfect container to cushion them, the perfect set of rules to govern their affairs.

It’s just that insofar as it works, it’s a great way to ensure you never feel much of anything, bad or good; certainly, you won’t experience the transcendence that all the songs and stories are about.

And it’s hard to think of a more potent illustration of the notion of setting yourself up to fail than entering a marriage with one eye already on the door, already thinking about what you want to take with you when you leave. To be planning how you’ll break free of your vows before you ever make them; to be asking yourself, “What do I want to take away from this?” instead of “What do I have to give?” The couple planning to wed should be like two people building a rocket to the moon, practically delirious with excitement for the journey they’re about to embark upon and faith in the person they’ve chosen to make it with. To introduce a prenup is to shatter the fantasy with pragmatic fatalism, redrawing the rocket to include a nice big escape pod — whose inclusion not only suggests the inevitability of failure but also paradoxically weakens the structure that was supposed to transport them to another world in the first place.

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None of this is to say prenups shouldn’t exist. I’ve read enough murder mysteries and celebrity divorce memoirs to know that pre-marital contracts have their uses, just as I’ve read enough about the plight of women in the era before no-fault divorce to understand why lowering the bar to exit a bad marriage was a good development. Ironically, the rise of the contemporary prenuptial agreement may even signal a return to tradition, insofar as it suggests a view of marriage more in common with that of ancient people — who saw it as a means to transfer property, consolidate wealth, and form strategic attachments between families to accrue power and resources — than with the modern romantic.

But that traditional, transactional approach to marriage was a product of a time, and a system, in which women’s rights were limited; in the girlboss era, in a society organized around equal rights and individual self-actualization, it suggests a totalizing inability to let our guard down even when it comes to love, to family, to lifelong commitment. And if the impulse to contractually protect ourselves from heartbreak and betrayal is understandable, there are nevertheless tradeoffs to changing the way we think about our commitments to each other, to adopting norms that undermine their seriousness and strip them of their magic right out of the gate — because isn’t the entire idea of marriage to build something lasting, something that isn’t easy to dismantle, something it would cost so much to walk away from that you’d do it only as a last resort? Isn’t that why we mark the act of commitment with ritual, tradition, and an enormous amount of cake; why we make our vows in sacred spaces, in the sight of God, in front of our families and our communities? The purpose of all this ceremony isn’t just to celebrate love, but to make a promise for which you will, and want to, be held accountable.

The obvious defense of prenuptial agreements is that having one is simply good sense, on the order of having car insurance or a fire extinguisher in your kitchen. The trouble is that what’s sensible when it comes to fire safety can look terribly cynical when it comes to love — maybe even fatally so. Because to really make a go of it in love, in marriage, does require a certain sort of delusional belligerence. Not just to make the delirious leap together, but to keep leaping, like fools, forever, because the foolish act of leaping is everything. It’s the material the rocket of your marriage is made of; it’s the fuel that makes it fly. And maybe it’ll take a while to get there, and maybe it won’t always be easy, but who cares? Yes, who cares, when you’re going to the moon!

In this context, how should we interpret the recent tussle between England and France over whether the Bayeux Tapestry should be loaned to the British Museum? At present the 224-foot tapestry, which depicts the Battle of Hastings, is due to be displayed at the British Museum for nine months, from September 2026.

But experts warn that the fabric is so fragile it’s impossible to transport safely. A campaign and petition have now mobilized in France to prevent the loan going ahead. Are the French and the English still covertly fighting over territory? Not exactly: Macron is in favor of the loan, while the opposition campaign is drawn from conservation experts and ordinary French people. At face value, the disagreement seems to be geopolitics versus heritage.

But at least on this side of the Channel, the ambivalent legacy of the Norman Conquest also suggests a second interpretation of the disagreement: an interpretation that turns on the tapestry’s fragility. The Bayeux Tapestry stands as a potent symbol of a hinge moment in English politics, that would eventually give rise to today’s elite consensus. But though it still commands international elite support, the consensus is — like the Bayeux Tapestry — growing more difficult by the day to preserve.

Whether, as an English person, you view the “heritage” of the Norman conquest as your own or not depends on an aspect of national identity that has, in recent years, become uncomfortably politicized: ancestry. Today, at elite level anyway, this topic tends to be politely skated over: for example Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, described the Tapestry and loan agreement as illustrating the “deep ties between Britain and France”. This is, we might say, an odd way of spelling “a thousand years of intermittent war”.

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But we never used to be so coy about national divisions. The Normans themselves, per Macaulay, initially didn’t think of themselves as “English”. Instead, they rewrote national mythology to replace “English” with “British”, to their benefit. The medievalist Francis Young describes how around a third of the knights who fought alongside William were not Norman but Breton, and justified their invasion of England by viewing themselves as distant kin to the Brythonic peoples displaced by the Anglo-Saxons. To this end, in place of Anglo-Saxon histories such as Bede, this new aristocracy encouraged the circulation of “Celtic” and Arthurian legend via authors such as Geoffrey of Monmouth. And this turn served the conquerors politically, by antedating their claim to be more originally “British” than the “English” peasants they had conquered: the original propagation of “British values” as a governing-class project.

For Macaulay, the history of the English nation proper began in the moment of reconciliation when the Normans lost their French holdings and embraced an English identity of their own. But that embrace always had an edge of ethnic and class wariness that, to this day, remains rooted in material disparities. Even in the 21st century, British people with Norman surnames such as Glanville are more likely to be wealthy than those with Saxon ones such Smith or Cooper. Some of modern Britain’s richest people, such as the billionaire Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, can trace their lineage all the way back to 1066.

The meaning of the Norman conquest, then, depends somewhat on where you stand in a class hierarchy that has, for the last thousand years, contained a trace element of ethnic hostility. But this tribal aspect has historically tended only to surface at times of bitter class conflict and popular dissatisfaction. For example, the 17th-century agrarian proto-socialist Diggers made much of Norman oppression, describing England’s aristocracy as still foreigners and colonizers: “The last enslaving yoak that England groaned under, (and yet is not freed from)”.

Similarly, the 18th-century radical Thomas Paine, whose The Rights of Man would be influential in inciting the nascent United States to shake off their own “Norman Yoke”, dismissed any duty to respect England’s aristocracy by dismissing this group as “A French bastard arriving with armed banditti and establishing himself the King of England against the consent of the natives”.

By Macaulay’s day, as the rising tides of the British Empire floated all boats, this narrative of racist Norman overlordship had lost its sting. As a Whig historian, Macaulay is keen to depict all lines of progress as converging on the supreme cultural and political supremacy of 19th-century England. And in his account, the Normans are plainly the prototype for England’s later imperial adventures around the globe — that is, both as brutally oppressive to the conquered Saxons, and also deserving victors on account of obvious cultural superiority.

They were, he writes, at the time “the foremost race of Christendom”, extraordinary in their “valor and ferocity” as well as their relative cultural refinement. And yet, following William’s victory in 1066, Macaulay describes how “[t]he subjugation of a nation by a nation has seldom […] been more complete”. This total militarized colonization was, he writes, marked by brutal suppression of the natives, and by violent insurgency from those thus oppressed.

But Macaulay doesn’t need to be on the side of the “bold men” resisting their “oppressors”, or the militarily and culturally superior conquerors. In the context of the overall arc of his narrative, though, England proper began with the fusion of these once-warring peoples into a single one: the modern English. In this happy context, nothing need remain of the original hostilities except Macaulay’s distant admiration for both sides, and romantic adventure-histories such as Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake (1866).

By Britain’s turn-of-the-century imperial high-point, the Normans had been so far forgiven that little remained of the divide save a useful metaphor for class hierarchy. Rudyard Kipling’s 1911 poem “Norman and Saxon” drew on the 19th-century romantic version of this past to depict what are presumably Kipling’s contemporary observations on cross-class differences within English culture. In the guise of advice given by a Norman baron to his son, Kipling writes:

“The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow — with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealing,” my son, leave the Saxon alone”

In our contemporary age of austerity, high taxes, and economic stagnation, though, class resentment is once again on the rise. And we might interpret England’s recent outbreak of politically charged guerrilla flag-hanging as evidence that, as in the age of the Diggers, old wounds are beginning to re-open.

And it’s not a coincidence that even now the dispute is between English identity and “British Values”. Today this might refer to the bland, updated internationalist version first proposed by Gordon Brown — but that doesn’t mean older connotations have been forgotten. Just last week, GB News commentator and erstwhile Tory politico Jacob Rees-Mogg dusted off his Kipling for a discussion of the now-raging conflict between ruling-class universalists and their nation-loving underlings. Just as Kipling predicted, Rees-Mogg added, eventually “the Saxons will run out of patience with their overlords”.

This parallel draws — we have to assume deliberately — on a seam of national ressentiment that is both a thousand years old and at times revolutionary in impact. What’s more challenging to trace, though, is how the Normans’ original “British Values” became the post-national Brownite vision. Here, again, the Normans are there to help: the trajectory is encapsulated in microcosm, in a recent culture-war spat over the BBC’s controversial decision to embrace “color-blind casting” in an otherwise scrupulously realistic dramatization of the Battle of Hastings.

King And Conqueror didn’t employ color-blind casting across the board, but only for the defeated and colonized Anglo-Saxons. The villainous colonizers are all white. This has tended to be interpreted as a “woke” effort to rewrite history. But it could also be read as a good-faith effort to transliterate the hierarchy of both race and class that characterized the Norman Conquest onto the only widely-understood modern template we have for parsing such a hierarchy: postcolonial and critical race theories. These theories were forged in a nation that sprang from England’s Norman legacy of seafaring and expansionism: America. And for specifically American historical reasons, these theories tend to conflate ethnicity with skin tone, and both ethnicity and skin tone with social class, more readily than makes sense in an Old World context — and which entirely obscures the nature of a conflict such as that between the Normans and Saxons.

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In turn, this framework has boomeranged back from the new imperial hegemon to structure casting decisions in the old. In effect, the BBC has reworked the Norman Conquest as an origin-story for what critical race theorists call “white supremacy”.

And yet even here, the Normans-as-white-supremacists retain their old, ambivalent aura, as objects both of ressentiment and forelock-tugging admiration. For they pioneered the model of land-grab, elite replacement, and peasant suppression in England that would, eventually, be exported around the world — only in turn to give rise to an American ideological successor that proposed to develop the model by optimistically trying to dissolve “nations” entirely in favor of a universal empire of rules.

The BBC casting policy and bland British Museum directorial euphemisms alike show how enthusiastically this has been embraced by a contemporary British ruling class in which Normans remain overrepresented. This contemporary version of “British Values” is as distant a descendant of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s version as Hugh Grosvenor is of Gilbert le Grosvenour. Like Hugh Grosvenor, though, it’s recognizably a descendant, and recognizably still immensely powerful. It is a bitter irony indeed that ideas which began life critiquing the kind of ethnocentric smash ‘n’ grab pioneered by the Normans and perfected by their English descendants has, in the hands of today’s governing class, become yet another stick with which to beat the sullen Saxons.

But Kipling’s warning is apposite. The Saxon now stands like an ox in the furrow. And that governing class would do well heed the omen offered by the Bayeux Tapestry’s age and fragility, for how threadbare and delicate their own mandate has become. The French conservationists are right: we should stop trying to make the Norman legacy belong everywhere.

Instead we might read it as metaphor for the true interdependence of a ruling class with those they rule. The former may provide symbols and narrative thread, but without a (social) fabric upon which to embroider all you have is rags. Instead of demanding that it give way once again to the needs of international politics, our leaders should look to that desperately tattered cloth.

Was the Nottingham Building Society right to bin Robin Hood? Actually, yes. The sentimentally patriotic Robin of the Victorian era really is a museum piece today. But once we dig past this layer, to the vigorous, amoral spirit that animated earlier folklore tales of England’s most famous outlaw, what we learn is altogether bleaker. The rise and fall of Robin Hood tracks that of England’s backbone, in our historic “yeomanry”. And today it’s not so much that England has ditched Robin Hood, as that he’s ditched England.   

Robin is much older than Victorian nationalist myth-making. His earliest written appearance is in the 14th-century poem Piers Plowman; but the context makes clear that by then he was already a well-known figure in songs and ballads. His folklore emerges in tandem with a new social class, and as a representative of that class: he’s always depicted not as a knight or bondsman, but a “yeoman”. 

Medieval social hierarchy divided England roughly into three “estates”, according to historian Ian Mortimer: the lords who governed, the clergy who prayed, and everyone else who worked. But as Mortimer also shows, there was huge variation among workers. Pop-history sometimes caricatures feudal life as starkly divided between lords and grubby, miserable peons after the fashion of Monty Python, or perhaps Baldrick in Blackadder. But in reality, the workers’ estate varied immensely — notably in how free they were. 

“Villeins” were tied to a great estate, and entitled to work a portion of its land in exchange labour. They were, in a sense, part of the estate’s “property” and estates that changed hands were sold complete with tied villeins. But over time, and at accelerating pace after the Black Death in the 14th century, much freer working-class groups emerged: the yeomen. Some of these, Mortimer explains, were small farmers with a freehold on their land — a class that gained in prominence with the sharp population fall after the plague. Others might be tradesmen who, again, could command much higher wages due to the labour shortage. 

Meanwhile, over the Hundred Years’ War, yeomen had also become strongly associated with the development of semi-professional soldiery — and particularly with England’s increasingly lethal longbowmen. As one military historian describes, these highly skilled archers came increasingly to typify the rising importance accorded to merit, over inherited rank.

By the time Robin Hood was first mentioned in Piers Plowman, the yeomen’s real-world independence created a class far less compliant than indentured villeins. It was yeomen who led the so-called “Peasants’ Revolt” which erupted in 1381 against John of Gaunt’s excessive taxation. 

Robin Hood emerges, then, as a folkloric representation of this emerging middle class. But in a twist that perhaps reflects deeper anxieties about the risks of lawlessness attached to yeomen’s relative freedom, he was also depicted as an outlaw. In medieval justice, this category was reserved for criminals deemed so dangerous they were denied all protection of the law. But in an England whose total population was about half that of modern London, such fugitives would simply flee to forests or other under-populated areas, where they would survive on a mixture of foraging, poaching, and banditry. 

There were many such gangs in the medieval English wilderness, meaning travellers were wise to travel with armed retainers, or as we might call them today “thugs”. But unlike Robin, most historic leaders of outlaw gangs were minor aristocrats, and these gangs would rob, rape, and kill anyone. By contrast, the Robin Hood of early folklore is a yeoman and skilled archer, like the soldiers of the Hundred Years’ War — and while he’s often violent, early stories often emphasise that he directs his attacks only at priests and lords. 

The medieval Robin combines Christian piety with violent contempt for actual priests, and displays a kind of class solidarity even across formal differences in social rank: he often shows sympathy to impoverished knights, while scorning, scamming, or even murdering great lords. In one 15th-century work, The Gest of Robin Hood, for example, Robin lends money to a poor knight so he can reclaim his lands from a villainous abbot. Later, Little John has a huge punch-up with another lord’s personal chef only for both men to shake hands, get drunk together, rob the lord and return to Robin in the greenwood.

The sense that emerges is of a germinal middle class, finding an imaginative language for self-representation. Overall, the sensibility that emanates is volatile, competitive, bloodthirsty, and full of lust for life: a hardy group, independent-minded to the point of recklessness, and shaped against the impersonal forces of church and governance by luck, courage, and in-group loyalty. They are recognisably the class of loyal, warlike Englishmen whom Samuel Johnson would describe in 1760 as possessing “a kind of epidemick bravery”. 

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This pious, violent, sentimental but always fiercely vital character couldn’t be further from the purse-lipped, curtain-twitching sensibility commonly associated with England’s modern middle class. This transformation began in the 19th century; it too can be traced via that era’s reimagining of Robin Hood, from the merry and violent medieval hero into the version whose disappearance from Nottingham Building Society has caused such a kerfuffle.

Johnson’s description of “epidemick bravery” among the English soldiery was written amid yet another round of war with France, now intensified and globalised by these rival nations’ competition for colonial territories. Just four years after that conflict concluded with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Sir Walter Scott defined Robin Hood for Britain’s era of peak nationalism, in his epic three-novel reimagining of 12th-century England, Ivanhoe: a text that arguably made an equivalent contribution to Victorian Britain’s self-image as the cowboy myth did in 20th-century America. 

The story centres on an Anglo-Saxon aristocratic family, struggling to survive amid dastardly Norman occupiers that Victorian readers no doubt gleefully identified with their recently defeated French antagonists. It’s all set against the backdrop of the Crusades, and the forest-dwelling “Robin of Locksley” makes numerous appearances and does heroic things before pledging fealty to the returning Richard the Lionheart. More or less every Robin Hood since has the heroic, patriotic outlaw-underdog traits first depicted by Scott, and many repeat his motifs: for example Ivanhoe is the origin of the famous moment, immortalised by Arrow Cam in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, where Robin splits his opponent’s arrow in an archery contest. 

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It’s thanks to Scott, then, that Robin Hood became indelibly linked to patriotism, Englishness, royalism, and (more obliquely) national triumph against those damnable French (ahem, sorry, Norman) fops. But does this Robin make sense today? After all, the global empire that gave rise to and was legitimised by it was dismantled half a century ago. So there’s little point in writing angry articles about the evaporation of its last symbolic memories, save to spare Telegraph readers the pain of thinking too directly about the political and territorial realities driving that evaporation.

And also follows that in the context of modern post-imperial Britain it probably makes sense to bin the Victorian Robin Hood. Aside from anything else, his high imperial Ivanhoe connotations are surely out of keeping with a Nottingham that, since 2001, has gone from 81% white British to almost half ethnic minority according to the 2021 census. Under those circumstances, we can hardly blame the Nottingham Building Society for pivoting away from British Empire-coded symbology toward the more nebulous and ductile “financial diversity”. 

Meanwhile where are England’s yeomen now? For some time now, the picture for what’s left of this class has been bleak. Commentators have long remarked on the hollowing-out of middle class life in the British Isles, and the way both Tories and, now, Labour, seem always to favour policies that fall hardest on their shoulders. 

But perhaps it’s less that they’ve been obliterated, than — like Robin of old — they’re fleeing the priests and sheriffs who would bind them. In Samuel Johnson’s time, or indeed that of Sir Walter Scott, those with the vitality, courage, and lawlessness of the medieval Robin Hood might have found an outlet Great Britain’s imperial sprawl. But where would such a character flourish today? And the grim answer is: probably not in England. Instead, today’s Robin Hood might be flouting employment law to make a fortune job-stacking from a beach in Indonesia, or outraging polite society as a danger tourist in Afghanistan. Perhaps he’d be a mercenary, in one of the modern world’s less-than-completely-official warzones. Perhaps he’d be across the Atlantic, dreaming of conquering the stars.

For there’s still plenty of wilderness in the world, for those yeomen with a taste for danger and a casual attitude to the rules. But there’s none in Sherwood now: just shabby Victorian terraces. The men of the greenwood are all gone, roaming further afield.

Though most Chinese viewers have apparently treated the sight of an elderly man painstakingly making ham and tomato sandwiches as a kind of inadvertent food horror, some have exoticized it as something more glamorous. “Middle-class” supermarkets in China are now stocking “Old Dry” sandwiches in Keith’s honour. For others, his daily battles with inexplicably pallid ingredients have come to exemplify the Sisyphean struggles facing humanity. 

Said one commentator: “We watch him struggling to saw apart two slices of dry bread, as hard as weapons-grade steel, slicing off a few thin streaks of yellow from a block of hardened butter, and then placing two slices of pre-smoked salmon on top… He bravely faces all of life’s blows.”

By a process of extrapolation, this image of “Old Dry Keith” seems as good an answer as any to all the current hand-wringing about who the English “really” are, though it is understandable that few tourist boards would wish to put it on a poster. For it affectionately describes someone most of us know: a hobbyist distracting himself from the mediocrity of life by finding solace in a few modest pleasures, inexpertly but enthusiastically pursued. Think of the love affair with the garden shed; Basil Fawlty trying and failing to listen to Brahms; teabags placed in a plastic bag in the holiday suitcase. As Bill Bryson observed, albeit of the British generally: “[They] are so easy to please. It is the most extraordinary thing. They actually like their pleasures small.”

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Admittedly, this version of us reads a bit like one of the narratives of self-deprecating mundanity gathered at Very British Problems, and for that reason will appear disappointingly anticlimactic to many. A recent, much-mocked, attempt to summarise “Britishcore” in The Guardian left commentators thirsting for a less self-abasing, more red-blooded story of who “we” are. (I say “we” for the sake of argument: I was born and raised in Scotland to English parents, making my grasp on the contours of my own national identity as slippery as it gets.)

The consensus seems to be that there is now a great need for a settled narrative of admirable traits and daring achievements that the English people can claim as their own. According to Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick, Scottish and Welsh people already have this, but “woke culture” has taught the English to be ashamed of the past and “we can’t possibly forge a united country around an identity we aren’t proud of”.

But while serving a bit less shame with our history would be no bad thing, I’m not so sure the Scots and the Welsh really do have such a firm grasp on the magnificent deeds of their forebears. What they have instead is a pronounced animus toward their larger neighbour — and there is nothing like the spectre of a much-disliked outgroup to bond an ingroup. By dint of being the more powerful partner in the Union, England lacks this sort of resentful focus. Nor is there even a satisfying hatred of France or Germany to get people going any more, international football fixtures notwithstanding. 

And it is not just the lack of an obvious local contrast class that hampers our quest for national differentiation. It is also the fact that, across the world, millions speak the same language as us, and some of them share our head of state. No wonder it feels so hard to articulate where we end and the rest of the world begins. Viewed from this angle, hackneyed English traits like repression, understatement and self-deprecation even start to seem like useful features, not bugs. Creating an in-your-face sense of English selfhood, when we can already shapeshift so easily and advantageously into wider settings, might even be positively against the national interest.

Still, Jenrick seems to crave a more definite story — even if only to get interviewers to stop asking him about the details. What, then, are the options? In discussions of national identity, it’s standard to distinguish two possible routes: ethnic and civic. But practically speaking, the ethnic route is hopeless in an already multicultural country set in a globalised world — at least, assuming social cohesion is the sincere aim.

Of course, there are those who positively relish an ethnic framing for English identity, seeing it as compensatory for years of neglect and liberal guilt-flinging, and they tend to be unconcerned about the conflicts in existing communities that this exacerbates. We should note that “identity” is used here in Francis Fukuyama’s sense of a site of grievance about lack of adequate political recognition, rather than as a source of beaming pride in past achievements. It’s hard to tell a convincingly chest-thumping story about yourself when you are simultaneously pressing a tale of victimhood and alienation.

In any case, no one in parliament is currently making the case for ethnic identity as a national narrative (and long may that last; we are not Hungary, after all). The official focus is on the destructive effects of mass immigration generally, and not on particular minorities who have been here for decades or centuries. Shorn of probably the easiest yet least ethically acceptable route to creating the sense of a unified People, academics and politicians have turned instead towards “civics”. This envisages social cohesion as achieved not by appeals to ethnicity, but by commitment to a shared set of norms and values, and appreciation of common history. 

Such a conception is implicit in the “Life in the UK” test, required as part of an application for British citizenship, and is presumably the kind of English identity that Jenrick thinks is on the wane. But trying to implement a single normative story, endorsed at scale, also seems likely to undermine existing solidarity. This is because a civic approach requires not just that you indoctrinate already-incentivised newcomers into a single story, but that you get longstanding and more recalcitrant citizens to sign up too. 

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Never mind the inevitable religious and cultural conflict that this would entail, in a context where, for years, we have been encouraged to make values up as we go along — we’d also have to improve the cultural and historical literacy of the average Anglo-Saxon type first. Arguably, given the state of national education, the “Life in the UK” test has already created a two-tier society; one in which the only people who know what the Statute of Rhuddlan was, or who designed the Clifton suspension bridge, are those trying to get into the country. Add to this the fact that another part of the English personality is to be disputatious, mocking and contrarian and the hope of us collectively submitting to just one set of norms is bleak. 

As these remarks suggest, our best hope of telling a convincing, genuinely cohesive story about English identity is not to stipulate what facts about history and literature we are supposed to recite approvingly, nor the values we are all supposed to hold — but more neutrally to stick to predictable facets of the national character: a love of small pleasures, emotional repression, argumentativeness, and all the rest of it. This is in fact what chroniclers of Britishcore are already trying to do, though with an off-putting helping of smugness or self-loathing on the side. 

And crucially, to avoid the twin traps of self-aggrandisement and self-flagellation in working out who we are, we still need the help of outside observers looking in, for we are probably our own least reliable narrators. It takes Chinese consumers of English video content, say, to remind us that we are not all sophisticated bon viveurs in the midst of a culinary renaissance, as we might otherwise like to imagine. We are still a country where schoolchildren are unable to identify courgettes, and where companies launch cheese toastie-flavoured crisps. In other words, we are the home of Old Dry Keith — a fact in which we might be interested, but should feel neither particularly proud nor ashamed.

These are all classic signs of an avoidant attachment style. According to the Attachment Project, avoidant individuals “do not want to depend on others, have others depend on them, or seek support and approval in social bonds”, which is a pretty good description of my longstanding fear of relying on others.  The question is whether the broad understanding offered by attachment theory can really help me be a better partner, or enable my partner to better help me.

The concept of attachment styles has been rattling around in psychology for at least 70 years, but it has recently become inescapable. Pioneered by the British psychologist John Bowlby in the Fifties, attachment theory suggests that experiences in our childhoods, most significantly the way we were parented, play a large role in our later adult relationships. If our parents made us feel safe, if their attachment to us was stable, we carry that into adulthood and have healthy relationships in turn. But if we were parented in a way that was cold or uncaring or inconsistent, then we will bring echoes of that treatment into our friendships and romantic partnerships, to our detriment.

Attachment theory has gone in and out of fashion over time, but when it’s been hot, it’s been worked into self-help books, discussed to death by unhappy girlfriends, and used to analyse everything from societal trends to episodes of reality TV shows. The 2010 book Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find — and Keep — Love has become something of a bible for adherents to this philosophy, and has kept selling, to the point that the New York Times wrote it up in a trend piece more than a decade after its publication. NPR, which is a good guide to the id of the overeducated American liberal, ran an explainer of attachment theory last year. And right now, topics related to it have hundreds of millions of views on TikTok.

The theory goes that there are four major styles, though there are variations depending on who you’re listening to. A healthy childhood, with loving and committed parenting, usually leads to the secure attachment style: these people tend to be dependable and self-confident, good partners who don’t let their relationships be influenced by fear of abandonment. The avoidant style presents itself as a commitment to extreme independence, which can threaten the mutual bonding of a healthy relationship, and which typically springs from the fear of relying on others and the vulnerability that brings. The anxious style is found in those with an unhealthy degree of need for their partner, and a constant fear that the person they’re attached to will leave them. The disorganised style combines aspects of both the anxious and avoidant styles, alternating between aloofness and deep neediness.

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The internet is a sea of dubious claims that your partner might be a sociopath, or that your relationships fail because of conflicting astrological signs; in this context, a simple explanation about the connection between loving and secure parenting and loving and secure romantic partnership seems sensible. The existence of the secure style does seem a little like a projection of a “normal” ideal that few people actually reach, and as always with this type of thing, there’s a question of how far you can deviate in any direction before you occupy another of the styles. But I’d certainly like to believe that there’s plenty of people out there who enjoyed healthy childhoods and are able to navigate adult relationships with confidence because of that. The assumption of universal childhood trauma that has grown over the years is good for no one.

Still, there’s little doubt that people who have suffered neglect in childhood often struggle, later in life, to feel safe in relationships — because they are either unable or unwilling to allow for true intimacy, or constantly afraid of losing it. But the disorganised attachment style — otherwise known as “fearful-avoidant”, “anxious-avoidant” or “mixed” — strikes me as just the kind of catch-all category that you often see with this sort of schema, into which people squeeze stubbornly complicated cases.

That doesn’t mean it’s a useless concept. What I’m suggesting here is that categories like these are helpful when our experiences conform to their guidelines, potentially unhelpful when they don’t, and dangerous when we begin to see them as science instead of interpretation. If we think of them as useful-but-artificial frames for understanding ourselves, they can be handy and healthy. If we insist on seeing them as a matter of scientific fact, we risk falling into all sorts of bad mental habits. For example, let’s consider me.

As I said, I’m typically avoidant. When I’ve wanted to end a relationship, I’ve simply pulled further and further away, making it clear to the other person that I was no longer invested, without sitting them down for a frank talk. When someone else has ended a relationship with me, I’ve responded by parting as quickly as possible, shutting down the opportunity for a sympathetic conversation, even when I was secretly very upset. In general, my inability to escape the fantasies playing out in my head was convenient to me: they became another world, in which what I was trying to avoid was not present.

This dynamic would only support attachment theory if it stemmed from childhood and my relationship with my parents. Here again my case study seems to support it. Both of my parents died when I was young, and I spent the remainder of my childhood without an adult to securely hold on to. I had a legal guardian, but she and I had an explosively unhappy relationship, and I left home as soon as I was able. I spent so much time in a state of emotional self-defence that I never really confronted what happened to me, and it’s taken decades of turmoil to put it together, with the help of therapy. My embarrassingly predictable response to a childhood where attachment led only to pain has been an adulthood in which I have craved intimacy but have consistently refused to allow myself to feel it. This is about as obvious an expression of the core of attachment theory as you’re likely to find.

And yet I’m also a good object lesson in the limitations of this approach. According to the Attachment Project, “parents who are strict and emotionally distant, do not tolerate the expression of feelings, and expect their child to be independent and tough might raise children with an avoidant attachment style”. But my parents were remarkably libertine, relentlessly loving, and gave us the opportunity to express our feelings. It’s true that we were raised to be independent and make our own choices. But this wasn’t a result of neglect; it was, in fact, a purposeful approach to parenting, and thus a reflection of love. Their belief was that allowing us to make our own choices and accept the bumps and bruises that came along with them was ultimately the only way to prepare us for real life.

There are also ways in which my behaviour, as well as my background, doesn’t fit into attachment theory. Avoidant people supposedly dodge arguments, which is not exactly a trait I’m known for. And they are generally less likely to fall in love, but as a younger man I would fall head over heels in no time at all. Within a given intimate relationship, romantic or not, I’m likely to withdraw, as a defence mechanism — but my heart still desires intense connection. My brain is just unwilling to countenance the risks.

Some would say, well, that means your attachment style is disorganised. But this is precisely my problem with catch-all categories like that one: anytime there’s an apparent internal contradiction, you just throw people into them. The result is a system that’s non-falsifiable, and thus not useful.

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If you dig around into forums devoted to attachment styles, such as the relevant subreddit, or look through the endless Instagram posts dedicated to them, you’ll find that this kind of confusion is very common — people will say something like, “my attachment style describes me so perfectly in this regard, but in this other aspect of myself, it doesn’t describe me at all”. And it seems that the more closely a given attachment style seems to reflect one part of your life, the more it stings when it fails to reflect another. An apparently scientific model that seems to fit us perfectly can feel like validation, like our problems and struggles are not incomprehensible to others. When we then fail to conform to other aspects of that model, it makes our original feeling of alienation — the one that had us Googling “what’s my attachment style” in the first place — all the more acute.

And yet, any broad categorisation of messy human people will, in practice, blur at the edges. People who subscribe to Myers Briggs or the Big Five Personality Test, or the most popular categorisation scheme of all, astrology always find this — it explains everything, until it explains nothing. Horoscopes are written to be vague and broad enough to be non-falsifiable. But as the industry of astrology has grown, so too has its claims to truth — which will inevitably and eventually fail, given that the stars can’t actually predict our destinies. People who are invested in attachment styles hate the comparison to astrology. But if you look at how these systems are discussed and experienced, you can’t help but note the similarities.

So, if they’re doomed to fall apart, why do we keep putting ourselves in categories? We all recognise that taking a Buzzfeed quiz about which Disney princess we are is a frivolous exercise. And yet the enduring popularity of that sort of thing — I remember the copies of Seventeen magazine that my sister collected and the endless personality quizzes therein — speaks to one of the most powerful urges in human life, which has only grown stronger in the digital age. We long to be understandable to others, to represent a type, so that we can be seen — especially in the cacophony of personalities that is the internet.

Of course, anyone who has ever known a teenager knows that this desire to fall into an easily-communicable category often goes hand-in-hand with extreme discomfort with being categorised. But in a culture that has effectively discarded religiosity — which has ironised defining ourselves by our professions and abandoned the communal markers that once created a sense of meaning — we find ourselves desperate to be something. Some people fill this need by overidentifying with their consumer choices — the person who has tried to make owning Beanie Babies a personality, the ones who thinks environmentally-friendly consumption makes an identity. Some people become “stans”, giving their autonomy to a celebrity to feel a sense of belonging. Some people join cults. And some people overinvest in systems like attachment theory.

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As an atheist, and one who feels that spiritual woo-woo is ultimately corrosive to many lives, I’m not a fan of people reading their horoscopes or Googling whether a potential match has a compatible star sign. But I also understand that most people use astrology for fun and perhaps to give them another lens through which to consider their own behaviour. Despite their scientific patina, attachment styles ought to be used in a similar way. They are useful rather than true.

If they are understood to be a metaphor for deeper patterns and pathologies in relationships, they can promote healthy romantic and sexual lives. If they are mistaken for some sort of transcendent categories into which we all fit, and which are existential or comprehensive descriptors, they are more likely to promote misery than healthy relationships.

It’s particularly easy for this sort of system to create self-fulfilling prophecies; someone who encounters attachment styles in popular culture, rather than therapy, might decide that they are simply cursed to be a certain way and act out avoidance or anxiety in response. A therapist who uses attachment theory to counsel couples in how to have better relationships will be well aware of this distinction between what is useful and what is transcendently real. But the internet is a machine for making people place undue faith in limited human concepts. “There are exactly four ways that adults attach to each other” fits comfortably in an Instagram meme, just like “Geminis are capricious and can’t be counted on”. “These concepts are useful descriptors of broad human behaviours, but they are necessarily limited and contextual and should not be relied on for literal or perfect advice” does not. And the latter doesn’t sell self-help books, which become popular by offering exactly the kind of certitude and totalising advice that we shouldn’t invest in them.

Part of the misery of the contemporary conversation about mental health is that the people who are best equipped to navigate its incredible and increasing complexities are precisely those that need it the least. An emotionally healthy person is more likely to accept the limitations of attachment theory, where an emotionally vulnerable person might get overinvested in it. An avoidant person is more likely to use broad concepts they find on the internet to make sense of their lives, because they lack the deep human relationships that would help them understand themselves. An anxious person is more likely to cast about for any reassuring explanation for precisely what they need to change in order to maintain their grasp on someone they love. A fearful-avoidant person might experience both at the same time. Each, in other words, is highly impressionable, and more likely to put too much faith in attachment theory.

The devolution of psychology to a crowdsourced “science”, popularised through memes, has done tremendous damage to our ability to let experts guide our complicated paths toward understanding our own minds. The solution here is for us to return mental healthcare to the status of medicine, not internet fads. There’s nothing wrong with reading about attachment styles — or boundaries, or gaslighting, or narcissism; nothing even wrong with learning about them through Instagram. The trouble is when we start to think of these frameworks for understanding relationships as “real”, as certainties rather than human tools, when in fact, like so much else in the science of human behaviour, they cannot exist outside of our collective effort to define them. We created them, and we would do well to remember it — but of course, that’s hardest for the people who need help the most.

One of them is individualism. In a society which lacks any strong bonds between its members, everyone is likely to have their own interpretation of the world, just as everyone is likely to have their own toothbrush. You wouldn’t want to borrow someone else’s version of the truth, any more than you would want to borrow their toothbrush. Truth becomes privatised. It’s a matter of my personal experience, and surely no one can challenge that. 

In fact, personal experience is as open to debate and dissent as the existence of God. There’s nothing absolute about it. One of the key insights of the late modern period, before the birth of postmodernism, is the recognition that human beings are constitutively opaque to themselves. “Constitutively”, because this lack of self-transparency is built into the kind of animals we are, not just some lamentable self-blindness which we could put right with a little more self-reflection.

When Oedipus in Sophocles’s drama finally comes to know who he is, he recognises that he is a stranger to himself. It has taken incest, parricide, pollution, self-blinding and self-exile to arrive at the conclusion that he has no certain grasp of his own identity, and that this is the condition of us all. There must be easier ways of learning this lesson. 

There was a time when we thought that we were transparent to ourselves and that it was others who were indecipherable to us. Nowadays, we tend to accept that we aren’t always in entire possession of our own experience, and that others can sometimes know us better than we know ourselves. Among other things, this is because other people are frequently well-placed to see what we do, and what we do is a surer guide to who we are than what we say or think we are. If someone insists that he’s a passionate lover of animals and spends his spare time dissecting live frogs, then he is self-deluded. It’s the beliefs implicit in our behaviour, not those recorded in our memoirs, that really count. If the truth is what we feel, there can be no place for self-deception in human affairs. It simply wouldn’t be possible for a prime minister to declare himself a pretty straight sort of guy, and probably believe it, yet seek to deceive the public about the invasion of Iraq. 

So I am no infallible guide to the meaning of my own experience. I thought at the time I was furious, but looking back I realise that I was afraid. It’s true that my experience is beyond doubt in the sense that I really am in agony, and no mistake; but to know that what I’m feeling is agony rather than ecstasy, I must have the concepts of agony and ecstasy, and this isn’t something I can achieve all by myself. I can know this only by belonging to a community whose language includes these notions.

In this sense, even the most private of experiences is public. Toddlers don’t spontaneously come up with the concept of unfairness. Rather, they take part in a form of social life in which the idea of unfairness has a function, they watch how their elders behave and listen to how words are used as forces in these contexts. If they have the misfortune to be brought up in Conservative Party headquarters, they will never get the hang of the idea.

Suggested reading

The death of historical truth

By Jonathan Sumption

Another insight of late modernity is that experience and reality are in some ways out of sync. It looks as though the sun circles the earth, but this is because the Earth revolves on its axis. (“The sun’s coming up — or as the new theory has it, the Earth’s going down,” as a 17th-century character remarks in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosenkrantz and Guildernstern are Dead). One purpose of science is to close the gap between reality and our experience of it, as well as explaining how the gap comes about. 

Like all concepts, truth is inherently social. There must be public criteria by which we can determine what counts as true or false, and these criteria are nobody’s private possession. The philosopher Wittgenstein imagines someone exclaiming “But I know how tall I am!” and placing his hand on top of his head. He hasn’t grasped the fact that tallness is a comparative notion, one that involves socially agreed modes of measurement. There must also be public criteria for conflicts over truth. Disagreement is only possible if you can agree on what you are disagreeing over. We aren’t conflicting over the value of the pound if you are thinking of sterling and I am thinking of the American poet of that name. 

A certain degree of consensus must underlie the most vehement of altercations. People who cry “Well, it’s true for me” (the #MeToo generation is also the “Me-Me-Me” generation) haven’t grasped this point, either. Rather than making the coldly impersonal idea of truth more warmly experiential, they end up abolishing it altogether. If truth is just what anyone happens to think is true, then the word drops out of use. It becomes impossible to distinguish between what I feel and the way the world actually is. There are people who insist that slavery is one of the most outrageous episodes in Western history, yet put the word “truth” in scare quotes. They tend to do the same with the word “fact”, while maintaining that it’s a fact that women are equal to men. 

Does all this mean that truth is beyond dispute? Certainly not for science. The fact that truth isn’t just subjective doesn’t mean that it must be absolute. The one is just the flipside of the other. Relativists and subjectivists fear that unless they are right, truth becomes dogmatic, infallible and authoritarian. But this is to be afraid of a bogeyman. To say that a proposition is scientific is to say among other things that it could be wrong. It’s the kind of thing that someone might always come along and falsify. It differs in this way from “Put that tiger down!” or “Sorry, make that two tuna sandwiches”.

Science is a never-ending argument, in which one’s conclusions are perpetually open to revision, and argument is fundamentally a political affair. You must make sure that everyone gets a chance to participate in the debate, that they do so on equal terms, that nobody is allowed to impose their own partisan interests on the discussion and so on. None of this guarantees the emergence of truth, but it’s an essential pre-condition of it. People who claim “It’s true for me” tend not to be interested in any of this. What is there to argue about? It is they who are the absolutists, since there would seem no way of disproving what they assert. Anyway, someone can always protest that the “it’s true for me” claim isn’t true for them.

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Prince Harry is a Freudian dream

By Giles Fraser

“It’s true for me” springs from a false egalitarianism. If everyone is to be included in political society, then everyone’s views must be respected as well. So what about the view that everyone isn’t to be included? Is that to be respected as well? And what of the so-called law of contradiction? If you think that reading Agatha Christie gives you prostate cancer and I disagree, then one of us has to be wrong. But postmodernists are reluctant to admit that anyone is wrong. It offends against the law of inclusivity, as well as making some people sound inferior to others. Anyway, from what Olympian vantage point can one make such a judgement? How can I possibly judge that there are some sexist police officers in Britain? Isn’t any such claim a sign of moral superiority or intellectual elitism on my part? 

Such is the addled thinking that passes for genuine argument in certain circles. A fear of sounding authoritarian, when all you’re trying to do is tell the truth, haunts contemporary culture. This is why it’s fashionable to qualify what one says with the word “necessarily” — as in “It’s not necessarily that people are passing themselves off as Tom Cruise, it’s just that there’s a crisis of identity”, where what you mean is that people aren’t passing themselves as Tom Cruise at all. But it sounds offensively dogmatic to say so. Similarly, to say “It’s nine o’clock” sounds unpleasantly absolute, so it’s advisable to throw in a “like”. “It’s like nine o’clock” sounds far more agreeably uncertain. A pervasive sense of uncertainty is one reason why truth has come into disrepute. But there are other reasons, which i’ll return to in my next essay.  

Maggie Bullock, author of The Kingdom of Prep, on the other hand, went all-in on style after she left the American South to attend boarding school. In her book, which covers “the rise and fall of J.Crew”, she examines the history of the company that enabled her to quickly dress in the preppy style of her classmates: flat-front trousers, polo shirts, roll-neck sweaters. A well-worn roll-neck sweater, Bullock writes with nostalgic affection, “had social acceptance knit into its very fibres”.

Like America, J.Crew sold a paradoxical dream: the top tier of society is exclusive, but anyone can reach it. Its products aped those of Ralph Lauren, Brooks Brothers, and J.Press — whose name J.Crew emulated — but retailed for a fraction of the cost. The clothes were still pricey, but could be thought of as an affordable investment; the company was aspirational, certainly, but it wasn’t exclusionary. That is, unless you happened to be a woman who wore a size larger than 12 or a man who wore “XXL” shirts, although the company redressed its skinny-bias in the more obese world of the 2010s.

Indeed, what J.Crew was selling evolved in tandem with American society. At its point of inception, in 1983, clothing retailers played a critical role in the capital-powered construction of self. And J.Crew offered a ready-to-wear identity: a beginner’s guide to prep for those who quickly needed to ingratiate themselves to the establishment. Initially, the company was catalogue-only, but during the late Eighties, founder Arthur Cinader’s daughter Emily steered its expansion into the indoor mall — the place of American identity creation during this period. Being able to buy the prep look straight from a catalogue had been an innovation, but taking it to the mall, where you could browse identities between stops at the food court and the arcade, was a critical next step in expanding J.Crew’s reach.  

But the early 2000s saw the beginning of the end of the American indoor mall — with many older malls built in the Seventies and Eighties being abandoned — and so, too, the decline of this iteration of J.Crew. As the company struggled with its identity, young consumers turned elsewhere, particularly to Abercrombie & Fitch. In 2002, I was hired to manage an A&F store at the Streets of Southpoint Mall — one of the elaborate, indoor-outdoor mega-malls that appeared during this period of rapid mall consolidation. At the time, A&F was doubling down on a truly exclusionary aesthetic, marketing clothes solely to people hot enough to wear them. Only a very particular kind of cool young person belonged in our clothes; I was exhorted not to hire anyone who didn’t fit the bill. (When the tide turned, a swarm of online identities — pro-social justice, pro-size acceptance — made A&F something of a punchline.)

The American Dream is a constant quest for an identity that is both recognisable and exceptional, and the divergent paths of J.Crew and A&F expose this seesaw between inclusivity and exclusivity. The Ronald Reagan-overseen Eighties, the true heyday of J.Crew, still held the promise of upward mobility and material success for all. Everyone was invited. Meanwhile, the 2000s were a time of economic retrenchment, eventually leading to the major recession of 2008. The elite felt threatened, and needed to differentiate itself, even superficially, through something like the vision A&F was selling. The effect of economics on the identity of Americans played out through off-the-rack fashion; it seems as if Americans are forever in high school, anxiously buying new looks to fit in with whichever lunch table they find themselves sitting at. This never-ending quest for identity and belonging speaks to a deep-seated, uncomfortable need to navigate the complexities of American society, where class, race, and personal identity intertwine and continuously evolve.

This incessant buying and selling of the product-mediated self fascinated me long before I entered a high school refectory. It probably began with my father, who wore the same half-dozen ill-fitting Brooks Brothers Number One Sack Suits all through his four-decade career as a car dealer. He considered anyone who linked their identity to branded material goods — whether Ford, Chrysler or J.Crew garments — to be susceptible to manipulation by the rapacious, advertising-driven economy. What he sold were ephemeral dreams: were you a Chevy man, an Oldsmobile man, a Cadillac man? The answer didn’t matter to him — they were all quick-to-depreciate “hunks of junk” — but it was this question that could motivate uncertain people to fork out their life savings. Everyone in America wants to be someone else, someone different and better; we can be easily convinced to invest hard-earned money in ourselves.

J.Crew experienced a revival in the mid-2000s and 2010s, when it became the preferred clothing brand for Barack and Michelle Obama. It had managed to successfully blend its old Ivy League staples with hipster trends, but this was J.Crew’s last big money: where could identity formation go in post-racial, post-class, post-patriarchy America? The answer, we would eventually learn, was online, where the process of branded self-differentiation was able to remain in dizzying flux.

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Adderall is not an identity

By Oliver Bateman

I never imagined — and neither, apparently, did the executives at J.Crew and A&F, even as their billion-dollar brands began to struggle — that high-quality clothing would cease to play such a fundamental role in defining a person. The internet introduced a thousand new ways to form an identity, with Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok allowing users to continuously evolve. Some retail companies kept up, at first. Fast fashion companies such as Zara and H&M fuelled a retail apocalypse by churning out new wearable identities in response to viral articles and much-liked Instagram posts. By the end of the 2010s, if a certain influencer was wearing a particular designer shirt, Zara could have a cheap equivalent in its stores a week later.

But eventually, material possessions like clothing became less important in shaping identity, as digital profiles and online avatars took centre-stage — especially with the advent of lockdowns, Zoom meetings and fully remote existences. In this world, upon encountering someone else’s identity marker, the desire to adopt it as part of one’s own “personal brand” could be instantaneously satisfied; adding pronouns to one’s online “bio” is even faster than Amazon Prime. Even the speediest fast fashion purveyor can’t construct you an identity as quickly as a few mouse clicks or carefully angled selfies.

And material products are vulnerable. They rip, and tear and shrink in the wash. Pronouns endure, until the split second you decide to change them. The countless “skins” that can be purchased for your League of Legends characters won’t fade, but can be easily swapped on or off. Each signifies something supposedly unique about the skin buyer, who might have spent hundreds of dollars on these trifles. Pronouns are free but increasingly, in the virtual world, as in the material one, identity is for sale. And clothing companies like J.Crew and A&F cannot compete. While a garment may convey a message, its impact is limited, compared to a video of your freshly-filtered face that gets thousands of likes, or an announcement of your new pronouns that is met with widespread yet ephemeral approval.

Our pursuit of branded identities is a curious one: we are seeking uniqueness in the context of comfortable conformity, looking for the “right stuff” to distinguish us enough to join the clique of our choice. By providing affordable, aspirational style, J.Crew may have democratised fashion to some extent, but even when worn by the Obamas, it also subtly reinforced the class distinctions that are so deeply ingrained in American society. The wearers we are seeking to emulate are, in turn, seeking to appear more like us. But they are in fact part of an American upper class whose true markers of distinctions are subtle or deliberately obscure. A&F, at least, was frank about the existence of an obscure qualification to enter the elite that some will never attain. But online, it’s easy to forget that the carefully-curated versions of ourselves are often amplifying social divisions, pre-existing biases and class structures — rather than challenging them.

What the story of J.Crew teaches us is that our constructed styles, and by extension our constructed selves, are always on the way out. Their expiration dates are getting closer, and the periods of planned obsolescence shorter. The time-limited high school experience serves as an apt metaphor. Individuals strive for both self-expression and acceptance by conforming to an accepted aesthetic, and hundreds of high school movies have ended with characters achieving this tightrope walk. But in reality, it’s impossible to simultaneously break out as a unique individual and be accepted by the masses for adhering to a specific set of rules. Ultimately, our continuous reinvention of style highlights the fact that social politics always reduces, as in high school, to perpetual insecurity.

Jackson hadn’t been asked to explain how blood is deoxygenated, or to offer an intricate overview of the molecular mechanisms by which protein function is regulated in cells. The question “what is a woman?” is hardly the riddle of the sphinx; a reasonably intelligent six-year-old would be able to give an adequate answer.

Increasingly, the question has become seen as a “gotcha”, but it is a useful gauge of the extent to which figures in authority have been ideologically captured. How can we possibly trust politicians if they cannot acknowledge the most basic realities of human biology? While most voters have a limited understanding of various key political issues, we can all see that a failure to define “woman” is either delusional or dishonest, neither of which are qualities we seek in our elected representatives.

For a long time, most people have been unwilling to express what they know to be true for fear of being monstered as a “transphobe” or, even more absurdly, as a “fascist”. But we appear to have reached a turning point. Today, the term “peaked” is used to describe the moment when an individual realises that he or she has been blindly following the dogma of trans activism at the expense of the truth. To reach this point is an inevitability for the intellectually curious, given that gender identity ideology will always dissolve upon scrutiny.

This has been most aptly demonstrated in the recent tribunal of Maya Forstater, a tax expert who is taking legal action against the Center for Global Development (CGD) for wrongful dismissal. Her erstwhile employer’s case rests on the view that Forstater’s belief that sex is immutable is a sackable offence, and it has been fascinating to read the live tweets of the tribunal in which Ben Cooper QC, counsel for Forstater, has been able to interrogate representatives of the CGD. The typical strategies of gender ideologues — to cry “hate” or “transphobia”, or to proclaim that there must be “no debate” — simply cannot be deployed in the context of a tribunal. As a result, perhaps for the first time, we are seeing what happens when the high priests are forced to defend their creed.

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The fictional world of trans activism

By Kathleen Stock

So when Luke Easley, the CGD’s Vice President of HR and Operations, claims that “identity is reality — without identity there’s just a corpse”, the religiosity of this movement is on full display. He is reiterating the view among gender ideologues that we each have a kind of soul that determines our identity, what trans activist Julia Serano has described as a “subconscious sex”. Forstater’s crime was to deny this essential doctrine, or to refuse to pay it the necessary lip-service. Like heretics throughout history, she was willing to exclaim that the emperor has no clothes.

Virtually all of us support equal rights for transgender individuals, and so it is understandable that we would sympathise with those whose happiness depends on presenting as the opposite sex. I am convinced that in most cases the intonation of the mantras “trans women are women” and “trans men are men” comes from a place of empathy.

The recent case of trans swimmer Lia Thomas, however, has prompted many to reconsider the uttering of falsehoods even for compassionate purposes. Thomas ranked 554th in the college league tables when competing among men, but soared to the top of the rankings in the women’s category. The biological advantages of being a man in a woman’s competition became obvious when a photograph was widely circulated of the winners in the 500-yard freestyle in Atlanta: Thomas towers over the other athletes on the podium.

Even those who are determined to hold fast to the view that “trans women are women” will find it difficult to look at the image of Thomas mounting the victor’s podium without sensing a collision with the brick wall of reality. As William Hazlitt put it: “Facts, concrete existences, are stubborn things, and are not so soon tampered with or turned about to any point we please, as mere names and abstractions.”

Yet this hasn’t prevented certain media outlets from disregarding the significance of biological sex, even when reporting on male violence. Only last week, an article appeared on the BBC website that outlined the vicious crimes of an 83-year-old woman in New York who had dismembered another elderly woman she had met online, having already spent 50 years in prison for murdering two female friends. Those new to the story would be forgiven for feeling that something is amiss in the reporting. After all, there are very few female serial killers, and even fewer who target other women. It is only towards the end of the article that the writer acknowledges that the killer had “recently identified as a woman”. This detail is presented as an aside, as though it is an inconsequential aspect of the case.

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The liberal case against pronouns

By Andrew Doyle

But perhaps the revelation most likely to “peak” members of the public came last week when Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne spoke in the House of Lords about a woman who had allegedly been raped on a hospital ward. Apparently, when police contacted the hospital they were told that there were no men on the single-sex ward, and “therefore the rape could not have happened”. The attentive reader will have already filled in the gaps.

This kind of gaslighting is part of a policy known as “Annex B”. The NHS accommodates patients by gender identity, not biological sex, and if a female patient complains that there is a man on her ward, she is to be told that this is not true; there are no men present. As the official NHS guidelines make clear: “Views of family members may not accord with the trans person’s wishes, in which case, the trans person’s view takes priority”.

In the same NHS document, it is asserted that sex is “assigned” at birth. Everyone knows that sex is observed and recorded, often before birth, and so it is surprising to see the holy writ of this new religion find its way into an official report. For medical practitioners it is particularly important that there are records of our sex, which is why we each have a unique NHS number to store this information. Yet patients are currently able to change this number on request so that it reflects personal identity rather than biological reality.

Even more worryingly, a 2010 document from the NHS Information Standards Board entitled “Mixed-Sex Accommodation Specification” explicitly states that the public must be misled on these matters in order to avoid general confusion: “The policy commitment relates to gender, not sex, but to ensure a better public understanding it is referred to as Mixed-Sex Accommodation (MSA)”. In other words, although the then Health Secretary Andrew Lansley had announced that NHS wards must be segregated by sex, behind the scenes it was understood that gender was to be the determining factor. It seems that the plebeians cannot be trusted with the truth.

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The truth about trans murders

By Tish Still

Today, the public are seeing for themselves the impact of gender policies in the real world: male athletes are competing in women’s sports, the media is reporting on male serial killers but using female pronouns, and a rape victim is told that the assault she experienced must have been a figment of her imagination. Incidents of this kind, now occurring too often to be dismissed as aberrations, have led us into what Jürgen Habermas described as a “legitimation crisis”, a general loss of confidence in institutional authority.

This is why it is crucial that we find a way to restore the primacy of truth in our public discourse. It isn’t a “gotcha” to ask a politician to define terms such as “man” and “woman” — it is a means by which we can assess the honesty of the ruling class. Their white lies might be compassionate in nature, but they clearly have damaging effects and the public is losing its patience. For all the false accusations of “hate”, “bigotry” and “transphobia” that stifle open conversation about these important issues, the tipping point is undoubtedly near.

Like many post-Soviet states, upon becoming independent in 1991, Ukraine faced a serious challenge of nation-building. Ukraine is a multinational, multireligious and multilingual country with little historical experience of independent statehood. Its major ethno-linguistic groups include Ukrainians in the west and Russians in the east. Many speak both languages and their histories and cultural practices are deeply intertwined.

An atavistic nationalism that bases political authority on supposed ancient traditions of ethnic-Ukrainians alone is neither consistent with reality, nor capable of uniting the whole Ukrainian people. The challenge of post-Soviet nation-building was, therefore, to craft a civic nationalism, based around a shared commitment to democratic self-government.

Sadly, Ukrainian elites failed in this task. Indeed, as Yuliya Yurchenko documents in her compelling but depressing book, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital, they were too busy plundering the remnants of the Soviet economy, with officials and their criminal-business networks transforming themselves into powerful, predatory oligarchs while the rest of their society fell into penury.

From 1990 to 2000, Ukraine’s GDP fell from $81.4bn to just $31.2bn. Hyperinflation, peaking at 10,155% in 1993, destroyed people’s living standards, creating long-term unemployment, especially among the young. The oligarchs had little to offer citizens, relying increasingly on fraud, corruption and intimidation to stay in power.

In this context, reformers — who took power after the 2004 “orange revolution” — looked to EU and Nato membership as a way to transform their society. This attempt to move “from Brezhnev to Brussels” occurred widely in post-communist Eastern Europe. In Ukraine, reformers hoped that EU rules would discipline or destroy the oligarchs and root out corruption by imposing free-market reforms.

But this was a very dangerous strategy. As Yurchenko observes, the EU-Ukraine Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) signed in 2008 would, if fully implemented, devastate small businesses and workers by exposing them to continental competition. Meanwhile, many oligarchs have found ways to exploit the opening of markets and limit measures that would damage their interests.

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Sanctions won't save Ukraine

By Lee Jones

Other oligarchs resisted liberalisation by rallying the people of eastern Ukraine into thinking that pro-Western elites were not heeding their interests. Donetsk, where many oligarchic businesses are based, has deeper economic, linguistic and cultural ties to Russia, and people there have often complained of being neglected and sneered at by the West, despite constituting a substantial share of Ukraine’s GDP and population.

The oligarchs began harnessing this resentment, fostering a growing east/west split in Ukrainian politics. The “East” — led by Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions — retook national power following the 2010 presidential election. Yanukovych’s subsequent persecution of his opponents drew the ire of Washington and Brussels, but this only reinforced his preference for stronger ties with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), reflecting the economic needs of his eastern base.

This growing internationalisation of Ukraine’s domestic struggles was perilous, given the geopolitical context. Russia had stridently opposed Nato’s eastward expansion since the Nineties. Gorbachev had asked Washington to disband Nato in exchange for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, while Yeltsin had asked for a new, inclusive security architecture that incorporated Russia into Europe, only to be rebuffed. The latter later warned the West that a Cold War was giving way to a cold peace, with Nato expansion entailing “nothing but humiliation for Russia”.

When the West proceeded anyway, Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, made it clear that Moscow saw Nato expansion as directed at Russia. In April 2008, a Nato summit welcomed Georgia and Ukraine’s aspiration to join the alliance. Putin invaded Georgia a few months later, rather than see it join this anti-Russian bloc. Many analysts, from the Cold Warrior George Kennan to the realist professor John Mearsheimer, predicted disaster if Nato continued to expand towards Russia’s borders.

The same, to a lesser extent, applied to EU expansion. Putin described the DCFTA as a “big threat” to Russia, as it would allow EU exports to enter tariff-free, via Ukraine, and “choke” the Russian economy. EU officials insisted their cooperation with Ukraine was merely technical, refusing to recognise the geopolitical implications.

The 2014 “Euromaidan” crisis saw the culmination of this toxic fracturing of the Ukrainian nation. In 2013, President Yanukovych rejected the DCFTA, opting for closer ties with the EEU. This prompted widespread protests, which were egged on by senior EU and American politicians, despite the growing involvement of far-Right nationalists. Eventually, amid escalating unrest and violence, Yanukovych fled to Russia. But while his opponents in western Ukraine celebrated, his eastern supporters perceived a “fascist” coup against their democratically-elected president. The Ukrainian state’s authority collapsed in the east, allowing opportunistic pro-Russian separatists to seize power in many areas, while Russia reacted by invading Crimea.

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Instead of moving to reassure their fellow citizens and build an inclusive national project, Ukraine’s pro-Western faction instead doubled down. Under the new president, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko, the Government purged eastern politicians and officials from the state, sending many fleeing into exile, and banned Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, intensifying the crisis of representation in the east. It also launched military offensives against the separatists, triggering further Russian intervention, producing heavy casualties and a grinding stalemate.

Neither Poroshenko, nor his successor, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have implemented the Minsk accords agreed with Russia in 2014-15, which proposed to settle the conflict by granting autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk. Instead, the new government loudly sought full membership of Nato and the EU — measures that could only undermine Ukraine’s national sovereignty. Yet the EU has not — and will not — actually admit Ukraine, as it is still reeling from the divisions induced by the last round of enlargement into post-communist Eastern Europe and does not want to take responsibility for a war-torn country. But it was happy to pretend otherwise, flattering Ukrainian elites while pushing neoliberal reforms on them.

The Poroshenko government enacted the EU DCFTA, rapidly introducing structural reforms to comply with EU rules. Facing rising debt amid economic decline, the Ukrainian state became economically dependent on the EU and IMF. Foreigners were brought in to run three ministries and IMF advisors were embedded with the central bank, entailing further losses of sovereignty. Austerity, neoliberalism and further privatisation benefited well-positioned oligarchs but did nothing to alleviate mounting poverty.

Far from reaching out to Ukraine’s ethnic Russians, Kyiv has actively promoted a narrowly Ukrainian, anti-Russian form of nationalism, reflected in language policy, “de-communisation”, and the secession of the Ukrainian Orthodox church from its Russian “mother” church. As Yurchenko observes, instead of reconsolidating Ukraine, these measures only “further divided the broken nation”.

This failure of Ukrainian politicians to represent the whole nation has led both sides to turn to foreigners to bolster their domestic position. The pro-Russian faction appears backwards and corrupt, offering little to inspire and unite the country, and ultimately relies on Russian intervention to prevent Ukraine slipping from its grasp. But nor can the pro-Western faction command the consent of the whole nation. It was prepared to overthrow a democratically-elected president to get its own way, and has persistently sought to lock in its preferences against internal opposition by sacrificing Ukrainian national sovereignty to supranational organisations.

Russia’s role in this disaster is obvious. It is hardly surprising that Ukrainian nationalism has taken a sharply anti-Russian turn given the annexation of Crimea, Russian support for separatist fighters, and Putin’s open contempt for Ukrainian independence and sovereignty — let alone the recent invasion.

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Could Russian mercenaries conquer the world?

By John Lewis-Stempel

But the West has also been reckless and irresponsible. Russia has made perfectly clear that it will not tolerate the expansion of the Western sphere of influence up to its borders. It wants at least a neutral buffer zone between itself and Nato, and ideally a friendly sphere of influence among its post-Soviet neighbours. We might wish this were not so, but it is a geopolitical fact. Russia’s willingness to use force to achieve its goals — at great reputational and economic cost — has been beyond doubt since 2008. To put this into perspective, we can imagine how the US might react if Canada sought to join a Russian-led military alliance — or merely recall Washington’s reaction when Cuba did so.

The West had two strategic options. Either it could acknowledge and accommodate Russian interests, or it could defy them, ushering Ukraine into Nato and deploying overwhelming military power to deter Russia from using force. Instead, it did neither. It allowed its Ukrainian allies falsely to believe that they could rely on the EU and Nato, yet did not nearly enough to deter Putin militarily. This has encouraged the Ukrainian government to prioritise integration with Russia’s enemies over rapprochement with its own citizens, while fanning Russian anxieties. Had Nato been clearer, Ukrainian elites might have come to their senses and pursued a less reckless course of action.

The only solution to this crisis, aside from war and devastation, is for Ukraine to become a neutral state, as Finland was during the Cold War. The sovereignty of the Ukrainian people — their capacity to work out their differences and collectively determine their life together in a peaceful and democratic manner — can only be enhanced if all sides renounce their external ties, and foreign powers cease meddling in Ukrainian politics.

To be truly sovereign, the Ukrainian state must be seen to represent the whole national population. The push towards Nato and EU membership — only intensified by Russia’s aggressive reaction — has fragmented the Ukrainian nation. It is hard to see how it can be reunited if this continues; bloody partition seems more likely.

Sovereignty does not imply total control over the state’s internal or external environment; it only entails self-rule, and this requires political realism. This was a source of some confusion in the Brexit debate. Many Thatcherite Eurosceptics foolishly believed that the UK could restore its sovereignty — its capacity to make laws and adopt policies inconsistent with EU rules — while retaining full access to the EU’s single market. The EU had no interest in agreeing such attractive terms; on the contrary, its interest lay in making Brexit as painful as possible.

Today, the Ukrainians clearly have no more “sovereign right” to join the EU or Nato than Brexit Britain had a “sovereign right” to full access to EU markets. Reflecting their own interests, these organisations will not admit Ukraine. This is the geopolitical reality that any truly sovereign Ukrainian government must reckon with.

Of course, Russia must withdraw from Ukraine. But the only way for the Ukrainian people to achieve national sovereignty is for all sides within Ukraine to cease internationalising their political conflict, and for foreign powers to cease their meddling. Neutrality offers the only context in which Ukraine can restore its territorial integrity and secure peace. It also provides the only context in which pro-Western forces will be forced to reckon with their pro-Russian counterparts, and find a more consensual way to exist.

Is the anonymous internet really just a breeding-ground for nutters, extremists and people whose hobby is harassing MPs? That’s the fear behind a recent petition, signed by nearly 700,000 people, calling for the Online Safety Bill currently making its way through Parliament to require anyone creating a social media account to provide verifiable ID.

The petition will be debated later this month. Defenders of anonymity will doubtless point to its importance as a free-speech outlet for whistleblowers, or for those who don’t have much public clout and wish to speak their minds in the “cancel culture” age without repercussion. But how much longer will it last? For free speech no longer commands wide institutional or even public support.

That doesn’t mean I’m against online anonymity. Far from it: last week I cracked and created an anonymous “alt”, out of nostalgia for that feeling of wandering the internet’s weird byways without a comet-tail of public selfhood trailing after me. But our growing unease over the accelerating weirdness and perverse incentives of our digitised public conversation needs to move on from a simple focus on “free speech”.

It’s not a coincidence that for some time now, public support for online censorship has grown steadily more overt on both sides of the Atlantic. And how could it be otherwise, when the entire medium of digital debate encourages ideas to adopt the most extreme and lurid form possible in order to cut through?

Digital culture embraces an increasingly voyeuristic online dynamic, a “pornography of the self” — a perverse set of incentives, that encourages already fragile personalities to offer themselves up as an ongoing psychiatric spectacle, in exchange for money and attention. The results may not be sexual, but have a tendency to grow steadily more grotesque. This can converge with actual pornography, and culminate in outright atrocity, as when seven people were arrested this week following discovery of a bizarre cult that live-streamed human castration for paying viewers.

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The ratchet toward this kind of monstrous spectacle is captured by a TV trope named after Simpsons character Ned Flanders. In the early series, Flanders is an amiable and slightly cringe Christian neighbour. But over the programme’s history, Flanders’s character becomes ever more exaggeratedly focused on his faith. The trajectory is so pronounced it’s given rise to a TV trope: “Flanderisation”: whereby a comic character becomes ever more grotesquely defined by a single trait.

Over the last couple of years, pandemic restrictions have virtualised ever more of our personal, social, romantic and professional lives. And with it, something like “flanderisation” has spread. It’s not as though “real life” has disappeared, exactly; but the relation between “real” — that is, non-digital — life and the public discourse has grown steadily more lurid and strange.

It’s not as though Technicolour tabloid headlines are a new phenomenon: the immortal Sun splash FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER ran in 1986. And the term “attention economy” was coined even earlier, by Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon, in a 1971 article. Here, Simon explored how to build organisations in a world saturated by information, arguing that attention is a key bottleneck in human culture. That is, the more abundant information is, the scarcer attention becomes as a resource.

Simon believed that people could learn to allocate their attention “efficiently”, among “the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”. But if information felt over-abundant to Simon in the Seventies, that flood became a tsunami with the arrival of the internet. And with that escalation, we’ve been forced to abandon the idea that there’s anything very efficient, rational or wise about how we allocate our attention.

In the brutal competition for clicks, attention is allocated not by reason or efficiency but flanderisation. You can reach a relatively small audience of serious-minded fellow-travellers by weighing an issue thoughtfully and talking reasonably. But for widespread engagement, you need red meat. Scandal; fights; larger-than-life characters; absurd propositions, bad-faith arguments defended to the death. The more grotesque, simplified and caricatured, the more likely it is to cut through.

In this landscape, topics that have serious ongoing repercussions but resist flanderisation will sink without trace. For example, the mere words “agricultural subsidies” will be enough to send many fingers clicking instantly away — and yet the nuts and bolts of post-Brexit farming policy impact millions.

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But it’s an issue where the devil is all in the detail. Outside specialist publications, the only way to make people notice would be to flanderise — a difficult task in a complex subject. A spate of farm fire-sales or farmer suicides might attract brief attention. You might get a whole ten minutes of discourse out of a proposal to improve biodiversity by reintroducing wolves in Britain. In the meantime, though, complex issues with major long-term ramifications for the whole country, such as topsoil erosion or upland subsidy regimes, remain of little interest to the general public. Our long-term food security, biodiversity and rural economy are poorer for it.

This fundamental failure of seriousness in public conversation extends even to the question of how we conduct that public conversation. Even as the Online Safety Bill has continued its lurch through Parliament, with the contours of our entire digital discourse at stake, the press focused its investigative energy on whether or not Boris Johnson had a birthday party during lockdown.

The Bill contains provisions to tackle a range of negative aspects of digital discourse, including trafficking, online abuse, and child pornography. But like all regulatory issues with systemic impacts, it’s difficult to persuade people to think about the fine detail — even MPs — and the Bill itself has been under fire from all fronts, including the parliamentary committee set up to scrutinise it.

And when it does manage to consider the issues, they are flanderised. And perhaps the central such over-simplification concerns freedom of speech — for in truth the “free speech” ship sailed a while ago. And if widespread public and institutional support for the idea is waning, this has a simple cause: the digital era has turned what was once a generous ocean of ideas into a grotesque Marvel Studios cartoon sea-battle, between flanderised caricature concepts.

In the resulting bare-knuckle war for attention, it’s not reason that wins. Nor is everyone saying that the best, sanest, or most constructive ideas will prevail. Rather, it’s the most lurid (or aggressively state-sponsored) ideas that make it to the surface, a dynamic which does much to account for absurdist identity politics, hyper-polarised Covid discourse and the roiling underbelly of online extremisms alike. In that noisome soup, anons may be nutters or extremists — but sometimes they’re really just people who prefer to wander the weird byways and be left alone.

Because it’s also not just politics that gets flanderised. Having an online presence, as an individual, creates a similar incentive to flanderise ourselves: that is, to turn your online “self” into a caricature, based on compulsively oversharing whichever features of your personality are the most attention-grabbing. And while this pressure affects everyone, it’s still greater — as I’ve discovered — if you post under a “real” identity.

For young women, that might mean incentives to garner online attention by posting sexualised selfies. For those not blessed with looks or opinions, but willing to invite voyeurism, another option is a warped version of the common human bonding mechanism of sharing personal information: pornography of the self. Those who embrace this online are often women. But the result is less bonding or intimacy than flanderisation: a kind of ritual self-humiliation for clicks.

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If you have the stomach for it, a glance at how “e-girls’ are discussed on the lolcow website gives a sense of how such compulsive over-sharing often results less in friendliness or bonding than in cruelty and objectification.

In turn, this toxic dynamic (rightly) fuels concerns about online abuse — as well as calls for online anonymity to be banned. The petition to include provisions outlawing anons will be debated later this month; will it rehash the same old free speech ground again? If it does, we can expect it to be even more reductive and polarised than last time: because the real danger we face isn’t restrictions on speech.

This can be a hard thing to explain. Just before I sat down to write this, I was at a bar where a liberal guy invited a not-so-liberal guy out to the parking lot. The liberal showed off a fly rod he’d built, and the redneck showed off a not-at-all-legal belt-loaded gun that he’d built. They came back smiling. Everyone mostly gets along fine. The incidents that seem to show overt cracks in the social order are very rare — occasional spats at restaurants or threatening visits to trailers, county board meetings moved online for safety.

They’re usually non-violent, and so wrapped up in the baroque Facebook-driven personal drama that colours life the rural American West these days that any honest observer has to wrestle with questions about whether or not they portend a real breakdown. The numbers of people involved are tiny. The divides aren’t really about Trump, race, class. They aren’t really about anything that fits into mainstream America’s understanding of why civil violence feels so possible in this country, unless you count the fact that basically everybody around here has guns.

Luckily, America has an influential class of professionals who make a living explaining situations like this. These are our extremism-watchers, and I should say here that I’m one of them. Today extremism-watching is a boom industry, and I was fortunate to have got in on it early, before Trump was elected, because now the race to establish yourself in the field can look frantic. The people who manage to do it tend to have long academic or government experience. The best way for them to get attention on Twitter and spots on NPR and cable news is by offering evidence that alarms the political and media class. And that class is naturally most alarmed by evidence that confirms its already-existing fears about what is going wrong in America.

The result is that there’s a very real professional incentive not to get to know your subjects too closely, lest you discover something that muddies up the story. And so the people who make the best living by describing America’s descent towards civil violence tend to be those with almost no personal knowledge of the armed rednecks they think are leading us there.

In this sense, Barbara F. Walter, author of a dire new book called How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, is extraordinarily well-positioned for success. This book, which came out January 11, has produced grimly portentous reviews in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Guardian. David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, warned Americans that “Like those who spoke up clearly about the dangers of global warming decades ago, Walter delivers a grave message that we ignore at our peril.”

But the book’s warning that America might be headed for a civil war isn’t what’s interesting about it. It seems unlikely that anyone reading this article hadn’t contemplated the possibility already. What’s interesting about the book is that it shows that something has gone deeply wrong with the systems of information that many Americans use to learn about their country. And that, in turn, is doing quite a lot to lead us towards civil war.

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Back in November, before the book had come out and as she was getting the brand-building game going, Walter posted a Tweet. “The CIA actually has a Task Force designed to try to predict where and when political instability and conflict is likely to break out around the world,” she wrote. “It’s just not legally allowed to look at the U.S. That means we are blind to the risk factors that are rapidly emerging here.”

It was a bizarre thing to say. It’s true that the CIA is legally barred from this kind of activity in the United States, for reasons that probably don’t need to be explained. But that doesn’t at all mean that the US lacks a domestic intelligence or threat-assessment apparatus, as most people who deal with the fringe world of America’s militiamen, anarchists, and environmental activists will be very much aware. It makes sense to assume that Walter is aware of this too. So what is she getting at?

To see it, you have to understand how our internal intelligence-gathering apparatus really works. The important thing to grasp is that it’s a politically responsive system: During the George W. Bush administration, there was the period anarchists call the “Green Scare”, when Congress held hearings on “The Threat of Eco-Terrorism” and every anarchist gathering for a decade became fraught with fears of FBI infiltration.

This surveillance, and the arrests and wildly disproportionate prison sentences that followed, didn’t happen because the FBI’s organic threat-monitoring systems started noticing arsons in a few Western states. It was the result of an inflamed political narrative, fostered by business groups, that pushed the FBI to make radical environmental groups into its top enforcement priority. “You don’t have a bunch of companies coming forward saying I wish you’d do something about these Right-wing extremists,” one former FBI analyst told the Intercept later. “If enough people lobbied congresspeople about white nationalists and how it’s affecting their business activity, then I’m sure you’ll get legislation.”

It seems fair to assume that Walter understands how this works. She has spent decades researching civil conflict as a professor at UC San Diego, and makes much of her time serving on a CIA advisory panel called the Political Instability Task Force. Her first argument, drawing on data produced by the sorts of NGOs that gained an ever-more-prominent quasi-intelligence role in world affairs after the end of the Cold War, is that the potential for violence and political conflict in human affairs can be captured by data and predicted by experts like her. “Average citizens may not foresee civil war or who may start it,” she wants us to understand. “But experts who study civil war know where to look,” she says. “And it is often not the group most people would expect.”

Or is it? Walter offers a very assured-sounding analysis from an NGO called the Center for Systemic Peace, which ranks democracies on how stable their parties and elections are, among other factors, to show that America has become an “anocracy”, a state of government “somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state”.

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She believes very strongly in the judgments of NGOs and research panels, and she does not seem to have considered whether the worldview of the people who staff these groups might cause them to produce data that reinforces it. She offers their conclusions as fact: “We are no longer the world’s oldest democracy,” she writes. (People on the Right who think we’re ruled by an unelected administrative state will happily concur.) “We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated +10 on the Polity index.” Japan has been ruled almost continuously by the same insular party since 1955. But the numbers are the numbers.

It’s important that America has been deemed an anocracy, because anocracies are where most civil wars start, a fact that anyone who reads the foreign news section would already be aware of. And she cites a study of civil wars since 1800, which showed that in societies experiencing mass migration, immigrant groups were only half as likely as majority groups to launch a civil conflict.

This becomes a very important bridge in the book, suggesting that if we have a civil war it will surely be an ethnic one, organised in opposition to a diversifying America. The thesis of the book becomes that the entire Right-wing radical fringe is oriented around ethnic identity, and that ethnic resentments — organised by “ethnic entrepreneurs” like Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman, who helped kick off the wars in the dissolving Yugoslavia — are the source of most civil wars since the end of the Cold War.

Ethnic resentment only partly explains many major recent civil conflicts, including the wars in Libya and Afghanistan (both of which were instigated by US military action), but it will serve for ours. She suggests that by using phrases like “shithole countries” and proposing a wall, but also by pulling out of international agreements and starting a “trade war” with China, Donald Trump “did exactly what Tudjman did,” and “what Hutu extremists did when they characterised Tutsis as cockroaches and Hutus as the chosen people.” The Republican party itself, she says later, “has become like the Serbian Radical Party in Yugoslavia.” This is a party whose longtime leader was directly involved in ethnic cleansing.

It’s probably pointless to wonder whether saying Republican politicians act “exactly” like génocidaires is a meaningful way of looking at what’s happening in this country. Because this is how the extremism micro-industry’s incentive structure works: it would have been impossible for her to get a book deal, get reviewed, go on talk shows, get paid, and build a career had the situation not been dire and, to some degree, radically simplified.

But this simplification creates an epistemological problem. There is no incentive at all to feed America’s policymakers and media narrative-shapers information that doesn’t alarm them, or that would give them a complex moral picture of America’s radical fringe, which is overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon. Even if our urban thought leaders wanted to get a fair sense of what was going on in their restive hinterland, how could they get good information?

Walter’s suggestion is that they hire researchers and intelligence professionals who will approach the radical Right as if it were Isis or the Taliban. “If we are to avert civil war,” she writes, “we must devote the same resources to finding and neutralising homegrown combatants as we do to foreign ones.”

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This sort of suggestion feeds what leftist critics call the “carceral” approach to counter-extremism research. Many Right-wingers now openly regard reporters and academics as out-of-uniform members of the intelligence apparatus, tasked with narrative creation and developing justifications for state repression. This means that researchers and journalists can often give up entirely on the project of trying to gain in-person access to these groups. As a result, we’re left with Walter’s data, leveraged to confirm her readers’ preconceptions. And so the cycle continues.

I happen to think that there’s a lot of white identity involved in the fringe politics of the county that I live in. But it’s not the organising force, and it would be dangerously naive to think that it was. Here there is a very totalising war of worldviews, touched off by the pandemic and resistance to expert advice and state action, led by a militia-aligned faction that thinks the local government betrayed the county’s free-living values by participating in California’s Covid protocols. Their liberal opponents often say that the “rugged individualism” driving the radicals is really just a cover for white supremacy.

There haven’t been any bombings or shootings, but there have been fights, and much of the local police force is more or less openly sympathetic to the radical faction. The Right in the county is now almost entirely alienated from the other structures of government, and it is hard to see how this situation could change, because many of the people involved in state and county government don’t actually see their concerns or worldview as democratically valid.

This is a good illustration of how analyses like Walter’s can become self-fulfilling. The paper here has mostly stopped reporting local news, and so many experts and officials have no way of knowing what’s going on — all they have are national narratives about Trump and demographic change that don’t actually explain the particular circumstances of the county. So the reactionary alienation grows deeper, the online threats get more serious, and the FBI has been showing up frequently to trailers and houses around the county. And, as the studies show, police crackdowns can often end up sparking insurgencies.

Meanwhile, column inches continue to be generated by whether or not the next 007 should be a woman, and Superman is now bisexual. Just as reliable as the output of these franchises is the grumbling about our apparent inability to come up with fresh new stories.

The usual explanation given for the domination of franchises over new material is that media industries like a known quantity. But what if the real problem lies deeper? What if, in truth, we’re no longer able to come up with new stories because we’ve turned storytelling itself into a branch of influencer culture?

This was the unsettling implication of last week’s water-cooler debate: “Kidneygate”. A long New York Times essay told the strange story of Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson, two aspiring writers now embroiled in a bitter dispute.

Dorland donated a kidney to a stranger, then created a Facebook group to talk about her “journey”, and shared it with her writing group. Larson, a member of the same writing group, then wrote a short story depicting an egotistical and implicitly borderline racist woman donating a kidney. When Dorland learned this, she began an increasingly monomaniacal campaign of lawfare against Larson.

Like the dress that was either black and blue or white and gold, the story prompted a lot of debate. When does taking material from the world around you stop being legitimate and become invasive? Do we “own” our own stories? Or as the NYT put it: “Who is the Bad Art Friend?”

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But perhaps the question should be: would you trade a kidney for a shot at immortality? For while on the face of it Kidneygate seems to be two women arguing about art, in truth it’s about the only form of immortality on offer since the internet killed literature: clout.

Once upon a time, the way to get famous as a writer was to publish a book. But the internet inverted that. The print publishing industry today is both bigger than ever and more beleaguered than ever by competition from other media, not to mention the ocean of free digital content. The result is diminishing returns: more than 188,000 books are published every year in the UK alone, but only 5% of authors sell enough to earn more than £30,000 a year.

Against that backdrop, not unreasonably, publishers are more likely to be interested in people with the sort of profile that will help market their work. There are countless talented writers out there; the decisive factor in who gets the book deal is often being an existing player in public conversation. In other words, the swiftest route to becoming a famous author today is already being famous for something else.

That means aspiring writers need that indispensable resource for an attention economy: “clout”, which translates roughly as “the number of eyeballs you can persuade to notice you online”. And chasing clout is indisputably a skill, albeit not a literary one.

Building up clout can be done several ways, but perhaps the two most common are emotional exhibitionism and identity-politics controversy. Expert wielders of clout attract fans and haters in equal measure, set people arguing among themselves and then leverage the resulting public profile for real-world power or earnings.

One such expert clout-engineer is Nikocado Avocado, real name Nick Perry, a YouTube celebrity famous for his “extreme eating” or “muckbang” videos. Nikocado Avocado’s content is voyeuristic in the extreme. Categories on his channel include “Fights”, “Emotional” and “Upset Feelings” among others. More importantly, he has 2.6 million subscribers — a store of clout that translates into serious earnings. In 2019, his net worth was estimated at $3m.

It’s almost impossible to go too far with this kind of content. The only unforgivable crime, as far as consumers are concerned, is being caught faking the emotion. “Mommy vlogger” Jordan Cheyenne was recently pilloried after she accidentally uploaded an unedited video of herself and her child, in which she could be heard encouraging her child to act like he was crying. She has since deleted her channel.

In the more traditional cultural spheres of academia, politics and literature, competition for eyeballs drives clout-chasing identity politics controversies. These can be guaranteed to spice up any otherwise dull policy debate with angry culture war clicks, while handily boosting the profile of the would-be activist. Perhaps the consummate operator in this mode is the US Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who attained meme status recently by appearing at the $30,000-a-ticket US Met Gala in a white dress with “TAX THE RICH” scrawled across the back, then blamed the criticism she received on racism and sexism.

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In every case, though, the core feature of clout-chasing is that it centres not on what you say, but on others’ perception of who (or what) you are. And here we see the heart of Kidneygate: a dispute over who gets to use the organ-donation story as a means of cultivating their public self.

If Nikocado Avocado figuratively spills his guts for those who follow his channel, Kidneygate saw someone spill them literally — and then post about it on social media. Dorland created a Facebook group to collect the applause she expected to receive. She walked in a local parade as ambassador for organ donation. She even created a hashtag: #domoreforeachother.

Larson, in contrast, wanted to use the kidney-donation story alongside her own Asian-American ethnic identity to boost her profile with a short story about “white saviour” politics. That is, she wanted to apply the clout-rich filter of American racial politics to this highly emotive content, in order to increase her own standing in the world of fiction-writing. And it should have worked: before Dorland’s legal action scuppered the offer, Larson’s work had been selected for “One City One Story”, a Boston literary award that would have seen her short story distributed free all over the city.

I’m just about old enough to remember the Before Times prior to mass social media. Back then, we still clung to the idea that writing was about immortality — an idea captured by Shakespeare: “So long as men can breathe and eyes can see/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

Now, though, writing a book is just part of the “media mix”. Where fame used to be a means of getting your message out, now messages are a means of getting your fame out. In September, CBS launched The Activist, a show that turns political activism into reality TV — and where successful activism is measured “via online engagement, social metrics, and hosts’ input”. Never mind making a tangible real-world impact: like successful writing, successful activism is measured in clout.

And once you’ve attained enough of it, you can pivot effortlessly from reality TV to book-writing, perfume launches, politics or whatever. The only condition is that, like Harry and Meghan, you continue to feed gobbets of personal tragedy, emotional intensity, marginalised identity or some other kind of emotive content to the clout machine.

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Do this, and the whole media mix is yours. It’s not just the raft of celebrities flocking to write children’s books. The 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman made history earlier this year as Biden’s inauguration poet, as much for her look and ethnicity as her aggressively bland poetry. Shortly after the inauguration, she signed a modelling contract.

And this pipeline works just as well in reverse. Transgender model Munroe Bergdorf has a threadbare literary track record, having attained clout mostly for being photographed wearing clothes, or for public rows with corporations and gender-critical feminists over identity politics. And yet Bergdorf received a six-figure advance from Bloomsbury for the “memoir and manifesto” Transitional.

The true message of Kidneygate, then, is not about art but what art now serves. It signals that if we allow it, the world of letters will irrecoverably join cinema, music, politics and activism as mulch for an online economy of attention.

And the Faustian nature of the bargain is increasingly clear. A culture powered solely by the hunger for intensity will devour any form of culture that isn’t already literal pornography. For in a raw economy of attention, the aesthetic or moral value of your work is irrelevant: what matters is emotional intensity and the power to generate discussion. Whether it’s politics, art, literature, music or simply people’s personal lives, the clout economy will transmute it, by a kind of reverse alchemy, into pornography of the self.

Before pivoting to YouTube emotional exhibitionism. Nikocado Avocado dreamed of being a concert violinist. Before pivoting to organ donation for clicks, Dawn Dorland dreamed of being a celebrated author. But there’s little clout to be gained through working hard at creating beauty for a common cultural domain. No wonder one in five British children want to be social media influencers when they grow up. And when everyone’s so busy crafting their online selves, no wonder there’s no creative energy left to dream new shared stories, leaving us nothing but zombie franchises crudely gingered-up by the culture wars.

Will we rediscover an ability to resist donating everything — even our organs — to the clout machine? I hope so. If we don’t soon regain a measure of digital self-restraint, the endpoint of every aspiration will be emotional porn. Or perhaps we could call it Kidneygate culture: a never-ending livestream of lost and miserable souls self-defining, fighting, crying, binge-eating or quite literally eviscerating themselves, all for our voyeuristic pleasure.

At one stage he even says: “When speaking to a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil, don’t call them a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil! Many contemptible idiots find that language insulting.” But he continues to do it, and frequently segues into lengthy digressions about how stupid and harmful the idiots’ beliefs are. Presumably you would not feel that the author had really taken his own advice on board

This is very much how I feel about How to Talk to A Science Denier, by the Harvard philosopher Lee McIntyre.

McIntyre wants to help us change people’s minds. Specifically, to help us change the minds of these strange, incomprehensible people called “science deniers”. He addresses five main groups of “deniers”: flat earthers; climate deniers; anti-vaxxers; GMO sceptics; and Covid deniers.

This is, on the face of it, an important project. It’s a truism that the world is polarised, and our sense of shared reality is under attack. If there is some way of learning how to talk across difference, and to persuade without attacking, that might go a long way to bridging our various divides, not just the five he discusses.

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The framing is that McIntyre goes and meets representatives of these groups and tries to persuade them out of their wrong beliefs. He goes armed with social-psychology research about how best to persuade people. His big trick (which I think is a good, if limited, one) is asking: what evidence would it take to make you change your mind?

But the whole book is premised on one idea: McIntyre is right, and the people he is “talking to” are wrong. 

And it’s true that all five groups are wrong, or at least their central claims are. The earth is in fact an oblate spheroid; the climate is warming, due to human influence, and will likely have severe negative impacts; vaccines work; GMOs are safe; and Covid is real.

The trouble is that by using these groups, McIntyre is playing on easy mode. When your example of a “science denier” is a literal flat-earther, it’s easy to say “look over there at the crazy deniers”.

Even with climate change scepticism, sure, there are people who literally don’t believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are warming the planet. But those people are relatively rare. People who believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are warming the planet, but that the emissions are going to be hard to stop because of economic growth in the developing world and it would make more sense to concentrate on adaptation rather than mitigation, are much more common. Are they “deniers”? Certainly they’re often called deniers. But McIntyre himself acknowledges that China is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and that the IPCC says the sweeping global changes required to cut emissions sufficiently to avoid a 1.5°C warming are unprecedented.

McIntyre constantly wants to make a clean distinction between “science deniers” and non-deniers. So, for instance, he says that there are five “common reasoning errors made by all science deniers” [my emphasis]. They are: cherrypicking, a belief in conspiracy theories, a reliance on fake experts, illogical reasoning and an insistence that science must be perfect. If you don’t make all five of those errors, you’re not an official McIntyre-accredited science denier.

Hang on, though. A “belief in conspiracy theories”? McIntyre spends a lot of time talking about the tobacco firms who manufactured doubt in the smoking/lung cancer link, and the oil firms who did the same with the fossil fuel/climate change link. He says that the spread of Covid denialism through the US government was driven by Republican desire to keep the economy open and win the election. Aren’t these conspiracy theories?

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Ah, but for McIntyre these aren’t conspiracy theories, they’re conspiracies. The distinction is “between actual conspiracies (for which there should be some evidence) and conspiracy theories (which customarily have no credible evidence).”

So, since some anti-vaxx conspiracy theories like the polio vaccine giving children polio, or the CIA using fake vaccination stations to take people’s DNA, are true, does that mean anti-vaxxers don’t believe in “conspiracy theories” but “conspiracies”?

Obviously not. But the point is that there’s not some clear line between “real conspiracies” and “conspiracy theories”. When Alex Jones says that chemicals in the water are turning frogs gay, he’s referring to real claims that endocrine disruptors are affecting sexual development in lots of animals. It’s not easy to draw a line between real and fake, evidence-based and not evidence-based.

I think the basic problem is that McIntyre is a Popperian. That is, in hugely oversimplified terms, he believes that no amount of evidence can confirm a theory: but evidence can falsify it. “If we find only evidence that fits our theory, then it might be true,” he writes. “But if we find any evidence that disconfirms our theory, it must be ruled out.” 

I, on the other hand, am a Bayesian. I have some prior belief and I assign some level of probability to it: “climate change is real and dangerous”: 90%; “the world is flat”, 0.1%. And then each new piece of evidence shifts my belief a little: if next year NASA say “we got new photos in, looks like Earth is sitting on the back of a turtle”, then I’ll upgrade my belief in a flat earth to, I dunno, 1.5% (but also upgrade my belief in there being mad people at NASA to 95%).

So I don’t need to draw a bright line between “denial” and “reality”. I can say: “I think it’s likely that tobacco firms conspired over lung cancer, but I think it’s pretty unlikely that NASA faked the moon landings.” And I can update my beliefs as new evidence comes in. I don’t have to “rule anything out”, I can simply downgrade how likely it is.

McIntyre, though, is stuck with two categories: things that might be true; and things which have been “disconfirmed”. If you believe things that have been disconfirmed, then you must be a “denier”. And so he needs to find ways of explaining why these “deniers” are so different from the rest of us. 

He has various ideas about “inflated self-confidence, narcissism, or low self-esteem”. But if you reject the idea that there are two groups of people, “deniers” and “non-deniers”, then you can avoid the need to explain it at all, beyond saying “some people are better than others at working out what’s true”. 

But we’re not just here for his epistemology: we’re here for a masterclass in how to persuade people out of false beliefs. Over the course of the book he meets various people — the flat earthers; two coal miners; a couple of hippyish friends of his — and tries to talk to them about their beliefs, using the methods he has learnt. His solution is to listen, to be respectful, to meet people face to face, and to do so over several meetings. Does his approach work?

In short: no. Hilariously, both of the coal miners he meets cheerfully accept the reality of climate change, but say that the economic value is worth the potential damage to the climate. His first hippyish friend is entirely pro-vax and only slightly GMO-sceptical; the other one is anti-GMO but on anti-corporate grounds rather than safety ones. 

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So he falls at the first hurdle: he not only doesn’t convince anyone, he doesn’t meet anyone who unambiguously disagrees with him, except the flat earthers. (He also struggles to be respectful, at least in the book itself. There’s an astonishing line on p77 in which he says “When speaking to them, we should remember that it is an insult to use the word ‘anti-vaxxer.’” There are 109 uses of the term “anti-vaxx” in the book. Occasionally he remembers and says how important it is that we listen and pay attention, then he immediately reverts to calling, say, Covid scepticism “ridiculous conspiracy theories and partisan nonsense”.)

But there’s a bigger problem. McIntyre’s big question, as mentioned, is asking: What evidence would it take to change your mind? But at no point does McIntyre ever ask himself what it would take to change his mind. 

For instance: when he was talking to the Pennsylvania coal miners, he accepted that they were just trying to feed their families. I assume he’d also acknowledge that Chinese coal mining is allowing that country to get richer and improve its citizens’ way of life. But I don’t think I’m misrepresenting him when I say that he thinks coal mining is a disaster.

When he talks to a friend of his about GMOs, though, that friend says that even though GMOs can save lives now (in the form of golden rice), they’ll cause disaster in the future. McIntyre says, OK, so the kids who can’t get the golden rice now, they’re just going to die? And his friend says yes. McIntyre says that’s easy for him to say, “because he had money and wouldn’t be one of the ones who suffered”.

The exact same question, though, can be asked about coal mining. Sure, McIntyre can say stop using coal, and it’ll help prevent future disasters. But it will also presumably mean some number of tens or hundreds of millions of Chinese people losing electric lights and functioning hospitals, and a smaller number of Pennsylvanians losing their jobs. McIntyre himself would be fine, except for somewhat higher electricity bills. 

Is the tradeoff worth it? McIntyre clearly thinks so (and I think I do too): but what would change his mind? I can tell you: I would update my beliefs significantly if you showed me a utilitarian calculation showing that more people would be harmed by ending coal mining than by continuing it. But McIntyre never asks himself the question. He is stuck on transmit, never on receive.

What’s sad is that he sometimes comes close. He recognises that beliefs are part of people’s identity, and that that makes it hard to change them – but again, applies the lesson only to the weird, wrong, other people, not to himself and people like him. The near-total lack of introspection renders the whole grand project largely meaningless. I am right, you are wrong, the only thing we need to discuss is how to make you realise how wrong you are. The idea of working together to establish a shared reality is hamstrung by his certainty that the reality that needs to be shared is his one.

It’s mainly a book designed to tell readers that people they already think are dumb are, in fact, dumb. It is, really, How to Talk to A Contemptible Idiot Who Is Kind of Evil.

If you knew nothing else, and you were told that there was a public mood of discontent with the status quo, this line-up of speakers would give you a strong hint about who won the vote two days later. The middle-aged, establishment figures would surely have lost.

Except they didn’t. The three white, middle-aged MPs were Gisela Stuart, Andrea Leadsom and Boris Johnson. Their opponents were Ruth Davidson, Sadiq Khan and the TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady.

It is easy to imagine how pleased the Remain campaign must have been with the composition of their trio: a Scot who is also a lesbian, a military vet and a Tory; a working class Londoner from a British-Pakistani background; and the first woman ever to get to the top of the organised labour movement. The collective image they projected could hardly have been more inclusive or well calibrated to the complex realities of Britain in 2016.

It was also, of course, quite useless. Complexity and variousness did not carry Remain to victory in 2016. These qualities also proved, in the struggle to prevent a very hard Brexit, not only ineffective but arguably counterproductive.

All things being equal, it seems obvious that, in a democracy, a broad alliance is always better than a narrow movement. The problem for Remain is that all things were not equal. When national identity becomes the dominant issue, it rips up the familiar score. Harping on one note becomes much easier than trying to conduct an orchestra with too many instruments.

It is hard to avoid the old (and admittedly cliched) Greek image of the fox that knows many things and the hedgehog that knows one big thing. Remainers were animated by many different things. Leavers were defined by one big thing.

To leave the European Union was to be out. To remain was to be in. But in what exactly? There were far too many answers to that question and most of them were in conflict with each other.

What polity, what place, what imagined community could Nicola Sturgeon and Keir Starmer, Gerry Adams and Dominic Grieve, Caroline Lucas and David Cameron collectively conjure? There was none because there could not be. On almost everything except the desirability of not leaving the EU, Remainers had profoundly different visions of what the UK should be, and indeed sharply conflicting views on whether it should exist at all.

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Embodying a persuasive idea of contemporary Britain is actually a very hard thing to do. Is Ruth Davidson the kind of Tory with whom most English conservatives would identify? Do Sadiq Khan’s working-class credentials evoke a sense of solidarity among working class voters in the Midlands? What political weight does the organised labour movement represented by Frances O’Grady really carry any more?

Defining a collective identity is difficult in any country, but much more so in a multi-national kingdom with shifting and uncertain notions of its own past, of its place in the world, of the relationships between its constituent parts, of the politics of social class, and of attitudes to migration and globalisation.

The great irony of Brexit is that it did in fact generate a kind of collective identity for Remainers. But it did so only in reaction to defeat. Remain lost because its only real binding agent was a sense of loss. It had to be beaten before it could discover a collective self. By definition, that was too late.

It is true of course that Leavers didn’t agree with each other about what Brexit really meant. But the crucial difference is that they didn’t have to. For the one big thing that nationalist movements know is not who “we” are. It is who we are not. Leavers had a deep-rooted sense of their Other, their dislike and distrust of the EU. For Remainers, the Other was merely the Leavers. If, as W.B. Yeats claimed, there is “More substance in our enmities / Than in our love”, the Leavers had the great benefit of enmities whose substance had been formed over centuries rather than mere years.

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If, like me, you’re Irish, it seemed very funny that Brexiteers were casting England (and it was very much England) as an oppressed nation, a colonised country being given the chance to overthrow its imperial overlords. (The picture on the door of Nigel Farage’s office at the European Parliament was not of himself but of the 19th century Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell.)

I remember laughing out loud when Johnson, in his summing up at the end of that Great Debate, said that “Thursday can be our country’s independence day” — a claim that Farage indeed repeated when the result of the referendum came in. This notion of England as Kenya or Ireland or India at the end of empire seemed too over the top as a performance of victimhood to have much purchase on the minds of voters.

I was wrong. The idea of Brexit as the rising up of a subjugated nation clearly did seem real to many voters. And once that is the case, you are in very different game. Because if you’re Irish you also know that national insurgencies have a great advantage. They capture the idea of freedom as an end in itself — they do not have to say what you will be free to do.

Once you generate the belief that you are in a movement towards independence, you establish a temporal order. First, we become independent. Then we decide what to do with our freedom. There may be various promises about what we aspire to when we have broken away from our oppressor, but they exist in a different time zone, the one that only becomes real after we’ve broken our chains.

Remainers, confused by the innate absurdity of the idea of enslaved Britannia, never quite understood this. They stuck with two assumptions that had ceased to apply once the Leavers had successfully generated the idea of Brexit as a nationalist revolution. One is that it surely must matter deeply that the Brexiteers betrayed their promises. The other is that it also mattered that the Brexiteers had no agreed idea of what form Brexit should take.

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Thus, when the Brexiteers very quickly disowned the infamous pledge from the side of the bus — £350 million a week for the NHS — Remainers expected outrage from voters who had been so cynically misled. There was none because the promise was about the afterlife, the time that lies on the far side of the great defining moment of independence. It was always in a different category of reality.

The same, incidentally, goes for all the threats made by the Remain side, even the ones that were (unlike the Project Fear vision of an immediate one-way trip to Hell in a handcart) well founded. They existed, for Leavers, in that nebulous never-never land of the future, another country where they do things differently.

Nor was the Brexit project really weakened by what, in a different kind of political discourse, ought to have doomed it. The deep internal divisions about whether the UK should remain within, or at least be closely aligned with, the EU’s single market, made it look like the Leave cause would implode under the pressure of its own contradictions. It did not seem foolish to believe this as Theresa May’s haplessness turned to a paralysis that shaded into anarchy.

But in fact even this disarray was a kind of strength for the Leave cause. The profound uncertainty about what Brexit would mean in reality allowed it to sustain its character as a gesture, a notion, a one-off act of liberation. It kept it on the plane where it was most inviolable, unsullied by mere detail: reclaimed sovereignty, golden age, sunlit uplands.

Think, by way of contrast, of why the SNP lost the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014. It provided the details: 900 pages on what an independent Scotland would look like. This was a target-rich environment and unionists could see all the weak points at which to aim their fire. The very vagueness of Brexit saved it from this fate. Remainers never knew, until the endgame, what the deal was going to be. They were always chasing a shadow.

What could Remainers have done differently? Well, as we say in Ireland, you wouldn’t start from here. If there was going to be an epic debate about how the peoples of the UK see themselves, you would not start with David Cameron’s glib promise of a referendum on Europe to appease his internal malcontents. You would not begin with a smug assumption that questions of identity could be shooed away with dire warnings about trade.

You would have started with a recognition that, in the wake of the Belfast Agreement of 1998 and the establishment of the devolved governments in Scotland and Wales the following year, ideas of belonging have become deeply unsettled within the UK. You would have engaged in particular with the growing evidence from the turn of the century onwards of an emergent but unformed English nationalism and thought about how it could be expressed, not just as a “not them” but as a positive “us”.

The Leavers were talking, though usually in reactionary and often in absurd ways, about identity. Remainers largely disdained such talk as innately reprehensible. But an identity crisis doesn’t go away if you ignore it. Leave offered some kind of an answer — albeit a very bad one. Remain barely recognised the question.

That is my father’s family. My mother’s was comically different. “As goy as it gets,” a friend once remarked. Seeking to escape a dysfunctional and claustrophobic working-class home in rural Leicestershire, she dreamed of another life. Running away to become a nurse, she imagined something more exotic, well-travelled, urban. And her name for that became “Jewish”.

She had no idea what that really meant, of course. But when she met my father’s mother in her Golders Green flat, she marvelled that they said “darling” all the time and had carpet in the loo. This is what she wanted. But by then my father was already in full flight from his Jewishness. When Nazi bombs fell on London, he was evacuated to a small Christian prep school in Devon where they wore little pale blue crosses on their caps. The war stole his history. And we never spoke about it.

This was the joke of my family background: I have a non-Jewish mother who pretended she was, and a Jewish father who pretended he wasn’t.

It is nearly a decade now since all this buried history unexpectedly caught up with me. I had just resigned from St Pauls following the Cathedral’s decision to evict the Occupy movement from the cathedral precincts. And I was in search of a new job.

I had landed an interview in Liverpool, and having a bit of time to spare beforehand, I went to check out the synagogue that was just along the road from the Cathedral. I understood there was some distant family connection. Chancing my luck, I banged on the door, and was welcomed in by the caretaker.

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There on the wall was a large oil painting of my great great uncle, Rev Samuel Friedeberg, who ran the synagogue for over 40 years. I stood staring up at his face for a good ten minutes. Then I left, filled with some weird and uncontrollable emotion. I had to stop and sit at the side of the road. All I could do was cry. And I really didn’t really know why.

The Friedebergs had arrived in Britain sometime during the reign of George I, which makes them among the oldest Jewish families in the country. Over time, they pulled themselves out of the ghetto in Portsmouth, and began to do increasingly well for themselves. They were constantly changing names, trying to fit in, trying to deflect the brutal anti-Semitic culture of the Portsmouth Point. Mordechai became Mark. Bilhah became Elizabeth. And eventually, Friedeberg became Frampton or Fraser.

Why had that paintings so affected me? A few months before the Occupy episode, I had been interviewed for the post of Bishop of Edinburgh. And I was asked “Where are you from?”, a once innocuous question that is now politically freighted. Identity politics has turned it into a threat, rather than an open invitation. I blithely explained the provenance of Fraser, that, no, it didn’t imply some deep Scottish connection. As it happens, I wasn’t all that bothered that I was not chosen for the job. But I was seriously disturbed by the question.

And I think seeing that portrait in the synagogue exploded the same buried question in my emotional life. Where was I from? Even my name felt made up: Giles — an attempt to claim some sort of poshness, chosen by my aspirational originally working-class mother — and Fraser — an attempt to disguise Jewish origins. It was like I, too, was made up, something confected, artificial. A lie.

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What, then, of my Christianity? Was that also an elaborate disguise? Generations of my father’s family had struggled to climb their way into the establishment, to be more English than the English, distancing themselves from the more recently arrived Jewish immigrants from Russia. And what to make of Samuel Friedeberg — dressing up in clerical collars, mimicking the clergy of the Church of England, styling himself Reverend as many Jewish clergy did at the time? Being a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral was the ultimate family triumph. And, for me, it didn’t work out. Disraeli once described himself as the blank page between the Old and the New Testaments. Queen Victoria didn’t understand him, but I do.

My attempt to reckon with this complex and conflicted past is going to be published this month. Chosen: Lost and Found between Christianity and Judaism is no doubt a curious book. “Part autobiography, part religious reflection, part ghost story” is how the journalist Paul Vallely has rightly described it. I suspect that many immigrant families will understand those tangled emotions that attend the desire to fit in with a new culture, the various adjustments that it requires, even the questions of betrayal that it sometimes raises. I, too, call the book a ghost story because my forebears come at me as ghosts, figures that I ignored for most of my life, and ones that have not received a proper burial.

It is a religious reflection, too, because of the curious hybridity with which I have struggled. And something that was baked into the very origins of Christianity itself — a religion founded by a Jew, whose first followers were Jews, and yet one that, within a few generations of its origins, was distancing itself as much as it was able from its Jewish beginnings. In other words, Christianity itself requires a great deal of unscrambling. Because in the attempt to ingratiate itself with the dominant Roman culture, Christianity is also the product of a kind of wilful forgetfulness of its past, a betrayal even. And intellectually, I think we are only just beginning to work this through.

But what sort of work is working it through? And how does working it through help? In 1915, Sigmund Freud — a secular Jew with a complex and ambivalent relationship with his past — published Mourning and Melancholia. The difference between these two conditions is crucial. Melancholia is the unconscious pain of buried loss, one that does not even know how to name what has been lost, or indeed is even aware that something has been lost. It is a kind of miserable stuckness where a kind of diffuse unspecified unsettledness seems to stay with you, wearing you down. Mourning, on the other hand, is the conscious attention to what has been lost, allowing grieving to take place. And eventually healing.

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I think my reaction to that painting in a Liverpool synagogue was the first indication that something was wrong, that there was a pain of loss I was not even able to name.

Where are you from? I think any immigrant will understand the attempt to hide one’s previous commitments in order to proclaim oneself loyal to some new situation, that feeling of unnamed guilt as old loyalties are replaced by new ones.

And not just immigrants: social mobility itself, that totem of progressive politics, often means the abandonment of one culture for another.

But deep change is nonetheless unsettling. And some of it takes generations to work through. The Hungarian psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok speak of “transgenerational haunting” — our ghosts echoing down the family tree, often carried by the things that are not said, by our silences.

Little wonder “Where are you from?” remains such a threatening question.

Giles Fraser’s ‘Chosen: Lost and Found between Christianity and Judaism’ is available to pre-order now. It will be published on April 29th. 

But masculinity takes its toll on men. Most glaringly, there’s the suicide rate. In his new book You Are Not the Man You Are Supposed to Be: Into the Chaos of Modern Masculinity, author Martin Robinson describes this as “an orange flare in the night sky, illuminating a heaving ocean of self-harm, addiction, eating disorders, violence and anti-social behaviour”. In England and Wales, three quarters of those who died by suicide in 2019 were male — a trend which has been consistent since the mid-1990s. That’s a horrifying 4,303 men, in just one year.

And there’s more. Robinson lists the stats: “95% of prisoners are male, 86% of homeless people, 73% of deaths from drug misuse.” Some of these figures are not quite as clear cut as suggested, thanks to a data gap that consistently under-measures women (female homelessness, for example, is often hidden in official figures). But nevertheless it’s true that some men pay a hell of a price for masculinity.

Yet the informal man code requires that men accept this suffering without complaint. Robert Webb put the predicament vividly in his own memoir-slash-dissection-of-manhood, How Not to Be a Boy: “if you want a vision of masculinity,” he wrote, “imagine Dr Frankenstein being constantly bum-raped by his own monster while shouting, ‘I’m fine, everyone! I’m absolutely fine!’”

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Robinson is neither imprisoned, nor homeless, nor addicted (although he does make a point of mentioning just how many of his encounters over the course of reporting this book took place drunk, wasted or straight-up pissed; the use of booze as a solvent for male reticence is one trope of masculinity that isn’t getting reassessed here). He lives with his partner and their two children, and until 2016, he was a magazine journalist; in 2018, he launched the website The Book of Man, with a self-defined brief to “open up the possibilities by questioning masculinity”. You Are Not the Man You Are Supposed To Be is the book-form version of that mission.

Whose benefit is all this questioning for, though? Robinson notes that the audience at one of his many “events encouraging men to talk” is “as ever” made up of almost completely women. Most reviewers of Webb’s book were female, and here I am, female also, writing about Robinson’s. Women, it seems, feel compelled to understand men — to do the emotional picking-up. And while there is certainly a male market for introspection, the success of Jordan Peterson shows that there’s an even bigger one for hearing that maleness has been cruelly traduced.

Peterson tells men that their problems lie, not with masculinity itself, but with a society that fails to value masculinity properly. For Robinson, masculinity is the problem. He sets up the ideal of manhood in his chapter headings — “in control”, “one of the lads”, “hard”, “ripped”, “straight”, “the breadwinner” — and then tries to understand why aspiring to this role hasn’t made him happy. His explorations take him to men’s groups, to a cage fight and to a drag queen who paints him up in full femme mode (Robinson is disappointed to discover that this does not unleash an inner reservoir of campy wit).

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Robinson is interested in how gender stereotypes make men unhappy. He is less curious about what they do to women. We’re halfway through the book before he mentions the problem of male violence against women, and three quarters before the wage gap comes up. A discussion of domestic abuse focuses on men and boys as unrecognised sufferers, but elides the fact that, while female perpetrators do exist, most perpetrators are men whatever the sex of their victims.

One of feminism’s perpetual battles is the insistence that to address violence, we must “name the agent”. That means rejecting passive constructions like “woman killed”, which suggest some inevitable and impersonal force at play, and instead use formulations such as “man kills woman”, identifying both the human source of the violence and the fact that committing it is a voluntary act. When Robinson baulks at naming the agent, it’s hard to resist the suspicion that his interest is less in solving the problems masculinity causes, and more in repositioning men as an afflicted class deserving of sympathy.

It’s right to sympathise with men, as it’s right to sympathise with anyone, but doing so is not a radical reframing of gender politics. It is usual for male subjectivity to take centre stage (the philosopher Kate Manne calls this phenomenon “himpathy”). The flow of feeling from women to men is one of the mass transfers of resources ensured by men’s social dominance, and if Robinson had read much feminism, he would perhaps have come across that concept.

In fact, he seems hardly to have engaged with feminism at all — there are cursory mentions of de Beauvoir and Butler, but that’s as far as it goes. And this is very strange, because masculinity and femininity exist in relation to each other. When feminists address the state of women, they write about men because it would be impossible not to. Yet women barely figure in Robinson’s book, which suggests he is less willing to leave the strictures of masculinity than might be hoped.

When it comes to the vexed issue of gender identity which has lately ripped feminism in two, he has a splendid obliviousness to the detail that I can only envy. At one excruciating point he announces that “the trans community should be worshipped as the ultimate humans, for showing the rest of us how it’s done”. This is embarrassing for everyone, including trans people, who surely do not want the burden of sainthood.

The most curious thing about gender is that while its outward forms can be flexible, its function rarely is. There have been many versions of being a man, ranging across history and geography; but however masculinities differ, they share the property of dominance over femininity, and that dominance ensures the flow of goods (power, property, reproductive labour, sex, compassion) from women to men.

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If men want to stop the Frankenstein of masculinity from committing its daily violations, they need to start by admitting that this monster was made for a reason. In 1980, philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards put the matter with perfect clarity in her book The Sceptical Feminist:

“What, for instance, must be happening if an employer passes over a competent woman in favour of a less competent man? It means that the job will be less well done, and therefore (to put it schematically) that he will be losing money by appointing the man. Why should he do that? He is actually willing to pay for something or other, and it is hard to see what it could possibly be other than the simple cause of male supremacy.”

Some men are paying a hell of a price for masculinity. That price is the cost of dominance. (Of course, the class system and racism help to ensure those prices aren’t borne evenly.) Robinson says towards the end that men must “cede power for parity with others”, and deserves credit for that; he’d deserve more credit if he outlined exactly how that might happen.

Advocates for women’s rights have always known that attaining justice for their sex meant giving up the illusory securities of feminine subordination. Men who want to break the constraints of masculinity similarly have to embrace the losses, as well as the gains. Books like Robinson’s will be half-hearted so long as they are only seeking a version of masculinity with the sharp edges worn off. Men can have their new version of manhood: it starts, not with a glorious expression of pent-up emotion, but with cleaning their own bathrooms.

But even as I rippled through the deep, marvelling at flashing schools of fish, there was a trade-off: constant self-control. Don’t breathe out through your nose. Don’t sneeze. Never, ever panic. For a short while it’s possible to pretend that you have the freedom of such an alien world, but in truth you’re only ever a tourist, granted safe passage thanks to technology, training and self-discipline.

Something about this sense of crossing an uncrossable threshold surely also powers our obsession with mermaids. And it is an obsession: mermaids are everywhere. Monique Roffey’s novel The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story recently won the Costa Book Prize, while “mermaiding” — swimming in the sea wearing a “mermaid tail” — has gained a cult following in Australia. And you only need to browse the girls’ clothing selection in a high-street shop to find countless cartoon girls with fish-tails, sequinned and sparkly, smiling at you from t-shirts, dresses, wellies, duvet sets, pencil cases and the like.

As a parent of a four-year-old, I’m more familiar than I’d like with mermaid content, and Disney is a rich source. Sofia the First: A Mermaid Tale is a favourite with my daughter, who is entranced by the moment when Sofia is magically transformed into a mermaid and dives underwater. There, she swims in circles exclaiming: “This is incredible!”. And it is. The rest of the story is almost an afterthought, with the whole narrative punch condensed into that moment of metamorphosis, and the dive into a new and mysterious realm.

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If mermaids offer an enchanting dream of transformation, perhaps it’s no surprise that the transgender movement enthuses about the special place mermaids have in their iconography. Activist Janet Mock links this to Ariel, heroine of the 1989 Disney film The Little Mermaid, who chafes at her underwater life and longs to visit the world beyond.

Ariel falls in love with a human, Prince Eric, and persuades the sea-witch Ursula to give her human legs, in exchange for her voice. Of course, being Disney, it all ends happily: Ariel gets her transformation at the end and marries the prince. It’s an elegant, arresting fantasy of pursuing and realising a seemingly impossible vision, and encapsulates perfectly the Disney motto: “Where Dreams Come True”.

Today, it’s increasingly accepted that we should support each individual in pursuit of their dreams — even to the extent, as in Ariel’s case, of accommodating those who radically alter their bodies to align with inner identity. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that in the 31 years since The Little Mermaid was released, the association between mermaids and those who pursue an identity at the cost of physical transformation has only deepened. Six years after the film’s release, a charity was founded with the aim of supporting transgender youth — and given the name Mermaids. Meanwhile, Starbucks (whose logo is a mermaid) ran a 2019 campaign in partnership with Mermaids, celebrating the moment a young transgender person hears their preferred name spoken by a Starbucks barista and, for the first time, identity supersedes body.

But just as scuba divers gain the enthralling freedom of the deep only via technology and absolute self-control, a delve into the deeper iconography of mermaids suggests that crossing a threshold as un-crossable as that between air and water isn’t as straightforward matter of making Dreams Come True. As T.S. Eliot hinted in 1911, the dream of oneness with the ocean always comes with a price, or else comes to an end:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The modern mermaids of pre-teen iconography are both ultra-glam and sexless, sporting revealing, shimmery shell bikinis and jewelled hair — even as the iconography swims smoothly past the question of what’s going on below the waist. As transgender icon Amiyah Scott puts it to Janet Mock: “With mermaids, the bottom is kind of like an unknown and I like that.” It’s not really done to speculate about how mermaids make more mermaids.

For a culture that simultaneously offers pre-teen girls Playboy-branded merch and rages about paedophilia, this style of mermaid perfectly combines an alluring, hyper-feminine aesthetic with a convenient evasion of the sexual dynamic that hyper-femininity is meant to evoke in adults. But the deep history of mermaids — and their element, the ocean itself — tackles those far darker and more turbulent feminine sexual associations in a way that’s far less sanitised.

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Once you’re out on the open sea of unbounded female desire, the mermaids of legend aren’t pretty and sexless at all. They’re alluring, slippery and apt to steal your loved ones. In one Cornish folk tale, chorister Matthew Trewalla followed a mysterious woman out of the Sunday service in the mining town of Zennor, straight to the ocean where he vanished.

As the story goes, Trewalla was never seen again — until spotted by a ship’s captain some years later. He had transformed to a merman, swimming alongside his mermaid wife and mer-children. Zennor’s mermaid tempts Trewalla to turn his back not just on friends and family but on land itself. She’s far closer to the temptress of seafaring lore, who sings to passing ships and causes them to run aground.

In Old Norse mythology, sea-maidens are more menacing still: the nine daughters of Aegir the sea-god and Rán, goddess of the drowned, are waves on the ocean. Each of these nine sea-maidens has a different aspect — such as the frothing one, the billowing one, the welling one — “through which one can see heaven”. The seafaring Vikings who told these stories were intimately familiar with, and healthily afraid of, an ocean seen as both feminine and deeply dangerous.

This hostile undercurrent to the association between women and the sea comes out even today. There’s no shortage of not very polite modern euphemisms for women’s genitalia referencing seafood, for example, while in drag culture someone is said to be ‘fishy’ if they pass as a woman.

So is crossing to the other side desirable or detestable? And what’s the price of a visit? In the movie of The Little Mermaid, there is no price: Ariel’s father Neptune uses his magical trident to transform his daughter permanently into a human, whereupon she leaves permanently for the land and marries her prince. There’s no sense in the movie that this is anything other than an unambiguously happy ending. But while older mermaid tales evoke that same longing to cross the boundary, either seaward or landward, they usually carry a far greater sense of loss or danger than this “Dreams Come True” retelling.

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The hauntingly sad Hans Christian Andersen story that inspired Disney couldn’t be further from wish-fulfilment. As in the film, the mermaid falls in love with a prince she rescues from a storm. But in exchange for giving her legs, the sea-witch doesn’t just steal her voice but cuts out her tongue. Even as the magic grants her a pair legs, walking on them is agony. And though the prince is fond of the transformed mermaid, he loves someone else. There’s no happy ending: the mermaid knows his marriage will break her heart, but though her sisters beg her to break the spell by murdering the prince, the mermaid loves him too much to save herself in this way. Instead, she throws herself into the water and dissolves into foam.

From the Disney perspective, this is all a bit grim. After all, we can all be whatever we want if only we believe. Can’t we? Far from offering a happy tale of dreams that come true, though, Andersen’s story reads like a bleak cautionary tale about struggling against your own natural limits.

Disney animations have a way of crowding out earlier and more ambiguous fairy tales, and it’s a safe bet the founders of Mermaids hadn’t read Andersen’s story when they named their organisation. In their search for a positive depiction of youth gender transition, it seems unlikely they had in mind constant physical pain, the loss of one’s authentic voice and a lifetime of being passed over as a sexual partner.

So even as the ancient history of mermaids has mixed feelings about the beauty and peril of femininity, the modern mermaid reboot is just as ambivalent about what’s real and what’s artificial — and just how far artifice can help us realise our desires. Perhaps it’s fitting that even as we’ve filled our real-life oceans with plastic, we should make such a concerted effort to give the archetypal oceanic feminine a plastic-toy  — or plastic-surgery — makeover.

But despite this embrace of the mermaid as a poster-girl for a consumer approach to identity, the mermaid as symbol isn’t so easily sanitised, or persuaded of her own happy ending. Some mermaids decide they don’t like the land after all, even if they’re no longer quite at home in the sea either. Some find new voices, and use them.

For despite all the toys, t-shirts and upbeat Disney stories, darker, older currents still roll beneath the safe and sparkly modern mermaid. These currents invite us to wonder: maybe some dreams bring no relief, even when they come true. Maybe some kinds of restlessness can’t be cured, only navigated.

But while it may feel like mainstream culture has gone down the gender rabbit hole with bewildering speed, the enabling conditions have been gathering force for some time.

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In 2004, on the soundtrack to the Disney family comedy Ella Enchanted, Amanda Remanda and Bryan Adams sang: “Believe the voice inside of you, live out your dreams and make them true”. This sentiment is so common across children’s movies that songs voicing it are difficult to tell apart: we can transform our public selves if we only believe hard enough. But it wasn’t until the noughties that this idea crossed the line from being a metaphor about hope and perseverance to beings something that felt achievable, as they say, IRL.

I’m old enough to have got all the way to my late teens without the internet. But as a not-wholly-heterosexual and not-at-all-comfortable-in-my-own-skin teenager in the late Nineties, I fell deeply in love with the online world the moment I discovered it. Here was a social space, in which I could just be ‘me’, a disembodied consciousness, engaging with others like me purely through the medium of words. It was exhilarating.

MySpace was founded the year before Ella Enchanted came out, and Facebook the same year. Sebastian happened (I think) the following year, existed approximately 2005-2008 (though most of that decade is a bit of a blur) and would never have been a thing without the then-nascent phenomenon of social media.

In search of ‘my people’, I fell feet-first into a ‘genderqueer’ subculture that’s well-developed now. If I were in my early twenties today, I’d doubtless have a full bore ‘non-binary’ identity, complete with flag, fancy pronouns and a raft of internet friends lining up to validate me becoming my authentic self.

In the noughties, though, this subculture was just a tiny corner of the wild, emerging world of online communities. In its London incarnation, it had two hubs: one weekly bar night, and one corner of a then-popular lesbian messageboard. We’d all meet up offline for beer and chat, but the lion’s share of the culture-building happened online, via all the classic traits of an online subculture: in-jokes, micro-celebrities, sacred truths, fantasies and friendships and spectacular messageboard fights.

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For someone who was, like me, uneasy in the End of History normie world of globalisation, Jamie Oliver and the New Labour Third Way, it felt liberating. Online, you could be anyone you wanted. Someone who was, in real life, a pudgy woman with a moonface and a buzz-cut could be magically transformed, via the collective story we wove on that messageboard, into a brooding hybrid of James Dean and Oscar Wilde.

In 2005, hardly anyone was Very Online enough to have a whole parallel internet persona who came out IRL only among kindred spirits. But times change: between 2005 and 2015, the average amount of time teenagers spend online every week tripled. Today, by the time kids reach their teens, they spend an average of 20 hours a week online.

And it’s not just the kids: in 2005, the average UK adult spent around 10 hours a week online, but that doubled over the next decade to 20 hours. This year, under lockdown, average internet usage is nearly 30 hours a week. As you might expect, the Very Online approach to identities and social groups is no longer a fringe activity.

And as it goes mainstream, the costs are becoming more visible too. Last week, detransitioner Keira Bell won her case challenging the Tavistock Clinic’s ‘affirmative’ treatment model for children and teenagers with gender dysphoria. Bell recounts a now-common story: a child who didn’t fit normative social stereotypes about how boys and girls behave and, once she reached her teens, went looking online for her ‘people’.

But, unlike me, Bell grew up in a world where we’re all used to creating ‘selves’ largely divorced from our physical bodies. Today, we’ve grown used to digital social lives where we can edit, control and curate our selves to suit how we feel on the inside.

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So where I found a tiny subculture of those who felt at odds with sex stereotypes and their bodies, Keira Bell was greeted by 15 years’ worth of mass acculturation to this avatar-first understanding of ‘identity’. She was embraced by an international, well-networked digital community, dedicated to promoting the idea that our ‘selves’ are self-created and independent of our bodies, and backed up by serious lobbying money and a well-developed medical infrastructure.

This identity-first vision of selfhood, forged in the disembodied online world, was an exciting novelty for me. For millions of now-adult children of the internet age, though, it’s baked into their worldviews as a core paradigm for reality. But the problem it faces is that once you take this paradigm offline, it doesn’t really work.

As the first incarnation of Facebook was launching in 2004, Amanda and Bryan were singing to the impressionable tween watchers of Ella Enchanted:

Through your eyes, I may see
With your love, you set me free
Wishes can come true
If you believe

It might seem unfair to subject something as ephemeral as a second-rate Disney soundtrack to a close reading. But bear with me, because the core idea expressed by this dreary ditty is contradictory in ways that have wider repercussions. On the one hand it claims: believe hard enough and magic will happen. Your true self will emerge. But it also claims that to make that magic a reality, I need to see myself through your eyes.

Thanks to the internet, we can all play at creating ourselves by believing hard enough. Online, no one can tell whether I’m really who I claim to be. Divorced from our bodies and the semi-random nature of who we know in real life, we are all free to find ‘our people’ and express whatever we feel our inner selves to be. If a ‘true self’ or group of ‘true friends’ starts to chafe, we can find another.

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Offline, though, it doesn’t really work like that. Having created Sebastian, I found it easy to get people who didn’t know me well to use that name, but longstanding friends were a different matter. Put simply, it felt weird. And yet self-created identities feel unreal until they’re affirmed by other people, meaning Sebastian only ever was real inasmuch as people actually used the name. Even if my reluctance to demand validation from my parents is proof that I wasn’t truly serious about my new identity, it also pointed to a deeper truth: there’s no such thing as an identity created independently of the way others see you.

To reinvent ourselves without regard to our contexts also implies an inhuman degree of mastery over our bodies. The year Ella Enchanted and Facebook both appeared also saw the launch of one of the defining scifi series of the noughties. Battlestar Galactica depicted a fraying remnant of humanity pursued through space by the embodied-but-mechanical, humanoid-but-infinitely-reincarnated flesh/robot hybrid Cylons. In reality, though, it’s the other way round.

I can’t just upload a new face or different secondary sex characteristics when the old set no longer feel quite ‘me’. Just as our inner sense of selfhood is both consolidated but also constrained by the willingness of loved ones to recognise it, so our ability to apply the digital style of selfhood in ‘meatspace’ is limited by the stubborn refusal of our bodies to behave like a slate we can wipe clean and over-write at will with new selves.

I may have dreamed, as Sebastian, of being able to reincarnate as a new, unblemished me when the old one didn’t suit. But as has become apparent with age, I will always be pursued by the fraying, beleaguered traces of old selves: childhood scars, stretch marks, a C-section scar, the piercings I no longer wear.

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Keira Bell, raised in the social-media paradigm of the authentic-but-infinitely-reinvented self, was on puberty blockers at 15 and cross-sex hormones at 18. By 20 she’d undergone a double mastectomy in search of her authentic self. And having discovered that this ‘authentic self’ did not bring the promised peace, she must now live with the bitter truth that the medical changes she underwent in search of authenticity can’t be erased by uploading a new profile picture. Her willingness to tell the brutal story of how she was misled shows enormous courage.

But in turn the traces and scars offer a clue to a more grounded and human understanding of self than the digital one. The scars, wrinkles and other traces now building up on my gradually ageing physiology are ‘me’ in a sense that’s far more profound than Sebastian ever was. And seen thus, ‘who you truly are’ isn’t something that comes from within, to be greeted with awed affirmation by a hushed and waiting world. Rather, it’s something that emerges, over time, in conversation with that world.

But the disembodied online world in which so many of us now consolidate our selves continues to repeat the lie that our selves are plastic, infinitely renewable, atomised and under our exclusive control as individuals. This untruth betrayed Keira Bell. It hacks at the foundations of what makes us human: our relationships, and our embodied limits. We should resist its further progress through our laws and institutions.

My evidence is anecdotal. But among the friends that I speak to during this bleak time, one subject keeps on coming up, again and again: the soul-sucking nature of video conferencing. As many as 300 million users worldwide now communicate with each other using Zoom, and other video platforms are catching up fast. We use it not just for meetings, but for everything from socially distanced dinner parties to church services. It’s is the software through which we make business deals, go to school, say goodbye to our dying loved ones, and even — believe it or not — attend sex parties. Zoom is now the gatekeeper, the space between our separate, isolated lives.

Now Zoom is having its problems with security. Is it vulnerable to foreign surveillance? Will uninvited participants come in and disrupt our meetings? My interest is not in such matters. I worry about its existential consequences. That this all-pervasive digital mediation is means of communication in which we lose something essential about ourselves.

In 1929, the Jewish Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote a seminal essay reflecting on the advent of mass culture. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, he argues that the technological changes of modernity, and in particular the capacity to reproduce images, has a profound and transformative effect on how we understand art. For with mass reproducibility we begin to lose the idea that there is something special about the original work of art — its uniqueness, its “aura”. The original painting of the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre has a quality about it that its many representations, on posters and postcards, just do not have. Benjamin thinks that this special and unique quality the original artwork has is linked to the original use of art in cultic and religious festivals. One could even say that Benjamin was arguing that the camera steals the painting’s soul.

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Benjamin’s essay was the reflection of a Marxist worried about the dehumanising effects of modernity and mass culture. I wonder what he would have made of Zoom? It is not too much of a stretch to extend the argument he used more than 90 years ago to our present concerns — not just the work of art, but also the human subject in the age of digital representation. For it is Benjamin’s essay that best captures for me the thing that Zoom takes away — our “aura”, our souls.

I think a word or two about the idea of the soul is necessary here. I do not mean it in the sense that it developed in the early Christian era, when some aspect of our personal identity was required to carry the essence of who we are into the heavenly kingdom, beyond death. I simply mean by the soul the thing that makes me… me. My essence, my individuality, the specific characteristic that picks me out as different in the world.

Philosophers have argued about what this ‘thing’ could possibly be ever since at least the fifth century BC when the comic playwright Epicharmus described how a debtor tried to wriggle out of his obligation to repay a loan by arguing that because so much of him had changed since he took it out, he was not the same person and so could not be reasonably expected to repay something that was effectively taken out by someone else.

So too with justice. If there is no thing that makes me me, how can I be punished for a murder I committed 20 years ago when I was, so to speak, a totally different person? The soul may be a fiction, but it is a fiction that underpins some of the very basic features of our common life. These days philosophers are much more likely to speak of our physical continuity in space and time as the carriers of our identity. Our bodies have become our souls, so to speak.

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I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole of the philosophy of personal identity. But I do just want to disabuse those who presume that the very use of the word soul commits someone to a Christian-type world view. I use it as a useful shorthand for what makes me me and you you. Our distinctiveness.

With many of the people I meet over video conferencing, especially in a business context, I don’t care too much about their fundamental distinctiveness. Our relationship is transactional and instrumental. We want to get some sort of deal done. I don’t need to know how they smell or the funny, distinctive way that they stir your coffee. I have no need of their “aura”. But if I am trying to communicate, say, with my wife after a period of absence, Zoom is incredibly frustrating. I want to touch, to hold, to inhabit the same space. I want the original, not the digital copy. And indeed, if Benjamin is correct, even if the technology gets so advanced that we will be able to experience the touch of another at a distance and mediated through technology, that still wouldn’t be enough.

Zoom does many weird things. The other day I sat in a meeting with people sitting in the US and Jerusalem. The space we commonly inhabited, the Zoom space, was not a physical space. It was a space that is not a space. There is both a curious intimacy to the face-to-face encounter, but also a sense that something is not quite right.

Zoom enables a rather bloodless kind of meeting. Not only do we carefully curate ourselves to the other — now even concerned about the books we have on the shelf behind us — but the whole experience seems stage managed in such a way as to make impossible many of the traditional ways that we use to get to know each other. For example, getting to know someone partly involves my presence disrupting the careful self-presentation of the other, and their presence disrupting mine. Never before have I appreciated quite how essential the interruption is to mutual acquaintance. On video calls all this is flattened out.

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With Zoom you can travel the world and meet important people, not only without leaving your study but without even having to put on your trousers. In other words the social obligations of sharing a common physical space no longer apply. And, to me, that makes for something profoundly disquieting. Different rules apply to the public and the private realms. Zoom collapses them, plays with them. And I worry that no good can come of this.

There is something religious about this sense of disquiet, as there was to Benjamin’s idea that mechanical reproduction dissipates the aura. Over the lockdown period I have been celebrating the Eucharist for my congregation in front of a Zoom camera. In such a context only I am able to receive the bread and the wine that has been transformed into the body and blood of Christ — and this is a real privation for many of my congregants. How about if we get some bread and wine and place it near the screen, some have asked: can you consecrate it over Zoom? And the answer of the church is clearly no — it doesn’t work like that. And this is not because “the magic” doesn’t carry over Zoom. Consecration is all about real presence. It requires the physical connection of shared space. Incarnation, so to speak. Indeed, Zoom is the magic that is being distrusted here.

Video conferencing is an extremely useful tool of human communication. And it has become a lifeline to many in these times of isolation. But it is precisely because it is so important that we must also worry about it, for we can all too easily allow our agendas in life to be set by the limitations of our tools. As Abraham Maslow famously said in 1966: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” And the tool du jour is Zoom.

It is not easy to express my anxiety about this new tool, and what it is doing to us. But I feel there is something subtly dehumanising about it. Perhaps that’s why Zoom is so draining, why it makes us so tired using it. It’s like a voodoo doll. We pay the price for our global connections with something that is slowly sucking away at our souls.

Rich in description, Tribes begins with a DNA test landing on his doorstep. Driven to find out more about his pre-slavery roots, Lammy discovers he is part-Tuareg and journeys to Niger in search of his origins where his newfound co-ethnics wrap him in a long white turban and robe. Initiated into the Tuareg in a ceremony accompanied by the “infectious beat” of singing, drums and ululating, he feels this “immense sense of belonging” which changes his world.

“This has been one of the most special moments of my life,” he tells his hosts, and when in Parliament, he would now “stand much taller”. In the local capital, he recognises himself in the physical features of those around him.

Lammy’s quest for origins is the most interesting part of the book. He transports us to his ancestral community of Hopetown, Guyana. Here he recounts that “everyone in the village seems to be related to me in some way… the Thomsons, the Johnsons, the Semples and the Grants…” He speaks warmly of the luxuriant fauna and the local village festival, as well as his ancestors who helped establish the village in 1841.

It’s a powerful story of identity, so I was interested in how the book drew a connection between these rich life stories and those of England. Unfortunately, my admittedly academic outlook was repeatedly frustrated as the narrative chopped and changed between topics, rarely pursuing an argument for more than a few pages.

Yet when Lammy considers the ethnic English, his attraction to communities of shared ancestry takes a sharp dive. “An ethnic Englishness,” Lammy writes, “tied to toxic assumptions about group supremacy, has put down deep roots in recent years.”

His connection to the white English runs through Peterborough, where he attended a state boarding school and made local friends. The parents of one friend, Clive and Kathy, are depicted as generous, but critical of the new East European migration. While claiming to understand the feelings of insecurity induced by rapid immigration in Peterborough, Lammy admonishes those who don’t embrace the transition.

Some of the local white working class are “anxious about the changes society is undergoing and end up retreating into smaller groups,” yet “others are bursting with hope and generosity”. All that is needed is more opportunities for Clive and Kathy to mix with the “dozen or so hard-working Eastern European migrants crammed into the small family home next door” and all will be well.

The term ‘tribalism’ is often reserved for expressions of group feeling Lammy dislikes, notably English ethnicity and, more broadly, ethnic majority sentiment across the West. Minorities tend instead to have the more positive-sounding ‘identity’. Yet, as I point out in my book Whiteshift, attachment to in-group is not correlated with disliking out-groups in peaceful societies. Does someone’s attachment to being black make them anti-white? No, say decades of studies. The same holds the other way around, even as the book seems unable to separate English ethnicity from the unfalsifiable charge of superiority and domination.

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This said, Lammy does own up to being a member of various tribes, including the Labour one, and the book makes an important argument that competitive individualism has eroded older communal structures, paving the way for a less cohesive society. The solution, he argues, is a new localism, promoting mixing across groups, giving local authorities more money and power, as well as the mandate to set their own immigration policies.

The book is at its best when discussing Lammy’s autobiography and the identity questions faced by Afro-Caribbean Britons. There is no doubt that differing from the majority – on the grounds of race, sexuality, language proficiency, height or disability – makes life more complicated, and can give rise to discrimination and inequality. There has been considerable injustice on these fronts in the past, and indeed some persists today. However, whereas a systematic approach to this problem would place it in world-historical context, Lammy tends to lose his sense of proportion when discussing race in Britain and America, favouring — dare I say it — an ideologically tribalist approach.

It seems the book has two settings. The first, corresponding to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s deliberative “System 2″ is the macro discussion of individualism, loneliness and alienation, how these promote tribalism, and how to address it. This part of the book, though overdetermined and insufficiently alive to counterarguments, is based on academic studies and a clear thesis.

On occasion, however, Lammy toggles to a fast-thinking “System 1”, bypassing the prefrontal cortex to enter a totalising binary mode in which there are the good folk who embrace diversity and the bad ethnic nationalists/fascists/racists. While he acknowledges some difference between the “fears and anxieties” of the Mail-reading classes and “more sinister groups like…UKIP”, there is precious little in the way of nuance when it comes to understanding his tribe’s ‘other’. Perhaps aware that there might just be a tension between donning the mantle of Healer while demonising the outgroup, he claims that he has sacrificed his tribalism by calling out anti-Semitism in his Labour Party.

The problem, of course, is that Lammy’s ideological tribe is not just Labour, but the cultural Left, or, more specifically, adherents of what African-American linguist John McWhorter terms the “religion of antiracism”.

This secular religion holds that an identity group’s place on the oppressor-victim totem pole determines when it should speak or “just listen”, and that group experience endows a member of an oppressed group with both unique empirical knowledge and a moral authority, neither of which may be questioned with representative data or analytic logic. To attempt do so is to profane the sacred. To question whether a comment like “America is a colourblind society” is racist, or whether “white fragility” is an unfalsifiable trope based on circular reasoning, marks one out for excommunication.

Lammy is quite open about the fact that when the religion kicks in, tribalism is fine: “There are times for cool, dispassionate and objective politics, but there are other occasions when it is important for politics to be about who you are, where you come from and where you belong.” Cue System 1. Back in System 2, we hear the reasonable argument that social media is helping to fuel division, anger and loneliness. Yet we also hear that the author has more followers than the daily circulation of the Times or Telegraph, using this platform to “call out opponents when I think they are wrong”.

For Lammy, when his identity – be it black British or the identity Left – is triggered, he feels entitled to dispense with System 2. The Windrush scandal, in which administrative sloppiness led to people resident for decades in the country being told to leave, was rightly criticised. So too was the Grenfell Tower disaster, in which building control failures were compounded by inept fire evacuation instructions. Theresa May’s campaign to crack down on illegal immigration was likewise bedevilled by bureaucratic errors in the Home Office.

The fact that these measures fell disproportionately — but far from completely — on black people and ethnic minorities led proponents of the religion of antiracism like Lammy to stick the ‘racist’ label on them. The same holds for Oxbridge, which Lammy berates for their low black student intake, his first port of call being to blame discrimination and racism.

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It’s one thing to deliver a strongly-worded accusation of racism if one has compared the public response to analogous situations in which the victims are predominantly white (Hillsborough, for instance). An honest attempt to rule out competing explanations would provide the scientific foundation for a claim of injustice. But to presume that because one possesses the right identity credentials, one’s outrage should cause others to fall to their knees in supplication is to overestimate the size of the progressive religion’s congregation. In fact, the main result of this priestly strategy is to fuel the polarisation Lammy rightly laments.

Some of the book’s policy aims, such as more money for local government, spaces for mixing across social lines, and facilities for people to interact face-to-face on the basis of equal status, are sound. The plea to overcome tribal division is welcome. However, the idea that Britain should not have a limit on the number of immigrants because businesses need workers, or because “the world is far wealthier, connected, and more reliant on the free movement of labour than in previous centuries” shows that Lammy is deaf to those outside the bubble. Calls for a global identity, Canadian-style multiculturalism and re-educating people to celebrate immigration come straight out of the New Labour playbook.

Writing off the views of older generations as rooted in chauvinism, Lammy essentially rests his hope in demography: baby-boomers dying off will allow cosmopolitan youth to bring forth the millennium. Like much of the Left, he has learned nothing from the rise of populism and urges ideological purity.

Lammy repeats the claim that British people uncritically celebrate Empire. Yet there is no evidence presented that this is what is being taught, or that Britons are unaware of Britain’s part in the Slave Trade. Yes, there is pride in Empire, but — as with Pakistani celebration of the Mughal Empire — this is more a reflection of general national sentiment than a moral statement.

And those like Oxford’s Nigel Biggar who seek to adjudicate the positives and negatives of Empire are under immense pressure to bend the evidence toward the latter. For Lammy to dismiss the view that transatlantic slavery was not distinct in world-historical terms – a claim made by the recent “1776’ group of African-American intellectuals – as a “glib attempt to deny a real injustice” is not an argument, but just a system 1 reaction.

Banging on about national sins more than already occurs in elite institutions can only feed division. Better to permit those who wish to pay more attention to sins to do so, others to foreground the positives, but all to agree on basic facts, basing claims in representative historical samples.

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A vision of Britain's polarised future

By Daniel Kalder

At first I imagined that the book would engage in more self-reflection about tribalism rather than criticising it for opponents while indulging in it for one’s own, yet at bottom the book fails to see the log in its own eye.

It caricatures Leave voters and ethnic English people attached to their identity as fearful, backward-looking authoritarians, yet part of nationhood and local identity includes historic ethnic composition. It is possible for people — including minorities — to be attached to the distinctive ethnic composition of England without this implying that non-whites are less English. Seeking to conserve a critical mass of distinctive characteristics, or slow their erosion, is not the same as excluding from membership. To use the charge of ‘exclusion’ as a stick to beat those who want slower ethnic change or more time for ethnic assimilation is to stoke the politics of division.

A critical reflection might have asked how the African-Caribbean residents of Hopetown, or of Guyana, should react if their town or country were to transition to majority Indian. It might have mused about Afro-Creole cultural and political hegemony in Guyana and other diverse Caribbean societies.

It might even have reflected on Lammy’s Bantu ancestors, who enslaved pygmies and conquered the San the way agriculturalists in North America conquered the hunter-gatherers there. Not because Lammy’s co-ethnics are worse, but because they have acted the same as whites in analogous situations.

Ultimately the book fails because it sidesteps the role of progressive tribalism in stoking cultural conflict and polarisation. There is an accommodation to be had, but not on these terms. 

David Lammy’s Tribes: How Our Need to Belong Can Make or Break Society, is published by Little, Brown, priced £20