But the Epstein horror show has more in common with Britain’s rape gang scandal than just Starmer’s apparent wish to avoid grasping any awkward nettles. Both involved the grooming and trafficking of vulnerable girls. Both convened a close-knit network of depraved insiders, some bonded by sexual degeneracy and linked through a host of further personal and economic ties. Both have a way of bubbling to the surface at intervals, triggering horror and disgust, then disappearing off the front pages again.

Both scandals also implicate the entire political regime in which they occurred. By rights, both Rotherham and Epstein ought to be extinction-level events for these respective (in fact, interlocking) regimes. But somehow, public life staggers on. After all, how would we go about purging an entire national ruling class, let alone a transnational billionaire one with a combined net worth greater than many nation states?

It’s a bit like that joke about a rickety house, only standing because the termites in the woodwork are holding hands. If you booted everyone touched by this corruption from public life, would there even be anyone left? The list of luminaries connected to Epstein reads like a Who’s Who of the overclass. Epstein claimed Bill Gates caught an STD from Russian girls, and tried surreptitiously to slip his then-wife Melinda antibiotics. Prince Andrew pulled strings at RAF bases for Epstein’s private jet, and pumped him for investment in a warzone where British soldiers were still being killed. Bill Clinton; Woody Allen; Mick Jagger; Kevin Spacey. Bankers, plutocrats, lawyers, politicians, stars of music and film. Those exposed insist that — in Clinton’s famous words about being handed a joint at college — they didn’t inhale. They were just at the parties, and somehow didn’t register all the little girls being served up like Ferrero Rocher.

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In the public reaction, it’s generally been the sexual depravity that has elicited the most visceral disgust. This is understandable, especially when this comes with a backbeat of still-darker rumors, that shade from sex trafficking into Gothic horror. Buried amid the files, for example, is one in which a man alleges he was raped by “George Bush 1” and that he witnessed babies dismembered and feces eaten. Another alleges that Donald Trump witnessed the killing of her newborn baby, whom she birthed aged just 13. Then there’s the video footage of a hysterical Mexican model in Monterrey in 2009, screaming in the street after attending an “elite” party about how “they ate a person”, only to vanish off the face of the Earth that very night. No one knows much about the context, or if it’s even related to Epstein, but especially in the light of the latest revelations it’s doing the conspiracy rounds again.

The Epstein files contain many documents that are unverified, and could be hearsay or libel. High-profile abuse cases sometimes attract fantasists. It is eminently possible that many of the more baroque papers in these millions of documents may be untrue. But conspiracy theories can both be factually false, sometimes with grossly exaggerated or fantastical details, while still speaking poetically to something that is true. It can both be pure fantasy that anyone was literally killing babies on yachts — and also accurate that real children had their lives destroyed by Epstein. Horror and disgust is the right response.

But what is harder to parse, and yet is arguably more consequential, is the social picture that emerges from these files. Epstein’s emails convey the sense of a world that operates on terms completely alien to those by which normal people live. This is, I think, the real source of the swirling conspiracy theories about occult cabals and the like: the correct intuition that something doesn’t have to be “occult” in the sense of pentagrams, to be occult in the sense of being hidden.

Epstein was a node in a world that is precisely occult in this sense, available only to those with table-stakes high enough to participate. He emerges as a consummate flatterer, adept at brokering links between cultural and financial capital. One novelist reported, after attending a dinner arranged by Epstein for Les Wexner, his first billionaire client, that “Les seemed like this rumpled, sweaty schlub. He was so ill at ease. And there was Jeffrey facilitating the conversation.” Later, as Epstein’s power increased, he’s revealed as bartering favors, introductions, and insider access in every direction, majordomo for an intricate interpersonal economy of perks and privileges.

Everyone is now trying to make the revelations a scandal for their enemies in particular. But it’s clear that at the level on which Epstein operated, political “sides” simply don’t exist. To take one illustrative example, the Financial Times reports that Epstein pulled strings in 2019 to obtain an exclusive golf-club membership for Brad Karp, chair of the prestigious Wall Street law firm Paul, Weiss — and that he did so with the help of Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon. Yet the same report also shows that Epstein set out to arrange meetings with himself, Karp, and Kathy Ruemmler, now at Goldman Sachs and former general counsel under Barack Obama.

Money, though, was real, in Epstein’s network; money and influence. In Mandelson’s case, for instance, emails between him and Epstein show him putting pressure on the British government to water down proposed curbs on bankers’ bonuses, in the wake of the financial crash. Geopolitics is real, but can be transcended if you know how: Sergey Belyakov, a Russian FSB officer, wanted Epstein’s advice on evading sanctions. Clout is real too: for Wexner, Epstein provided glittery guests. Karp wanted an exclusive golf-club membership. Elon Musk wanted “the wildest party”. Richard Branson wanted the “harem”. Sarah Ferguson wanted a lifestyle she couldn’t afford. The mind recoils from what Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor wanted.

For everyone, their heart’s desire; the thing they will do almost anything to get. Identifying and trading in such desires seems to have been Epstein’s superpower. But surely this miasma of upscale corruption didn’t touch everyone, or did not taint everyone to the same degree? The insurance mogul Robert Meister, who introduced Epstein to his first billionaire client, told Vanity Fair that the last straw in his mounting dislike of the financier came when Epstein turned up at his house with a bevy of young models, apparently for his sexual entertainment. Meister was, he said, not tempted: he told Epstein to leave and never come back. Angel Ureña, a spokesman for Bill Clinton, recently claimed that this was also the case with Clinton, and that he cut ties in 2005, before Epstein’s 2008 conviction on a charge of procuring a minor for prostitution.

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Who knows. Mandy Rice-Davies, another teenage girl molested long ago by a powerful man, famously said when told that Lord Astor denied it: “Well he would, wouldn’t he?” Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor also would, wouldn’t he, claiming to have cut ties with Epstein long before he actually did. Trump likewise claims the latest document drop “absolves” him, though his enemies retort that millions of files remain under wraps. Mandelson claimed he’d cut ties with Epstein some years back, only for the latest document drop to show that far from doing so, he was asking Epstein for advice on property buying and may well have leaked confidential government documents to him, well after his conviction.

Now, whether it’s the influence-peddling or the snapshot in his scanties, the game seems to be up. There is no suggestion that Mandelson was implicated in sexual abuse. But the girls were never the main action anyway. Now, the once apparently unassailable “Prince of Darkness”, already fired as Keir Starmer’s man in Washington due to Epstein ties, has resigned from the Labour Party and declared that he won’t be returning to the House of Lords. Starmer, ever on the communications front foot, responded to this statement by indicating he does not think Mandelson should sit in the House of Lords.

So that’s all fine then. Except it isn’t. For what’s also clear is that Mandelson was just one actor in a sprawling, incestuous web, that will outlive Epstein, and in which I suspect the household-name celebrities and public figures currently making headlines (and headaches for the Prime Minister) often counted for less in power-broking terms than those less high-profile but seriously influential in politics, finance, or law. For some in this group, raping trafficked children may have been a fun diversion. But the real frisson — and Epstein’s real work — lay in the subtler and more varied trade, in things that money can’t buy.

The nihilistic overclass of transnational kleptocrats and their hangers-on Epstein catered to in this occult marketplace operated, and still operates, at a level where political principle simply does not feature, let alone the moral or spiritual kind. There’s only whatever you want, and whatever strings you are willing or able to pull for someone else, in exchange for it. This was the real feast; those poor violated girls were just the amuse-bouche.

***

Philosophy, claimed Étienne Gilson, always buries its undertakers. Gilson was himself a philosopher, so perhaps he had an interest in believing this. But there might be something in it: as the complaints pile up, about cultural stagnation and loss of meaning, Britain’s young people are on a renewed quest for higher things.

One of the forms this seems to be taking, at least for some, is a turn toward God. According to a new study a “Quiet Revival” is afoot in British Christianity, with young people leading the way: reportedly, the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds who attend church at least monthly has risen from 4% in 2018 to 16% in 2024: a startling increase. And yet it may also be true that England’s Christian heritage is as moribund as ever — at least in an institutional sense. For this reported church attendance is mainly growing in Roman Catholic and Pentecostal congregations, while the established, national Church of England continues to languish.

This isn’t the first indicator that some kind of religious backswing is underway among the young. A poll in January, for example, revealed that Gen Zs are half as likely as their parents to identify as atheists. The trend reaches beyond England as well, with the French journalist Solène Tadié recently pointing to a revival of traditional Catholicism in Europe, again especially among the young. Last year, too, Rod Dreher documented a similar pattern of Christian revival across the West, especially among young people, setting this in the wider context of a general, youthful turn toward spirituality.

Dreher argues that the governing feature of those churches that are thriving is their orientation toward the numinous, whether expressed through adherence to ancient high-church liturgy, or through intense, charismatic spiritual communion. But why would this be happening at all? Why especially young people, and why the mystical edge? I wonder if this trend is less about a spiritual awakening among Gen Z, and more about how sharply this contrasts with the generation that raised them: so-called “Gen X”, born roughly 1965 to 1980.

I belong, just about, to this demographic. It’s an open question for me whether Gen X exists at all or just comprises those Boomers born too late to enjoy the fun phase of smashing history, heritage, and the future. Either way, by the time I reached adolescence in the early Nineties, there didn’t seem much left to believe in; and yet, growing up in an unusually peaceful and prosperous era, we combined this sense of post-cultural anomie with far too much time to think.

The result was a pervasive sense of nihilism as a kind of moral duty, and profound unshakeable truth. It’s difficult to convey in these virulently ideological times, but back in the Nineties Nirvana’s anthem to existential boredom felt fiercely real in its raw but morally empty energy: “Here we are now, entertain us.” The same restless, angry alienation energizes the work of writer Irvine Welsh, whose Trainspotting (1993) was for a while the definitive edgy zeitgeist text for younger Gen X: so much so, in fact, that Trainspotting’s opening monologue made its way onto t-shirts, posters, and other merch, all spitting in the face of what it meant to “Choose life”.

For Welsh’s heroin-addicted anti-hero Renton, “life” is empty of meaning and purpose. It’s mere mechanical, dull consumerist tedium grinding toward a loveless, pointless, neglected end: “Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.”

Renton declares: “I chose not to choose life.” And the 1996 movie adaptation, starring Ewan McGregor, enthroned Renton as one of Britpop’s most iconically perverse heartthrobs: as enthrallingly self-destructive a cultural icon as Kurt Cobain.

But what happens, then, when nihilists have kids? Raising kids requires innumerable choices, all of which tacitly concede a vision of the good. How does this square with a cultural outlook that denies any such thing? Describing his own predicament as a Gen X parent, the novelist Ewan Morrison — a friend and contemporary of Irvine Welsh — captured this paradox in a recent talk when he recalled seeing a young woman in the Nineties wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the Sex Pistols’ slogan “No Future”, over a visibly pregnant belly.

What does it mean to disavow futurity even as you’re gestating it? And how do you go about raising the resulting kids? The object of philosophy and religion has classically been eudaimonia: human flourishing. But by the end of the 20th century, pace Étienne Gilson, even those adults who chose not just life but creating new life often struggled to articulate what flourishing should look like.

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In Trainspotting, the only parents are the addicts Lesley and Sick Boy, whose neglected baby dies while they are high on heroin. But the fact that Gen Z has reached adulthood at all suggests that even parents with a fondness for Nietzsche and goth music generally didn’t prove as radically relativist as Lesley and Sick Boy, when it came to pursuing eudaimonia for their own children. Very simply, much of the circle was squared by pragmatists: parents who embraced a vague humanism, or New Atheism, while teaching their kids to say please and thank you and answering questions about Christmas and Easter with a shrug.

And yet at a deeper level the ambivalence remains, between the need to model the good for your kids and the relativist’s aversion to any such definitive moral stance. In turn, this produced a distinctive approach to child-rearing that the philosopher Agnes Callard characterizes as “acceptance parenting”. Acceptance parents, Callard argues, disavow any obligation to provide a substantive account of the good for their kids. Instead, children are left to determine what “happiness” means for themselves.

As the children of Gen X reach adulthood, we can thus ask: what kind of adults does such an upbringing produce? In What Are Children For?, published last year, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer some indication of how it feels to grow up under “acceptance parenting”. Wiseman recounts quizzing her own mother about whether there was anything at all she could choose to do that would disappoint her mother. Her mother demurred. Wiseman found this less supportive than incomprehensible: “Her purported indifference was sweet, but also baffling.”

It’s not difficult to see how a generation that sang “oh well, whatever, nevermind” and pinned Welsh’s “Choose Life” monologue to their student bedroom walls might balk at defining eudaimonia for their kids. Who are they, after all, to say what the good life looks like? But this reluctance to impose values, Wiseman gently suggests, can result less in an enabling freedom, than a moral vacuum: “Without a model to reproduce or rebel against, growing up with acceptance parents can feel tractionless, like a wheel spinning in a void.”

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Is it really so strange, then, that a generation raised in this void might, in some cases, turn to religious faith in search of clearer guidance? When the world’s faith traditions offer cumulative millennia of writing and practice on how to live well, it stands to reason that some young people would opt not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to fill the void.

And this, in turn, sheds light on why such an exploration might take literally any form other than the mainstream Anglican Church: in its conventional form, Anglicanism functions as a continuation of “acceptance parenting” by religious means. There are, of course, a great many deeply devout Anglicans; but by virtue of its historic role, the Church of England walks a precarious institutional tightrope between politics and faith, political and spiritual England. And this invites a public image less as a spiritual body, than as the representative of whatever remains of British institutional Christianity that hasn’t been subsumed by the welfare state and mainstream secular liberalism.

In fulfilling its duty as far as possible to offer spiritual welcome to the whole national community, our established Church risks appearing to stand for nothing much, or at best to embody the Christian equivalent of the moral vacuum Wiseman describes. Against this, young people weary of the effort to define their own values and happiness ex nihilo, and eager for guidance from somewhere — anywhere — might be forgiven for concluding that such direction is not to be found in a church whose leaders shrug at turning over their sacred buildings to silent discos or helter-skelters. Confronted by what looks overwhelmingly like a mass abdication of moral authority by parents and religious institutions, then, perhaps the last form of youthful revolt available is against nothingness itself: a rejection of relativism, and embrace of doctrine and mystery.

We can perhaps draw a few inferences from this. Firstly, taken at the broadest level, this presages an increasingly faith-inflected world as this generation matures — not just within the Christian Church but also across the fast-growing “spiritual but not religious” cohort. Secondly, as regards Christianity in particular, it suggests that predictions of the coming end of established, institutional Christianity in Britain, at least in the form it’s taken for the last century or two, may well turn out to be accurate. But this doesn’t mean that Christianity is dying out in Britain.

If anything, what’s on the wane now is nihilism, physicalism, and the reductive “nothing-butness” characteristic of the “Nevermind” era. By contrast, Christianity appears to be growing stranger, more countercultural, and more resistant to corralling in mainstream political institutions. This is a faith whose God rose from the dead; a generation of relativists will not finish it off.

This last is no over-statement. In 2025, companies and private investors will spend more than $600 billion developing ever-more-powerful AI. This enormous boom (or bubble) has made people like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison even more fabulously rich. But advanced artificial intelligence is, notoriously, a black box. No computer scientist understands how it really works, and while everyone agrees it will profoundly change our lives, no one can say exactly how. One prominent economist predicts that AI will somehow introduce an era of unprecedented “human flourishing”. Others, including the computer scientists who developed the AI 2027 scenario, warn that it may “kill all the people”. Setting aside that extreme outcome, there are obvious reasons for concern. The internet, social media, and chatbots have already allowed us to peek under the hood of advanced, highly monetized digital technology, and what’s flown out so far is not encouraging: depression, psychosis, cognitive impairment, societal atomization, political polarization, enhanced surveillance and censorship — the list goes on. And because more than half the people in the world already own smartphones and spend, on average, more than three hours a day on them, these effects are global.

Yet while superintelligent AI is already looking like Pandora’s box, governments, corporations, and consumers are hell-bent on opening it. The march of technology is unstoppable, and tech oligarchs now have as much say over our collective human fate as any world leader. What’s more, they know it. Some, such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, have even come to regard themselves as potential saviors of humanity.

We’ve grown used to enormously wealthy tech entrepreneurs acting like they are in the business of solving global problems. Peter Thiel recently recalled a conversation in which Musk and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, disagreed about whether making us an interplanetary species or building superhuman AI was “the most important project in the world”. You might have thought that the most important project in the world would address some substantial threat to people’s safety and well-being, like the precipitous collapse of education at all levels, or the serious risk of civil war in Western nations. But superhuman AI and the quest to colonize space are expressions of a techno-politics that aims not to mend the world, but simply to leave it behind.

The desire to build machines that will allow us to flee our terrestrial home, and that will make humanity functionally obsolete, reflects the fatality of technology — a seductive, yet ultimately monstrous synthesis of desire and ingenuity. René Descartes spelled out the project in his 1637 Discourse on Method. This masterpiece of political rhetoric was written not in scholarly Latin but demotic French, to reach the broadest readership. He claimed that basically everything he learned in the finest school in France, where he was at the top of the class, was worthless. Knowledge needed an entirely new foundation, to be provided by modern tools of mathematical analysis, including the algebraic geometry he pioneered. His as yet unnamed project, he wrote, promised to make human beings the “masters and possessors of nature”. Descartes predicted a future in which technology would produce “an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth and all the goods one finds in it”, rid us of “an infinity of maladies”, and perhaps make us immortal. He compared himself to a prophet of God, who would not sin against mankind by withholding earthly salvation — a magnanimous example, perhaps, for today’s tech oligarchs. Scientists, he suggested, would be the new rulers; science, the new state religion.

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Human beings have always made tools to accomplish their goals, altering their relationship with nature and one another in the process. But for most of human history, that activity was subordinate to larger conceptions of the good, embodied in cultural practices and political structures. Our pre-modern forebears regarded the natural or created world as intrinsically well ordered, a suitable basis for human fulfillment. They found goodness and beauty in everyday life, and celebrated them in religious ritual, architecture, art, music, and literature. Technology, however, is indifferent to such soulful gratitude. It considers the world to be, at best, neutral matter, capable of any number of transformations and uses, waiting only to serve our desires for security, convenience, and pleasure.

In the long run, technology — which promised to give people what they want, when they want it — was the easiest of sales. It didn’t just supercharge technical advancement. It made the potentially boundless or infinite development of what the Greeks called technē, technical skill, an end in itself, eclipsing all prior conceptions of the human good. Actuality — the real character of human existence, felt and understood — paled in comparison with possibility; the imagined future, a virtual playground of unconstrained individual freedom, came to seem more desirable than the quotidian present. Digital technology in particular has insinuated itself throughout our daily lives, dissolving human connections at alarming speed and exacerbating a crisis of meaning. Yet it has also proved to be a powerful economic engine and an invaluable military resource, so much so that it would be unthinkable to step off the accelerating AI train.

Today, technology is entering its final, post-human phase, in which it no longer regards nature, our bodies, and our psyches as neutral material to be molded according to our wishes, but rather confronts them as enemies. This development, while shocking, was not entirely unforeseen. Its main lines were spelled out almost a century ago, in 1929, in a hideous little book by the gifted Irish scientist J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. Bernal’s “rational soul” is the spirit of technology, which is moving with “ever increasing acceleration”. Its enemies are the primary forces opposing “the progress of the future”: the world (nature), the flesh (the human body), and the devil (human psychology).

For Bernal, the world is a poor prison from which outer space is the only escape. In the future, synthetic foods and clothing will make for “a world incomparably more efficient and richer than the present”. Later, manmade “globes” — space shells 10 miles in diameter — will replace the pathetic one we’ve been stuck on for so long. Like the Russian Revolution (Bernal was a Stalinist), itself a violent leap into an inscrutable future, this radical break with the past promises somehow to make ordinary politics unnecessary: in these artificial globes, “there would probably be no more need for government than in a modern hotel”. But our descendants will aspire to govern the universe, putting an end to its spectacular wastefulness: “the stars cannot be allowed to continue in their old way but will be turned into efficient heat engines.”

In Bernal’s estimation, the flesh — the human body — is by no means our friend. Much of it already serves little purpose: “modern mechanical and modern chemical discoveries have rendered both the skeletal and metabolic functions of the body to a large extent useless.” What the flesh needs now is “radical alteration” through physiological chemistry and the extension of foreign bodies into the structure of its living matter. “Normal man”, Bernal insists, “is an evolutionary dead end”, and there is much work to be done: “We badly need a small sense organ for detecting wireless frequencies, eyes for infra-red, ultra-violet and X-rays, ears for supersonics, detectors of high and low temperatures, of electrical potential and current, and chemical organs of many kinds.”

Bernal envisions “the direction of mechanism by pure volition” (something Elon Musk’s Neuralink, now rivaled by other groups, has already achieved through brain implants for people with spinal cord injuries). And while his transhuman cyborg — which, he predicts, will ultimately evolve into a brain in a vat — is apt to strike us as “a strange, monstrous and inhuman creature… he is the only logical outcome of the type of humanity that exists at present”.

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The greatest impediment to the birth of the technological and ideological “new man”, Bernal writes, is our species’ persistent irrationality, especially including its “unintelligent respect for the past”. This is where his book becomes truly demonic, inverting the spiritual order on which civilization was founded. For “we can abandon the world and subdue the flesh only if we first expel the devil” — the retrograde sensibility that rejects “the progress of dehumanization”. That can happen only if “the scientific expert” — linked, Borg-like, to other advanced consciousnesses — rules the world. Bernal imagines political and psychological manipulators on the model of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, a scientific aristocracy with “the means of directing the masses in harmless occupations and of maintaining a perfect docility under the appearance of perfect freedom”. These masses, reduced in numbers until the elite “are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them”, might be allowed to live on Earth as “a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment”.

Bernal’s chilling priorities to one side, he understood earlier than anyone else that technology, like Soviet communism, would ultimately demand a radical disconnection from the past and a leap away from the only world we’ve ever known. Such desperate leaps are, at bottom, a symptom of, and response to, nihilism: the sense that life as we know it is basically meaningless. And in a kind of doom loop, technology now offers itself as the solution to the problem of nihilism it has helped to create. This helps to explain the willingness of tech leaders to take extraordinary risks with our collective future.

Musk’s idea of space colonization was a political project, which he gave up on when he realized that “woke AI” would follow us to Mars. His desire to make a clean break with the ideological overload of contemporary life was so strong that he was prepared to abandon the Earth. How many people would have been willing to join him? The answer would give us some idea about the insufficiency of meaning that Bernal so completely expresses in his dystopian vision.

Rather, his themes of freedom, faith, nationalism, family breakdown and suicide link into very modern cultural concerns. At a moment of surging popularity, Dostoyevsky’s prophetic nature has come into sharper focus. The works of this complicated figure reverberate powerfully in our own conflicted era, as the allure of Russian literature continues to grip the Western imagination.

Whatever way you look at it, Dostoyevsky has struck a chord with a new generation of readers. The top-selling Penguin Classic last year — helped by hype on social media community “BookTok” — was his novella White Nights (1848), while the publisher’s sales of The Brothers Karamazov (1880) and Crime and Punishment (1866) have roughly tripled since 2020.

This growing interest is the latest stage in a reputation which has changed significantly over time, both during the author’s lifetime and after his death in 1881. After the rapturous reception of Dostoyevsky’s debut novel Poor Folk (1846), his second The Double (1846) was poorly reviewed and was followed by more than a decade in the wilderness. Dostoyevsky only really achieved lasting popular glory in Russia towards the end of his life.

Literary luminaries have come to quite different conclusions about Dostoyevsky and his legacy. Albert Camus believed that “the real 19th-century prophet was Dostoyevsky, not Karl Marx”, while E.M. Forster argued that “no English novelist explored man’s soul as deeply”. On the other hand, Joseph Conrad complained that “there is a certain foul stench emanating from Dostoyevsky’s works that I cannot endure”.

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Given his reputation as an arch-reactionary, for those new to Dostoyevsky it can be a shock to discover that he had a liberal past. It was interest in French utopian socialism which led him into a revolutionary group connected with the radical Petrashevsky Circle in St Petersburg. This resulted in his arrest in 1849, a last-minute reprieve from death by firing squad, and banishment to Siberia with only the New Testament to read.

Dostoyevsky later wrote with contempt of the period when “I transformed myself into a ‘European liberal’”. The liberalism he reacted against was the Russian nihilism of the 19th-century, which took the path of negation and cast aside all tradition and moral restraint through its faulty vision of progress. This nihilism, which entered the Russian psyche more widely with Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862), arguably has deep similarities to 21st-century liberalism: both in its scientific utopianism and its vision of materialism as a means of providing fundamental values.

Devils (1872) is Dostoyevsky’s great attack on nihilism. In the novel, the maniacal Peter Verkhovensky speaks gleefully of revolutionary terror: “A Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes gouged out, a Shakespeare will be stoned”. The “devils” of nihilism and materialism lead Peter and his band of motley radicals to murder and self-destruction in provincial 19th-century Russia. In his portrait of a nihilistic descent into chaos in the pursuit of absolute freedom, Dostoyevsky anticipated the totalitarianism of 20th-century Bolshevism.

The novel, which despite its dark plot is full of buffoonish and slapstick moments, was a response to real events and intellectual forces. Dostoyevsky based the murder of Ivan Shatov — a member of the slapdash revolutionary group who manages to free himself from its nihilistic grip — on revolutionary Sergei Nechaev’s killing of a student who had turned against him. Inspired by Nechaev, the radical Vera Zasulich would shoot the governor of St Petersburg; Oscar Wilde based a play on her.

Dostoyevsky’s answer to materialism and liberalism was Holy Russia. With his belief in the spiritual superiority of the Russian nation, and Orthodoxy as the only expression of pure and undefiled Christianity, his faith took a jingoistic form. Dostoyevsky called for Constantinople to be reclaimed as the center of Orthodoxy, and supported Russia’s attempts to reclaim lost territory from the Crimean War. His sometimes-exaggerated voice can be found in the mouth of Shatov: “Only one nation is ‘god-bearing,’ that’s the Russian people”.

This worldview provokes discomfort in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — though it would surely be unfair to second-guess exactly what Dostoyevsky’s own take would be on the conflict. Either way, at a time of growing nationalism and political extremes, Dostoyevsky’s messianic politics are of particular pertinence in his native country. Vladimir Putin, who has attempted to justify contemporary Russian messianism by pointing to Prince Vladimir’s baptism in Kyiv in 988 as the birth of Holy Russia, has equally singled out Dostoyevsky as a writer of the Russian “heart” opposed to the “pragmatic” West.

It’s impossible here to understand Dostoyevsky and downplay his Christianity. While he explores religion through a heavy dose of doubt and spiritual desolation, and often spoke of faith through contradiction, it would be a fundamental misreading to consider him as some sort of doubt-ridden agnostic. After all, if he doesn’t provide formal arguments for the existence of God, he does paint a picture of a world in which the choices and consequences of belief and unbelief tell their own story. His own position, in the corner of faith, shines through in the often dark and terrible episodes of his novels, in intellectual distress, madness, murder, suicide, and rape.

This religious perspective is again being read at an interesting cultural moment. The New Atheist consensus of the early 21st century is under serious strain. That’s echoed by an uptick in interest in traditional forms of Christianity amongst the young: a recent YouGov survey found that 16% of 18-24-year-olds in the UK attend church at least monthly, up from 4% in 2018, while young adult converts drove the French Catholic Church’s record number of baptisms last Easter. There are Reddit threads about how reading Dostoyevsky has inspired new Christian conversions, while contemporary Christian figures from Pope Francis to Rowan Williams have cited him as a figure of significant spiritual interest (the former Archbishop of Canterbury even wrote a book on him).

This brings us to The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky’s final and greatest novel. This is a profound exploration of faith, morality and freedom, centered on patricide, suffering and moral uncertainty through the murder of Fyodor Karamazov and the violently different outlooks and experiences of his four sons.

The novel contains the famous poem of the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”. This is told by the intellectual Ivan, who is tormented by the problem of evil, to his novice monk brother Alyosha. Christ returns to earth in 16th-century Seville and is arrested by the Inquisitor, who is fresh from burning heretics. The Inquisitor tells Christ that he got freedom wrong. Humanity would’ve been happier if he had accepted the Devil’s temptations in the desert. The masses cannot handle freedom, but want bread, miracles and strongman authority. “Those same people who today kissed your feet will tomorrow at one wave of my hand rush to rake up the embers on your bonfire.” Christ is silent throughout the Inquisitor’s elocutions. Finally, he “quietly kisses him on his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips”. With a shudder, the Inquisitor turns him out.

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The poem gets to the heart of 20th-century totalitarianism and the conflict between freedom and secure contentment which lies at the center of modern liberalism. All the while, it foreshadows 20th-century dystopian literature from authors like Huxley and Orwell. It also highlights the sometimes-paradoxical approach of Dostoyevsky to religious truth: the critic Konstantin Leontiev wrote that “the beautiful fantasy” of the Legend displayed Dostoyevsky’s “mistaken, false and obscure” view of Christianity.

This should not be a surprise, for like any prophet, Dostoyevsky has paradoxes. While cultural context can’t be ignored, it is galling that a writer who explores suffering humanity in such astounding depth could fall foul of base antisemitism. In response to a question in The Brothers Karamazov about whether Jews steal and kill Christian children at Easter, Alyosha replies with a simple “I don’t know”. That is quite the glib treatment of blood libel.

Then there is Dostoyevsky’s anti-Catholicism, evident in the Legend, which was tied up with his antipathy towards the West and reached absurd heights. Prince Myshkin in his novel The Idiot spouts Dostoyevsky’s own view that the Catholic Church “is even worse than atheism itself”. Ecumenical Dostoyevsky was not, even if I don’t feel this diminishes the power of his literary apologia for Christianity.

Despite these tensions — and the misguided calls to boycott all Russian culture in the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion — classic Russian literature has maintained a deep hold on the Western mind. Russia is a European country which in its anti-liberal traditions is fundamentally not of the West, which gives it a definite sense of strangeness and otherness. While Russia in some ways feels like a not-so-distant cousin, its soul seems exotic, even incomprehensible. The familiar yet unfamiliar spiritual and political forces contained within the grand Russian novels, explored against the backdrop of the extremities of the nation’s history, have proven durably enticing.

As for Dostoyevsky himself, there is something dark and dangerous, perhaps even depraved, about his work which makes him more relevant to contemporary readers than even Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. The violent realism of his writing and its frantic existentialism fits strangely well into modern literary appetites, while his anti-capitalism is surely appealing to young readers exhausted by the desperate failures of contemporary mainstream politics. Plenty, in short, for new children of doubt to grapple with.

The cold and the darkness of the city had undone me, and I soon began to feel as if I were living inside a Russian novel. I walked aimlessly along the dark, frozen canals for hours at a time; after staying over one night at the apartment of some hooligans who had offered me hash, I woke up glistening with bed bug bites. Afterwards, my incessant, paranoid pacing late at night prompted the “host mother” with whom I was staying to eject me from her premises. 

Hence, the new apartment with the roommate. A Quaker from Pennsylvania who was also studying Russian literature, he was one of the kindest people I have ever met. With his help and with the help of literature itself, I nursed myself back to sanity. We donned snowsuits indoors and kept water continuously boiling on the stove (an old Soviet trick) to stay warm; and we tore through Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol, discussing the books over spartan meals. Then one day, we got to Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, and something very strange happened — something that changed the course of my life.

Any number of paths were open to me then. But my reading of Fathers and Sons and my discussion of it with my roommate prompted me down that most torturous, least remunerative, and yet most delightful one: the writing of fiction. It was a fateful decision, but if I had it over, I’d make it again.

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The encounter with Fathers and Sons led me to an obsession with the novel as a literary form. Over the course of my young adulthood, I have witnessed the advent of the blog, the tweet, the Instagram poem, and the Facebook wall screed. But none of these interested me much. These were fine forms for the spouting of invective, or the acquisition of customers, or the airing out of dirty laundry. But only the novel could capture the insane polyphony of passions and ideologies that I felt as I navigated life in the internet age. And only the novel could transmute the complexity of the modern world into something both beautiful and true. Because I believed in this, I worked doggedly for close to a decade to write a novel of my own that I felt would exemplify what is best in the form, thus putting my theory into practice. 

How did all this come from reading Fathers and Sons? The Turgenev novel, first published in 1862, tells the story of two college-age friends, Bazarov and Arkady, their families, and their love interests. Bazarov is a nihilist; though the word originated in Germany, it was in 19th-century Russia that it gained currency among terrorists and revolutionaries, and Fathers and Sons itself did a great deal to popularise it. For Bazarov, the upstart son of a country doctor, the word means that he accepts no authority whatsoever: neither church nor state, neither family nor custom.

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Arkady, the younger of the pair, worships Bazarov and invites him to stay at the country estate where his widowed father, Nikolai, his father’s mistress, Thenichka, and Arkady’s uncle Pavel all live. Bazarov proceeds to enrage Pavel with his monologues on the uselessness of poetry and art and the vainness of all custom, and with his badly disguised contempt for Pavel, a stiff aristocrat whom he believes to be among Russia’s “superfluous men”. When Pavel encounters Bazarov stealing a kiss from Thenichka, he challenges him to a duel. Bazarov coolly shoots him in the leg and immediately proceeds to tend to the wound. Recounting the event later to Arkady, he quips that it “was of a nature uninteresting from every but the medical point of view”.

Meanwhile, Arkady and Bazarov pay a visit to two lovely sisters, Anna and Katia Odintsov. Anna, the elder of the two, is a cautious and world-weary widow, who has seen enough of life to be grateful for the comfort she has now attained, while Katia, a fresh and lively 18-year-old, is intelligent and independent, but not at all jaundiced. Bazarov falls in love with Anna and is rebuffed; though deeply curious, Anna is far too practical to give herself to such an intense personality. Arkady falls in love with young Katia; she accepts his marriage proposal and the novel leaves them in connubial bliss. 

Towards the end of the book, Bazarov returns to his own parents, a rustic country doctor and a superstitious peasant woman, who fuss over him and delight over his arrogant sallies against them. They believe that their brilliant son will become a Great Man. But Bazarov accidentally infects himself with septicemia while treating a typhoid patient, and the slovenly doctor nearby has no treatment with which to cauterise his wound. Bazarov dies at home with cool dignity, making no explanation or apologies for the life he has lived. Before he expires, he breezily advises his father to console himself with the Christian religion for which he, Bazarov, has only contempt.

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Bazarov, it seemed to me when I first read the novel in 2010, is a cold-blooded monster. Here is a wretch who despises poetry and art, disdains his parents’ love, cruelly taunts a younger friend who idolises him, arrogantly forsakes all the wisdom of the past, and spends his free moments catching and dissecting frogs. Who could admire such a boor?

My roommate, it turned out. I was shocked to discover that for my gentle roommate, Bazarov was the tragic hero of the novel: a man with the will and the courage to bring great reforms to his country but stifled at every turn by the pettiness and inertia that eventually suffocates him.

I simply couldn’t fathom it then. But rereading the novel now, I find I’m able to see things from the opposite perspective. Bazarov’s Russia was filled with stupidity and injustice. Poetry doesn’t have any practical benefits, much as the cultivated classes may love it. To fall in love with a woman is indeed often disastrous. Nature, as sages from Lao Tzu to da Vinci have proclaimed, is the best teacher — not custom or authority. Arkady is in many ways a naïve “donkey”, as Bazarov calls him, and Bazarov’s own parents are doddering fools.

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So who was right? Me or my roommate? Well, both of us. And neither of us. The novel as a form, unlike the tweet or the newspaper polemic or the TikTok rant, isn’t designed to score points for one side or the other. Its greatest specimens — Fathers and Sons, but also the likes of Charterhouse of Parma, A Sentimental Education, Bleak House — court precisely this sort of ambivalence.

This is far more consequential than it may at first seem. Today, we have grown accustomed to novels, taking them for granted. But the novel remains a potent — even revolutionary — technology. Because of the ubiquity of storytelling in the modern world, it’s easy to forget just what a violent shift in consciousness the novel brought about. Prior to the novel, religious sermons were the most popular reading material for the masses. These were no doubt interesting and morally edifying to their readers. But with the novel, for the first time, it became possible to enter the subjectivity of another person. In England, the passion for novels among the newly literate middle classes was so great that a moral panic ensued.

But why should the novel matter now, in an age that offers such confectionary pleasures as tightly plotted Netflix shows, frenetic video-game streamers, and TikToks? To answer this question, we must go back to the great mid-century American literary critic Lionel Trilling. Already in Trilling’s day, intellectuals were declaring that the novel was dead, and so he penned his 1948 essay “Art and Fortune” in its defence.

Trilling asserted that the novel is the realm in which abstract ideas become concrete. Take the ideas of Bazarov. Many intellectuals in Turgenev’s day theorised about the value of custom and class, and whether all such things should be forsaken. But Turgenev made this question powerfully concrete. He did not weigh the pros and cons of such a course of action, as an investor — or a philosopher, for that matter — might do. And he did not concoct the most outrageous or engagement-farming opinion on such a matter, as a contemporary influencer might do. Instead, he showed us in heartrending detail the unhappiness of Bazarov’s attempt at love, the sorrow of Bazarov’s parents, and the stoicism of Bazarov in facing death.

For Trilling, this method was especially important, because the world he lived in was chock-full of abstract ideas — ideologies — that had yet to be tested out. “The life in ideology,” Trilling wrote, “from which none of us can wholly escape, is a strange submerged life of habit and semi-habit in which to ideas we attach strong passions, but no very clear awareness of the concrete reality of their consequences.”

This is a thousand times more true in 2025 than it was in 1948. We are all in constant thrall to ideology. As social-media users, we are swayed this way and that by the violent attachments of the crowd, even if the crowd’s belief du jour on Tuesday contradicts its belief on Monday. To be ambivalent is a forgotten technique.

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Unfortunately, we’re losing this skill just when we need it most. The speed with which technological change is renovating the world increases exponentially each day. Artificial intelligence threatens to completely upend our notions of work and labour. Strange political ideas like protectionism and monarchy are renaissant. Modern science grants us God-like powers: to select which embryos we wish to bring into the world, which ancient species we wish to revive from extinction, and which tasks we would like to delegate to robots.

This all is the rightful domain of the novelist. Yet too many of our contemporary novelists shy away from the world’s most explosive topics, or else treat novels as mere extensions of their social-media feeds, where it is always obvious who is the bad guy and who the good. Or else we find novels depressingly insular — concerned only with the smallest social milieus or tawdry domestic affairs. 

During the era of American prosperity in which “the end of history” was in the air, this may have sufficed. But today, the novel must return to concretising the most gripping ideological issues of the age, just as Turgenev and the great Russian novelists of the 19th century did. This is a potentially dangerous task. Turgenev himself was all but driven from his native land because of the furore that Fathers and Sons stirred up. And there are probably even more third-rail subjects for the American or British writer in 2025 than there were for the Russian in 1862.

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I felt an obligation when I was writing my first novel not only to understand but to empathise with my most violently provocative character. I hope I find some readers who love him, and some who loathe him. But most important, I hope I find some readers who prefer to engage with ideas through the reading of novels, rather than online mudslinging. No, literary fiction cannot directly change the world — or it can only rare. But I do believe that whatever new society we build out of the wreckage of the 20th century will require the mental capacities of those who can feel comfortable sitting with their own ambivalence. That is to say, sitting with a good novel.

As for the shrill polemical novels, kitchen-sink realism, and insular auto-fiction under which today’s bookstore shelves groan, I’ll simply repeat a remark of Bazarov at the moment it becomes clear his friendship with Arkady has ended: “Dear lad, it is no misfortune. At all times is something in the world finding out that it has no use for something else.”

One of the forms this seems to be taking, at least for some, is a turn toward God. According to a new study a “Quiet Revival” is afoot in British Christianity, with young people leading the way: reportedly, the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds who attend church at least monthly has risen from 4% in 2018 to 16% in 2024: a startling increase. And yet it may also be true that England’s Christian heritage is as moribund as ever — at least in an institutional sense. For this reported church attendance is mainly growing in Roman Catholic and Pentecostal congregations, while the established, national Church of England continues to languish.

This isn’t the first indicator that some kind of religious backswing is underway among the young. A poll in January, for example, revealed that Gen Zs are half as likely as their parents to identify as atheists. The trend reaches beyond England as well, with the French journalist Solène Tadié recently pointing to a revival of traditional Catholicism in Europe, again especially among the young. Last year, too, Rod Dreher documented a similar pattern of Christian revival across the West, especially among young people, setting this in the wider context of a general, youthful turn toward spirituality.

Dreher argues that the governing feature of those churches that are thriving is their orientation toward the numinous, whether expressed through adherence to ancient high-church liturgy, or through intense, charismatic spiritual communion. But why would this be happening at all? Why especially young people, and why the mystical edge? I wonder if this trend is less about a spiritual awakening among Gen Z, and more about how sharply this contrasts with the generation that raised them: so-called “Gen X”, born roughly 1965 to 1980.

I belong, just about, to this demographic. It’s an open question for me whether Gen X exists at all or just comprises those Boomers born too late to enjoy the fun phase of smashing history, heritage, and the future. Either way, by the time I reached adolescence in the early Nineties, there didn’t seem much left to believe in; and yet, growing up in an unusually peaceful and prosperous era, we combined this sense of post-cultural anomie with far too much time to think.

The result was a pervasive sense of nihilism as a kind of moral duty, and profound unshakeable truth. It’s difficult to convey in these virulently ideological times, but back in the Nineties Nirvana’s anthem to existential boredom felt fiercely real in its raw but morally empty energy: “Here we are now, entertain us.” The same restless, angry alienation energizes the work of writer Irvine Welsh, whose Trainspotting (1993) was for a while the definitive edgy zeitgeist text for younger Gen X: so much so, in fact, that Trainspotting’s opening monologue made its way onto t-shirts, posters, and other merch, all spitting in the face of what it meant to “Choose life”.

For Welsh’s heroin-addicted anti-hero Renton, “life” is empty of meaning and purpose. It’s mere mechanical, dull consumerist tedium grinding toward a loveless, pointless, neglected end: “Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.”

Renton declares: “I chose not to choose life.” And the 1996 movie adaptation, starring Ewan McGregor, enthroned Renton as one of Britpop’s most iconically perverse heart-throbs: as enthrallingly self-destructive a cultural icon as Kurt Cobain.

But what happens, then, when nihilists have kids? Raising kids requires innumerable choices, all of which tacitly concede a vision of the good. How does this square with a cultural outlook that denies any such thing? Describing his own predicament as a Gen X parent, the novelist Ewan Morrison — a friend and contemporary of Irvine Welsh — captured this paradox in a recent talk when he recalled seeing a young woman in the Nineties wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the Sex Pistols’ slogan “No Future”, over a visibly pregnant belly.

What does it mean to disavow futurity even as you’re gestating it? And how do you go about raising the resulting kids? The object of philosophy and religion has classically been eudaimonia: human flourishing. But by the end of the 20th century, pace Étienne Gilson, even those adults who chose not just life but creating new life often struggled to articulate what flourishing should look like.

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In Trainspotting, the only parents are the addicts Lesley and Sick Boy, whose neglected baby dies while they are high on heroin. But the fact that Gen Z has reached adulthood at all suggests that even parents with a fondness for Nietzsche and goth music generally didn’t prove as radically relativist as Lesley and Sick Boy, when it came to pursuing eudaimonia for their own children. Very simply, much of the circle was squared by pragmatists: parents who embraced a vague humanism, or New Atheism, while teaching their kids to say please and thank you and answering questions about Christmas and Easter with a shrug.

And yet at a deeper level the ambivalence remains, between the need to model the good for your kids and the relativist’s aversion to any such definitive moral stance. In turn, this produced a distinctive approach to child-rearing that the philosopher Agnes Callard characterises as “acceptance parenting”. Acceptance parents, Callard argues, disavow any obligation to provide a substantive account of the good for their kids. Instead, children are left to determine what “happiness” means for themselves.

As the children of Gen X reach adulthood, we can thus ask: what kind of adults does such an upbringing produce? In What Are Children For?, published last year, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer some indication of how it feels to grow up under “acceptance parenting”. Wiseman recounts quizzing her own mother about whether there was anything at all she could choose to do that would disappoint her mother. Her mother demurred. Wiseman found this less supportive than incomprehensible: “Her purported indifference was sweet, but also baffling.”

It’s not difficult to see how a generation that sang “oh well, whatever, nevermind” and pinned Welsh’s “Choose Life” monologue to their student bedroom walls might baulk at defining eudaimonia for their kids. Who are they, after all, to say what the good life looks like? But this reluctance to impose values, Wiseman gently suggests, can result less in an enabling freedom, than a moral vacuum: “Without a model to reproduce or rebel against, growing up with acceptance parents can feel tractionless, like a wheel spinning in a void.”

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Is it really so strange, then, that a generation raised in this void might, in some cases, turn to religious faith in search of clearer guidance? When the world’s faith traditions offer cumulative millennia of writing and practice on how to live well, it stands to reason that some young people would opt not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to fill the void.

And this, in turn, sheds light on why such an exploration might take literally any form other than the mainstream Anglican Church: in its conventional form, Anglicanism functions as a continuation of “acceptance parenting” by religious means. There are, of course, a great many deeply devout Anglicans; but by virtue of its historic role, the Church of England walks a precarious institutional tightrope between politics and faith, political and spiritual England. And this invites a public image less as a spiritual body, than as the representative of whatever remains of British institutional Christianity that hasn’t been subsumed by the welfare state and mainstream secular liberalism.

In fulfilling its duty as far as possible to offer spiritual welcome to the whole national community, our established Church risks appearing to stand for nothing much, or at best to embody the Christian equivalent of the moral vacuum Wiseman describes. Against this, young people weary of the effort to define their own values and happiness ex nihilo, and eager for guidance from somewhere — anywhere — might be forgiven for concluding that such direction is not to be found in a church whose leaders shrug at turning over their sacred buildings to silent discos or helter-skelters. Confronted by what looks overwhelmingly like a mass abdication of moral authority by parents and religious institutions, then, perhaps the last form of youthful revolt available is against nothingness itself: a rejection of relativism, and embrace of doctrine and mystery.

We can perhaps draw a few inferences from this. Firstly, taken at the broadest level, this presages an increasingly faith-inflected world as this generation matures — not just within the Christian Church but also across the fast-growing “spiritual but not religious” cohort. Secondly, as regards Christianity in particular, it suggests that predictions of the coming end of established, institutional Christianity in Britain, at least in the form it’s taken for the last century or two, may well turn out to be accurate. But this doesn’t mean that Christianity is dying out in Britain.

If anything, what’s on the wane now is nihilism, physicalism, and the reductive “nothing-butness” characteristic of the “Nevermind” era. By contrast, Christianity appears to be growing stranger, more countercultural, and more resistant to corralling in mainstream political institutions. This is a faith whose God rose from the dead; a generation of relativists will not finish it off.

Explanations for this escalation in violence are framed in two distinct ways. The first sees it as a question of individual responsibility and free will. The perpetrator must assume sole culpability. If there are other factors at play, they are thought to be immediate ones: from bad parenting to the grooming cultures of gangs. There is no doubt some truth to this, especially the way gang culture promotes and glorifies violence, which is also inseparable from that of the drug economy. But most would also agree that when it comes to youth violence, given the age of the assailants, the account needs to factor in a wider question of blame. After all, can a child be held fully responsible for their actions?

The second approach focuses on those broader social conditions, or what sociologists would identify as embedded “structural factors”, which include various measures for deprivation. In this reading, insight is less concerned with dangerous individuals than with society more generally. This is the approach associated with Henry Giroux, whose focus on what he terms “the war on youth” addresses adolescent rage within a framework that considers social neglect and criminalisation. If we choose to emphasise not agency but social ecologies, if there is blood on our streets, it’s not just the perpetrators that should concern us.

To have a full sense of the problem, though, we must also factor in the conditions of austerity and the major cuts to youth services which once provided children with educated alternatives to gang lives. There is a clear correlation between cuts in funding after 2008 and the exponential rise in knife violence. Before the pandemic, an official Parliamentary report specifically highlighted the link. And since this hollowing-out of civil society began, there have been clear warning signs that something was being neglected, and was allowing violence to brew.

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Particularly instructive were the inner-city riots of 2011. Driven largely by youths in cities across the UK, these mindlessly destructive events demonstrated what the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall pointed to as revealing of nihilistic tendencies born of a real sense of alienation and a dispossessed future. The eminent sociological theorist Zygmunt Bauman concurred, referring to them as protests without aim, a causeless revolt for a post-political generation who no longer believe their future can collectively be steered in a different direction. As Hall wrote:

“Some kids at the bottom of the ladder are deeply alienated, they’ve taken the message of Thatcherism and Blairism and the coalition: what you have to do is hustle. Because nobody’s going to help you. And they’ve got no organised political voice, no organised black voice and no sympathetic voice on the left. That kind of anger, coupled with no political expression, leads to riots. It always has.”

Since then, some would claim that social alienation has found more genteel avenues to march along: there has been an exponential rise in youth protest, from concerns with ecology to the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet any close study reveals how the impetus and main participation of such movements remains a largely middle-class preoccupation. And too often, the lauding of this newly awakened generation affirms the wonders of digital activism, which has been a catalyst for a new kind of political community building. But digital technology isn’t solely a progressive catalyst — the same is directly responsible for compounding the violence we are seeing on the streets.

For middle-class youths, the internet allows them to advertise themselves as the new vanguard of digital activism, which from time to time sees them taking to the streets or damaging works of art without any real risk to their personal safety. For children from poor backgrounds, however, what social media exposes them to are glamorous lifestyles that will probably remain beyond all reach, while ensuring the visual records of their impoverished lives will continue to follow them around. Given their conditions of acute poverty, many young people prefer to live virtually, playing violent video games and scheming an escape from their surroundings. And when hit with the rub of the real world, these forces of brutality and social aspiration only merge and warp.

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That the digital revolution has diminished the wellbeing of children is now well-established. The addictive effects of technology and its impact on anxiety, mental health, attention spans, and general ability to navigate the world in a more tolerant and open way points to a generational problem which many would readily accept. And yet for too long we have treated the outlying social issues of our time as immune from this diagnosis.

While children, like the rest of us, have become forced witnesses to spectacles of violence and voyeurs to daily sufferings, they are also mirroring the brutalism and loneliness that fills digital landscapes. We live in an age defined by what I would call “hyper-primitivism”, occupying digital nervous systems of hyper-arousal, where everything is tethered to emotional reactions and responses in an excessively sensitised way. It smothers our genuine respect for others. And instead of bringing humans together, it propagates tribalism and division as creeds of hatred and intolerance. Individualism and rampant disregard becomes the norm. And emotion is liberated from responsibility.

The consequences are all too shocking. Online battles and disagreements that take place in virtual bubbles are finding their way into the material world: slashed bodies on digital screens make their way into the real world as bloodied corpses on our streets. And in a deeply tragic and symbolic way, one item has come to stand out as the symbol for this new reality. The weapon of choice, and perhaps the only kind of leveller on city streets: the zombie knife. Garishly coloured, unrealistically huge, they represent the merging of the artificial and the alienated.

The rise of the zombie genre in the violent virtual world is instructive. Born out of the Sixties concern with consumerist culture and the soul-destroying landscapes of the American shopping mall, it has also become one of the leading products defining the digital age for youth. Yet the zombie also evokes a particularly nihilistic sense of the world, where the only strategy is one of pure survival. As depicted in the “Men Against Fire” episode of Black Mirror, seeing humans as zombies facilitates dehumanisation, which makes the violence easier to afflict. We only need to look at popular games children are playing, from the Resident Evil franchise, The Last of Us, and Dead Island, onto other popular series like Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto, to note the prevalence of slasher killings. The zombie knife brings this utter hopelessness into reality, a weapon for a place where children place no value on the lives of others.

Mindful of this, it’s hard not to see the current problem of youthful killings as a novel kind of nihilism, executed by children who no longer have any belief in the future. We know that the more we weaponise the world, the more we are likely to usher in its obliteration. That same logic should be applied to the streets. The fact that children carry knives is the surest indication that their means of navigating space is by being prepared for a violent ending, and taking another life should that eventuality arise.

So what can be done about this? It’s not enough to say we just need better regulation, and societies shouldn’t expect parents to carry the responsibility. When the young die, we only see the body lying in the street or on the hospital bed. But there are other forces putting them there. Knives have become more than a weapon. They cut open the illusions of a digital world.

Faced with this situation, it’s time that our society started taking seriously the desire for such violence. Hyper-primitivism is all about desire, creating emotional states on virtual spaces, which then leave us feeling helpless once we enter back into the real world. For young people who spend most of their lives feeling powerless, violence is attractive because it has real-world effects. Violence fills the void.

If you linger long enough in Berghain’s Panorama bar, if you remain until Monday morning when the sun is back up, occasionally they’ll open the blinds and flood the room with light. Maybe you’ve been in there dancing for 15 hours. And then you, and all the other people who didn’t get bounced, the elect, are bathed in this infinite glowing band of gold. On tour, Luke, the bass engineer, mentioned he had watched a George Michael documentary that said he had lived above a nightclub in Berlin. They could surely only mean one place. George would never have shacked up above KitKat; far too classy for that. We decided it had to be Berghain.

I pictured George in the club for the first time in the late aughts, the hits all dried up, thinking: “Fuck it, I’m George Michael, I’ve done my bit, once or twice a month isn’t enough for me, not even close… that infinite band of gold, that eternal present, I’m moving there.” He knew, too, he was just one chorus away from a purple patch. And that niggling voice in his head kept reminding him. That chorus. She must be somewhere in Berghain, she must be somewhere in that light, that purity, that abandon.

George understood all too well that only contradiction breeds spiritual depth. That, in order to join in, you have to drop out completely. I picture him in his private Panorama. A mild throb of bass warming his feet through the floor. The Berlin skyline coated in early morning rust through giant panes of glass. The world’s best MDMA coursing through his blood. Two glazed Teutons gazing up at him in awe from a bedroom-sized bed, disbelieving of their luck. Just one more chorus. Just one more hook. But even here, with experience stretched to its absolute limit, she doesn’t rear her head.

Once the tour was over, I made my way down to the Greek Island of Ios, for my first ever beach holiday. In the past, I would “travel” rather than “holiday”. There would always be some pyramid of human skulls or red-light city or psytrance opium vortex I wanted to visit. Relaxation was a part of it, but some kind of sensual frontier was usually the goal. And this image of George was slowly inflating behind my eyes the entire time. Could it be true? Moved in? Above the world’s most decadent nightclub?

More from this author

Punk's spirit is broken

By Lias Saoudi

Now that I’m a bit tired generally, sitting on my arse for weeks on end with a book really appeals. Someone bringing me iced coffees during the day; Piña Coladas in the evening. All the same, I’m too laden with guilt to fully switch off. I decided a beach holiday would be a fitting time to write a paean to perhaps my favourite philosopher-poet, Romania’s arch-pessimist E.M. Cioran. It’s hard to write about E.M., which is how I imagine he wanted it. Not because the language is complex or impenetrable. There just doesn’t seem to be much to add in the way of commentary where his denunciations of absolutely everything are concerned. The fact he throws himself under the bus first and foremost, not unlike Eminem’s character at the end of 8 Mile, means he’s open to slandering the universe without restraint. His syntactic depth charges are contained microcosms of resentment. Bitterness on a cosmic scale. 

When I heard this thing about George, I thought OK. What about George as Cioranic mascot? I think both E.M. and George would have appreciated that. For Cioran, “absolute lyricism” constituted a “juxtaposition of act and reality, because the act is no longer a manifestation of reality but reality itself”. Had George actually become one of his gut-wrenching refrains? I took to abusing the pair of them down there on that Aegean shore. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born, A Short History of Decay, The Temptation to Exist… spliced with an endless rotation of “Careless Whisper”, “I Want Your Sex”, “One More Try”, “Jesus to a Child” and “Fastlove”. I used to think the only thing scarier than death was suicide — until I started reading E.M. Cioran. I now think of this off-switch as rather empowering.

For E.M., it is those with no access to irresponsibility who are the world’s truly wretched. And only hermitude and naivete can stave off idiocy. E.M.’s mind is constantly check-mating itself, George Michael’s soul does the same. Both in a perpetual state of collapse under the weight of their own ingenuity. Both have a tendency to begin with conclusions. You could start or end a career with “Careless Whisper”. You could do the same with Cioran’s emo-centric first, The Heights of Despair.

But whereas George elevates not knowing to an endless sigh of ecstatic longing, Cioran elevates it to a supreme comic pitch. The blackest laughter you’ve ever heard: “There’s no point in committing suicide, because you always do it too late.” I try to imagine him reading that one out loud to himself in his autumn years, how E.M. would have vocalised the italic shift. The thought of it warms my heart.

Point your disillusionment in whichever direction you like, and there’s a Cioran aphorism out there waiting for you, to help you refine your disdain. It’s nihilistic tapas. You only want, you only need to read Cioran in small portions. It’s perfectly in tune with today’s shrivelling attention spans. There’s often an “Eastern” inflection. He always does the decent thing, though, and pulls back at the last moment: “Buddhism calls anger ‘corruption of the mind’… I know this, but what good does it do me to know?” He reminds us that the Western psyche is incompatible with circularity. Freedom implies comfort in exploiting one’s own vacuity. Wisdom constitutes only exquisite insipidity. I began wondering if George had ever been introduced to Ciroan’s work. George who, by the end it seems, could no longer put his confusion and worry to work at converting emptiness into mystery.

I toyed with the idea of E.M. as a plausible, missed shot at salvation for the Singing Greek. When I find myself irretrievably depressed, metaphysically alienated, celebrating and denouncing myself in the same breath, there is only one man who can help me through the fog. I’ve developed a kind of Cioran dependency in recent years. I have to make sure I’ve got at least one of his books to hand at all times. He’s like a wellness guru, or an unwellness guru. There should be people pamphleteering extracts from The Trouble with Being Born on Golden Gate Bridge, a Cioranic helpline phone-box installed at Beachy Head. School kids should have it drilled into them. That the notion our ideas must come to something is at best a source of undying hilarity; everywhere we search for elsewhere, then we go back to being what we were before we were born… nothing. An unnecessary detour.

Suggested reading

Michel Houellebecq is a hopeless romantic

By Jarryd Bartle

What is a philosopher other than a human being who plunders indecision for all it’s worth? What is a pop star? Without some form of near cataclysmic inner contraction, a ruptured personal paradox, how does either break any new ground? George and Emil. If not reading from the same hymn sheet, definitely born of a similar mother. Opening up territory for the rest of us, holding space… turning existential dread into a kind of game, something you can kill the time with, occasionally make a song and dance about. Not taking oneself — or anything for that matter — seriously, a matter of the utmost seriousness.

I had to get to the bottom of it. This thing about the nightclub. My life had grown George-coloured since the revelation. I heard his voice everywhere. I’d allowed him to colonise even my most intimate thoughts. Whether I was reading Cioran, making love or masticating Gyros, he was there. Cue a re-run of every single George Michael documentary available to a man at the beach house. No mention of it anywhere. Not a whiff. Nada. I called Luke from Decius, who’d birthed this phantasm in the first place. He swore by it. Promised he’d re-watch them all himself. Days later he replied. You’re right. It’s not there. Weird. Very weird. Where the fuck did that come from then?

The American regime has become a tawdry theatrocracy in which political actors, hypokritai in Greek, play stock characters in a loathsome farce. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, Donald Trump stars as the persecuted saviour, and Joe Biden the righteous defender, of the American republic. Never mind that Trump is self-absorbed and impulsive to the point of criminal stupidity, that Biden is senile and evidently corrupt, and that both of these braying, boorish old men are fraudsters and fabulists. These vices do not matter to their furious followers, who love their man precisely because he is not the hated other. Trump and Biden cannot, and will not, be separated; each needs his opponent as the hammer needs the nail. And above the wretched spectacle sit a click-hungry media, feeding on riot and picking favourites like vulturous pagan gods.

This drama of political decadence defies easy categorisation. Aristotle wrote that tragedy depicts people who are better, and comedy worse, than us spectators. Biden and Trump are certainly worse than those who voted them into office, but they are not remotely funny. Their antics are repellent and their goofiness unlovable. Observing them and the choral leaders that follow in their train — jerky puppets like Rudy Giuliani sweating hair-dye, or Anthony Fauci claiming to be science itself — Americans feel only shame and dread, without the cathartic release of laughter or tears.

These trapped emotions spring from the same source. They are visceral responses to the approaching death by senescence of the American experiment in ordered liberty. The problem goes well beyond presidential dementia. The US Senate (from the Latin senex, “old”) looks more like the waiting room of a geriatric neurologist than a council of wise elders. There’s Mitch McConnell, prone to falls and freeze-ups; wheelchair-bound and confused Dianne Feinstein; and John Fetterman, who at only 53 is less fit for public service than any other member of that formerly august body. It’s as if C-SPAN, a network that televises congressional hearings, decided instead to air absurdist, post-apocalyptic horror films.

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Ideology has poisoned the West

By Jacob Howland

The zombification of the Capitol — not to mention our city streets, which have become permanent encampments of the dazed and disturbed — is merely a symptom of the underlying disease. Like all institutions, politics falls apart without regular infusions of constructive energy. A modern democracy is healthy only if its major parties grow organically from their voters, representing their interests by habit and inclination even more than conscious effort.

But the grassroots politics Tocqueville admired when he visited the US in the 1830s gave way long ago to the top-down astroturfing of technocratic managerialism. Our governing elites represent no one but themselves and their cronies, and they don’t welcome shocks to the system. Insurgent candidates such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose public elevation of the concerns of many Americans aims to revitalise national politics, are censored and met with active resistance, even by their own parties.

It’s not just in politics that the wellsprings of individual and social vitality have dried up. Americans are marrying less and later, and having too few children, to reproduce themselves and the families that nurtured them. What is more, our public schools have largely ceased to transmit the accumulated knowledge and civilisational wisdom of the past to the children we do have. A taste for historical repudiation has taken hold across the culture, leading curators to “contextualise” art, city governments to take down statues, colleges to rename buildings, and publishers to censor or rewrite books. But creativity withers when it ceases to be nourished by the oxygenated blood of the tradition. Little wonder that Hollywood increasingly cannibalises its legacy by pouring old films into new plastic scripts.

Technology has exacerbated our national enervation. We have become charging-stations for our smartphones, which drain psychic energy with insistent distractions and overloads of information-babble. Video calls and work-from-home limit in-person interactions with actual existing individuals, who would otherwise be together for most of their weekly waking hours. Targeted advertising, fine-tuned algorithms, and politically stratified social media sharply decrease our exposure to new ideas. We are immuring ourselves within our own private caves, watching flickering images in darkness.

AI language-learning models offer a cautionary parable of these larger cultural developments. Programs such as ChatGPT, whose writing remains formulaic and prone to errors, learn by sifting through a sea of digitalised text, a growing share of which consists of AI-generated content. The predictable result of this feedback loop is the kind of levelling we’ve seen across our institutions. Like newspapers that drink their own ink — and which ones don’t, these days? — their product can only get worse.

Cultural exhaustion, social withdrawal, and the general enfeeblement of life forces are the practical expression of a will to nothing. There is a name for this spiritual and intellectual condition, and it is nihilism. Nihilism is demonic to the extent that the will to nothing is still a will, a life force. That it is only a negative one is by no means reassuring, because it is easier and more economical to tear down than to build up. Destruction is dramatic and accomplishes the illusion of vitality with relatively little energy. And who in this apocalyptic time, including the nihilist, doesn’t want to feel even a little alive?

We all know this happens, because we’ve see it in others – even if we’re too young to have experienced even twinges of it ourselves. I was reminded of the process as I watched the further descent into grumpy old-manness of Bret Easton Ellis.

The author of American Psycho has been giving interviews to publicise his first non-fiction book, White. This is a full-throated assault on the culture that Millennials have brought into the world. It’s an account of the world of snowflake censoriousness that makes all discussion of almost anything almost impossible. The world of feelings over facts. The world of ‘cancelling’ people if they have ever emitted the wrong view.

But there’s a problem. While we might recognise Ellis’s descent into curmudgeonliness, it cannot be allowed to pass without censure.

Further reading

The bitter truth about Millennial burnout

By Peter Franklin

Let’s not forget that Ellis did not make his name by writing a succession of polite social comedies. Nobody would have called him the EF Benson of his day. On the contrary, right from one of his earliest novels, The Rules of Attraction, Ellis’s shtick was to give no-holds-barred portrayals of drug-fuelled, empty, hedonist and indeed nihilistic culture, force it between the covers and then shove the results down his readers’ throats.

His commercial success suggests that people loved it. There is, after all, a great market in American literature for a particular form of nihilism, perhaps that form the late Allan Bloom once described as ‘American nihilism’, that is nihilism with a happy ending.

As it happens, Ellis’s career only really hit the stratosphere when he was able to marry precisely this sort of nihilism with a plot. In American Psycho the nihilism was at least propelling the narrative somewhere. The moment someone kills someone, the reader wants to know if that murderer is going to be brought to justice. They want to know if they will kill again. And it is in the nature of violent murder fiction that there is some reward each time for the writer who is willing to take the violence to the next level.

Further reading

It's no crime to come late to Dostoyevsky

By Douglas Murray

In its day and for its time Ellis did that. He dragged the corpses to places beyond where they would normally be. And with it, was an unmistakeable note of something, which if it wasn’t misogynistic, then was certainly something that enjoyed dancing close to that line.

His audience lapped it up. Indeed, the extremity and the pornography of the violence in American Psycho paved the way for depictions of it elsewhere – on television and film. As a result, people’s attitudes towards it were dulled. And each subsequent iteration had to break a new taboo. Thus did a writer enrich himself as he soiled his audience.

But what, precisely, did Ellis think would follow? Did he presume that the next generation would perform variations on his theme: more novels about sex and drugs with a little meaningless violence occasionally thrown into the mix? Did he think they’d find increasingly imaginative ways to pervert his genre?

No wonder he was disappointed with how they turned out, as he mistakenly failed to note that periods of extreme debauchery and free licence are inevitably followed by counter-movements of puritanism.

Further reading

The righteous anger of youth

By Gerard de Groot

Hence Ellis’s general mood as he does the rounds with his book, busily bemoaning a whole slew of things about the Millennial generation. In her superb interview with him in The Times last weekend, Decca Aitkenhead got him to make a number of excellently perceptive comments, in one of which he pointed out that Millennial culture is really an oxymoron.

“What is it?” He asked. “There’s no writing. None of them read books.”

Some will hold such statements to be useless – because they are too sweeping. But there is a kernel of truth, as well as a grandiosity, to his claim. It’s not that Millennials don’t read books, nor that Millennials don’t write them. But it is true that anyone who believes they are right have no especial need of books. Given that books are – to date – perhaps the most reliable transportation device our species has come up, then Millennials with their clear sense of direction will, therefore, have less need of them.

This generation, destined to rebel against libertinism and nihilism, must develop a very clear sense of purpose. It cannot adopt the luxurious and decadent position of going wherever words and ideas take it. Rather it can go on journeys only if those journeys are likely to take it to the places it has already decided to be the correct destinations.

Further reading

Why does everyone have it in for the Puritans?

By Giles Fraser

Which brings me back to puritanism. Millennial culture is nothing if not puritanical. It finds people on tracks that they should not be on and castigates them. Conversely, it identifies the true and correct paths that people should be on and praises them for staying there.

I have an enormous amount of sympathy with Ellis’s criticisms of this new generation, its hypersensitivity and boringness. I can stay for these criticisms, and many more. But along the way, a question has to be asked. What is it the younger generation has rebelled against? And who are the cultural figures who have set the stage for precisely this sort of backlash?

Criticism of the new generation is fine and good – and probably quite necessary. But this does have to start with a degree of self-reflection from that generation who – and this is particularly woeful for those of us who thought of them as enfants terribles – we must now describe as the old.

This celebrated sentence has long been read as Dostoevsky’s prognosis of the terrorism that plagued Russia in the late 19th century. Aiming to achieve an unprecedented freedom, small groups of revolutionaries denied freedom and life itself to their own members.

The same transformation occurred on a vast scale when terror was practised by a revolutionary state. Understood as a critique of communism, the formula Dostoevsky put into his character’s mouth was prophetic. Wherever the communist project has been attempted, the result has been the same: an eclipse of freedom more complete than any that existed in the tyrannies the revolutionaries overthrew.

Yet the ideas that are the true demons in Dostoevsky’s novel are not only those that fuelled late 19th-century terrorism and 20th-century communism. They are found among liberals today, who are ready to dissolve religion, family, nationality and the practice of tolerance in order to bring into the world a kind of freedom that has never before been known. Some on the ‘Right’ believe this freedom will come from unfettered market forces, while others on the ‘Left’ favour using education to deconstruct practices and institutions that have held societies together in the past. Like the Russian revolutionaries, these liberals are possessed by a vision of ever-increasing human freedom that can only end in tyranny. If Dostoevsky was a prophet of 20th-century totalitarianism, he also foresaw how 21st-century liberalism would undermine itself.

It is easy to forget that Dostoevsky began as a liberal himself. When he was arrested in April 1849 as a member of a group of dissident intellectuals he shared the beliefs of the progressive Russian thinkers of his day. Passionately promoting what they perceived as the most advanced European thinking, they rejected religion and any morality that was based on it. Society had to be founded on scientific materialism and governed by an ethic based in science. Several intellectual movements came together in this mishmash of ideas.

Some favoured the roseate visions of French utopian thinkers such as Charles Fourier, who envisioned society reorganised into ‘phalansteries‘, ideal communities where work would become a type of play and the task of rubbish collection assigned to dirt-loving children. (Another side of Fourier’s thought is shown in his proposal that Jews be confined to duties as farm labourers.) Others were more drawn to hard-headed English Utilitarianism or the radical humanism of the German thinker Ludwig Feuerbach, who interpreted the idea of God as an image of the unlimited possibilities of the human species. All believed that human beings must fashion their own values and make a new world.

Suggested reading

Deluded liberals can't keep clinging to a dead idea

By John Gray

By the 1860s, these ideas had come to be called ‘nihilism’, a term made popular in Russia by Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862). Today, nihilism means the denial that human life or history have any meaning. In its mid-19th century meaning, however, nihilism accurately describes our contemporary liberal consensus. Like the progressive Russian intelligentsia to which Dostoevsky initially belonged, early 21st-century liberals believe the human future will be shaped by science and values that are somehow derived from science. Religion and everything connected with it must be rejected an obstacle to progress. A naïve version of this sort of nihilism is presented in the writings of Steven Pinker.

After his arrest and exile, Dostoevsky rejected the liberal ideas of his day forever. Condemned to death – a sentence commuted to hard labour in Siberia after a mock execution by firing squad – he returned to St Petersburg in 1860 a lifelong enemy of the ideas for which he had been exiled. His own ideas – a murky mix of Russian messianism with a rather dubious version of Orthodox Christianity – do not amount to anything much. But his subsequent writings, above all Demons, reveal an astonishingly prescient insight into the liberal mind today.

Published in 1872, the book tells how an ideal in which human beings are freed from any authority or constraint morphs into squalid violence and pervasive repression. Based on an actual incident in which a student who had questioned the leadership of the terrorist Sergei Nechaev (1847-1882) – who argued that any means were justified if they contributed to a progressive transformation in society – was murdered with Nechaev’s complicity, the novel provides a pitiless and extremely funny account of the self-immolation of liberalism.

Demons has often been attacked as being didactic in tone – a criticism that misses the dark humour that runs throughout the novel. But it is true that Dostoevsky aimed to teach a lesson. Revolutionary radicalism in politics has its ultimate source in atheism. Dostoevsky conveys this lesson through the character of Kirillov, an engineer and member of the radical group, who contends that if you do not believe in God you must become God yourself:

“To recognise that there is no God, and not to recognise that at the same time you have become God, is an absurdity… I have found it: the attribute of my divinity is – Self-will”

Kirillov believes that in order to demonstrate his divinity he must kill himself. By doing so, he would prove that human beings are not ruled by mechanical laws but possess a god-like freedom to do as they will. The core of his atheism is the assertion that without God human beings are free do whatever they chose. Exercising his freedom as a “god-man”, Kirillov shoots himself.

Kirillov is possessed by the idea, which Dostoevsky explored in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Brothers Karamazov (1879), that if there is no God everything is permitted. Generations of secular thinkers have attacked this as nonsense, and it is true that ethical life can be understood in strictly naturalistic terms. Morality is as much a part of what it means to be human as language. But in a naturalistic perspective, a liberal way of life is only one of many the human animal has invented. The belief that only one morality is ordained for all is a relic of monotheism, and Dostoevsky presents a compelling account of how an idea of unlimited freedom derived from Christianity became the inner logic of liberal humanism.

Among Russian nihilists, atheism meant the replacement of God by “humanity” – a universal subject that shapes its own future by deploying the power acquired by growing scientific knowledge. In this version, atheism is a project of collective human self-deification. Though they are careful to avoid such language, today’s liberal humanists pursue the same project. Claiming for the human species the freedom that Christianity attributes to God, they believe humankind can fashion a good life for all of its members.

According to Dostoevsky, however, the end-point of this kind of atheism is each human being acting just as they please. Nechaev justified terror on the ground that it is necessary in order to create an earthly paradise. But if human beings can adopt any means to achieve this end, why can’t they also chose their own ends? Why should anyone serve “humanity” – an entity as elusive as the Deity – or concern themselves with something as nebulous universal freedom? If any means is allowable, so too is any end. The attempt to create a new world collapses into Kirillov’s self-will. It is not surprising that Nietzsche recognised in Dostoevsky one of his predecessors.

Suggested reading

There's more to atheism than the dim-witted Dawkins brigade

By Giles Fraser

Historically, liberal humanism is a footnote to theism. John Locke grounded human rights in duties to God, while Kant argued for the immortality of the soul as a necessary basis for human freedom. Here again, generations of secular thinkers have insisted that liberal values do not depend on religion. Yet liberal humanists continue to rely on the belief that human beings are by nature freedom-loving – a view that is certainly not based on empirical observation. Liberals might respond by asserting that human nature is not fixed – it can be transformed by political action. But if human beings are free to alter their nature, what is there to say they will remake themselves as free beings? They may prefer the tranquillized peace of a society like that imagined in Huxley’s Brave New World. Or decide that the freedoms of the past are relics of oppression, which must be swept away for the sake of social justice.

The liberal mind at present divides into two schools. One is composed of people who call themselves classical liberals, unwitting disciples of the Russian nihilists that believe human progress is ensured by the continuing advance of science. The other comprises postmodern liberals, who view science as little more than congealed ideology. The two are very much at odds, and yet both are possessed by an idea of unfettered freedom.

Suggested reading

Liberal individualism is killing the planet

By James Bloodworth

If classical liberals believe human beings can use the laws of nature formulated in science to make a new world, postmodern liberals believe scientific laws – including those that apply to human nature, a concept they reject – are no more than cultural constructs. The upshot is the same. Humankind can shape its own future unconstrained by any external force or authority. But if freedom is unlimited it is also empty. Whatever latter-day nihilists may say, science cannot supply human values. There is nothing in the laws of physics that prohibits the Holocaust. Equally, deconstructing science cannot validate whatever values are currently regarded as progressive. If science is ideology and human nature a fiction, anything goes. The alt-Right is as much a product of postmodernism as the alt-Left. Either way, the practices of tolerance and free expression that used to underpin liberal values are consumed in culture-wars between rival mobs.

Among western traditions, there are some that limit human freedom without invoking theism. Ancient Greek drama and Shakespeare show human beings are trapped by their own deeds and characters whatever they may will. A sceptic like Montaigne used reason to humble the human mind, not exalt it. The implication of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is that freedom is situated in particular forms of life. When all the ways of life humans have fashioned for themselves are rejected as exercises in repression, nothing remains but the assertion of will or feeling. That is pretty much where we are now.

If liberalism were a scientific hypothesis, it would have been falsified many times over. But for its disciples, it is far from being a mere hypothesis. As the ex-liberal Dostoevsky understood, liberalism is nothing if not a religion. In the past, this may have been a strength. Today it is a weakness, and possibly fatal. Shigalyov was right. Trashing old freedoms in order to bring about a new state of unbounded freedom can only lead to despotism. Liberals cannot stem the on-going retreat of liberal values because it is they that are driving it.

Suggested reading

How the liberal West is dismantling itself

By John Gray