Going back to acting would be Meghan’s latest self-reinvention, but then self-reinvention is what actors do all the time. It’s also a distinctively American practice, which like many things in the States has its origins in Puritanism. The greatest self-reinvention of all is the crisis of spiritual conversion, after which you aren’t the same person as you were before. You turn from a sinful world to a regenerated one, and there seems no reason why this remaking shouldn’t become a perpetual way of life. When it does, it’s commonly known as postmodernism. The self is plastic, protean stuff, clay in your hands to be molded this way or that depending on how you happen to be feeling. Does Madonna even remember being part of the English squirearchy in a previous incarnation, riding her horse in the Cotswolds? The only force which binds together your various identities is the will to succeed. If that means making jam or dressing up in a giraffe costume, so be it.

In the 19th century, the world was seen as in constant flux, but there was a stable point in the midst of this mutability: the self. It was a kind of substance, rather like the body but invisible. In our own time, flux has invaded the inner sanctum of the self and scooped it out. As Oscar Wilde remarked, truth is one’s present mood. This is all very different from the traditional bourgeois idea of selfhood. One of the great revolutionary breakthroughs of the European middle classes was the notion of self-determination. You were no longer instructed what to think and do by feudalist, monarchical, autocratic regimes. Instead, you decided for yourself. You wrote your own history, rather than playing a humble role in a pre-scripted narrative. The creed of liberalism was born. It was advances of this kind which caused Marx to admire the middle classes so much, a fact of which most of them seem nowadays to be oblivious. To be free meant not just to be unshackled, but to construct your own destiny without the interference of others. What was important wasn’t simply what you did, but the fact that you did it. To that extent, it was an adolescent kind of ethics. Yet it had world-shaking political implications, not least when the idea of self-determination was applied to nations as well as individuals. The result of that was the unleashing of one of the most transformative political forces the modern world has witnessed: revolutionary nationalism.

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There’s a difference, however, between self-determination and self-invention. To shape your own identity suggested that you had such a thing already. The problem was that someone else — the state, the church, the nobility — was forbidding you to be your own master. It wasn’t a matter of plucking your selfhood from thin air, but of being allowed to realize a self which was in some sense already given. Self-invention, however, is a different affair, because now the self becomes nothing more than the story of its endless refashioning, like the life-history of David Bowie. If who you are is somehow given, then this restricts what you might do, and is thus an obstacle to complete freedom. For total freedom, you need to abandon all ideas of a set identity and simply make yourself up as you go along. The result of this, however, is a freedom which is purely empty. It’s what you get when you push laissez-faire to an absolute limit.

Negative freedom of this kind wants to cut itself loose from all external determinants. Like God, it is purely self-creating. Aggressively independent of Nature, history, heredity and environment, it relies on nothing outside itself in order to be itself. This isn’t true of a lily or a can of beans. Nor is it true of an animal like a badger or a zebra, which is completely shaped by the species to which it belongs. And despite the liberals, it isn’t true of human beings either. Freedom doesn’t mean being unconditioned. It means being conditioned in a way which allows you to transform what conditions you. Take language, for example. Language molds our consciousness to its roots, but we’re not just passive effects of it. On the contrary, to be brought up in a language is to learn how to use it creatively, producing utterances we have never heard or spoken before. We start off with the alphabet and end up writing Paradise Lost. To some extent, then, we can determine whatever it is that determines us. And this is what we call freedom. It isn’t true on any significant scale for badgers or zebras. Badgers and zebras don’t have any history of their own (though they may occasionally play a role in ours) because they aren’t built to be able to reconfigure what makes them what they are. They can only be what they are, so that their life is safer than ours but probably more tedious too.

The contrast with humanity is clear. “I can be anything I want!” is one of the most mindless of postmodern mantras, not least in the United States. The problem with this vision, as the Romantics discovered a long time beforehand, is that any actual achievement or identity is automatically diminished. To act is to limit a self which is pure, infinite possibility. For this reason, true freedom would be not to act at all, and so would be purely negative. What Meghan discovered to her dismay was that even the role of princess was imprisoning — that what looked like liberty was more like a privileged form of incarceration. In a notable paradox, those at the very top of the tree, and thus (one might have thought) most free of restriction, may turn out to be the most rigorously scripted of all.

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By Simon Critchley

As an actor, Meghan was able to choose her parts and could always shift from one to the other. She also got to choose her role as Duchess of Sussex. The Duke of Sussex, however, had no such privilege, as he has made a point of complaining. Like most of us, large chunks of his narrative were written for him by others. Few of us are self-authoring, given that being around the place involves having parents, and having parents involves being part of a whole world without ever having been consulted on the matter. But Harry is less self-authoring than most of us and now wants to claim control over his own story.

This idea of life-as-story is a particularly fashionable notion at present. Not everyone thinks of their life as a narrative. You could see it instead as a cycle or a montage or a mosaic, not to speak of a heap of fragments. “Narrative” suggests a certain shapeliness, whereas some of us regard our lives, rather as Henry James saw the realist novel, as “loose baggy monsters”. A human life doesn’t always have the clarity and coherence of a parable. “What’s your journey?” suggests that you feel yourself to be en route to a destination, but we don’t all live with some grand goal in sight. There isn’t that much continuity in every human existence. The philosopher Galen Strawson thinks it not only true but transparently obvious that who he is now isn’t who he was at the age of 10. Besides, everyone’s narrative includes a lot of other characters who usually turn out to be hard to control, as well as spawning a whole series of sub-plots which refuse to slot neatly together. The view that everything in the world conspires with everything else to form a luminously intelligible whole is known as paranoia.

Having been scripted by others, though, Harry is now eager to script himself — or, as he would say, own or take control of his life-story. It’s revealing, however, that he thinks of his life as some kind of property, to which his relation is one of proprietorship. You don’t own your life any more than you own your body. You can’t leave it in a pub by mistake, or swap it for someone else’s. Harry and Meghan think in acquisitive terms even when it comes to their very existence. Your life is a commodity to be invested on the most profitable of terms.

Which is to say, in the current barbarous jargon, that you’re a brand, just as your hair-style or apple chutney is. And that’s where the problems begin. Because a brand is precisely something you can’t exert complete control over. It’s a relational matter, in the sense that whether it takes off depends on the public. In striking out for freedom and autonomy, then, you find yourself the puppet of forces which are entirely anonymous, just as a toothpaste manufacturer does. You can try to fend off that anonymity by writing “Love”, “Meghan” or “As ever” on your products, as though you have a fierce personal affection for every potential customer, but that won’t fool anyone. The fickleness of consumers forces you into yet more desperate or ingenious self-reinvention in order to stay in business. In an age of self-determination, you find yourself adrift in a market in which nobody can be entirely self-determining. Postmodernism marks the point at which the logic of the marketplace begins to infiltrate the ways we think and feel.

In any case, no one can shape the course of their life in isolation from others. To form one’s history collectively is known as democracy. For two people to shape their selves in and through each other is known as love. Let’s hope Harry and Meghan keep on doing that. There may not be much more left.

Just because some things are historical constants, however, doesn’t mean their essential characteristics remain unchanged. These shift in tandem with broader material and ideological transformations. It’s remarkable, for example, that Cole Tomas Allen, Trump’s latest would-be killer, is a member of the professional class pursuing an essentially moralistic (and cranky, Epstein-tinged) vendetta, untethered from any larger project of mass social change. 

Allen, in other words, embodies the collapse of grand narratives that the French postmodern theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard identified as the defining aspect of the postmodern condition (in a 1979 book of that title). Allen would kill not in order to open a new political horizon — but to purify himself from political contamination: “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” as his manifesto put it.

“Postmodernism” is a relic from earlier rounds of the culture war. On the Right, the term was only barely understood, with many conservative critics mistaking Left theorists’ diagnosis of the condition for an endorsement. “Everything I don’t like is postmodern” was a feature of much conservative (and liberal) discourse in the 1980s and ’90s. Among Left academe, meanwhile, the term soon faded, as other progressive concerns occupied the foreground.

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Yet if the postmodernism debates were often inane, Lyotard and his heirs described a real shift of immense significance: namely, the incredulous reaction that, beginning in the latter third of the 20th century, greeted universal accounts of the human condition that once explained and inspired social change. The classic examples include Enlightenment liberalism, scientific Positivism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and, of course, Marxism and dialectical materialism.

Some thinkers cheered the demise of the grand narratives, viewing them as supplying legitimacy to existing power structures and ultimately as untenable. Yet their loss entailed a price. Among the casualties was the sense of optimistic futurity that attended the modernist project. In different ways, the proponents of modernist systems like Marxism displaced man from the central position he’d occupied in classical and medieval cosmology. 

At the same time, the likes of Comte, Freud, and Marx claimed to have discovered new foundations for human freedom. To be a Marxist meant giving history a push toward its inevitable destination: the breaking of the capital relation, based on man’s exploitation by man, and its replacement with an abundant, classless society in which each could develop his individual capacities — what Marx, in the third volume of Capital, called “the true realm of freedom.”  

After modernism, scientific and technological advancement continued apace. But this progress no longer fit into a larger emancipatory frame. If anything, the new communications technologies that would emerge by the 1990s brought about greater fragmentation, as a thousand atavisms and backward, hyper-local causes found new vitality online, and people siloed themselves in boutique communities of shared interest — and identical opinions.

In art, as the late American critic Fredric Jameson contended, modernism’s characteristic concern with time — either in anticipating the future or eulogizing the past — gave way to the spacial “flatness” and deliberate “superficiality” of pastiche. In architecture, utopian monumentality was supplanted by styles that were playful, populist, and attuned to popular culture (one influential text urged designers to learn — rather than run away — from Las Vegas).

And in the realm of political violence, we might add now, the murderous anarchist or socialist revolutionary gave way to, well, the Cole Tomas Allen type: the loner who, acting apart from any mass movement or any vision of broad emancipation, kills or tries to kill in pursuit of an essentially private or hyper-localized account of meaning — exactly the sort of knowledge that Lyotard saw replacing the grand epistemologies of Comte, Freud, Marx, etc.

This isn’t to say that all Allen-type shooters are motivated by nutty convictions or that their actions are bereft of political meaning. Some are like that, most notably John Hinkley, Jr., Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin, who tried to imitate Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle in a desperate bid to woo the film’s child star, Jodi Foster. The same could largely be said for Ryan Routh, Trump’s second would-be assassin, who has more than once been declared “delusional” by the mental-health system (he wanted to defend Ukraine and bring peace to Gaza and discussed Hitler in his opening statement at his trial on several serious charges).

By contrast, Allen wrote a fairly cogent manifesto, and it’s clear that he thought he was acting in line with progressive and even Christian duty. But the mere possession of political intuitions, however strongly felt, isn’t the same thing as taking up a political project of the kind that animated the 19th century and most of the 20th. When socialist revolutionaries threw the bombs that killed Tsar Alexander II, they thought they were removing an obstacle to a bright future. Ditto for Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated President McKinley.

What about Allen? What sort of future did he think he was inaugurating in killing Trump and his senior officials? His manifesto doesn’t mention “freedom,” “equality,” “the working class,” “imperialism,” or the like. Such watchwords are only legible within a broader grand-narrative politics, one that would pit workers against bosses, the Global South against the North, the subaltern against the hegemonic, progress against reaction, and so on.

To be clear, I’m not wishing that we had killers who killed for the right reasons. Even in the age of grand narratives, terrorism as a tactic had its critics on the Left, who argued that the lone killer, whatever his motives, only ends up strengthening repressive elements in the state, doing harm to innocents, and worst of all, substituting the romance of individual heroics for collective action and mass mobilization.  

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The point is to merely register the poverty of a post-grand-narrative, postmodern age. And to wonder why it is that Allen-type killers predominate in it. 

One of the supposedly failed grand narratives, Marxism, could offer an answer. It has to do with Allen’s class position (and that of others like him, such as Luigi Mangione, the Marylander accused of killing UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson). Both Allen and Mangione attended prestigious schools — Caltech and Penn, respectively — and belonged to an increasingly stressed and downwardly mobile professional class.

Professionals don’t own the bulk of assets like the bourgeoisie; but nor are they proletarians, barely reproducing themselves with hourly wages. Professionals occupy an in-between position, one that came to mediate between the two dynamic classes — capital and labor — under the New Deal order (and social democracy in Europe). Twentieth-century professionals both oversaw the labor process and attended to its ideological upkeep.

Indeed, the “late capitalism” in the subtitle of Jameson’s book, Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, refers precisely to these kinds of midcentury orders, in which the brute competitive capitalism of the 19th century gave way to something more stable and managed, and managers eclipsed the bourgeoisie in influence. The neoliberal turn — the sharp deregulation of the market system launched in the ’70s — didn’t lessen the importance of the professionals’ functions (mediation, symbolic upkeep, etc.), but merely shifted them to the private sector.

But now the old bourgeoisie is reasserting itself in the likes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Alex Karp. These tycoons are beginning to formulate a new grand narrative, in which they themselves figure as the master subject of history (explicitly so, in the case of defense-tech firm Palantir’s new “manifesto,” which calls on Big Tech to arm the West for a new age of perpetual war).

Arguably, the 2024 election was the story of the so-called Tech Right joining hands with the asset-poor majority to dethrone the professionals and managers who once mediated between them; automation in white-collar sectors tends toward the same result — managers and mediators gone, as rich and poor once more confront each other ever more directly.

In a materialist telling, then, the modernist-period grand narratives were a product of the heroic age of capitalism, characterized by violent class struggle — violent gyrations of the dialectic. This was snuffed out by the more bureaucratic, managed phase that followed (“late capitalism”). But now, there are signs that we are entering a second heroic age, with an aggressive bourgeoisie that is once more generating jejune grand narratives of its own (Alex Karp ain’t no Hegel).

What such a moment demands are new visions of the future and new grand narratives articulated from below, by the asset-less majority, which is beginning to discover that the tech bosses aren’t its friends. The revival of Christianity could help anchor these new narratives in ancient truths. Until then, we are likely to see more and more of the kind of random violence characteristic of stressed professionals — the screams of an increasingly irrelevant class into the void of meaning they helped create.

It’s true that under severe marital pressure I once took to visiting a gym. After a year of grudgingly lifting weights and hanging like an inverted bat from wall bars, the only perceptible difference to my body was a slight increase in the circumference of my calves. So I jacked it in and returned to debauchery and six-course meals heavy in carbohydrates, all of which made me feel a lot more lithe and sprightly. Exercise can be fatal to your health. Having spent a lifetime high on various kinds of dope, Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead was arm-twisted into going to a gym, where he did a few sit-ups and promptly dropped dead.

My churlish attitude to sport is shaped by childhood experience. A sickly, waif-like creature, I was forced to play rugby at school and opted to be a winger, which meant I could race purposefully up and down the touchline avoiding the ball. Over time, I developed the technique of appearing to play rugby but not actually doing so with a virtuosity far superior to those whose heads were stuck in the scrum. At the end of a game, the captain would clap me on the back with a gruff “Well done, Eagleton”, having mistaken taking flight for taking part. Afterwards I would sleep for a day. It’s remarkable how exhausting not playing rugby can be.

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There have been moments, however, when I was proud to be mistaken for an athletic type. I was once in a swimming pool in the United States (I don’t know why, since I can’t swim) when two young boys approached me and asked “Are you a lifeguard, sir?” No doubt they needed a lifeguard present if they were to swim. I conceded rather reluctantly that I wasn’t but returned to my hotel glowing with quiet pride. Being mistaken for a lifeguard seemed second only to being mistaken for Tom Cruise.

So there’s something to be said for sport after all. In fact, it’s hard to think of a brand of popular culture which has such universal appeal as football, yet which combines this mass devotion with such magnificent displays of artistry. According to most theories of 20th-century culture, this isn’t supposed to happen. Instead, culture is sharply polarized between high and low, the former being unintelligible to the latter and the latter being contemptible to the former. Not much manages to slip over this well-policed frontier. There’s Shostakovich on the one hand and the Sun newspaper on the other. Yet football dismantles this opposition. It pulls in millions of ordinary men and women, yet also offers a dazzling display of talent which at times can touch on genius. No other cultural form can equal it in this respect.

It is, in fact, a form of secular religion, vastly more popular than the churches, with its own pantheon of saints, demi-gods, collective rituals, communal ecstasy and time-honored ceremonies. In the United States, the religious fervor surrounding sport borders on the pathological: no political speech is possible without a sprinkling of sporting metaphors. One day when I’ve nothing better to do I might find out what a slam dunk is, since it occurs about as often in American speech as the phrase “proud Americans”. (I know what a slam dunk means, but not what it is.) As for Britain, if you want to bring the place to its knees, ban all football games immediately. The result would be an outbreak of social disruption not far short of revolution. Governments would be toppled, public buildings would be razed to the ground and supporters’ clubs would take over the running of Whitehall.

In reality, football is a cunning way of heading off such turmoil, not of creating it. All ruling classes are aware that it’s not only bread but circuses that keep the common people content. Theater, pageantry and spectacle are crucial ways of keeping governments in power, siphoning off energies which might otherwise prove troublesome. Much of this today is known as television, rather as for the ancient Romans it was called gladiatorial combat; but football offers a great deal more than TV.

For one thing, it allows every plumber and taxi driver in the country to be an expert. People who might have trouble in spelling “fortuitous” can make the subtlest of judgments on whether a player is minimally off-side, or whether someone who’s playing mid-field should be moved upfront. They could also probably tell you when their club last played Everton, and what the score was. In a society for which the past is largely irrelevant unless you can package it as “heritage”, football helps to sustain the idea of tradition. You are heir to a heritage which stretches back far beyond your birth. Not many young Mancunians know who Harold Macmillan or Harold Wilson were, but a lot of them know about Matt Busby and George Best.

Football also allows people an experience of solidarity in a social order sorely lacking in it. It’s true that like many forms of solidarity, this can involve a collective hostility to others. Could there be Celtic without Rangers? But there’s more to it than that. A demonstration is a crowd of men and women united by a common goal — to drive out immigrants, for example, or protest against a war. A football crowd, like an audience at the London Philharmonic, is united simply by a shared love of what they’re witnessing, and that affection is intensified by the knowledge that thousands of others are feeling it too. It’s true that a lot of players are grotesquely overpaid, but many of them would probably want to do what they do even if they weren’t so grossly over-recompensed, which is more than you can say about sausage manufacturers.

Football is a form of collective celebration which includes an appreciation of the individual — of the defensive agility of one player or the strategic sense of another. Besides, football clubs can be the focal point of local identity, in the way that supermarkets or the town hall can’t be. Even those who’ve never been to a game in their lives may well see the club as in some way symbolic of their city. All this, to be sure, has been much diminished by the absorption of the sport into corporate capitalism, a scandal which has politicized many an outraged fan. The obvious solution is that clubs should be owned and controlled by their patrons, not by avaricious overseas businessmen who wouldn’t know a free kick from a throw-in.

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When did I last go to a soccer game? Maybe 70 years ago. I haven’t ever played the game myself, since as I began by saying I have principled moral objections to physical exercise. If others want to shorten their lives by chasing a ball, doing 50 press-ups a day or indulging in other potentially suicidal activities, that’s up to them. This isn’t a popular view in a society which makes a fetish of the body. We live in a culture in which you bear your body around with you like a sickeningly fragile piece of china which might shatter at any moment. In a postmodern world in which people insist on being themselves, one treats the body as though it were someone else’s. One thinks of the unctuous Mr Pecksniff of Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, warming his hands at the fire as benevolently as if they belonged to a friend. It’s a self-alienation implicit in the phrase “to put something in your body”, as if it were an icebox or a paper bag. You mustn’t put a vaccine in your body, for example, even if failing to do so may inflict a painful death on others. Having to take an aspirin can trigger a panic attack in some young people. A meal becomes as complex, potentially as lethal an operation as defusing a landmine. Judiciously selected items are occasionally placed in the body with scrupulous care, an activity once known as eating. We become custodians of our bodies, attending to their every whim like those of some imperious aunt or querulously demanding pet.

Postmodern bodies also demand their own sealed-off spaces. It’s a far cry from the libidinal riot of medieval carnival, where it could prove hard to say where one body ended and another began. Some people today say “excuse me” if they come within five yards of you. Smoking is forbidden not only because it can kill you but because smoke violates other people’s space. It constitutes a lethal, almost invisible link between them. It won’t be long before we walk around zipped up in astronaut suits and communicating only by radios built into our helmets. Hygiene is a posh word for not interacting with others. In this context, football reminds us of the other meaning of the word “body”, namely a mass of men and women who assemble together either for some practical purpose or just for collective enjoyment. It’s the people’s theater or concert hall. Which doesn’t mean that I’ll be watching the Champions League any time soon…

There would have been a word or two about the importance of community spirit, along with the recklessly controversial proposition that peace is to be preferred to war. Those who have behaved heroically in the past year would have been commended as an inspiration to us all. There would also have been praise for people who serve those less fortunate than themselves, punctuated by a few irritable comments about “this stinking autocue”. People enduring hardship would have been exhorted to persevere in their misery. Kindness and tolerance would have been elevated over conflict and brutality. There might even have been a mention of homelessness, though not of its social causes, or of antisemitism, but not of the fact that massacring Palestinians in their thousands doesn’t help in laying this monstrosity to rest.

The trouble with speeches by figureheads is that the moment they say anything definite they’re likely to be divisive. To avoid splitting the nation into warring factions, you have to keep your pronouncements as bland and vacuous as possible. The Pope, for example, has just denounced war, which isn’t likely to send many generals into a blind panic. Perhaps the King would do better simply to sit there nodding and smiling for five minutes, with the odd wave of the hand or twitch of his bat-like ears.

Or perhaps the whole concept of the speech should be overhauled so that it becomes a practical report on the nation. Charles might point out that two or three potholes still need filling in in Lower Staughton Street in Derby, and that St. Swithin’s primary school in Abergavenny could do with a few more slates on its roof. There’s still a petty thief on the loose in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, and a Mr Worthing of East Grinstead admirably resisted the temptation to ride his bike through a red light. All of this would be unbelievably boring. But so is the speech at present. And at least it would be saying something.

Why do we need a monarch? To symbolize the unity of the nation, some would argue. But the nation isn’t united, and nor should it be. People who are being ripped off and exploited shouldn’t reconcile themselves with their exploiters simply in the name of their shared nationhood. Teachers and pupils in schools which can’t afford to mend the roof shouldn’t feel solidarity with managers thinking of selling one of their several sports fields to a property developer. The idea of national unity is far too convenient for the minuscule elite who actually rule the country. If the King symbolizes the unity of the nation, then it is a bogus one. Most appeals to unity are attempts to displace attention from divisions rather than tackle them. The royals are a family, so the argument goes, and so is the nation. As a conscientious father, the King loves all his children equally, and is prepared to make a handsome profit out of any of them at all.

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Nations are abstract phenomena, in the sense that nobody has ever clapped eyes on one or taken one for a walk, so it’s arguable that they need some tangible incarnation to persuade people that they exist. (Jesus Christ is supposed to have served this role for God.) And this is what the monarch provides. But so did Hitler. Countries can get along perfectly well without seeing a particular individual as incarnating their very essence. Nobody asks this of the banks or the railways. We continue to shop at Tesco even though there is no Mr Tesco to make us feel that buying a bunch of bananas is more than just a sordidly commercial affair. Tesco don’t fall apart because they have no figurehead to signify their unity. Besides, if there were a King Tesco it would have to be an individual, and the problem with that, as the royal family abundantly shows, is that the defects of the individual are always at risk of undermining the symbolic role he or she performs. King Tesco might turn out to hobnob with pedophiles or sell the possibility of an interview with his partner to a fake journalist for an eye-watering amount of cash.

The best way to avoid this problem is to select individuals for this role who are as boring and low-profile as possible. Kate Middleton fits this bill, as a demure, excessively well-behaved daughter of the Home Counties without an unconventional view in her head, as does her colorless spouse. Downplaying yourself has the advantage of turning yourself into a blank screen on which other people can project their fantasies; but if you press this blankness too far you end up with the likes of the former Prince Andrew, one of whose more minor defects is to look like everyone’s bank manager. The late Queen maintained a reasonable balance between individual personality and symbolic role by intimating that she had quite a bit of the former but was muting it in the name of the latter. She did this, of course, as a form of service to the nation, which these days is the chief rationale for royalty as a whole. It’s a scandalous piece of hypocrisy. As that other scion David Dimbleby lately revealed in his TV series, the Crown pumps an enormous amount of money out of the country, not least in the Duchies, only to present this rip-off as a selfless service. Cutting the odd ribbon is what it gives in return for this barefaced plunder. The King’s swollen retinue of cooks, valets, shirt-buttoners, trouser-zippers, senior sock adjusters, assistant armpit fresheners and so on is all in the service of the common people.

But the royals were always likely to run into headlong collisions with the modern age. One can see this conflict as a shift between two different meanings of the word “cool”. Before Princess Diana arrived on the scene, “cool” in royal circles meant emotionally restrained, as with the kind of public-school off-handedness which remains just an inch or two short of outright insolence. From Diana onwards, however, “cool” came to mean what Robbie Williams would mean by it. Charles is cool in the old-fashioned sense, whereas Harry is cool in the postmodern sense. That culture had begun to penetrate the inner sanctum of traditionalist Britain, and the path was prepared by the likes of Sarah Ferguson, who as a personality has about as much in common with the late Queen as Danny Dyer has with Jeremy Irons. The monarchy needed urgently to modernize, yet modernizing would nearly prove its downfall. All families, however sealed to outsiders, have a chink in their armor known as marriage, through which all sorts of potentially deadly viruses can enter. Had the royals but known it, a particularly lethal strain of infection was on its way across the Atlantic in the form of Meghan Markle.

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Or, to put it another way, sham show business is now up against the formidable resources of the real thing. Real jewels contend with fake ones designed for the big screen. One kind of glamor and mystique is in the process of ousting another. It’s a battle between the values of Holyrood and those of Hollywood, and the latter has a lot more wealth, power and influence than the former. There’s more than the royal family at stake in this confrontation. Britain survived the loss of its Empire with its traditionalist values still pretty much intact. If it had lost Cecil Rhodes, it could still boast of Richard Dimbleby, father of David and suave, unctuous, eminently reasonable voice of the nation.

As for the younger Dimbleby, he’s surely living proof that nepotism isn’t always a form of corruption. No doubt his surname helped him into the BBC, but once established he proved himself at least the equal of his father. Now, though, even settled traditions like the Dimbleby dynasty are under threat from the eternal Now of a consumerist culture — with a series of recent assaults on the BBC just one sign of this onslaught. If it weren’t for his ample girth, Dimbleby would be turning over in his commentator’s box.

There are global forces at work behind this conflict. In a roundabout sense, the Harry and Meghan spectacle is a consequence of Margaret Thatcher. Her reign marked the beginning of the demise of traditional, one-nation Toryism in the face of a deep-rooted capitalist crisis. Yet it’s on this paternalist ideology that the monarchy depends. Throughout Europe, the kind of solid, long-established, cultivated bourgeoisie that Thomas Mann or Marcel Proust would have recognized and applauded has given way to an army of sharks, grifters, financial thugs and high-class swindlers. In royal circles, greed is no longer simply a matter of quietly siphoning off common resources by long-approved procedures but of selling yourself to media corporations. Nothing could symbolize this whole dismal situation more aptly than electing a New York real estate mogul to the most powerful position in the world. There was a time when the political class kept a certain discreet distance from the big capital in the name of which, by and large, it governs. That age is about as unlikely to return as King Arthur.

The split between traditional paternalism and capitalist acquisition runs right down the personality of Prince Harry. A man who remains the very epitome of the service ethic — loyal, honorable, full of military ardor and a passion for the so-called underprivileged — is also the helpless captive of Hollywood. If he’s an enemy of the media, he’s also an exploiter of it. His only alternative to the hidebound conservatism of the Palace is the commodity culture of postmodernity. There’s no middle ground between the stuffed shirts and the stars. Those who, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, are both city financiers and country squires don’t realize that in the long run the former role is scuppering the latter one.

One argument in favor of the monarchy is that it provides a thread of continuity in an otherwise fragmented world. Yet the very concept of continuity has been under fire for several decades now, in contrast to the notion of self-fashioning. Rather than drawing your identity from the past, you make yourself up as you go along. The idea of having only one self is as absurd as having only one handbag. Contemporary culture claims this is just the way identity is. It isn’t going to fall apart because we abolish the monarchy or the House of Lords. It’s in pieces already, and that’s simply how it works. The past is just a great storehouse of styles and images which we can draw on when we need to, but which provides us with no kind of moral guidance. This is a scandalous matter for the political Left, which as Leon Trotsky remarked has always lived in tradition. It’s simply that our traditions are those of the Jacobins, Chartists, Suffragettes and hunger marchers, rather than the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Changing of the Guard.

To many Right-wingers, including Trump himself, the edit was propaganda designed to portray him as a riot-inciting demagogue. To Trump haters, even if it’s not an accurate representation of what he said in that particular speech it’s a fair distillation of Trumpishness, and as such true in spirit. So who is right? It’s not even a debate about the facts, but about what the facts mean.

And this is precisely the larger issue at stake for the BBC, too: not so much whether, or in which direction, the BBC is “biased”, but whether we still have any faith in the possibility of neutral, authoritative arbiters of information as such. And if the answer is “no”, what does the future look like for our supposedly neutral and impartial national broadcaster?

The fallout from the leaked dossier which drew attention to the clip, along with evidence of other editorial bias at the BBC, has triggered the resignation of the Director-General, Tim Davie along with the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Furness. It has even drawn comment from the White House, with Trump threatening legal action against the corporation and his press secretary Karoline Leavitt calling it a “propaganda machine”.

Supporters of the BBC allege that the dossier is in fact a nefarious Right-wing plot to destroy the institution. Conversely, those same Right-wingers might retort that the fact these insinuations are mostly published by The Guardian supports the suspicion that the Beeb may only appear “neutral” to people whose idea of sensible centrism is Polly Toynbee. This aside, I think it’s fair to say there is an unmistakable progressive tilt to the issues listed in the dossier, and the imputation of Left-wing bias is not totally baseless. But the problem goes deeper than bias in one direction. It is structural.

If the BBC is struggling today, it’s because, for a growing number of political issues, there is no “neutral”. All three of the dossier’s flashpoints — Trump, Gaza and gender ideology — have this quality. Trump is an archetypal case, and nowhere more divisively than in how you interpret the events that occurred at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. For one camp, this was a peaceful turnout by patriots in defense of an election they believed stolen; to the other, it was an attempted insurrection. There’s no way both interpretations can be true.

The same goes for the conflict in Gaza, which – depending on your worldview – is either justified retaliation for an unprovoked act of mass terrorism, or genocide thinly legitimized by the actions of freedom fighters. Again, there’s no way both of these things can be true. The trans issue has the same Rorschach quality: either a person’s sex is determined by what they are, or it’s determined by what they say they are. They can’t both be true, and there’s no “both sides” compromise.

This isn’t happening because there’s something uniquely polarizing about contemporary politics. The decisive change is the internet. Avant-garde commentators such as Clay Shirky were predicting back in the 2000s that people could use the internet to do away with institutional gatekeepers, unleashing a new era of popular democracy and cultural dynamism. And this did sort of happen, but not quite in the way the utopians anticipated.

The BBC is (or was) a paradigmatic example of this kind of gatekeeper. It has always been both in the business of representing what’s out there, and also of seeking to shape it. From its foundation, its remit was always patrician: to “inform, educate, and entertain”, including through the provision of (aspirationally) impartial news. Karoline Leavitt was perhaps not wholly off-piste: a pithier term for a state-owned, taxpayer-funded media giant with this improving remit might well be “propaganda machine”, for all that (as for example during the Second World War) this duty has generally been discharged in cooperation with the British people. Especially after the war, the BBC came to occupy a role contiguous with the Church of England: as diffident but still mostly trustworthy repository and delivery-mechanism for such collective morals as post-imperial Britain was able still to agree on.

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Even if the rise of commercial radio and TV dented the BBC’s crown, it still stayed more or less in place — until the internet. Now, though, everything is different. The internet poses an existential threat not just to the BBC as a body, but more fundamentally to the worldview within which having a national broadcaster makes sense at all.

For one thing, internet politics has stripped geography from political debate, which is now divided much more by language than geography. This means Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia, and other Anglophone communities worldwide all inhabit functionally the same public square. How, in this context, should a national broadcaster judge what counts as national news? But more important still, the internet has done as Shirky promised and “disintermediated” journalism. That is: it’s significantly reduced the power of institutional gatekeepers.

The result has been cultural dynamism, after a fashion. But it’s also revealed that the post-structuralists were actually right about “truth” being to some extent an effect of institutional power. That is: when you don’t have a powerful single arbiter of The Narrative, what you end up with may not necessarily be more truth. You might just get a Babel of competing narratives. And like market traders hawking their wares on a busy square, the incentive structures of such an information economy tend to reward the loudest voices and simplest, most vivid offers.

Lest anyone be tempted to comfort themselves with the idea that this is only a problem for “low-information voters”, think again: what the philosopher Dan Williams calls “elite misinformation” is just as rampant, and studies have shown education level to have no effect on how susceptible people are to misinformation. By way of illustration, we need only remember the bizarre assertions that came and went, week by week, during Covid-19, while at every stage the chattering classes enjoined us to “follow the science”.

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Indeed it was Covid-19 that provided the inflection point in this trajectory, for the simple reason that lockdowns forced everyone online. If it feels since then that the world has gone mad, it’s not that social isolation sent us crazy. It’s that the internet ate reality. In the resulting cacophony, everyone now assembles themselves a bespoke version of reality, from a near-infinite supply of media channels, podcasts, influencers, and the like.

And because humans are mimetic — that is, we decide what we want based on what those around us want — these realities have begun to agglomerate in affinity groups. In turn, these clusters have begun to define themselves in opposition to one another, and to mount information-war maneuvers against one another. One notable result of these skirmishes, for example, is the progressive capture of Wikipedia, which was founded as a neutral, crowdsourced online encyclopedia but has become bitterly politicized.

This dissolution of “truth” into tribal trench warfare is now the basic structure of what we used to call “the public conversation”. Huge amounts of money, status, and political influence are already at stake in this new environment; one the BBC, which was designed as a one-to-many vehicle for transmitting respectable establishment consensus, is hopelessly ill-equipped to navigate. For as in each of the flashpoint issues in the Prescott dossier, what’s at stake is often not the facts, so much as what the facts mean. And, for a national broadcaster tasked with impartial reporting, this presents an often impossible dilemma. There’s often no way to report on an issue this bitterly contested without effectively picking a “side”, which is to say an interpretation of those facts, even if only in choosing what to omit. For example (according to Prescott’s dossier) the BBC’s transgender reporting routinely centered trans experience, but omitted the voices of detransitioners.

But what is the BBC to do? The internet replaced one-to-many with many-to-many communication, and institutional gatekeepers with platform plutocrats. Now Auntie is just one voice in an increasingly noisy attention economy, and everyone just dismisses competing interpretations as lies and propaganda. The Panorama furor itself is already grist to the same disorienting mill: former Sky political editor Adam Boulton said of the edited clip that at worst the BBC was guilty of “sharp practice”, and in any case it was justified because the edit was morally accurate even if it was factually misleading. So much so, in fact, that it was “fake news to suggest Donald Trump did not egg on what happened on 6 January”. For his part, Trump’s press secretary has now declared the entire BBC to be “fake news”.

There is, in other words, nowhere to stand that isn’t someone else’s fake news. Pity the poor Beeb: when you can now search up 10 conspiratorial interpretations of every factual report, from every conceivable angle, in the time it takes to boil the kettle, how long is anyone going to go on believing in impartiality as such? You can be sure that any effort to “correct” the perceived existing Left-liberal BBC bias would simply elicit fresh accusations of “fake news” and “bias” from somewhere else. Under the circumstances, I don’t entirely blame the Director General, Tim Davie, for throwing in the towel.

More than one thing can be true simultaneously. It is surely true that many will be delighted by the opportunity these events have afforded, to put the boot into the BBC. It’s surely also true that the institution’s well-documented middle-class staffing skew exposes its employees to the blind spots and groupthink of that social milieu, and that this is often visible in editorial decisions. But it’s also true that comparatively speaking, the BBC is fighting a heroic last stand for neutrality, against perhaps insuperable has arguably already held out longer than any of its commercial counterparts, and indeed such utopian digital enterprises as Wikipedia.

As well as noting its lapses into bias, then, we might also acknowledge how very much worse this already is, almost everywhere else. But this is faint praise. “It’s not as woke as Wikipedia” may not be enough to save the BBC, as an institution, from the sucking void of Choose Your Own Reality. If it isn’t, then flawed and middle-class and sometimes irritatingly sanctimonious as it is, I suspect we will all come to regret its passing.

It all started last Tuesday when a relatively obscure tech entrepreneur, Grant Slatton, uploaded a seemingly ordinary family photo to ChatGPT-4o’s new image generator to “Ghiblify” it. Awash in pastel skies and gentle smiles, the image it spat out was the perfect encapsulation of the studio’s aesthetic.

The post went viral, amassing more than 43 million views in just a couple of days and prompting an eruption of Ghibli content. Suddenly no meme could escape Ghiblification. And backlash swiftly followed. Some critics took aim at the obvious intellectual property ambiguities. Others circulated clips of a 2016 documentary where Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki declared AI animation “an insult to life itself”.

However, this rapid onset Ghiblification foreshadows a much darker, and crucially stranger future than mere IP infringement and artistic degradation. In tech criticism, it is fashionable to contrast two dystopias: Beijing versus Las Vegas. The former is well-known. It foretells a 1984 Orwellian future of mass surveillance and thought control, turbocharged by AI-powered spyware. This is best characterized by Republican congressman Mike Gallagher’s warnings of a Chinese Communist Party-exported “Orwellian” AI surveillance dystopia.

In contrast, the Las Vegas dystopia envisions a future where we are distracted by entertainment as foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. This vision, proposed by Neil Postman in his 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, presents the future where “Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.” This is a future of limbic capitalism where we are inundated by the addictive soma of Las Vegas pleasures. Books don’t need to be banned, because everybody’s too busy scrolling, eating fast food, gambling, gaming, and watching porn.

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Yet the rise of Ghiblification presents a third tech future, not from Beijing or Las Vegas — but from Tokyo. This is not a future of mere tech surveillance or opiate. Rather, it’s a vision of the world that fuses the pleasures machines of Vegas with the emotional worldbuilding of the Japanese otaku subculture — a niche consumer tribe known for their devotion to anime, manga, and video games. While long subjugated to their parent’s basements, weird corners of the Internet, and Tokyo’s Akihabara neighborhood, otaku is now going mainstream.

In order to make sense of how this unique style of consumption is shaping our future, we must understand two macro shifts: one cultural, the other technological. The first is the mainstreaming of a postmodern otaku logic that prizes fiction over fact and vibes over shared mythologies. The second is the potent concoction of next generation multimodal AI and their capacity to create custom alternative realities with the touch of a button. Together, they herald a future not of a shared digital commons, but of hyper-personalized Matrixes-for-One.

To grasp the first shift requires digging out Japanese media theorist Hiroki Azuma’s 2001 cult media theory book, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Chronicling the rise of Japan’s otaku subculture, Azuma coined the term “database animals” to describe a new kind of postmodern consumer emerging from the worlds of manga and anime obsession. These consumers no longer follow grand narratives or cohesive story arcs. Instead, they graze from a vast database of aesthetic elements, characters, and tropes — selecting whatever fragments give them the most effective hit. They are “animals” not in a pejorative sense, but in that they prioritize instinctual pleasure over ideological coherence or shared meaning.

Azuma explains the rise of otaku subculture in the context of what French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called the “decline of the grand narrative”. From the late-18th to the mid-20th century, overarching grand narratives were the cornerstones of modernity, providing order and meaning for citizens. Now, in a thoroughly postmodern world where traditional horizons of meaning have collapsed, “grand narratives” have given way to something very different.

Grand narratives, according to Azuma, function like a tree. The trunk is the big “worldview” — a shared mythos that structures culture. From this trunk grow the branches and twigs of “small narratives”, the everyday stories, rituals, and traditions that reinforce and transmit the deeper worldview. In essence, the “surface outer layer” of small stories, rituals, and acts of consumption connects consumers to the “deeper inner layer” of the grand narrative. In Britain, rituals like churchgoing, learning Shakespeare, or buying a royal-warranted Wedgwood teapot tethered citizens to the mythos of God, King, and country. Similarly in Japan, reciting the Imperial Rescript on Education, visiting shrines, conducting tea ceremonies bound citizens to a virtuous vision of Emperor, nation, and spiritual destiny.

Azuma argues that these grand narratives were disrupted by waves of turmoil. First came the Westernization of the Meiji Restoration, then the Second World War. In their wake, citing Jean Baudrillard, Azuma describes an emergent postmodern world where the trunk-and-branch models of reality are replaced by a rhizomatic “hyper reality”. In this world, meaning becomes a tangled web where the lines between truth and fiction blur, and symbols become unmoored from the realities they once represented. Here, the grand narratives are “swallowed by the chaos of a sea of simulacra”, a world where there are “no originals and no copies”. All that survives is endlessly circulating fragmented content with no shared story — if only Baudrillard were alive to see our world inebriated by memes, trends, and vibes.

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This post-modern hyperreality breeds ideological chaos. As the grand narratives collapsed — in Japan and globally — their absence was felt in various ways. Azuma argues that the otaku were the first to trailblaze a new mode of reality-making in a world stripped of unifying mythologies. Abandoning conventional “narrative consumption”, they pioneered what he calls “database consumption”: a logic that replaces the tree-and-branch structure with a database and hyper-individualized pick-and-mix consumer mindset. Stories are no longer linear journeys with moral arcs, they become modular fragments, plucked from a database of options and consumed as highly personalized forms of pleasure and identity-making.

Azuma observes that otakus — in contrast to regular fans — are almost entirely uninterested in official canon or coherent storytelling. Rather, they are obsessed with animalistically chasing an emotional rush — known as moe — triggered by modular elements of certain manga/anime characters. Different otakus chase different “moe-elements” (or moe-yoso). Some are visual: cat ears, knee-high socks, specific hairstyles, maid or sailor outfits, flaming swords. Others are more abstract: distinctive speech patterns, familiar plot beats, even particular curves or camera angles.

Otakus call the hunt for this affective sugar hit chara-moe. Many actively search for their preferred moe elements regardless of what franchise or series they come from. Further, otakus use search engines like TINAMI to filter the endless databases and feast on their moe of choice — whether it is styles of ships or spectacles, or just good old-fashioned bikinis.

For Azuma, what distinguishes the otaku is not their devotion to manga or anime per se, but their distinctive mode of database consumption. While the objects of their obsession — Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Sylvanian Families — have had an obvious cultural spillover into the West, it’s this underlying logic of fragmented, non-narrative consumption that has truly gone mainstream. The seemingly endless and narratively incoherent Marvel Cinematic Universe and online culture wars demonstrate the hypnotic power of non-linear database consumption over linear grand, cohesive narratives. Our media landscape now resembles an endless database of familiar image templates, catchphrases, and decontextualized references — shared and reshuffled for the sheer thrill of recognition. To giggle at and share an AI Ghibli meme that hits right is to indulge in chara-moe. In essence: if database consumption is now the primary driver of demand, then it’s now suddenly met with a perfectly created and curated supply.

Which brings us to the macrotrend powering Ghiblification: the rise of next-generation multimodal AI. Last week’s ChatGPT-4o update offered a glimpse of what happens when ordinary users are handed tools to conjure images in any style they wish, instantly. While Ghibli aesthetics may have stolen the spotlight, the algorithm’s reach is far broader. From Lego to Pixar, South Park to The Simpsons, the internet has exploded with a surreal parade of fan-made transformations. Ghibli versions of The Office. Pixar versions of Severance. The possibilities are endless. Ghiblification is not really about Studio Ghibli, it’s about the turbocharging of hyperreality with AI.

This shift is being driven by a new frontier in generative AI: the rise of multimodal, or “omnimedia” large language models. Just a few months ago — the Dark Ages, in AI terms — most models were siloed by medium. To write or code you used ChatGPT or Perplexity. To create an image, DALL·E or Midjourney. To create a video, Runway or OpenAI’s Sora were your best bet. Yet with the latest update to ChatGP-4o (the “o” stands for omni), we have entered a stratospheric new era. Very soon, models will no longer be confined to one input or output. Instead, they are being stitched together across modalities — capable of inhaling and exhaling text, image, video, audio, and more. In this new “anything-to-anything” paradigm, you can turn a photo into a cartoon, a game, a song — even a 3D-printed statue. With just a single, frictionless prompt each of us becomes the world-builder of our own private universe.

It’s only going to get faster. The primary barrier to fully automated Ghiblification is no longer AI developer genius or human creativity, but computing power. Today, it takes 30 seconds to generate a near-perfect detailed image. Soon it will be instant. In 2024 alone, tech firms poured more than $100 billion into AI processing infrastructure to speed things up. By 2028, that number is forecast to go over $200 billion. The direction is clear: the only thing standing between users and immersive, personalized AI worlds — whether they be Ghibli, Pixar, or South Park — is processing time. IP rights and energy costs may be barriers, but on matters of AI, it seems that politicians are more concerned with Chinese AI drone swarms than artists’ rights and emissions. Everything else — the demand, the tech, the servers — is there.

Furthermore, it’s amplified by a different kind of AI: interest-graph recommender algorithms. In recent years, feed curation has quietly shifted from the social graph (what you and your friends like and follow) to the interest graph (what you actually pay attention to). The algorithms of TikTok’s “For You” page do not care what you claim to value; they optimize for what you linger on. And what do people want? AI slop. As Altman put it: “one man’s slop is another man’s treasure”. The latest research backs it up. A recent blind study found that most people genuinely prefer AI pastiches of the great poets to the real thing. On a critical level, it is easy to say one believes in the Miyazaki and Nick Cave characterization of AI creativity as “a grotesque mockery”. In practice it’s harder. While older models made creepy, creatively bankrupt pastiches, emerging visual models are increasingly indistinguishable to the untrained eye. Ghiblification is unlikely to be a fleeting trend.

And so here we are at the beginning of the new age of Otaku, possibly the end of shared reality as we know it. While reflecting on the creative process, Miyazaki once explained that “the creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos”. Now, in a cruel twist of fate, the opposite is happening. Reality is being shattered into billions of AI-crafted otaku worlds for one, but perhaps that’s exactly what we want.

In the interests of “balance”, an opposing view was deemed necessary. The counter-argument, published last week, was made by Jacqueline Rose, a professor at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. According to Dawkins, her response does not make any “coherent sense”, which he suggests may be a badge of honour among postmodernists.

I am a long-time admirer of Rose. Her insights on psychoanalysis have suffused my own writing and I loved her book Mothers, which, as it happens, I reviewed in the New Statesman. I described her as “one of our very best cultural critics”.

Yet even I was surprised at how poor her recent article was. I understand that, unless you are Zizek, you have to sign up to a lot of nonsense if you are to survive on the international academic circuit. Unlike Dawkins, though, I am weirdly steeped in postmodern theory. In the Eighties, I got an interview with Baudrillard and tried to sell it to The Guardian, but they had never heard of him.

From early on, I could see how much of this fashionable theory — rooted in a rejection of “grand narratives” about the truth — does not accommodate feminist politics. When I was teaching American students about postmodernism and Judith Butler, it became even more apparent that much of her argument was a response to Marxism; that postmodernism was born of the failure of revolutionary politics.

But there were good bits. And the Rose article reminds me strongly of something I wrote in 1988: “If the whole question of power cannot be tackled, it is because these new hysterics with their male bodies and optional female subjectivities cannot speak of a desiring subject who is actually a flesh and blood woman.” I was talking here about male theorists, rather than trans people. But I return to it in an attempt to understand how, in a call for “generosity”, Rose has written a piece that is so completely dismissive of women, our concerns, rights, bodies and fears.

She begins by claiming that a “central goal of feminism is to repudiate the idea of womanhood”. Is it? What is womanhood if there is no such thing as a woman? Does she mean “femininity”?

On the threat of sexual violence, she suggests that it is “the category of women as much as the safety of women that needs protection”. That category, she thinks, should include women who were once men. Let’s take this idea for a walk, shall we? Out of the academy and to Iran and Afghanistan, to places where women die in menstrual huts or undergo FGM, where women-only spaces are compelled. She complains that “the idea of female” is “some kind of primordial condition… as if it were the bedrock of all the limitations to follow”. She’s actually right here: this is the unfortunate reality in many parts of the world.

Of course, she uses the de Beauvoir quote — “One is not a woman, one becomes one” — but, predictably, chooses to ignore the rest of it: “No biological, psychological, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female acquires in society; it is civilization as a whole that develops this product, intermediate between female and eunuch, which one calls feminine.” The second part of the quotation is key. The construction of gender is social and there is a difference between being female (sex) and femininity (gender) which is learnt.

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Rose’s preference for referring to “females” as opposed to women, she says, is because Andrea Long Chu argues that “female” was developed in the 19th century as a way of referring to black slaves. As a result, it is “historically naive and racially blind” to assume it is a “neutral biological category”. Woah!

“Female” was in common usage long before the 19th century and I think Rose does Long Chu down here. Long Chu is a controversial, often witty, trans author who starts her book Females with: “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” For Long Chu, a female identity is one of self-negation and fuckable porn-addled passivity, which is precisely why she transitioned. If the answer to “What is a woman?” is this person, then the majority of the population — women — are tragic failures. Perhaps we are, but at least I know that male babies are not born “with spermatozoa”, as Rose asserts.

Rose goes on to argue that the act of transitioning challenges a binary which “reinforces the most regressive of gender stereotypes”. For her, it is an “imaginative leap”. Others might call it a fiction and listen to the accounts of detransitioners who can never experience parenthood or sexual pleasure. Others might say they are being sold a fantasy, that the sexed body has limitations whatever the imagination says, and that cynical drug companies and surgeons are cashing in on this.

Still, Rose insists there is no bedrock on which “sexual differentiation can securely ground itself”. Perhaps she has not read Dawkins or perhaps she knows more about biology than him. I couldn’t possibly say, but she goes into the familiar refrain that because some women don’t have a uterus, biology cannot be the gatekeeper of what she would call “femaleness”. This is true, but every one of us, however sexually interesting we may be, was born from someone who did have a uterus. There is no way of escaping this.

Transwomen, she says, have “a feeling that biology and a core, lived, sexual identity have been woefully misaligned”. What, pray, is “a core, lived sexual identity”? Is it a soul? Is it an orientation? Is it changeable? The issue with this Butlerian perception of gender is that, if it is nothing but performative, why is anyone compelled to repeat the performance repeatedly and permanently?

The dissonance between who you feel yourself to be and a sexed body is dysphoria, and I don’t know a single feminist who is not sympathetic to those who suffer from it. It’s just that, on the whole, we’re more worried about distressed, often gay, teenagers doing it.

The goal of transition is to simulate femininity, not femaleness because it cannot be done. The liberatory aspect of this, which Rose refers to as “discarding the straitjacket of masculinity”, is actually done by many men without them claiming to be women. But Rose doesn’t address the attendant power grab of women’s spaces and language. Instead, up comes Stuart Hall and his important work concerning moral panics in the Seventies, with a focus on “muggers” and young black men.

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Trans people, she is right to say, have become political footballs when we should be thinking about other things. Yet no other “civil rights” movement has had the dominant group identify into the oppressed group and then tried to take away their rights. Rose doesn’t dirty herself with such issues.

“‘Reality’ for feminism”, she argues, is something that has to be negotiated, and to dictate on this matter is patriarchal. Rose, you have to understand, is coming from a place where discourse always trumps objective reality. Postmodern theory depends on us seeing ourselves as formed only in and through language. Meaning is never settled; it is always contested. This is a fine and interesting philosophical argument, but as a politics it stinks. Postmodernism is patriarchy in drag.

What is a woman? “In the end,” we’re told, “it is a matter of generosity and freedom.” Well yes, that will go down well with the Taliban. Where is the generosity towards women who have lost jobs and reputations because of this “debate”? Where is the freedom for women to define themselves? If oppression is not rooted in biology, where does it come from exactly?

One is not born a woman but becomes one. And then one becomes an angry woman — not because we are gatekeeping an essentialist position, but because we cannot individually identify our way out of trouble. Feminism is a collective struggle or it is merely cosmetic.

What is a woman? I suspect Rose knows. She just also knows which side her bread is buttered on: the side that holds the power in academia, publishing and literary circles. They have stopped dreaming big and kid themselves they are radical in their safe spaces. Yet most women don’t get to choose our safe spaces: we are too mean and unsophisticated. Thankfully, unlike Rose, some of us remain unkind, unpersuaded, unbound.

Other people’s beliefs are ideological in the sense of being rigid, doctrinaire, immune to argument and detached from the practical world, whereas one’s own convictions are flexible, pragmatic and eminently reasonable. Capping child allowance so that more families are plunged into poverty is pretty much common sense in an economic crisis, while heavily taxing the oil companies springs from socialist dogma. There’s nothing ideological about revering the monarchy — like scratching your nose or gambling for eight hours a day, it’s a natural human inclination — but claiming that it provides circuses for the people to distract them from a shortage of bread is simply the talk of disaffected intellectuals.

To be post-truth, then, is to be post-ideological. Long ago, when the middle class were revolutionaries storming the strongholds of the aristocracy, ideas like God, liberty, progress, patriotism and equality mattered to them a lot. They were vital weapons in the struggle for hearts and minds. Once they settled down to the humdrum task of accumulating capital, however, these grandiose notions weren’t so essential. Besides, by secularising and rationalising the world, capitalism created a climate in which such high-minded stuff sounded increasingly implausible. In doing so, it undercut some of its own rationales.

It’s mostly American politicians these days who talk about God, freedom, “this great country of ours” and “our brave men and women in uniform”, the United States being on account of its Puritan heritage one of the most metaphysical nations in the world, as well as one of the most materialistic. One can’t imagine Jeremy Hunt waxing eloquent about the country’s eternal debt to the Almighty, as opposed to its debt to its international creditors. As capitalist society evolves, its everyday practice comes loose from its rhetorical self-justification, which is to say that the gap between what it does, and what it says it does, looms incongruously large. This is what philosophers know as a performative contradiction. Better, then, to ditch as much of its metaphysical baggage as you decently can — in which case truth, at least with a large T, becomes increasingly redundant.

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Truth is what compels our belief, but belief isn’t what binds late capitalist societies together. According to the ruling ideology of liberalism, you can believe whatever you like as long as it doesn’t stymie other people’s freedom to do the same, or pose a serious threat to their wellbeing. The state doesn’t give a toss about what you believe, a situation which would have been unintelligible to John Calvin or Oliver Cromwell, and is still unintelligible to a host of contemporary autocrats. Besides, in a relativist world, the word “conviction” comes to have a dogmatic ring to it.

This is odd, given that having convictions of some sort is constitutive of being human. To be a person is to have a point of view on the world. The convictions in question don’t need to be obsessive. You can believe that childbirth should be abolished without standing with a megaphone outside maternity hospitals. The historian A.J.P. Taylor once told a committee interviewing him for an Oxford fellowship that he had extreme political opinions but held them moderately.

Rather as religious belief was privatised some centuries ago with the birth of Protestantism, as a transaction between you and God alone, so belief in general becomes a kind of private hobby, as harmlessly idiosyncratic as Morris dancing or pigeon-fancying. What holds such societies together — consumerism, material interests, the rule of law — doesn’t really have to pass through the human mind, as it most certainly does in Islamist set-ups. This is one way in which the West’s latest bogeyman — terrorism rather than Communism — puts it at a severe political disadvantage. Solidarity in such nations goes all the way down, whereas in Britain it is largely confined to football. The word “fan” is short for “fanatic”.

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It was unfortunate for the West that just when Islamism began to blow up innocent civilians, its own culture was becoming increasingly sceptical and relativist. Conviction was falling in value at just the point when it was politically necessary. Truth became subservient to material interests. In the age of Plato, truth was thought to be independent of such mundane matters. It was an absolute affair, sublimely transcendent of the everyday world of ignorance and delusion. Later, however, thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche argued that what we held to be true was largely determined by our perspective on the world, which was merely one among many such standpoints, and which was shaped among other things by our struggle for material survival. This argument didn’t deny that truth existed, but it placed it within a social and historical framework.

In our own time, this case has been reduced to a cruder version of itself: truth is simply an instrument of power. You describe the world in whatever way best promotes your interests. And since there are many conflicting interests, there are many conflicting truths. Enter Donald Trump and the Big Lie, along with those postmodernists who maintain that truth is just what’s true for me. Truth had finally been either abolished or privatised. What matters is what works — and for that purpose a blatant falsehood may do just as well. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to trump up” as “to invent a false accusation or excuse”.

All this suits a society which is continually in flux. Truth and facts seem to be static, and thus incapable of surviving in a world whose only permanent feature is changeability. In the world of postmodern capitalism, everything is fluid, unstable, groundless and provisional. Change is good, but staying the same isn’t. This may be true for the CEOs of Tesco and Google, but as a general proposition it’s clearly absurd: if permanence and consistency are uncool, why not abolish the ban on child labour and send children of five into workplaces? But there’s also something absolute about historical truth that sticks in the craw of the Trumps and Hannitys of this world. If it’s true that the emperor Tiberius died on the island of Capri in 37 CE, it was true in 37 CE, true today and will no doubt also be true in the year 3000. Of course, it may not be true at all. But that is another question.

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There are other reasons why truth is being discredited. For Plato, truth was something deep, lurking beneath the surface appearances of everyday reality. Postmodernism is uneasy with this surface/depth model, for a number of reasons, one of them concerning what Lenin called the reality of appearances. In a culture of the image, star, brand, momentary sensation and instant gratification, everything seems on the surface; but if there are no depths, then there are no surfaces either, and the whole model collapses. The image is the reality, as in the term “Reality TV”. What you see is what you get. One is asked for one’s “take” on a topic, a verb borrowed from film and television. All this is convenient enough for the political Right, who also dislike the surface/depth model because it suggests that there are powerful but invisible forces which dominate our lives, not least those of the marketplace. “All the important processes,” Marx wrote, “go on behind the backs of individuals”. What we see and what we get aren’t at all the same thing. This belief lingers on in the post-truth era, but now it’s known as conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theorists have got at least two things right: that the truth can differ dramatically from what we’re officially told, and that it is usually unpleasant. There aren’t many conspiracy fantasists who claim that the world is run by a benevolent secret society which will one day deposit a fortune in all our bank accounts. There is, however, a more attractive aspect to the concept of truth. The word itself comes from the Old English “triewth”, which means faith or constancy. There’s a related word, “troth”, which means trust or loyalty. So truth is originally a moral concept. Speaking in a way which is true to the way things are is closely bound up with being faithful to others. In fact, we couldn’t do the latter without the former. Without mutual trust there couldn’t be any social existence. It’s not surprising, then, that Donald Trump’s cavalier way with the facts is linked with a foul-mouthed contempt for most of his fellow human beings.

The episode with Konni, in common with much that transpires in Le Mage du Kremlin (The Wizard of the Kremlin), really took place (during a Putin-Merkel summit at Sochi in 2007). Giuliano da Empoli affirms that, although his debut novel lends “a private life and imaginary words” to living people, nonetheless it’s about “real Russian history”. That history, of the rise of the “Tsar” (Vladimir Putin) to dictatorial power and the tangled ruses of the courtiers who enabled him, runs across a quarter-century from the collapse of the Soviet empire to the dress-rehearsal incursions into Crimea and Donbas in 2014. At that moment, when the Tsar’s intrigues crossed the line from the domestic arena onto the global screen, his ideologist-in-chief has to remind a patriotic biker chief that “war is a process, and its goals go much further than military success”. In Ukraine, “our objective isn’t conquest. It’s chaos.” The world now frets daily in the shadow of that chaos.

Empoli, a political analyst of Swiss-Italian background, finished Le Mage du Kremlin early in 2021. With scarily good timing, it came out in Paris in April 2022. It takes the form of a confessional monologue delivered to a mesmerised French expat over a decanter of Scotch by “Vadim Baranov”: a barely disguised version of Putin’s legendary strategist and in-house thinker, Vladislav Surkov. A former avant-garde theatre director who served as deputy chief of staff and later deputy prime minister, Surkov seems to have quit the stage of state power in 2020. Last April, reports told of his house arrest during a post-invasion purge of security officials. For UnHerd, Maximilian Hess cogently argued that Surkov’s star had fallen and that the great ideological string-puller had proved to be “no puppet-master, just another puppet”. But with Putin and his cronies — as Empoli makes plain — you can never be sure. The treacherous fogs and feints that fill his novel bring to mind Metternich’s apocryphal response when told of the death of Talleyrand, his rival diplomatic virtuoso in post-Napoleonic Europe: “I wonder what he meant by that.”

Empoli’s accomplishment is to dramatise the Putinist system of intermingled force and fraud as a malign work of art executed first on a national, then a planetary, scale. Baranov-Surkov transfers the stunts, coups and illusions of his art from theatre auditorium to public square, spotlit by TV and internet channels as Russia’s media free-for-all “pushed back the frontiers of trash”. Any masterpiece requires a signature, though the novel deliberately equivocates as to whether the manipulative “wizardry” belongs mainly to Surkov, or to Putin himself. From the crushing of the oligarchs to the conjuring of nationalist frenzy among the victims of free-market kleptocracy in Russia, Empoli’s Baranov likes to wrap the Tsar’s basic instincts and drastic actions in dainty theoretical packages. It’s Putin himself who warns his court intellectual that conspiracy-prone deep thinkers “systematically underestimate the power of stupidity, forgetfulness and chance” in great events.

The novel rode high in the French bestseller lists after the Ukraine invasion, and won the Grand Prix du Roman of the Académie Française. That august accolade fits the bill, for Empoli turns Baranov-Surkov into a wry, sly epigrammatic raconteur of a distinctively French kind. He strews his discourse with French quotations and alludes familiarly to the court of the Sun King — where his polished aphorisms and paradoxes would have shone. Some critics wondered whether Empoli — who had previously scrutinised the careers of populist spin-doctors in his book The Engineers of Chaos — was giving the devil his most seductive tunes. Did Baranov-Surkov’s worldly, ironic and elegant confession slide from admission into apologia? Only in the sense that Shakespeare’s Richard III (with whom he compares Putin) invites us to sympathise with late-medieval tyranny. Empoli’s Tsar begins and continues as an inscrutable monster, albeit one with a strikingly lucid mind and strong will, as he sets out to reverse the abject humiliations of the Yeltsin era and make Russian power speak once more in “the language of life, death, honour and fatherland”.

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Empoli, though, makes us ask whether his Surkov figure might be a dead-souled ogre of another rank entirely. We even side with the thuggish ultra-nationalist biker Zaldostanov (who really exists) when, in one of the book’s strongest scenes, he rounds on Baranov. Amid the debris of shelled Luhansk, it dawns on the leather-clad militia capo that his blood-stained patriotic crusade to reunite Mother Russia is, to the cynical strategist, just another page on the playbook of spin. Zaldostanov finds a mutilated doll in the rubble of an apartment block. He thrusts it into the abashed Baranov’s face. “This little broken, dirty thing must once have had a name. And a little girl played with it for whole afternoons.”

For once, Baranov fails to fire back with a killer quip. If Le Mage du Kremlin dissects the figure of the intellectual in the corridors of power, it draws back from saluting that role. This ambivalence has a French as well as a Russian face. The original eminence grise, the elusive strategist at the ruler’s side, was Capuchin friar François Leclerc du Tremblay, adviser to Louis XIII’s minister Cardinal Richelieu. Since then, in literature and politics, the backstairs thinker-fixer has transfixed the French imagination, and sometimes adopted human form: for instance, in the shape of Charles de Gaulle’s resilient culture minister, André Malraux.

Intellectuals love, and hate, to see one of their own atop the greasy pole; in France, many have dared to climb it. In a more knockabout vein, the recent acrobatic leaps and falls of what the French would call “Anglo-Saxon” spin-masters — notably Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings — have seen those Atlanticist figures pay their own sort of tribute to a very French tradition. For sure, Russian literature and statecraft has its own tradition of scheming, amoral artists of mind-control. None is more creepily compelling than Stavrogin in Dostoevsky’s The Devils, or (in history) more notorious than the mystic monk Grigori Rasputin. Yet Empoli’s cerebral courtier, “a poet fallen among wolves”, often sounds as if he belongs beside the Seine rather than the Neva or Moskva.

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That said, his ideas do retain a sinister allure. Empoli’s voicing of Surkov’s postmodern politics of spectacle, contradiction and disinformation may not be that original. Peter Pomerantsev has drilled down into the Surkov method in his exemplary books (This Is Not Propaganda; Nothing is True and Everything is Possible). Meanwhile, the documentary wizard of the BBC archives, Adam Curtis, seems spellbound by the Kremlin sorcerer. Surkov’s theory and practice haunts his 2016 series Hyper-Normalisation and the later Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. The theatrical stand-offs Empoli invents with the disgraced tycoons Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky, and with restaurateur-turned-Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, could almost appear in a Peter Morgan screenplay. Indeed, Morgan’s most recent drama, Patriots, tracks Berezovsky’s rise.

Empoli, however, lends the Surkov code and its art of lies a glinting, lapidary clarity. Don’t be afraid of chaos, but provoke and channel it. Forget labels such as “government” or “opposition”, “liberal” or “conservative”. Sow doubt and anxiety by backing, then thwarting, every competing social movement: “bikers and hooligans, anarchists and skinheads, communists and religious fanatics, the extreme right, the extreme left…” Foster the war of all against all, turn reality inside out, and in the wake of furious unrest restore “vertical” power with the almighty state and its leader-saviour in sole charge. As Empoli’s Baranov puts it in his suave but sulphurous credo:

“Anger remains the primordial drive you must take into account. You, right-thinking Westerners, think it can be absorbed. That economic growth, technological progress and — I don’t know — home deliveries and mass tourism will make the rage of the people disappear… It’s not true: there will always be the disappointed, the frustrated, the losers, in every age and under every regime. Stalin understood that rage is a structural element… To repress dissent is crude. To manage the flow of rage, to stop it building up, is more complicated, but much more effective. Over many years my work, at root, has been none other than that.”

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Le Mage du Kremlin shows us Baranov-Surkov in placid, domestic retirement. He’s happy to cherish his daughter and his library while posting pseudonymous tweets about the prophetic genius of the writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of the classic dystopia We (also, incidentally, a major influence on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). Reading the novel in 2023, one inevitably wonders whether the absence of Surkov from Putin’s nocturnal brooding contributed to the catastrophic blunders of the Ukraine invasion.

For Empoli portrays a ringmaster of steady-state disorder and permanent crisis — at home and abroad — who knows how to dodge final showdowns and settlements. The aim, remember, is “not conquest but chaos”. Chaos in the service of the spellbinding Tsar, a world-wide digital hubbub fed by Putin’s adversaries more than his allies, spreads “the myth of our power”. All-out war, on the other hand, drives events back from post-truth flux, blurring them back towards the old world in which binary alternatives of victory and defeat come into play again.

Without a Surkov-style counsellor, the Tsar seems to have broken his wand and retreated into an antique, analogue landscape of visible battle-lines, measurable advances and retreats. If Le Mage du Kremlin raises ethical questions, it does so not because it excuses the Tsar and his adviser’s stunts and frauds, but because it endorses their effectiveness. “I couldn’t bear the idea of losing,” Baranov reflects. But “indefatigable labour” ensured that “I was lucky; I nearly always won.” Will the real Surkov survive to re-emerge amid the ruins of the Tsar’s epoch? It would make a tasty sequel.

***

Le Mage du Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli is published by Gallimard; translations by Boyd Tonkin

Further setting the stage for what might be his final farewell a poem attributed to Surkov was published on Facebook a few days later. It is suitably full of contradictions, opening with the declaration, “I stand at the bottom of a pit, like a mountain’s summit, like the culmination of a drama, like the beginning of the game”. Its macabre ending — “I am going out into the negative, like Magellan into the Ocean” — may describe his fate, or that which he has engineered for Russia.

Publishing poetry is only one way that Surkov positioned himself as unique among Kremlin insiders. And he has always been taken at his own estimation. An advisor to Vladimir Putin from when he first assumed the presidency, Surkov made his name by not only acknowledging that the ‘sovereign democracy’ he helped usher in was a façade, but also by revelling in the fact that he was doing so publicly.

The brashness with which he effected this has made Surkov far better known outside of Russia than anyone else in Putin’s inner circle. In addition to articles in Foreign Policy and a Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) report dedicated to his ‘management’ of Russia’s proxies and media strategy in Ukraine, he has been profiled in both the London and the New York reviews of books. The Atlantic and Business Insider have also given it a go.

Surkov was an attractive subject because he would let Western journalists in on his not-so-secret tactics, and in a language they understood. His quip in response to being sanctioned in 2014 — “The only things that interest me in the US are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don’t need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing” — brought him to the attention of those beyond the usual Kremlin-watchers. The fact that he wrote his own novellas, Almost Zero (gangsta fiction) and Mashinka and Velik (gaga saga), and had an on-and-off relationship with Russia’s avant-garde, meant he was also a subject of curiosity for the art establishment.

His ex-wife, the artist Yulia Vishnevskaya, founded Moscow’s Museum of Unique Dolls in 1996, the year they divorced. Since 2004, Surkov has been married to Natalya Dubovitskaya – adapting her name into Natan Dubovitsky as his nom-de-plume. She presents as an art-inspired interior designer but her glamorous Instagram, real estate holdings, and ever-expanding business interests are archetypal of the Russian elite. So too is the rumoured reason for Surkov’s purported arrest — pocketing cash intended to destabilise Ukraine.

Surkov arguably reached his peak cultural prominence when the director Adam Curtis used his ideas as the centrepiece of his 2016 film HyperNormalisation, arguing that Surkov had invented a “new system of political control” by “import(ing) ideas from conceptual art into the heart of politics”. Curtis warned it was spreading from the Kremlin to the West.

Curtis argues Surkov’s open acknowledgement of his puppeteering made it impossible to know what was real and what was true. What many in the West had failed to realise was that — much as he had done with the Russian people — he wasn’t letting them in on the secrets behind his choreography, but turning them into other marionettes.

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Perhaps Surkov once was once in love with the theatre of the absurd, and the idea that we are all mere puppets. But today he sees such postmodernism merely as a tool to impose what he does want to achieve, a strong “long-lasting Putinist state,” the title of one of his occasional public essays.

Surkov has revelled in using the Dadaist approach to mock what he sees as the decadence of the West. He might be the auteur behind the idea that “nothing is true and everything is possible” (as Peter Pomerantsev titled his book on the Kremlin), but on Putinist rule we can take Surkov at his word, given his actions in managing the Kremlin’s extension of power not only in Ukraine but in other parts of Russia’s ‘near abroad’ as well.

His former aide Inal Batuvych Ardzinba now serves as Minister of Foreign Affairs in Abkhazia, one of two Russian breakaway regions in Georgia beholden to Moscow. Surkov also managed negotiations for Ukraine’s Minsk Agreements, while simultaneously hand-picking much of the “separatist leadership” in Donetsk and Luhansk, knowing full well the pacts would not lead to peace. As central as the absurd may be to these actions, Surkov has long effectively managed the expansion of Russian power.

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Surkov’s 2019 article on Putinism did not explicitly ascribe any ideology to the regime he had dedicated himself to building. He spent most of it attacking the West for its failure to understand Russia, for its “distrust and envy”, and for its lack of “belief in the good intentions of public officials”. This, interestingly, runs counter to Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism as an “incredulity towards meta-narratives”, dismissing decision-makers as people who merely “allocate our lives for the growth of power”. It seems Surkov was happy to do delve into postmodernism for its use in creating confusion, but expressly disagrees with the criticism of decision-makers. His Putinism article ends by using Albert Einstein’s witticism “sophisticated, but not-malicious” in describing the Russian people’s faith in Putin, painting it as quasi-religious.

Before he was removed from the corridors of power at the beginning of the year, Surkov was open about his role and intent in the Kremlin. In a 2021 Financial Times interview, he declared “I am proud that I was part of the reconquest. This was the first open geopolitical counter-attack by Russia [against the West] and such a decisive one. That was an honour for me.”

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He considered the propaganda that made him famous to be something that “people need”, comparing his output to McDonald’s and dismissing the need for “highly intellectual discourse”. Artistic intent usually requires taking pride in one’s work, or at least in having some underling meaning. For Surkov, his avant-garde tactics are merely a means to an end.

Surkov is by no means the only public intellectual — for that is how he is perceived, even if it fails to accurately describe his intent — to have fallen out with his avant-garde training. The liberal conservative Francis Fukuyama is another.

Fukuyama initially trained in political philosophy and literature, even studying in France under Jacques Derrida, perhaps the most famous of all postmodernists. The very title of his widely misunderstood book, The End of History and the Last Man, is a reference to a concept popular among other Marxist-inspired intellectuals, that there is a linear and perhaps even scientific path to historical development.

Like Surkov, Fukuyama today dismisses postmodernism — in 2018 he told an interviewer that what he had learned from his time in Paris was that postmodernist concept of deconstruction “was total bullshit”. The key difference between Fukuyama and Surkov in their divergence from heterodoxy, however, is in their approach to power.

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Surkov’s last polemic, entitled “Where Has the Chaos Gone: Unpacking Stability” published online in November 2021, placed “powerful statehood” at the basis of “the recipe for establishing and maintaining order”. He describes the state as “primarily an instrument for reducing social entropy”, before attacking the idea of social chaos that so many postmodernists have praised.

For his part, Fukuyama has acknowledged that his arguments about the future of world power are at least in part inspired by his earlier academic experiences, referencing the Marxist roots to his theory of liberal hegemony. But in his lectures in the years since, Fukuyama has emphasised that his belief in individual agency trumps any potential laws of history.

Both Fukuyama and Surkov’s criticise what they see as postmodernism’s offspring — identity politics, for example — and warn it can weaken the West. But Fukuyama recognises something that the war in Ukraine has made clear, and which Surkov has failed to see: namely that agency does not sit with the state.

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Surkov’s view that the state is the primary mover of history explains why he and Putin were so eager for war in Ukraine.

It would be generous to describe the Ukrainian state before Putin’s invasion as corrupt and fragile. Putin too appeared to believe this would make it an easy military target, apparently supported by “intelligence” from Surkov’s friends in the Federal Security Service (FSB). Meanwhile Surkov had helped Putin build a power-vertical that would enable the regime to position any propaganda as a crusade.

But it is Ukraine that retains its agency, while Russia has lost it. Its valiant defence of Kyiv, and litany of impressive actions on the battlefield have begun to forge a new unity and idea of Ukrainian nationhood. They also prove the fallibility of Putin’s own state: while Ukraine is recruiting volunteers from neighbouring countries, and even Russia, the Kremlin is resorting to conscripts, mercenary groups and favours from fellow dictatorships to bolster its ranks.

While Putin has sought to rewrite history in his 2020 article on the legacy of World War II and his diatribe the following year on Russian-Ukrainian”‘unity”, his ideas are not taken seriously. Russian policy academics may now bend their thinking to fit them — as do the once-respected Carnegie Moscow director, Dmitry Trenin, or the director of Russia’s International Affairs Council, Andrei Kortunov — but this hardly boosts his power.

The Ukrainian political scientist Volodymyr Ishchenko summarised Putin’s invasion not as the culmination of some superstate as Surkov would have it, but as a “crisis of hegemony; the incapacity of the post-Soviet and specifically Russian ruling class to lead, not simply to rule over, subaltern classes and nations”.

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Putin and Surkov have failed to build a Russia that serves as an alternative force in history. Instead — regardless of how much territory Moscow is able to claw away from Ukraine — they are witnessing the construction of that alternative by the Ukrainian people.

Russia’s long-cuckolded oligarchs, intellectuals and their offspring now know they can make their voices heard by shouting Glory to Ukraine. Simultaneously, Russian soldiers are being killed while fighting under meaningless and unexplained Z’s. No Russian politician has even attempted to invent a symbolism. The BBC journalist Grigor Atanesian noted the absurdity of Russians fighting under a “symbol void of any meaning… like in a bad 1990’s post-modernist novel”. The Kremlin has not even bothered to revive the Novorossiya project — complete with faux-historical flags — that Surkov once engineered to justify further invasion of Ukraine.

Putin’s army may be fighting against something, but they are not fighting for anything.

The Ukrainians are fighting for the ability to move West, reinvigorated by Putin’s war, towards Fukuyama’s conception of history and away from Surkov’s. In doing so, Kyiv may also be re-invigorating the values postmodernism’s critics argue it had undermined, concepts such as freedom for freedom’s sake, while Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy revives the possibility that leaders will once again be seen as heroic.

Surkov’s means achieved the opposite of his ends. It turns out he was no puppet-master, just another puppet.

For my first English literature class, I read Things Fall Apart cover to cover in one evening. I felt liberated: I’d actually enjoyed reading something I’d imagined was outside my comfort zone. With the other students on the Access Course, all of whom had also been to terrible schools and faced massive barriers to learning, I was able to laugh at my lack of general knowledge and poor historical and geographical facts, rather than attempting to cover them up.

Students from the course were guaranteed a place at the Polytechnic of North London (PNL) if we passed. I did, and when I started my degree in Film Studies and Discourse, I was in my element: I had a decade of feminist activism under my belt and there is nothing that cannot be studied through the lens of patriarchy. I was used to watching a film I had seen BF (Before Feminism) and howling at the misogyny in it, which I had once simply accepted and absorbed. My final thesis focused on men in gangs and, within that, the prevalence of sexual violence and abuse against women and girls. It was based on Grease.

The discourse part was less fun. Full of Derrida and Foucault and other incomprehensible philosophers and queer theorists, it flew in the face of my grassroots feminism. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity had just been published, and I recall being told by one of the lecturers that patriarchy was “performance”. I informed him that rape, domestic violence and other forms of male violence are rooted in the material reality of women’s oppression in relation to men. He responded by saying that perhaps “old-school feminism” needed a revamp.

A seasoned activist, I was used to defending my corner. But it felt like some of the lecturers found it threatening or uncomfortable to teach anyone who was used to engaging with ideas, theories and critical analysis. The staff at PNL were great when it came to class, but not so great at being corrected about feminism. The most amusing example happened during a class taught by the brilliant feminist sociologist Professor Sue Lees, who I believed had misrepresented a feminist law reform campaign I had co-founded the previous year. When I raised my hand to challenge her, explaining who I was, Sue shouted: “No, you are not!” We later became friends and would laugh about it.

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One of the male lecturers was a bit trickier. When I quoted Andrea Dworkin in an essay critiquing the male libertarian view of pornography, he was almost frothing at the mouth. He said Dworkin was “monstrous” and, in front of the entire class, accused me of taking a “moralist, anti-sex” approach. I asked if he thought it was a healthy sexual response to masturbate to women being gagged and raped. He declined to answer.

And I remember very clearly, in a class on the so-called feminist sex wars, a debate about sexuality and sexual practice that took in pornography, sadomasochism, and commercial sexual exploitation. On the one hand, there with libertarian “feminists” arguing that all sex is good sex; on the other, anti-male-violence feminist such as myself that ascribed significant meaning to the eroticisation of female subordination, and campaigned to end the sex trade.

“Here we have tension between the pro-sex feminists and the anti-sex neo-feminists,” proclaimed the male lecturer. Glancing down at the suggested reading for the module I saw not one actual feminist text but a load of stuff in praise of pornography.

“It is not ‘anti-sex’ to critique the sex trade,” I told the lecturer. “Making money from women’s pain and humiliation is surely open to criticism?”

At that point, the lecturer began to quote Foucault in French. Today’s universities preach an updated version of this anti-feminism, for example by promoting the view that prostitution is a fine way to earn money, and that speaking out against extreme transgender ideology and commercial sexual exploitation is “White Feminism”.

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Meanwhile, in my film studies class, I would often seethe with resentment at being told that depictions of horrific violence against women in Alfred Hitchcock films were merely “symbolic” of men’s fear of female sexuality and that feminists often “missed the point” about “meaning”. Silly girls!

These lecturers probably preferred to work with a clean slate than a person who could express opinions as opposed to simply form them from scratch.

And there were lots of people at PNL who just didn’t care that much. A number of posh kids swanked around, pleased with themselves for rebelling against their parents by not going to Oxbridge. Most of these entitled, arrogant teenagers had flounced around the global south on a gap year before embarking on three years at university. How disappointed their families must have been that they ended up in some grotty polytechnic rather than a redbrick. How proud mine were that I was doing something no one else in the family had been able to.

Still, I would fanaticise about being at a redbrick, channelling Julie Walters in Educating Rita. I wanted to sit in a ramshackle room full of bookshelves and whiskey decanters, with a don wearing a tweed jacket who gave me loads of attention and took my ideas seriously. What I got was a monthly seminar with 19 other students in a room with the paint peeling off the walls. I had always imagined university to be so much more glamourous.

Suggested reading

Cancel Culture has captured campus

By Eric Kaufmann

I was at university to get a degree, nothing more, because I thought it might give me more options in the job market. I wasn’t engaged in any social events or clubs because I already had my own tribe, although I once went to the student bar with a friend who promised it would be “a right laugh”. A couple of members of the Socialist Workers Party tried to recruit me, telling me that feminism was a “bourgeois movement” and that if, capitalism was destroyed, women would be liberated.

In 1993, I got what I had come for: a degree. But my battle with those who took exception to my prior knowledge was not over. Two of my final-year essays — a feminist critique of heterosexuality and an analysis of misogyny in the movies — were marked very low. They’d been so heavily edited with red pen that they looked as though a vein had been opened over the pages. I knew they deserved better. My work was externally reviewed and the marks shot up for both pieces. The reviewer commented that the tutors appeared to have marked me down because they disagreed with rather than because I failed to substantiate my arguments.

When I look back on the good things about my three years at university, I think about the working-class single mothers who somehow managed to fit a degree into their hellishly busy and stressful lives. I recall the way in which these women spoke about wanting to feel more confident in the world and get some qualifications that would give them options in the workplace. Like me, they considered education to be a privilege as well as a right.

More from this series

What Oxford taught me about posh people

By James Rebanks

Polytechnics catered to their communities, offering vocational qualifications, but, during the time I was there, changes to the labour market meant academic qualifications were seen as the best route to a good job, and the government began to turn polytechnics into “new universities”.

And as the number of universities has increased, the focus has shifted even more towards the postmodern horror story known as “discourse”, where the abstract “floating signifiers” are given precedence over scholarship that can be used to make a material difference to the lives of oppressed people. Universities should take a lesson from the now defunct polytechnics, and focus on making higher education accessible to those oppressed people, not just a privileged few.

The rampant elitism endemic within today’s universities has led to “feminist” societies being taken over by dudes sporting man-buns who dictate what feminism actually is to young women. It is no wonder that working-class single mothers in universities have become almost extinct as dinosaurs. Universities need to get back to reality. And it would help if feminism, in its true form, was put back on the curriculum.