Entrepreneurial types have started to get wise to this national obsession, too. Britain’s “leadership” industry has become vast and lucrative: podcasters and influencers throughout the land churn out self-help manuals and Diary-of-a-CEO-type podcasts, selling their listeners the dream that they might one day be as irresistibly charismatic as Steven Bartlett or Jake Humphrey; exclusive private networks promise to put aspiring board members in touch with real-life “NEDs”; historic stately homes are shuttered so that self-important middle-managers can take them over for residential leadership getaways. Any serious author who can get recognized as some kind of thought-leader in the theory of leadership can count on a flurry of sales — both to wonkish political commentators desperate to work out what makes someone fit to rule, and to ambitious young tech and business types, keen for someone to teach them how to sell their SAAS products with the might of Marcus Aurelius and Genghis Khan.

This, at any rate, seems to have been the main consideration behind the decision to publish Jared Diamond’s Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Make a Difference?, which is released by Allen Lane this September. Diamond shifts books: his 1997 inquiry into why the West became so powerful, Guns, Germs and Steel, sold over two million copies, and became the prototype for the other middlebrow blockbusters, like Sapiens and Prisoners of Geography, that dominated the bookshelves of the corporate-boardroom autodidacts in the pre-podcast era. His foray into the science of “leadership” promises to prise this old audience back into Waterstones with one weird trick: a nifty thought experiment that he calls “The Hamlet Test”. By posing the question of whether anyone else would have written Hamlet if Shakespeare had died of smallpox at the age of 10, argues Diamond, “we can make a strong argument that Shakespeare was uniquely talented”; in the same way, we can make a strong argument that a leader was effective by asking not whether he or she effectively represented a particular group, or achieved something noble, but whether he or she managed to make a difference in the world.

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Once we define effective leadership this way, Diamond seems to think, then the perennial question of “what makes a good leader?” can be reduced to “under what conditions do leaders make a difference?”. Conveniently, this gives Diamond the chance to conduct lots of nice, big, multivariate analyses of the kind that social scientists love. Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings contains several mad charts “ranking” different leaders according to how much they could be said to have “made a difference” to their countries’ economies: good leaders in this regard include Lee Kuan Yew and the military dictators Chun Doo Hwan and Georgios Papadopoulos; bad leaders, meanwhile, include Idi Amin and Harold Wilson. Occasionally, he goes into more depth — most convincingly his chapter on Seretse Khama, Botswana’s first president after independence, who almost, uniquely in sub-Saharan Africa, managed to steward a relatively peaceful handover of power, keep a lid on ethnic conflicts, and integrate the Botswanan economy reasonably effectively into the global system of trade. 

Whenever Diamond does try to go into depth, however, some pretty serious problems start to emerge. In the Khama chapter, for instance, he diligently lists a few obvious factors that helped Khama’s success — his chieftaincy of Botswana’s largest ethnic group, the discovery of diamonds shortly after independence — but totally neglects some of the most important factors of all. There were, in fact, plenty of other similarly promising leaders across sub-Saharan Africa in the Sixties, whether Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, or Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso — it’s just that they were all killed or overthrown in coups that Western powers were rumored to have sponsored. This, needless to say, seems important for anyone claiming to be conducting an empirical study of the factors that led to Khama’s success. Arguably, what really set Khama apart from his pan-African counterparts was his willingness to renounce leadership on a global level — distancing himself from the non-aligned movement, refusing to intervene against apartheid South Africa, and generally toeing the line drawn by the world’s greatest, pushiest power. Yet Diamond barely grapples with this possibility. Instead, he simply reproduces the hagiographies that liberal NGO-workers and development economists have been churning out for years.

There is, I suspect, something paradigmatic about this failing. All attempts to analyze “leadership” in terms of the different factors that contribute to it end up sounding rather nonsensical: after all, if a leader’s capacity to “make a difference” is reducible to certain structural conditions, or obedience to certain rules, then “making a difference” doesn’t really count as making a difference at all. Can you really be a leader by virtue of having been in the right place at the right time? Are you really a leader if you have got to where you are by following a simple five-step plan laid out for you by some podcast? No sooner does the literal-minded investigator start to ask questions about leadership than he or she starts to run up against an ancient antinomy: to make a difference, they must be free from the forces that determine events; but if they are free from those forces, there can be no science capable of explaining why they succeed. In Diamond’s case, this leads to some genuinely embarrassing formulations: Hitler was an effective leader because of “four qualities: anti- Semitism, speaking ability, tactical cleverness, and risk-taking”. 

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If you are really interested in the phenomenon of leadership, you will have to look elsewhere this autumn. Crowds and Power, the 1960 masterwork of the German theorist Elias Canetti that has just been republished by Fitzcarraldo, will probably not attract too many ambitious young politicos or corporate middle managers. It is a strange, unclassifiable document: a mixture of Victorian comparative anthropology, Jungian psychoanalysis and the just-so stories of modern-day evo-psych. It isn’t hard to see why it has been so thoroughly overlooked by mainstream social scientists: its main champions were literary and philosophical figures, including Susan Sontag and Iris Murdoch, and its first part is basically just one, vast typology of all the different types of “crowd” which human beings can amass themselves into — “closed crowds”, “open crowds”, the wolf-like “packs” that dominated human social organization in the days of prehistoric game hunts — interspersed with pieces of mad speculation about how certain deeply ingrained mythic symbols inform and determine real-world mass events. To give one gloriously unfalsifiable example, Canetti explains the Third Reich via the fact that Germany is a forested country, whose inhabitants have as their essential “crowd symbol” lots of tall, upright things standing to attention like coniferous trees. Thus, he concludes, Germans were particularly susceptible to militarism in the 19th century, and felt the disbanding of the German army by the Treaty of Versailles as a vast, existential humiliation that demanded redress.  

What would the contemporary consumer of leadership-content make of this kind of explanation? Clearly, Canetti’s account is massively unsatisfactory to the empirically minded reader — how exactly does one measure a “crowd symbol”? — and could certainly not be condensed into any kind of how-to guide for would-be Elon Musks or Seretse Khamas or Hitlers. But it does, I think, have one distinct advantage over almost every other invocation of leadership one might encounter in today’s media. By layering hundreds of apparently mutually exclusive explanations like the Hitler story — many of them seemingly self-sufficient in their own right — Canetti hints at the fact that psychic causation doesn’t work quite like physical causation. Human actions are, as Freud might have put it, overdetermined: the same act can be simultaneously caused by a dozen different motives, memories, fantasies and psychic mechanisms, none of which can straightforwardly be isolated as the variable which “made the difference”. In this sense, in fact, Canetti’s lunatic profusion of explanations is more realistic than Diamond’s sober attempt to rank them: the closer we look at why anybody does anything, the more their psychic life seems exempt from the laws of causation entirely.

Once we start to see human action in this light, questions like “what makes a good leader?” start to look very different indeed. Perhaps the most striking effect of Crowds and Power is the way it induces the reader to think of the great men of history as mere conduits for impersonal psychological and social mechanisms — as mere vessels, in whom vast, unpredictable “crowd energies” temporarily reside. It is a truth that we all notice from time to time: one only has to look at the last few parliaments to see the range of animal instincts and bizarre psychosexual neuroses that send people careening towards power. It is also, in a sense, the project that more mainstream leadership-theorists, Diamond among them, seem to be wanting to ask — even if the demands of reader-flattering liberal good manners never quite allow them to do so. 

The genius of Canetti’s account, by contrast, is to assign priority to the deepest, strangest mechanisms of all, and totally ignore what leaders say their interests might be, almost as a matter of methodological principle. The true common factor among leaders, he argues, is a kind of primal, evolutionary obsession with being the sole survivor of an atrocity, standing over a pile of dead — a terrified, animal desire to claw one’s way to a position where one can send others to die in one’s place. The archetypical political leader, in fact, is the Jewish historian Josephus, who, trapped with 40 fellow rebels during a siege, deceitfully engineered their suicide pact so that he emerged one of its only two survivors, then surrendered to the Romans, prospered, and wrote the history of his own lies. Josephus’s deception, writes Canetti, “is the deception of all leaders. They pretend that they will be the first to die, but, in reality, they send their people to death, so that they themselves may stay alive longer. The trick is always the same.” 

Of course, this kind of thinking will not be acceptable to today’s leadership-fetishists. One suspects Diamond’s book will outsell Canetti’s, and however much I would like to switch on Newsnight and see Andy Burnham locate the reason for his recent leadership campaign in his despotic compulsion to stand over a heap of corpses, I have to admit this will probably not come to pass. And yet, if there is one lesson of Canetti’s that is worth retaining, it is that people’s interests and fixations are never quite what they seem to be — especially when leadership is involved. 

The irony of Britain’s current fascination with “leaders” and “leadership” is that in many ways, it is born of a dissatisfaction with the way in which most people think about the role of human freedom in political and commercial affairs. Why else would you single out leadership as the thing that needs to change, if you were not hungry for some streak of pure, overdetermined madness to shock those in power out of their unimaginative ways? Perhaps, in their bottomless appetite for leadership manuals and corporate podcasts, the British public are channeling something deeper and more dangerous than we realize. Consider it, next time you are cornered by one of them at a party: look into your smarmy interlocutor’s eyes, and tell me you can’t see the piles of dead, smell the pine forests, hear the packs of howling wolves. 

The second time, the whole place went dark. The only illumination was the eerie glow of emergency lighting. Once again, the curtains closed, and the stage manager begged for our patience. After a couple of minutes, the house lights returned, but the hiatus dragged on until the final, apologetic, announcement that, after a total of three power cuts, the show couldn’t go on. Like the cast and crew, front-of-house staff coped perfectly, and as promised our tickets were refunded within hours.

Resorting to a local pub, our party discovered that the theatre over the road had cancelled their show before curtain up — again, because of power cuts. I later discovered that half a dozen West End shows had experienced power cuts that night. One of our group had recently been at Glyndebourne, which also had to cancel a performance because of power outages, prompting some snide commentary about that opera house’s lone wind turbine. 

Ironically, the report into March’s power outage that closed Heathrow Airport for a day had been published that very morning. So I became curious: was Glyndebourne’s often-mocked wind turbine unfairly blamed for the power cut that hit the opening night of Saul? Was our power outage a fluke, driven perhaps by the heatwave making unreasonable demands on the grid? Are theatres, with their energy-hungry lighting and special effects, particularly susceptible? 

Or is this a wider problem? Is the UK’s electricity supply becoming less reliable? That is a question which, it turns out, is hard to answer. Anecdotally, stories of power cuts lasting from a minute to a week seem to be more and more frequent. Small outages don’t even make the news: hardly anyone reported the show cancellations we experienced. But power suppliers give only generic answers, and theatre managers don’t want to comment at all.

We can piece things together, though. First, Glyndebourne. The opera house was not relying on its solitary wind turbine when it fell prey to power outages. Instead, said UK Power Networks, which maintains electricity networks across much of England, the outages were the result of a local fault. The half-dozen West End shows affected by power cuts the same night as ours were all in the same electricity distribution area, and that outage was down to a cable fault — rather than being weather-related. So the heatwave is off the hook.

But do theatres still — as they did back when I wielded a spanner and could tell you the catalogue numbers of my favourite colored gels — draw so much power from the grid that a poorly designed lighting rig can unbalance the substation?

The answer to that one is more complicated. 

Lighting technology has transformed in recent decades. LEDs have replaced most of the incandescent bulbs that would put out enough heat to burn a careless technician’s fingers. Rob Halliday, a stage lighting designer, calculated that the change could reduce the total energy demand for one performance by more than a quarter. The lighting for one musical could be done for less than 90 kilowatt-hours per performance — about the same wattage that Transport for London uses to transport 600 people for one kilometer. So it takes more electricity to get us all home than to entertain us.

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Perhaps more importantly for electricity suppliers, the energy demand has evened out, as peak power requirements have fallen to less than half the pre-LED levels. Curtain calls, when all the lights are blazing, are the moment of highest electricity use — but even if all West End shows had their curtain calls simultaneously, the local substations should be able to cope better than twenty years ago. 

On the other hand, Halliday pointed out to me, as theatre productions become more spectacular, with more special effects and dynamic staging, other energy-hungry equipment like winches and motors may be eating up the spare power. Then you have to add the ordinary building lighting, heating, bar and ice cream fridges, possibly air conditioning, and stage lighting starts to fade into insignificance. 

It nevertheless seems unlikely that theatres, compared to other public buildings, transport systems, and street lighting, are especially demanding of electricity suppliers. The latter are responsible for more than a quarter of local authority energy bills, which explains those authorities’ willingness to follow theatres in replacing older street lights with LEDs.

Which leaves me with my final question: was my party just unlucky, or is the UK experiencing more power outages? 

In the West End alone, Halliday tells me, “there have been a number of occasions I know about where there have been genuine power problems”. London is, after all, a tangle of tunnels, wires and pipes snaking around cellars and basements, with no definitive guide to what goes where. This is a tall order for anyone trying to maintain critical energy infrastructure, let alone repair it in a hurry. Many of the buildings are also old, with idiosyncratic wiring, though theatre wiring may be refurbished more regularly than, say, that of the Houses of Parliament. 

But on the other hand, it’s always easy to blame power when a problem is a technical one that’s specific to the building. Halliday tells me a story from decades ago: a failing show was closed shortly after opening for extensive rewrites and re-rehearsal, and “the excuse they gave to the public on that occasion was power problems”. A few days later, there were actual power problems in the building. “So we ended up with a generator parked outside, and the electricity board said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, we’re not covering the cost of this, because we read in the press that there were power problems, and you didn’t tell us.’”

UK Power Networks reassured me that “the electricity network is 99.99% reliable” — but that would leave a one-in-10,000 chance of failure at any time. And with millions of customers, that means plenty of room for problems. Halliday, like me, has the impression that UK power infrastructure is struggling to keep up with changing patterns of supply and demand. 

Decades of under-investment and planning delays have left the UK power grid out of date and sometimes struggling to cope. Old electricity power plants are shutting down faster than they can be replaced by new ones, leaving us regularly reliant on imported energy. Supply from intermittent renewable sources, requires different distribution infrastructure to keep the electricity flowing steadily when demand also fluctuates. Failure to regulate the frequency and voltage of power supply caused the massive Iberian Peninsula power outage earlier this year, according to a Spanish government report.

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May 2025 saw another power outage that hit multiple London Underground lines, on this occasion a National Grid cable fault that caused a fire at a substation. And of course the March substation fire caused Heathrow Airport to close for a day, with enormous impact on airlines and travelers, though no casualties. That catastrophic failure was traced to a known fault that went unrepaired for nearly seven years, compounded by the age of the substation and Heathrow’s assumption that such an event was a low-probability.

Are electricity suppliers complacent about the reliability of their systems? They maintain otherwise. UK Power Networks recently upgraded the Leicester Square substation to increase current reliability and future capacity. They’ve also adopted a “new technology” to reduce power cuts — consisting of steel support trusses for the poles carrying overhead power lines. You may giggle, but the power failure that hit Glyndebourne could perhaps have been prevented by such reinforcement. In general, suppliers are trying to anticipate and prevent unplanned power outages.

Nor are theatres content to relegate power outages to “low-probability events”. They don’t want to lose a single performance, says Halliday, so insurers insist on building redundancy into technical systems: sending the audience home, and refunding tickets, is the last thing they want. For every West End show’s lighting desk, “there’ll be a backup one sitting under the table, live, tracking along, ready to go. And other departments do that as well.”

Some theatres have back-up power supplies. Glyndebourne switched to battery storage when power outage hit Saul’s opening night, but in the absence of wind to turn the turbine, it wasn’t quite sufficient to finish the show. One newly-built London theatre has a generator on the roof, in case of power failure: clearly already enough of a problem in 2022 to merit an entire back up power system.

For Halliday, the question is why more venues don’t couple battery storage with solar panels, as festivals are starting to do. “I’ve become a bit obsessed with solar power,” he says. “It baffles me every time I walk past the National Theatre, for example, which is a big giant expanse of space that’s beautifully lit by the sunshine all day long. Why is that not covered in solar panels?”

So perhaps the unfairly maligned Glyndebourne windmill is not such a terrible idea. If the electricity distribution system fails, venues with their own generation and storage capacity will be able to say, “the show must go on”. Whether the transport system will still get us home afterwards is another question.

A few weeks ago, a police officer tried to arrest a man carrying a blank placard who might have written something offensive to the King on it. Perhaps this heralds a whole new category of crime, namely those which you haven’t committed and don’t even intend to, but always might. People going for a quiet run in the park might suddenly dash into a bank and rob it. We’re going to need a lot more prisons.

Most liberals and leftists look on power with suspicion. But this is because when they hear the word they instinctively think of dominant power, and look for some kind of resistance to it. But resistance is itself a form of power; not all power is oppressive. There are productive forms of it as well as despotic ones. It all depends on who has it for what purposes in which circumstances. Only those with enough power already can afford to be sniffy about it, just as there are millionaires who fix their thoughts on spiritual matters and despise the rest of us for our crass materialism.

The only thing worse than having too much power is having too little. Democracy isn’t the opposite of power but a particular form of it. You need power to free yourself from slavery or Vladimir Putin. The same is true of authority, not all of which is to be derided.

The Met police, for instance, are in trouble partly because becoming a police officer is an attractive prospect to a lot of natural-born bullies and rednecks, who wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to kick other people around or make obscenely sexist remarks in the knowledge that their mates would be alarmed if they didn’t. Trying to root out police bigotry thus has its limits, like trying to root out aspiring entertainers who enjoy being applauded.

But there is also the authority of a Nelson Mandela, which is a question not of rank but of wisdom and experience. Knowledge without wisdom is impoverished. So is knowledge without knowing how to apply it. There is such a thing as tacit knowledge, meaning something you know but can’t formulate. Try teaching someone how to whistle “Hey Jude”.

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Noam Chomsky once made an interesting comment on the flyblown old cliché “speaking truth to power”. He pointed out that power (of the dominant kind) knows the truth already. Only the excessively charitable see it as a clumsy but well-intentioned giant, blundering witlessly around the place and trampling on people like a rogue elephant without even noticing. On this theory, power is born of ignorance. If only it were aware of the havoc it wreaks, it would change its ways. If only the tobacco companies had known long ago about the lethal effects of smoking, they would have shifted over into producing cheese-and-onion crisps. If the logging companies are deaf to the danger of destroying the rainforests, let’s just tell them again, and then again. While we’re at it, let’s draw the attention of the gambling industry to the suicides whose blood they have on their hands.

Power, however, is far from witless. On the contrary, it makes use of highly specialised forms of knowledge all the time. Knowledge is itself a mode of power, rather as universities have become service stations for the capitalist economy. Power knows what’s going on in the most literal of senses, given its global networks of surveillance. It is perfectly conscious of its own darker machinations, but either doesn’t care or believes that they are unavoidable. What sustains it is not ignorance but self-interest. It isn’t schooling it needs, but restraining. This is also true at the individual level. There are people to whom one should no more give power than one would give a bowie knife to a toddler. The problem is that one usually finds out who they are when it’s too late.

It isn’t power, then, that needs the truth, which means that intellectuals will have to find some other high-minded justification for their salaries. It’s those whose lives power makes miserable. To be free, you need what is traditionally known as emancipatory knowledge — a grasp of your situation as a whole, one which involves not just a new view of the world but a new self-understanding. And this transformed self-understanding is itself an active force for change. If a process of political liberation is to be judged successful, those who emerge at the end of it aren’t quite the people they were when they started out.

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David Hume, perhaps the greatest of British philosophers, writes rather surprisingly that power always lies with the governed. He’s not speaking of democracy, which hardly existed at the time, but of the fact that sovereignty ultimately rests on popular agreement. You can imprison some of the people all of the time, but you can’t imprison all of the people all of the time. Any form of rule which doesn’t engage the partial consent of the masses is unlikely to endure.

Without that consent, as Sigmund Freud remarks, it would be impossible to understand how so many civilisations have survived for so long despite the justifiable hostility of the common people. There must be enough people who are complicit in their own subjection — enough people on benefits, for example, who are rather taken with that nice Mr Kwarteng and think he is doing a great job. It’s true that consent needn’t mean affection: most governments have been tolerated rather than admired. Power is what we have to put up with. But people, being properly self-interested, will only submit to it as long as there is something in it for them.

What that is, of course, may be pathetically meagre. It may mean having the secret police search your flat only once a month rather than twice a week. Those who are subject to power are usually reluctant to revolt against it — not necessarily because they have any particular relish for it, but because of the dangers involved in confronting its violence, the lack of any obvious alternative, and the fact that they have too much to do without chaining themselves to each other for days on end. On the other hand, the moment citizens realise that there simply isn’t enough in it for them anymore, they will rebel as surely as night follows day. It is rational to do so, and human beings are somewhat rational creatures. When any alternative becomes better than what you have, the days of your rulers are numbered. This may be partly because there is no longer much in it for them either.

The great theorist of political consent is Edmund Burke. In his treatise on aesthetics, Burke tries to square the fact that the law must be feared with the need for it to be loved. If the former evokes the image of the father, the latter has a more maternal flavour. The authority of the father, Burke argues, “hinders us from having that entire love for him that we have for our mothers, where the parental authority is almost melted down into the mother’s fondness and indulgence”. The problem is that only love will bind us to the law, but this love is likely to weaken its force and inspire in us a benign contempt. Desperate to resolve this contradiction, Burke offers us the figure of the grandfather — male, to be sure, but tempered by old age with a certain gentleness of spirit. It is unlikely that this will provide much guidance for Liz Truss.

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Freud, by contrast, sees no final solution to this dilemma. In his language, the law becomes the superego or source of punitive discipline; and since it is installed inside us all, its power is all the more draconian. To transgress it feels like violating ourselves. The law works as well as it does because we reap an obscene delight from being oppressed by it; and this is because being punished relieves us of our guilt. Yet we then feel guilty about our delight, which leads us to want more punishment. We revere the law, then, but our reverence is ambivalent: we never entirely submit to its coercion, and rejoice in seeing it brought low. No Tory government is going to work that one out.

The most authentic form of power, so we learn from King Lear, is one which maintains a pact with weakness and failure. The most elusive aspect of power is the exercise of it for its own sake. There is something excessive about this faculty, which tends to outstrip its practical goals and revel in itself. It wasn’t a burning desire to spread social sweetness and light which kept Boris Johnson hanging on to office like a burr to the seat of one’s pants. In this respect, power is as irrational as love.

Such power is not likely to disappear anytime soon, and this is good news for those who need to fight injustice. But we will know that genuine change has happened when the word no longer means quite what it means at present — when not only the power-situation, but the very concept of power, has been transformed almost out of recognition.

The French mystic and thinker René Guénon, who was doing his best work nearly a century back, was one of them. In his two books (The Crisis of the Modern World and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times), Guénon laid out his notion that the modern world had deteriorated into a realm of pure materialism as a result of what he called the “Western deviation” from eternal truth. He called this the “reign of quantity”, and predicted its future collapse. But Guénon was not simply talking economics or politics. What was going on, he said, was something akin to a spiritual war, and as a Sufi Muslim he wasn’t shy about naming its antagonist. To this age, he wrote, “the word ‘Satanic’ can indeed be properly applied”.

Presenting disorder as order and truth as lies — this, wrote Guénon, was the way that Satan rolled. The “more or less direct agents of the Adversary”, he explained, using the Biblical name for what Europeans would later come to call the Devil, always aimed to invert reality. Right is wrong, black is white, up is down, there is no truth, do what thou wilt: this has always been the Adversary’s line, and today it is prominent in all quarters.

The heterodox Catholic philosopher Ivan Illich, who died in 2002, also believed we were living in the time of Anti-Christ, but for different reasons. For Illich, any claims that we lived in a “secular age” were nonsense. The modern West was still Christian, he said, but it had disastrously attempted to codify the spontaneous expressions of love which Christ had shown to be God’s desire for humanity within systems and institutions. First the Church, and then the supposedly “secular” liberal states which had succeeded it, had attempted to transmute Christian love into obligation and enforce it by law, thus twisting it into a new form of oppression. His biographer David Cayley explained in a recent essay that Illich’s work “emphatically rejects the idea that ours is a post-Christian era. ‘On the contrary’, he says, ‘I believe this to be the most obviously Christian epoch, which might be quite close to the end of the world.'”

A decade or so before Illich was writing, the Jewish Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was also attending to the dark spiritual undercurrent of the age. He had a different interpretation of its source — or perhaps he was just using a different name. In Howl, he identified the forward march of industrial modernity — and especially the hypocrisy and brutality of the American empire — with the pagan god Moloch, who demanded human sacrifice from his devotees:

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! …

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! 

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Ginsberg, it seemed, could also sense that the spirit of his age was not under human control, either out in the world or in his own soul and mind. Usually this is easier to talk about in poetry or fiction, for the age doesn’t look kindly on anything which can’t be quantified. It can deal with Ginsberg, but it doesn’t want to talk about Moloch. It can just about cope with Christ if he has been brought down to our level — made into an activist or a defender of culture or a “cosmic” manifestation of the self — but it has nothing to say about Anti-Christ, who blows the whole story sky-high. As for St Paul’s famous notion that the world is subject not only to nature but to “principalities and powers” which wish us ill: this kind of talk was supposed to have been wrecked on the shores of the Enlightenment, never to be seen again.

But the powers and principalities didn’t die in the shipwreck of the old world, they just took on new forms. Today we can, in fact, still talk about these strange, underlying forces as long as we use the correct language. Take, for example, the Silicon Valley philosopher Kevin Kelly’s pet notion that technology has its own mind and its own purpose: that through the web of what he calls “the technium”, something is using us to create itself. Kelly sees technology growing into something self-aware and independent of its human creators, as he explained in his book What Technology Wants: “It may have once been as simple as an old computer program, merely parroting what we told it, but now it is more like a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.”

Other breathless Silicon Valley mavens, from Mark Zuckerberg with his Metaverse to Ray Kurzweil with his Singularity, regularly talk in the same register about where the technium is taking us. Our job, they seem to imply, is simply to service it as it rolls forward under its own steam, remaking everything in its own image, rebuilding the world, turning us, if we are lucky, into little gods.

They never consider where this story has been heard before. They never confront, or seem to even comprehend, what Illich or Guénon or even Ginsberg would have known, and which many a saint would confirm if they could hear the technium’s new story: that “AI”, on the right lips, can sound like just another way of saying “Anti-Christ”.

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By Matthew Crawford

Maybe it’s just me, but the ongoing and rapid inversion of so much we have previously taken for granted increasingly seems to be happening independently of human action. It is as if something else has become manifest in some way we can’t quite put our finger on, and has stimulated the craziness of the times. Perhaps it has become self-aware, like Skynet; perhaps it is approaching its Singularity. Perhaps it has always been there, watching, and is now seizing its moment. Or perhaps it is simply beginning to spin out of control, as our systems and technologies become so complex that we can no longer steer them in our chosen direction. Either way, this force seems to be, in some inexplicable way, independent of us, and yet acting within us too.

Let’s give this force a name: a less provocative name, for now, than Moloch or Anti-Christ. Let’s keep it simple. Let’s just call this force Progress. Then, à la Kevin Kelly, let’s ask ourselves a simple question: what does Progress want?

The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce saw the modern era as a thorough and permanent revolution — a radical break with the human past. He defined a modern person as “someone who thinks that ‘today it is no longer possible’”. We do not tend to see our time as continuous with what has gone before, he said. Instead, we believe we live after a “violent break with history”.

In the story of Progress that informs us today, the revolutions of the modern age — industrial, political and intellectual — are assumed to have radically changed the world. By sweeping away old ways of thinking, seeing and living, modernity has produced “a type of violence capable of breaking the continuum of history”.

What Progress wants is the end of history.

Del Noce seems to be having something of a moment at present, provoked by a recent collection of his essays and lectures, translated into English as The Crisis of Modernity. This crisis, in Del Noce’s seeing, is one of exclusion: it is what the modern way of seeing leaves out that matters: “what is excluded is the ‘supernatural’, religious transcendence … For rationalists, certainty about an irreversible historical process … has replaced what for medieval thinkers was faith in revelation.”

The modern epoch, explained Del Noce, guided by science, reason and the self, rejects the notion of anything “unseen” or “beyond”. From the 18th century onwards, philosophy swept away religion: the world was now understood in purely human terms, and managed with purely human notions. Everything became immanent: literally, down-to-Earth.

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All of this, said Del Noce, marks a radical transformation in human seeing. It is, for example, a “sharp break with respect to the Greek and medieval periods”. Both the followers of Plato and the followers of Christ (not to mention every other old culture on Earth, in their own particular way) believed that truth was transcendent, eternal and uncreated, and could be known through some combination of faith, practice and reason. 

No longer, said Del Noce: the only “transcendence” that our age will permit is that which we create ourselves. With no ultimate truth or higher story, there is now nothing to stop us bending the universe to our desires: indeed, to do so is our duty. This, in Del Noce’s telling, explained 20th century history. Having replaced religion with philosophy, we then tried putting philosophy into practice on a grand scale, with terrible results.

How do we shape the universe in the age of immanence? According to Del Noce, “the spiritual power that in the Middle Ages had been exercised by the Church … today can be exercised only by science”. In this “totalitarian conception of science”, “every other type of knowledge — metaphysical or religious — expresses only ‘subjective reactions’, which we are able, or will be able, to explain by extending science to the human sphere through psychological and sociological research.”

But the rise of science did not lead to the end of religion, however much Richard Dawkins might like it to be so. Instead — as noted by Illich — religion responded to the challenge by becoming immanent itself. Western Christianity progressively abandoned its commitment to transcendence and was “resolved into philosophy”, allowing itself to be brought down to Earth, into the realm of social activism, politics and ideas. “The conversion of a large part of the religious world to the idea of modernity”, said Del Noce, “accelerated the process of disintegration” that the modern revolution had unleashed.

What Progress wants is the death of God.

But Man cannot live by immanence alone. Religion meets a human need, and when it is gone, or corrupted, the hole it leaves will have to be filled by something else. What will that be? Del Noce’s answer is: revolution. Modernity, he suggests, could be defined as a permanent, ongoing revolution.

The desire to build Utopia on the bones of the old world has been the consuming fire of Western thought for 300 years. Jacobins, Bolsheviks, communists, socialists, Fascists, Nazis, neoliberals and many more have all attempted to scour the ground clean and start again, and we are not done yet. “The revolutionary attitude of creative violence”, writes Del Noce, “has replaced the ascetic attitude of seeking liberation from the world”. If once society’s refuseniks imitated St Anthony, now they copy Che Guevara. All that is solid melts into air: this, in the words of its most consequential revolutionary mind, is the best description of the age of immanence that we have ever had.

What Progress wants is permanent revolution.

The two world wars of the 20th century — which Del Noce prefers to view as a single European conflict, lasting from 1914 until 1945 — spread this revolution against transcendence and tradition all around the world. After 1945, America, unchallenged monarch of the reign of quantity, took on the global responsibility for waging “the Enlightenment’s war against their own past”. Del Noce agreed with another prophet, Simone Weil, that “the Americanisation of Europe would lead to the Americanisation of the whole world” — and so it has proven. But Europe, by pursuing the path of pure immanence, had in any case already doomed itself, by turning on itself the weapons it had long used on others and hollowing out its own historic culture in the name of Progress: “Colonisation can be achieved by only one method: by uprooting a people from its traditions. Europeans have a long history of extensively practising this method (and this was Europe’s greatest historical fault). Now — oh, wonder! — in order to feign regret they are applying the same.”

Where would all this lead? The ultimate result of the revolution of modernity, predicted Del Noce, would be fragmentation, nihilism, and “the death of the sacred”. The twin revolutionary engines of the postwar era, he suggested, were scientism and sex. The first usurped the role of religion and culture, reducing all life to the level of the measurable and controllable. The second, via the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the resulting “permissive society”, unleashed a radical individualism cored around sexual desire, which would lead to the fragmentation of everything from nationhood to the family — but leave capitalism and its attendant class, the bourgeoisie, intact.

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Modernity, in the final accounting, took aim at all authority, all tradition, everything rooted and everything past. Del Noce’s prediction, made decades ago, was that the end result of modernity’s revolutions would be the rise of a “new totalitarianism”. This time around it would not involve jackboots and uniforms. Instead, it would be a technocracy built on scientism and implemented by managerial elites, designed to ensure that order could continue after modernity had ripped up all former sources of authority and truth. Ironically, wrote Del Noce, “the rejection of authority, understood in its metaphysical-religious foundation, leads instead to the fullness of ‘power'”.

Create a void, in other words, and into it will rush monsters.

The new totalitarianism, suggested Del Noce, would “absolutely deny traditional morality and religion”, basing its worldview instead on “scientistic dogmatism”. It would negate all “spiritual forces”, including those which, in the 1930s, had been used to resist the totalitarianisms of Hitler and Stalin: “the Christian tradition, liberalism, and humanitarian socialism”. It would be a “totalitarianism of disintegration”, even more so than Russian communism, which had presented itself to some degree as a continuation of national tradition. This time around though, “the complete negation of all tradition”, including that of “fatherlands” — nations — would lead to rule by the only large institutions still standing: global corporations.

Faced with this challenge, Del Noce insisted that “current political formulas are completely inadequate”. Neither Left nor Right were equipped to understand what was going on: both, instead, would typically retreat to their historic comfort zones, with the Left blaming “fascists” and the Right blaming “communists” for the ongoing disintegration. The real source of the disintegration, though, was not partisan: it was the Machine.

What Progress wants is liberation from everything.

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Progress. The Machine. Moloch. Anti-Christ. The Technium. We are all grasping here, trying to name something we cannot see, but whose impacts we can feel undermining the foundations of everything we have known. Augusto Del Noce’s analysis of the modern revolution — and the rootless, spiritless, immanent world it had produced — pointed to the ultimate destination as both totalitarianism and nihilism.

Kevin Kelly, of course, would disagree. For him and his fellow tech idealists, the clearing away of the transcendent realm is only a precursor to building another one — and getting it right this time: “Technology is part of a great asymmetrical arc that begins at the big bang and extends into ever more abstract and immaterial forms over time. The arc is the slow yet irreversible liberation from the ancient imperative of matter and energy.”

Del Noce is often referred to as a conservative or even a reactionary thinker, but he didn’t accept either label. Simple “reaction”, he said, was no solution to what was unfolding. Both nostalgia and utopia were ultimately fruitless as tools of resistance. If permanent revolution, and the consequent disintegration, is the baseline state of a world that denies transcendence, then the alternative is clear: a return to the spiritual centre. A rediscovery, or a reclamation, of the transcendent realm and its place in our lives. This, and only this, is the alternative to the reign of quantity and its attendant cast of gods, demons and machines.

What Moloch wants — Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks — is sacrifice. We must sacrifice ourselves and our children to the robot apartments and stunned governments. What Anti-Christ wants is the opposite of transcendence. If the coming of Christ represents the transcendent breaking into the temporal in order to change it, then His opponent will herald a world of pure matter, uninterrupted by anything beyond human reach. Everything in that world is up for grabs. Anything, from rainforests to the human body, can be claimed and reshaped in the interests of advancing the realm of the human will. It is the oldest story.

The rushing power that runs beneath the age of Progress, the energy of the modern world, the river that carries us onwards — where is it taking us? We know the answer. Humans cannot live for very long without a glimpse of the transcendent, or an aspiration, dimly understood, to become one with it. Denied this path, we will make our own. Denied a glimpse of heaven, we will try to build it here. This imperfect world, these imperfect people — they must be superseded, improved, remade. Flawed matter is in our hands now. We know what to do.

What Progress wants is to replace us.

Perhaps the last remaining question is whether we will let it.

A longer version of this essay first appeared at The Abbey of Misrule.

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.

Political satire has been in a confused state these past five years, since Donald Trump short-circuited it so dramatically that it is yet to recover. It became a cliché to say that the things Trump said and did on a daily basis would have had you laughed out of any writers’ room if you’d invented them. How could you parody a man who, vaccinated against embarrassment by his total absence of humour, parodied himself? Boris Johnson is a very different character — a sense of shambolic comedy is his sword and shield — but similarly hard to spoof because he caricatures himself.

After The Thick of It, Iannucci went to the US and launched Veep, bringing a dissonant note of panic and incompetence to a country where fictional presidents are usually very good (Jed Bartlett from The West Wing) or very bad (Frank Underwood from House of Cards), but generally on top of things either way. He left the show after three seasons in 2015 so that he could direct movies, just in time to avoid having to grapple with the conundrum of a president who made Veep’s Selina Meyer look relatively decent and proficient. David Mandel, his replacement as showrunner, didn’t so much solve the problem as ignore it. Veep remained very funny but it lost much of its relevance by unplugging itself from the wild new reality of Washington DC. It ended in 2019, a few months after House of Cards.

Nothing has come along to replace those shows. The old warhorses of satire roll on — Have I Got News for You and the revived Spitting Image in the UK; Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show in the US (a British version of SNL is in the pipeline). But where are the dramas and scripted comedies? Politics is not where the action is.

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When I interviewed Iannucci recently, he chose Succession and The White Lotus as the most biting satires around. Both shows coolly dissect the callousness of the very rich, and show the casualties they leave behind. Inevitably, some of that wealth comes from tech. Nicole Mossbacher (Connie Britton) in The White Lotus is the CFO of a popular search engine. In this series of Succession, Waystar-Royco’s old-media empire is seeking a life-saving deal with Lukas Mattson (Alexander Skarsgaard), the bored and ruthless CEO of the streaming company GoJo. The most powerful character in Iannucci’s own Avenue 5, a sci-fi sitcom about a society under pressure, is tech billionaire Herman Judd, played by Josh Gad as a vain man-baby. And it’s telling that Adam McKay, whose 2018 movie Vice was a black comedy about Dick Cheney, is making his next picture about Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal.

There’s a novelty factor here. Next to most politicians, the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are fascinatingly weird characters with literally cosmic ambitions. Mark Zuckerberg, in his public appearances, comes off as less a human being than a beta-version AI — a flesh-and-blood demonstration of the uncanny valley. This is good material. Take Christopher Evan Welch in Silicon Valley, whose character Peter Gregory always looked as if he were on the verge of teleporting back to his home planet, Oscar Isaac’s malfunctioning hipster hermit in Ex Machina, or Nick Offerman’s glumly deranged schlub-genius in Devs. Succession’s Lukas Mattson combines a killer instinct with airport-bookstore self-help mantras and the distinct impression that he could tank GoJo’s share price with a single ill-judged tweet composed while tripping at Burning Man.

But tech gurus aren’t just a fun new toy for writers to play with. Satire follows power, and power is not where it was. In Western democracies there is a general sense that politicians are hamstrung and hopeless while tech companies are busy changing the way we communicate, think and act. After a mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, for example, social media companies did far more to dampen Trump’s efforts to overturn the election than Congress did.

Iannucci told me that his final episode of Veep, which ended with a deadlocked electoral college, “seemed to me to sum up where American politics is”, which is to say paralysed. While Joe Biden’s ambitious legislative agenda depends on the vanity of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, Jeff Bezos is flying into space and earning $143,000 a minute. Which man is the more fertile source of both comedy and outrage? In Succession, Logan Roy has the power to bring down one president and handpick another, yet even he is at the mercy of Lukas Mattson’s whims.

Charlie Brooker, who rivals Iannucci as the UK’s most celebrated satirist, was ahead of the curve with Black Mirror, where politics is a sideshow if it features at all. In its very first episode, The National Anthem, broadcast ten years ago this month, the Prime Minister is a sympathetic character who accedes to a horrific televised humiliation for honourable reasons. The real villains of the episode are the people who watch it. Nosedive, the first episode after Black Mirror’s move to Netflix, is a dystopia without a dictator, where lives rise or fall according to an app. In Smithereens, Brooker finally introduced a modern-day tech bro: a pseudo-hippie with a man-bun, evidently modelled on Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, who has lost control of his own creation.

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Brooker is sometimes stereotyped as a grumpy technophobe (“what if phones, but too much,” as one brilliant parody put it), but the world is coming around to his point of view. Who would have thought that a social-media platform that started out by rating the attractiveness of Harvard students would end up, 15 years later, facilitating genocide in Myanmar? There aren’t many takers these days for the old Silicon Valley utopianism. Perhaps the only heroic tech billionaire in popular culture, before his death, was Marvel’s Tony Stark, but his enemies were usually also tech billionaires, so that balanced out nicely.

This antipathy to Big Tech isn’t confined to the screen. In the realm of fiction, its most dogged opponent is probably the American novelist Dave Eggers, who has just published The Every, the hefty sequel to his 2013 bestseller The Circle. Eggers has called smartphones “technological crack” and compared our relationship with technology to “being in a relationship with a very controlling, needy, obsessive person. You’re never free; you’re always paranoid. You’re simultaneously on a leash and under a microscope”.

Several years on, the social media giant The Circle has acquired an online retail platform nicknamed “the jungle” from its spacefaring founder (the thinness of the disguise is a running joke) and rebranded itself as The Every. (The novel was finished, by the way, before Zuckerberg renamed Facebook’s parent company Meta.) True to its name, The Every seeks to permeate and control every nook and cranny of human existence — all for the greater good, of course.

Refuseniks who choose to live outside The Every are labelled “trogs”. Eggers is a proud trog and The Every is an unashamedly old-fashioned novel of ideas. It goes on for too long, as angry people often do, because Eggers has so much to get off his chest. Though ostensibly about the efforts of one employee to infiltrate and destroy the company, it is less a story than a series of conversations about increasingly berserk innovations.

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In a neat satirical twist, the company cloaks its unrelenting assault on personal privacy and freedom in the language of political correctness. It is obsessed with veganism and reducing carbon emissions to the point of demonising pets and bananas. Once something is deemed “problematic”, it is not long for this brave new world where totalitarianism wears a tight smile and shame is a weapon of mass destruction. As for politics, The Every runs the world’s dominant voting software (no account, no vote) and kills the presidential campaign of its leading opponent in just minutes. To The Every, democracy is a bug to be ironed out.

Likewise in the real world, if you really want to look at how the world works, you’re better off writing about a CEO than a president. As Boris Johnson’s hapless behaviour this week showed, a politician as smoothly machiavellian as Frank Underwood or his British predecessor Francis Urquhart would be no more plausible than one with X-ray vision. Perhaps, looking back, the panicky impotence of the characters in The Thick of It and Veep was a sign that political satire was running out of road. The day somebody writes a successful new satire on politics, politicians should welcome it with open arms. It will mean they matter again.

As Arthur C. Clarke put it:“I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings.” It’s a justified parallel. Dune is as central to science-fiction as JRR Tolkien’s masterpiece is to fantasy.

With Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) on general release we finally have a decent film adaptation. Villeneuve has done for Herbert what Peter Jackson did for Tolkien in the Rings trilogy (2001-2003). But dig a bit deeper into the comparisons, and I fear that team Tolkien comes off worse.

Let’s start with the central character in each story: Frodo Baggins in Tolkien’s epic and Paul Atreides in Herbert’s. Both embody the archetype of the reluctant hero. On screen, they’re portrayed by similar actors — Elijah Wood as Frodo and Timothée Chalamet as Paul. These are very much of a type: one part leading man, two parts haunted Victorian doll. Chalamet, though, oozes charisma, while Wood merely gains our sympathy. Score one to Dune. 

Then there’s the rest of the cast — which in the case of Dune meets the multi-ethnic criteria of contemporary film making. The Rings trilogy, almost 20 years older, does not. This is hardly Jackson’s fault — nor Tolkien’s for that matter. There’s an obvious difference in context between a fantasy world inspired by Nordic legend and the galactic melting pot of the far future. 

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As for gender balance, it must be admitted that Tolkien’s tale is a bit of a Boy’s Own adventure. Nevertheless, Jackson did his best to push female characters to the forefront. It hasn’t been so difficult for Villeneuve. For a start, the source material provides more to work with — for instance the “Bene Gesserit”, an order of terrifying space-nuns. Also Villeneuve was able to change the sex of one of the originally male characters, the scientist Liet Kynes, without it making much difference to the plot. I’m not sure Jackson could have done the same to, say, Gandalf. 

Still, such excuses won’t cut much ice with today’s progressives. We can expect their tutting disapproval to be layered on top of previous attacks on Tolkien and everything he supposedly represents. 

Dune is a progressive view of the future — it features a revolution against the established order. Tolkien’s fiction, on the other hand, is portrayed as nostalgic and reactionary — a yearning for a golden age that never existed. After all, what are the Hobbits except idealised Little Englanders who’d have definitely voted for Brexit?

The irony is that Lord of the Rings was once at the cutting edge. Though first published in the mid-1950s, it didn’t become a publishing sensation until a decade later — around the same time as Dune in fact. Both novels achieved cult status with the counterculture of the late 1960s. This was a more comfortable fit for Herbert, the free-thinking Californian, than for Tolkien, the tweedy, Catholic Englishman. Yet the latter did once observe that his political opinions “lean more and more towards Anarchy”.

The narcotic obsessions of the Sixties are lavishly catered for in Dune — whose entire plot (spoilers ahead!) revolves around a perception-altering substance called “Spice”. There is rather less druggery in Tolkien’s fiction, but some have interpreted the “pipeweed” of the Hobbits as consisting of more than tobacco. Certainly, one can see why the hippies were so entranced by the bucolic, laid-back lifestyle of the Shire. 

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A strong current of environmentalism runs through both books. However, while Herbert was a self-taught ecologist, Tolkien’s obvious distaste for industrialisation strikes his critics as sentimental and unsophisticated. Herbert’s ideas appear to be more astute because they’re informed by scientific and technological speculation. Though the events of his novel take place 20,000 years into the future, they clearly relate to the concerns of our own time. 

Let’s start with the desert world of Dune itself, also known as Arrakis. The planet is the only source of the aforementioned Spice — a drug that enables humanity to navigate between the stars. Without it, space travel would be impossible. Wars are therefore fought to control access to this indispensable resource. 

One only has to substitute crude oil for Spice to see what Herbert was getting at. For a book written in the early 1960s — years before oil shocks of the 1970s — he was well ahead of the curve. To drive the point home, his description of Dune and the culture of its native inhabitants is saturated with words and concepts adapted from Arabic and from Islam. 

Herbert tackles some other contemporary concerns — for instance the risks posed by artificial intelligence. In the future he imagines, AI has been forbidden: the most solemn of religious commands is “thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”.

A technology that hasn’t been banned is the “Axlotl Tank” — an organic machine used by a branch of humanity called the “Bene Tleilax” to give birth to clones. The horrible suggestion is that because the Bene Tleilax are exclusively male, the Axlotl Tanks are all that remain of their females. This is the bio-politics of surrogacy taken to its ultimate, ghastly conclusion. 

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You won’t find biting social commentary like that in the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s story was more expansive; it was about something that will never change, which is the corrupting effect of power. Yet this is where Tolkien is superior to Herbert. His heroes — and heroines — pass the test because they refuse to accept the world-changing power that the Ring would confer upon them.

My favourite passage in all of Tolkien is where Frodo freely offers the Ring to Galadriel. For a heart-stopping moment, the elven queen is tempted. It would, after all, be better for her to wear the Ring than the evil Sauron. Yet she understands that she too would be made monstrous by it: “All shall love me and despair!” And so she refuses Frodo’s gift. 

Frank Herbert’s hero, however, does not refuse. There is no actual Ring in Dune, but there is ultimate power. Paul Atreides takes it. Later he has second thoughts, but not before his galactic Jihad has killed sixty billion people and sterilised ninety planets. Bit late to turn pacifist after that. 

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Herbert did say that the “power attracts pathological personalities” and that his stories were meant as a warning that “superheroes are disastrous for mankind”.

And yet in the sequels to Dune, Paul’s son, Leto, takes up where his dad left off. In fact, he turns himself into a giant worm (don’t ask) and imposes an absolute dictatorship on the known universe for next three thousand years. Crucially, Herbert provides him with an excuse — the “Golden Path” — meaning a super-human vision of the best possible future for all mankind. Any unpleasantness along the way is justified by the greater good. 

I think we’ve heard that one before. 

In 1965 Tolkien was sent a copy of Dune. The next year, he was sent another one. Writing back he confessed that he was familiar with the book — and disliked it “with some intensity”. As usual, the old man was right. 

But if this is true, how could we ever translate anything without hopelessly mangling it? If a translation risks twisting or ruining the original, stripping it of nuance or even misrepresenting an idea, then it must be done only with the greatest sensitivity and skill.

This isn’t a problem that concerns only dilettantes and art mavens; ideas, even in translation, can be revolutionary. The dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei describes how his father sought to evade accusations of being anti-communist during the Cultural Revolution by burning the family’s books, including poetry by Pablo Neruda and Rabindranath Tagore. Likewise, just as translated works can be subversive, so they can be evangelical: the world’s most translated text today is the Bible. Whether encouraged in order to spread ideas, or forbidden in order to suppress them, translation is difficult to separate from power.

Predictably, then, the politics of translation have become a culture-war battleground today, with reports that the Dutch writer and poet Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has pulled out of translating Amanda Gorman’s poem for the Biden inauguration. Translation rights to Gorman’s work were hotly contested, and Meulenhof, the publisher that secured them, described Rijneveld, an International Booker Prize winner, as the “dream translator”.

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But Rijneveld’s selection was quickly seized upon by self-styled “cultural activist” Janice Deul, who wrote that Meulenhof should instead “choose a writer who is — just like Gorman — a spoken-word artist, young, female and unapologetically Black”. The implication was that Rijneveld, who is white, would have less insight into Gorman’s life than a Dutch writer who is black. In response, critics of Rijneveld’s decision to step down have objected to this firewalling of cultural artefacts on the basis of skin colour. But such well-trodden culture war arguments can easily obscure the complex power dynamics of translation.

Rabindranath Tagore, whose work Ai Weiwei remembers reading before his father burned the family library, was the first non-white person to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Gitanjali (or Song Offerings) was Tagore’s own translation of 103 of his Bengali verses into English prose, and was described by William Butler Yeats as “the work of a supreme culture”.

Tagore’s Nobel Prize in 1913 certainly widened the previously Eurocentric focus of such awards. Yet despite Tagore’s prolific artistic output and status as giant of the Bengali Renaissance, Gitanjali remains his best-known work outside the subcontinent, the subject of Pinterest pins and YouTube content, precisely because Tagore translated it to English. For, in no small thanks to the political legacy of two successive Anglophone empires, English remains the dominant global language.

This fact sits uncomfortably with the post-imperial and (officially at least) anti-imperialist perspective of modern Britain. Today it is common to feel, somewhat queasily, that the English language has been an irreversible and sometimes harmful imposition on the world: this sentiment even appears in the GCSE English syllabus, in the form of Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations.

Translations depicts the exercise of English colonial power in 1833 rural Ireland, as represented by a group of military surveyors who anglicise Irish place names while making a new map. It directly addresses the fundamentally violent process of using military force to impose a foreign language, and translating the cultural (and physical) terrain of an occupied people into that language.

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Although we decry Britain’s former imperial aggression today, the process Translations describes didn’t come to an end with the dissolution of the British Empire. In Hong Kong, the anglicisation described in Translations has been taking place in reverse since the return of the island to Chinese rule in 1997. As Beijing has tightened its hold, street names and signage have undergone a slow but sure shift from English to Chinese, which is framed explicitly as a process of erasing the British colonial legacy.

The cultural inroads made by empire — and the violence this often entails — are more visible yet when it comes to “translating” people from their native culture to the imperial one. This dates back to ancient Egypt and Rome, when hostages were routinely taken among the children of conquered aristocracies and educated in their conquerors’ culture. The Ottoman Empire turned such translation into a fine art, with the devshirme or “child-levy” system, which took children from subject nations and raised them as the empire’s elite governing class.

Nor was the practice of coercive assimilation abandoned in more modern empires: America in the 19th century saw the creation of boarding schools for Native American children, who were separated from their parents and compelled to study “the habits and arts of civilisation”. And a similar process is underway in China today, with reports emerging of boarding schools in Xinjiang where Uighur children are taught to forget their heritage and embrace loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.

The mixed feelings such assimilationist cultural policies produced among those who experienced them can be seen in the writing of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a Bengali contemporary of Tagore. Born in 1897, Chaudhuri’s boyhood coincided with the burgeoning Indian independence movement, which by then was trickling into schoolbooks.

But far from cheering this process on, in Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951) Chaudhuri describes envying the excerpts of English poetry in his older brother’s textbooks, which he found far more interesting than his own “Indianised” study material. And in The Continent of Circe (1965), Chaudhuri is even more explicit, claiming that “English is not a mere instrument for us but a force shaping and moulding personality”. That is, to argue for a language is to argue for a worldview.

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Having learned to translate my own worldview twice as a child, I never felt entirely “English” even after our return. Indeed, as the ebb and flow of translations follows that of politics, those who have been translated (voluntarily or otherwise) into a hybrid culture can be left radically adrift when the currents change. Chaudhuri was one such: he left India altogether in 1970 for England, explaining: “England is decadent, the young people are savages, but here I can still live according to the lights I have always known.”

The landscape of cultural and imperial power thus flows across places and cultures via literal and figurative processes of translation. And when we think of translation in these terms, it becomes clear that the quarrel over who translates Gorman’s poem isn’t a matter of race or marginalisation at all, so much as of imperial court politics.

Amanda Gorman’s work has been broadcast around the world from the nation that remains — in however battered a condition — the world’s pre-eminent superpower. She is not marginalised. In terms of pure cultural clout, she’s a heavy hitter, in the world’s top nation, writing in the world’s dominant language. Rijneveld, on the other hand, is a relatively obscure writer and poet, working in a language spoken by a mere 23 million people.

Being a trendy figure in Dutch literature has nothing on being America’s premier court poet. And so winning the job of translating Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem is less white appropriation than the scoring of an immense honour — one that was, in fact, conferred by Gorman herself, who personally selected Rijneveld for the job.

Deul’s intervention was not a move to amplify marginalised people so much as the use of a fashionable argument to redirect a desirable opportunity toward her own social network. (Her article names several of her personal friends whom she thinks would be more suitable than Rijneveld.) That is, it was less a fightback against imperial power than an intra-class skirmish for perks and status.

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Much of the currently fashionable “decolonisation” agenda that excites so much conservative commentary can be understood in a similar framework; as a process of imperial translation, with a new order reorganising the ideas and artefacts of alien cultures to suit its own priorities.

The lesson to draw from this isn’t that all empires are evil by definition, but that all of them exercise power literally, via coercive means, and also culturally via the spread and translation of ideas and ways of life. We may bridle at the new woke American anti-imperialist imperialism, gasp at the ruthlessness of the Chinese drive to assimilate its minorities, or recoil at the atrocities committed by the British empire. But the uncomfortable fact is that such forces are also the deep drumbeat of the most long-lasting achievements in human history.

The only way to avoid this drumbeat, in all its brutality, would be to end imperialism full stop, which history suggests isn’t going to happen. And even if it did, it would likely mean the end of art and culture. Is that a price worth paying? The intense competition for the right to cling to Amanda Gorman’s coattails suggests not even today’s self-styled woke anti-imperialists really want to give up the imperial power of literature. They’re just fighting over who gets to wield it.

SG Maclean is a historian who lives on the Black Isle in Scotland, which isn’t actually an island. She writes very good crime fiction set in Oliver Cromwell’s England, which isn’t just about Cromwell’s England. She wins prizes for her novels, and deserves more fame to go with them. Especially among people in politics.

On the face of it, Maclean’s Seeker novels are about Damian Seeker, a Yorkshire soldier for Cromwell who becomes the leading enforcer for the Protectorate’s domestic intelligence operation. Slowly and subtly over several books, Maclean explores the essential tension here: how can a fundamentally decent man serve a regime he increasingly recognises as falling short of his own high moral standards?

Seeker’s answers are instructive: because he fought for them once, and against another lot who were worse. But that is not enough to sustain — or deserve — lasting loyalty.

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It is the theme of loyalty that makes the Seeker novels good reading for politicians, who always need to understand why people support causes — and why they stop.

In the end of the series — so far, at least, for there is hope she will write more — Maclean shows Seeker’s break with the collapsing Cromwell regime not as a grand gesture or an exercise in psychodrama but rather the way real people make big decisions — with a resigned shrug.

Cromwell’s story deserves more attention in the Britain that voted for Brexit. It’s a reminder that, no matter what we tell ourselves about our phlegmatic stability, Britain does indeed do revolutions. Cromwell, of course, was no radical from outside the system. A son of the gentry who sat in Parliament, he led a cause that united disgruntled notables and true grassroots revolutionaries — for instance, the Levellers, who were to be marginalised and bitterly disappointed by Cromwell in power.

Maclean’s hero is part of that non-conformist tradition, a Seeker by faith as well as name, he was part of a small, obscure sect before shifting his faith to Cromwell’s cause and its defence against scheming royalists plotting to restore the dissolute Stuart monarchy.

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Such royalists are still a major presence in the England Maclean guides her readers through. Because no revolutionary regime can make its opponents simply disappear — accommodations must be made. The Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell makes regular appearances as an agent of Seeker’s intelligence operation. Marvell’s precise loyalties were and are unclear: he lionised leading Royalists, but then worked for Thomas Fairfax, the great parliamentary general.

We also meet a young Samuel Pepys, another parliamentarian who converted to Royalism when Cromwell died in 1658.

When that death comes, Seeker is in Bruges tracking the royalist cells that made that city their base while supporting the young Charles Stuart in his designs on the throne amid the shifting backdrop of European politics. This is the setting for the fifth and most recent Seeker novel, The House of Lamentations. It’s a nice way to illustrate the international dimensions of turmoil in British government, as well as a reminder that British leadership worrying about European plots is not a new thing.

The Seeker novels’ lessons for today’s rulers are numerous.  Perhaps the biggest is that taking power is easy enough — just win some big battles — but keeping it is much harder. In the end, the stars of the series are the ordinary folk who lent their support to Cromwell and his cause, but then, tired and resigned, welcome back the Stuart monarchy, albeit briefly. It’s a reminder that while elites take politics and government very seriously, the public on whom those things ultimately depend generally don’t pay too much attention, instead just getting on with their lives. Revolutions are easy to declare but hard to sustain.

This week, children across the country will be heading back to school; we asked our contributors to do the same. In this series, our writers share some lessons they learned at school – and how it shaped the way they think about education today.

I went to Eton. I am – here, he cringes in anticipation of a blow – an Old Etonian. Given the visibility of Old Etonians in our public life, and the widespread and understandable view that their influence has not been entirely for the good, I make this confession hesitantly when I make it at all.

Nobody wants to admit to “privilege” – but privileged we all, without any doubt, were. Had I not gone to Eton (I make, here, the disclaimer that I was a scholarship boy, in the hopes of claiming that I at least in part earned the privilege), I would not have had access to the cascade of educational wonderments I did enjoy.

You could not, not in a million years, claim plausibly that this was just another school – still less that it does not confer a vast and unfair advantage to its alumni, over the alumni of even the best schools in the state system. Yes, we all dressed like penguins and tourists pointed at us. But it was a small price to pay.

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