Reinforcing the sense of something in the water, or perhaps stars, at the time of their conception, both movies contain a notably similar scene. In each, the female lead (Dunst in Melancholia, Marling in Another Earth) presents herself as a nighttime sexual offering — open and waiting — to the impending planet. In each, the scene is gratuitous (in neither does cosmic penetration advance the plot), and as such essentially meaning-bearing. Both women are shown in an act of partly purgatorial, yet heroic, death-inviting-and-defying self-abandon.  

I do not know if the poet, astrologer, and 1990s cinema enthusiast Emmalea Russo had either movie in mind when composing her second novel, The Moon Papers, but it, too, is concerned with the arrival of a new celestial body. Granted, in Russo’s case, “Moon2” is artificial — an inflatable polyethylene contraption “one eighth as large” as the real moon and having “a strong analog vibe,” launched as an art project by the Mojave-based Collective for Constant Creation (“CCC”). Yet despite differences in tone, the three works share a mood — dispersed misgiving, sometimes accompanied by millenarian hopes — and also a specific interest in resonances between the celestial bodies and women’s sexual power. Each asks if these occult forces ought to be honored and even worshipped, or somehow tamed. For The Moon Papers, this also means meditating on the dark powers of art.  

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Against the background of the upcoming Moon2 launch, the novel’s main action unfolds in two settings: the Mojave Desert, where we follow Dean Konig, a disaffected member of the CCC; and rural Pennsylvania, home of Velour Bellmer, a 68-year-old pack rat and her daughter, Vesta Furio. Velour lives alone in a decaying mansion cluttered with antique furniture; Vesta, a painter, lives with her husband, Lars Arden, a gallerist three decades her senior, but is carrying on a cross-continental affair with Dean. Video calls grant the adulterous duo visual access to each other’s spaces: Vesta to the CCC compound, Dean to Vesta’s secret second painting studio, where she lets him watch her work. Meanwhile, a bat infestation in Velour’s attic draws local bat specialist Radko, who informs her she is hosting the “maternity colony” of an endangered species, which he cannot legally disturb. And so, in this ambiance of multiform gestation — natural and artificial, publicized and clandestine — the characters wait and Eros flickers. Radko and Velour feel attraction’s pull, despite their discrepant ages and his marriage to Chloe, a psychotherapist; Dean, unobserved by the husband, jacks off to Vesta’s video calls of herself fucking Lars. Lars, absorbed in his gallery work but sensing something is up, overrides his distaste for surveillance and plants a hidden camera in the potted cactus.    

Most of these characters are returnees from Russo’s 2024 debut novel Vivienne, to which The Moon Papers is a kind of sequel. The Vivienne Volker of that novel was inspired by the historical Unica Zürn, lover of the surrealist puppet maker Hans Bellmer; at its center was a story about an artist’s cancelation. Vivienne, a textile artist in her 80s when the novel opens, had been slated to appear in a group show of “Forgotten Women Surrealist Artists,” until an online pressure campaign — wittily rendered in the novel’s opening pages by Russo, herself the object of a bizarre cancelation campaign in 2023 — results in her removal. The ostensible primary motive for the campaign is that of imposing “consequences” — for having allegedly incited another woman artist, her husband’s lover, to jump to her death decades earlier. But Volker’s accusers also wish to avoid the harms posed by the “violent nature of her work,” doll clothing whose innovations include cloth intestines and an embryo pinned to the stomach of a dress. Once the renegade gallerist Lars snatches up Vivienne’s work for a solo show, however, all turns out for the best — at least until one last act of mob vindictiveness. In the process, Lars gets acquainted with both Velour and the then 7-year-old Vesta. An epilogue shows Vesta at 18, rolling up to the desert compound of the CCC, newly married to Lars.  

Vivienne distinguished itself with its pitch-perfect parody of 2020s art world safetyism, from the social media chatter that punctuates it like a tragic chorus to the embedded press release that declares “this is not an act of censorship. At the NAT Museum, we seek to foster artistic freedom in an atmosphere of safety. Wherever possible, we seek to reduce art-induced distress.” The novel’s deepest insight, however, that which lifted it above satire into vision, was to see in the acts of its dispersed internet chorus the most primal repudiation: essentially, a repudiation of nature, in its bloodiness and wildness, as embodied by Vivienne and her art. The primal “contamination” — to take up the theme of Russo’s essay on her own cancelation — was by the feminine principle. 

Vivienne thus proposed an analogy between artistic and gestational creation, as revealed by the efforts of the internet mob to control both, a mission that the CCC takes up at the end of the book. Vivienne’s closing pages depict a CCC project that sees comatose women used as gestation chambers for new births. “Our work transforms the often unnecessarily messy and risky process of creating new life,” a leaked memo reads: “By taking reproduction out of the hands of chance and into the luxury of our desert facility, the CCC fosters safety and equity, while de-emphasizing the role of capricious and often harmful nature.” The stage is thus set for The Moon Papers, in which we see the CCC advertising a “fellowship” offering artists “VCs (voluntary comas) as vacations,” likewise for purposes of parturition. 

Don’t let the CCC’s self-presentation as an arts “collective” fool you: it far more resembles Michel Houellebecq’s sterile ultramodern Europe than, say, the Big Sur hippie commune of his novel The Elementary Particles. In an apt parody of modern NGOism, the CCC is both nominally non-hierarchical and — in a Philip K. Dickian touch — funded by the shadowy Voortelle Corporation, as well as by the government (thus yielding the running gag, spanning both novels, as to whether its members have “bosses”). Any conceptual resonance between the CCC’s artificial moon and Vivienne’s detachable embryo, stapled to a dress and doubling as a purse, merely highlights the difference between these two modes of artistic creation. 

In a strange way, though, the CCC’s existence attests to a continuing need for art and religion, even in the most degraded circumstances. The spirit, it seems, must externalize itself. A collective devoted to the technological manipulation of the birthing process seems to yearn for some emblem of its reversal of nature. This is what “Moon2” provides. Both literally and figuratively a mockery, it symbolizes the aspiration to mastery by duplicating, usurping, and thereby seeking to tame the cosmic symbol of the feminine and mutable. This will to power is captured in a witty detail when Russo shows a member of an internal CCC chat reminding another member that their project aims to displace the terminology one would have previously taken for granted: “You’re forgetting that we rolled out the phrase Moon1.”

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The dubious conceptual project of the CCC is not the only artwork considered in Russo’s novel, however. Toward the end, the prevailing opposition between openness to the natural and attempts to restrict it — a dynamic also played out in Radko and Velour’s negotiations over the bats in her attic — reveals a new axis. This centers on the gallerist Lars, perhaps the most sympathetic of the novel’s characters, who represents a cussedly populist spirit opposed to the petty and conformist pretensions of the art world. (He is for much of the book a lone voice calling bullshit on the CCC.) Lars has spent most of the book waiting, with increasing impatience, for Vesta’s new paintings so he can include them in his next show. He gets more than he bargained for — a series of intimate nudes, unmistakably of Dean Konig, produced without either Vesta’s lover’s awareness or her husband’s, blowing the lid off both their affair and the inner sanctum of the CCC.  

The strange permissions of art let Vesta turn a real affair — if her digital escapades count as one — into at once a genuine work of art and an act of infiltration, each of which paradoxically plays to the sympathies of her husband, and might thereby bring her closer to him. In its implied endorsement of Vesta’s acts, the novel thus ends up being a defense of a more traditional art — call it exploratory or Romantic — linked to Eros. Yet if Vesta’s paintings amount to “evidence” (as Lars can’t help but recognize) of their origins in illicit acts, they are not reducible to them. Both embodied and transcendent, such art is unsettling and ambiguous, far more so than the ponderous travesty of “Moon2.” The novel’s ultimate contrast is thus between art that is, so to speak, officially anti-authoritarian and art that opens itself to the dark forces of creation and love. 

In moving beyond Vivienne’s cancelation plot, Russo seems, it must be said, to have decided against having much plot at all. With its chill vibe and reduced narrative drive, The Moon Papers feels at times like a set of thematic variations — a minor dependent satellite — upon its formidable precursor. Particularly toward the end, however, Russo’s second novel acquires a lunar intensity of its own. One awaits the next turn of the tide. 

This is the 21st-century vision of play: it’s safe, organised, educational, always supervised by adults. And it might have killed off what we used to think of as play: kids running around whatever space they could find, improvising unpredictable games and creating social worlds unfathomable to their parents.

Children are far less free than they used to be. While 71% of Boomers and 80% of Gen X recall playing in the street as children, only 27% of children do today. And last week, MPs heard evidence in an inquiry into how the built environment restricts children’s independence, with charities warning that a lack of outdoor play is very bad for their development.

In urbanised environments, where land is at an all-time premium, finding a place to run around can be a challenge. One in eight children don’t have a garden and nearly 800 playgrounds have closed in the past decade. But this doesn’t account for the precipitous collapse of playing on the street, when roads are more regulated and safer than ever before. Nor does it acknowledge that there are still 16,000 playgrounds maintained by local authorities in the UK, and 27,000 parks. There must be some other factors at work.

Having a child is generally perceived as harder than it used to be. In three quarters of families in which the parents are together, both of them work. And childcare costs have risen precipitously. There has been an attendant boom in helicopter parenting, with couples more focused than ever on the details of their kids’ development. Their aim is to optimise their lives — and excise all bad externalities.

But this safetyist instinct does have blind spots. While parents might be grilled in A&E if they bring in their child with a minor injury from climbing a tree; nobody tells you off for parking your toddler on the iPad for half an hour that turns into half a day. If your kids are a bit pallid from spending more time online than outside, that’s accepted as normal. Safeguarding culture is obsessed with preventing tangible, acute injuries such as cuts and bruises, but the slower chronic harms that emerge over years are often ignored — even though we know, and lament, that children are increasingly less physically and mentally healthy.

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At the heart of this issue is whether children are free to exercise their instincts. Dutch cultural theorist Johan Huizinga saw play as primal: just like any other young animal, children have an intrinsic drive to play, and don’t need to be taught how to do it.  Huizinga defines play as an act of self-directed freedom. It can only really happen when children are left to their own devices, which requires parents to ignore them.

To modern helicopter parents, this can feel counterintuitive. We are increasingly uncomfortable about our children’s discomfort: the influence of safetyism can be seen in how we approach their emotional lives as well as their corporeal ones. Parents worry that boredom is bad — when actually, it is an important learning experience. It’s a transitional space in which the child realises that she needs to do something differently. She might then try to attract a parent’s attention. If she doesn’t get it, she gets fractious; if she is still ignored, she eventually finds something else to do. If we leave that novelty-seeking impulse to develop, it turns into creativity. It just needs time.

This is increasingly difficult, though, now that we all have distraction machines in the palms of our hands. Most adults won’t choose the disgruntlement of boredom over the abundance of synthetic novelties on offer online — which makes it hard to admonish a child for seeking the Xbox or the iPad rather than inventing their own forms of entertainment.

And it’s true that when play involves temporary social orders, it brings discomfort with it. Playing out in the street means muddling along with whoever else is out there; it means trying — and often failing — to assert one’s role in an emergent group, which might be big, and include kids who are taller and older and cleverer. When children play structured games, whether it’s hide and seek or a ball game or soldiers fighting in the trenches, they have to abide by the rules of engagement — and deal with losing.

In other words, play is a good warm-up for life. But, crucially, it doesn’t take place for material or real-world gain. The goals exist outside of the goals we ordinarily strive for, and they evaporate. Kids need to be emotionally committed enough to want to win, but not so invested that they kick off when they don’t. At a time when children spend years of their lives being examined and graded in school, there’s benefit in both learning to strive and learning to let go.

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True play also teaches kids how to deal with uncertainty. So argued the French sociologist Roger Caillois, who built on Huizinga’s theory, emphasising that play isn’t predetermined, but animated by chaos. Hence why play necessarily comes with risk. Now, children are far more likely to engage in a sort of pseudo-play, either in the form of online games, which are pipelines of reliable and predictable dopamine hits, or educational games, which are led by the parent or teacher rather than by children themselves, and where the goals are geared towards real-world pedagogical gain. Whereas Huizinga argued that play happens outside of ordinary life — and is therefore a kind of anarchy — pseudo-play conforms entirely to conventional structures, whether it’s the gaming-industrial complex or the lifestyle capitalism promoting Important Experiences.

The forest schools and educational toys and tasteful wooden games that sneakily give kids lessons about biodiversity or engineering or maths may be wholesome, even captivating, but they’re anything but self-organising. We see this in the adult world of play, too. A festival was once a break from normal social order — a temporary, wild otherworld. Now, it’s a luxurious curated experience. Whereas play, for Caillois, was “an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money”, now, everything has to be optimised. But what happens when we’re not allowed to be wasteful? When all our earliest memories are goal-oriented, outcome-focused, organised?

A therapist friend who works with students at a nearby high-performing university observes that they often arrive burnt out and depressed. He’ll ask them what is meaningful to them, what their vision of a better life would be. They’ll go silent, confused. Deciding that, surely, is his job? Their motivation for going to therapy isn’t to find meaning — it is the knowledge that you need to look after your mental health in order to be productive. His strategy is to be playful with them, which rattles them at first, but they soon soften into it. Their thinking relaxes, and they start to find new avenues out of their malaise.

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Play, then, is an essential part of growing up — and, later, of life. For Huizinga, play was a sign of the “mind breaking down the determinism of the cosmos”, of a person forging their own path. Hence why play is getting harder: the techno-capitalist society we currently inhabit militates against autonomy; if people are to be interchangeable units of labour in a bigger machine, they have to do as they’re told. And so it sets out clear performance indicators for us, a tick-list of achievements in our roles as children, parents, workers and social beings, from which deviation feels like failure.

If we lose autonomy, we tend to lose faith in ourselves. For parents, this can manifest as fear: what if my child is unhappy, what if they get hurt, what if I haven’t done enough for them? Letting go is the best way to point children towards the path to a fulfilling life. Providing space for them to play isn’t just about parks and gardens — it’s about knowing when to trust them to work things out for themselves, and to cope when things go wrong.

The first happened, but the second didn’t even come close. To describe Terminal One that Thursday night as a shitshow is unfair to shitshows, which are at least darkly entertaining. This was bureaucratic hell: lines of exhausted travellers snaking out into dreary linoleum hallways festooned with disconcertingly cheery posters welcoming us to NYC. It took close to an hour to even reach the main hall, and then we endured another hour of slow shuffling up to the 10 or so border security agents.

Ever since I began my project to walk around the world, it has always been jarring to come home to the US, often from much poorer countries — in this case Bulgaria — to find that our infrastructure is infinitely worse. Of course, flying internationally is still a luxury, and complaining about it is a bit elitist. I really wish the US, and JFK in particular, would make an effort to meet global standards of air travel — but it was what happened after I left the airport that convinced me that America, and especially NYC, is broken.

After crashing at a friend’s house not far from JFK, I got up to take a 4:39am subway train to the Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan, so I could catch the first bus home. The train, to be fair, was on time. But it was filthy. The carriages were mostly empty, except for three or four homeless guys in each who were either sleeping or passed-out. The dozen or so of us who got on at the first stop chose our seats carefully, positioning ourselves close to each other, for safety, and as far as possible from the sprawled-out guys and their piles of trash and puddles of urine.

The train slowly filled at each subsequent stop, until it was standing room only. I was seemingly the only person on the train who didn’t have to be there. Ride a NYC subway from the outer boroughs at 4am and you’ll find that it’s jammed with overnight construction workers, office cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel employees — all coming from late shifts, or going to early shifts, carrying tool bags, hard hats, work clothes. The “help” coming in and out of the city. United in fatigue and quiet frustration with the squalor, with the unconscious men taking up multiple seats.

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I thought about Sofia, where the subways and buses — and other public spaces and resources — are so much cleaner, safer, and smoother. Where workers simply wanting to get to their jobs don’t have to deal with navigating the mentally ill, addicted and desperate every day. For context, the GDP of Manhattan alone is about nine times that of the entire nation of Bulgaria. But NYC’s problems only seem to be getting worse, especially for those who have the least. I don’t have to take the subway; I have the cash for an Uber. But I try to see, and to understand a little, the world as most people see and understand the world.

And what I see is that, in the US, larger cities are basically two-tiered. A wealthy downtown professional class relies on inexpensive labourers who can’t afford to live near their workplace or drive a car; who are forced into long commutes on public transport systems in terminal decline.

Eventually, that morning, a guy covered in old vomit and carrying a cane, his trousers only just above his knees, got onto the subway train, and went up and down each carriage, hitting every sleeping or passed-out guy on the legs, yelling at them to move on, to give the rest of us some space. Everyone else pretended it wasn’t happening, hoping it wouldn’t go south, focusing instead on the floor or their phones.

And nothing “bad” did happen, beyond a few raised voices and some pantomime air punches. We all got where we needed to go.

But having garbage-strewn subways that effectively serve as mobile homeless shelters is no way to run a public transit system. It isn’t fair on the riders who don’t have the money to avoid the subway. It also isn’t fair to the homeless, who are being encouraged — or at least not discouraged — to hang out on crowded trains, maximising the chances that bad stuff will happen. The Daniel Penny-Jordan Neely case was a horrifying example. The death, on Sunday, of a man who tried to break up a fight on a Manhattan-bound subway train may be another. NYC’s authorities, even if they tried, couldn’t design a better system to provoke a nasty backlash against addiction, mental illness and homelessness.

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But this isn’t just an East Coast problem. Last May, city officials in Los Angeles proudly announced a new kind of bus stop to address rider complaints by providing “shade and lighting”. They called in La Sombrita — and were promptly and roundly mocked by Twitter users, who pointed out that it’s a sad provider of both light and shade. I mean, just look at it. At best it provides shade for one person, maybe. As for the light, I’m not sure how it is any different from your standard streetlamp?

And then there was the expense. It was claimed that each La Sombrita came to $10,000, although the research that went into designing it is said to have cost well over $300,000. That process included junkets to foreign cities, to see what works, including Quito in Ecuador, a city I’ve spent a fair amount of time in. I can tell you, Quito doesn’t have these sad things.

I’m not saying LA shouldn’t be doing something about bus stops. While the city has a surprisingly extensive system, with clean and comfortable buses, the stops themselves can be pretty terrible: a pole by the side of a road under an underpass that reeks of urine, or a simple bench in the glaring sun. But that they came up with La Sombrita as the solution — and announced it so proudly — is depressing, and another revealing example of America’s much bigger problem: its inability to build nice things.

One of the forces that influenced LA authorities, though they won’t admit it, is homelessness. They built La Sombrita, rather than a proper bus shelter, for the same reason NYC is taking benches out of Port Authority: they don’t want people to sleep there. It’s something you see more and more in American cities: a locking down of public spaces in an attempt to deal with the growth of the homeless population. A removal of resources for the majority, because of concerns over “misuse” by less than 1% of residents.

I’m not saying those concerns aren’t well-founded. Benches become unusable if someone is sleeping or pissing on them. But removing them is a cowardly way to cope with a problem that authorities are otherwise not wanting, or able, to address.

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To get big-brained about it, something like La Sombrita could only happen in a high-regulation/low-trust society like the US. If regulations massively limit both bottom-up and top-down solutions, and if those solutions are expected to protect against all sorts of bad behaviour, you end up building the least to mitigate the worst — building things the majority doesn’t want, or doesn’t find useful.

The high-regulation part of the US is usually couched in the language of safety, but it’s really about not allowing organic growth, which is messy — even though, people being people, it tends to result in things the majority really wants. Ecuador, by contrast, is a low-regulation (although low-trust) society: here, you get ad hoc, bottom-up solutions. If there is a bus stop in the middle of nowhere, without natural shade around it, riders rig an umbrella to a pole, or throw some old seats under a tree. In the US, such solutions would be dismantled within days.

But also, in places like Quito, bus stops attract street vendors, who come with umbrellas, making people feel safer by their very presence. LA has some of that, but it’s against the letter of the law, and vendors are constantly hassled with fines, or threats of shutdowns. My favourite taco place was closed down twice during my short stint in LA, for bureaucratic reasons. All this is to say that in Quito getting the bus is a much more pleasant experience than in LA — even though the latter city is roughly 10 times richer than Ecuador, and the latter has its own serious troubles.

Regulations themselves aren’t the problem, though. Germany, like much of northern Europe, is a high-regulation society, but it’s also high-trust, compared to the US. Here, nice and fully functional things are built without fear of misuse. For Americans, who have both a high-regulation and low-trust society, this is all rather depressing; it’s the combination that means we can’t have nice things.

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I like to live here, but the reality is we are rapidly falling behind the rest of the world in liveability, especially when you adjust for our wealth. Our cities are being frozen in time by an absurd, centralised regulatory mindset, which sees human flourishing as dirty and unsafe, and seems determined to wring out the last drops of any soul from our urban spaces. A mindset that manifests as one useless La Sombrita at a time.

It’s not that I’m worried about Americans moving overseas. That’s a luxury most don’t have — or want. I’m worried that authorities don’t feel compelled to provide citizens with towns and cities that work, and feel safe, and offer slivers of shade and corners that don’t smell of piss. But I’m also worried about the cultural forces that have got us here: that they allow the tolerably well-off to ignore the plight of those who are forced to depend on public services. The regulatory mindset is a problem that can be easily changed; the more pernicious part is that we are now firmly a low-trust society, and social trust impacts everything — every facet of life — and it can’t simply be legislated back. Like a ratchet wheel, once social trust comes undone, it spins quickly out of control, and getting it wound back is a long, arduous, and complex process.

I wish we could stop it from spinning too much further out of control, but I’m not particularly hopeful. The first step would be to realise that something is wrong, and right now a lot of people in the US seem determined to deny we have a problem. Why complain, when you can just order an Uber to avoid the subway?

1. Preference Falsification
If people are afraid to say what they really think, they will instead lie. Therefore, punishing speech — whether by taking offence or by threatening censorship — is ultimately a request to be deceived.

2. The Opinion Pageant
The rise of social media as the primary mode of interaction has caused us to overvalue opinions as a gauge of character. We are now defined more by what we say than what we actually do, and words, unlike deeds, are easy to counterfeit.

3. Limbic Capitalism
Capitalism needs us to keep buying, and the best way to keep us buying is to get us addicted — to food, drugs, porn, news. Our brains are being violently overstimulated as businesses compete to obsess us; the market is slowly turning us into mindless dopamine-junkies.

4. Path Dependence
The Qwerty keyboard layout was a misguided attempt to stop typewriters jamming, but, despite being inefficient for typing, it’s endured into the digital age, because we all just accepted it as the norm. We become blind to so many problems because we let them become part of life.

5. Firehosing
In the past, the purpose of disinformation was to convince you of a single narrative. In the digital age, the purpose of disinfo is to overwhelm you with many contradictory narratives until you start to doubt everything and become confused, demoralised and passive.

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6. Dartmouth Scar
In 1980, social psychologist Robert Kleck told his research subjects they’d engage in a study to test discrimination. He painted scars on some of their faces, and then had them attend job interviews. The participants with scars painted on their faces reported feeling discriminated against for their looks. However, unknown to them, their scars had been removed before they entered the interviews. It would seem we can be victimised by the mere belief that we’re a victim.

7. Bias Blindspot
Whenever I write about a bias or fallacy, I’ll receive replies from Leftists claiming it explains Rightist views and Rightists claiming it explains Leftist views. Not once has someone claimed it explains their own side’s views. The belief that bias is just something that affects our opponents is our greatest source of bias.

8. Shiny Object Syndrome
We’re drawn to whatever’s new, because in our evolutionary history new info tended to matter. But now it doesn’t, because 99% of new info is clickbait, mass-produced and rushed out to exploit our attraction to novelty. So stop chasing the new and seek info that’s stood the test of time.

9. Dysrationalia
Just because someone is intelligent, it doesn’t mean their intelligence is pursuing intelligent goals. It’s possible to devote a genius-level intelligence to justifying idiotic opinions and behaviours. Tragically, a common fate of intellectuals.

10. Fanbaiting
Ideas that divide spread further than ideas everyone agrees with. Film studios portray a white character or historical figure as black, which stokes outrage and divides the internet, and as everyone complains or defends it, they all unwittingly publicise the movie.

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11 Licensing Effect
Believing you’re good can make you behave badly. Those who consider themselves virtuous worry less about their own behaviour, making them more susceptible to ethical lapses. A big cause of immorality is self-righteous morality.

12. Switch Cost Effect
We simultaneously inhabit two worlds — online and off — and both regularly interrupt us with demands/notifications, so we’re never able to settle in either. The constant switching of attention apparently lowers working IQ by around 10 points, dumbifying us twice as much as being high on cannabis.

13. St. George in Retirement Syndrome
Many who fight injustice come to define themselves by their fight against injustice. So, as they defeat the injustice, they must invent new injustices to fight against, simply to retain a sense of purpose in life.

14. Goodhart’s Law
When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure. Since schools started to use test-scores as targets, they’ve gradually stopped teaching kids how to live fulfilling lives — and now mainly teach them how to pass school tests.

15. Hotelling’s Law
Rival products — burgers, pop songs, political parties — tend to grow more alike over time, because creators copy more successful rivals to steal their customers or audiences. Paradoxically, this increases the value of being different.

16. Segal’s Law
“A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 watches is never sure.” Ancient societies followed a single narrative. Modern societies are cacophonies of competing narratives. Without trust, more data doesn’t make us more informed but more confused.

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17. Parkinson’s Law
Work expands to fill the time allotted for it. No matter the size of the task, it will often take precisely the amount of time you set aside to do it, because more time means more deliberation and procrastination. The underlying principle, known as induced demand, applies to many other resources: software expands to fill memory (Wirth’s law), patient numbers expand to fill hospital beds (Roemer’s law), energy consumption expands to meet supply (Jevon’s paradox), road congestion expands to fill roads (Braess’ paradox).

18. Pareidolia
We see whatever we look for. For aeons, survival favoured the paranoid — those able to discern a predator from the vaguest outline. From these survivors we inherited hyperactive pattern-detection, which once saved us from the lions, but now curses us to see them even in the skies.

19. Safetyism
After US schools banned peanuts because some kids had allergies, more kids developed peanut allergies from lack of exposure. We’re increasingly protecting kids from life, which only makes them more vulnerable to it. Too much safety is dangerous.

20. Nutpicking
Online political debate mainly involves cherry-picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy. The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side’s lunatics.

21. Celine’s 1st Law
National security is the chief cause of national insecurity. Government attempts to stop a threat to security lead it to draft harsher laws and to spy on its citizens, which eventually becomes a greater threat than that which it’s protecting against.

22. Problem Selling
Problem solvers take an issue and break it down into small solvable chunks. Problem sellers — such as politicians, or the press — do the opposite, blaming many small issues on one big problem that looks insurmountable and terrifying.

23. Idiocy Saturation
Online, people who don’t think before they post are able to post more often than people who do. As a result, the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user. 

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24. Celine’s 2nd Law
Honest communication occurs only between equals. If one person has power over another, then the less powerful person can’t risk saying what they really think. Thus, in any hierarchy, honest communication only occurs horizontally.

25. Crabtree’s Bludgeon
It’s possible to create a coherent explanation for any set of observations — even ones that are mutually contradictory. In other words, there is at least one seemingly rational argument to justify even the most idiotic bullshit. So be careful.

26. Presentism
We judge history by modern standards. We regard slave-owners as evil, but slavery was so common and familiar to our forebears that they were blind to its iniquities, as we are to the industrial slaughter of animals — for which we too will eventually be called evil.

27. Cynical Genius Illusion
Cynical people are widely seen as smarter, but sizeable research suggests they actually tend to be dumber. Cynicism is not a sign of intelligence but a substitute for it, a way to shield oneself from betrayal and disappointment without having to do or think.

28. Boxer’s Child Paradox
Each generation tries to make life better for the next, but this deprives future generations of the ordeals needed to build character. In our relentless quest for ever more convenience, are we dooming posterity to weakness?

Suggested reading

The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

29. Ambiguity Aversion
A 2016 study found that test participants who were told they had a small chance of receiving an electric shock exhibited much higher stress levels than those who knew they’d certainly receive an electric shock. People tend to find uncertain outcomes less tolerable than bad outcomes.

30. Semantic Stopsign
One way people end discussions is by disguising descriptions as explanations. For instance, the word “evil” is used to explain behaviour but really only describes it. It resolves the question not by creating understanding but by killing curiosity.

31. Opinion Shopping
Many who conduct research online ignore every source they disagree with till they find one they agree with, and then use this source as an authority to justify what they already believe. They don’t consider someone an expert unless they agree with them.

32. Compassion Fade
“One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” When presented with two appeals for charity — one based on famine statistics and one based on a single starving girl — people tend to donate much more to the girl. Our minds can’t grasp big numbers, so we navigate the world through stories, not statistics. We’re moved by drama, not data.

33. Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity
Evil can be guarded against. Stupidity cannot. And the world’s few evil people have little power without the help of the world’s many stupid people. Therefore, stupidity is a far greater threat than evil.

This is an edited version of lists that first appeared on The Prism.

Since we now do so much online, governments obviously feel that the law should apply to the online world as it does to the offline world. In general, it already does. The Malicious Communications Act of 1988, for example, covered both online and offline communications. Existing laws can also be used to prosecute crimes that institutions and companies might commit in the virtual realm — including fraud, libel, or failing to uphold their own professional standards.

But the translation between the actual and the virtual isn’t seamless. Technology means we do things differently. Instead of a pub conversation which is heard in context, in person, and only by those present, social media conversations can be spread to an audience of millions and survive for decades. School bullies can message their victims day and night. News and opinions can be found with the twitch of a thumb, with no editorial board responsible for tone, taste or checking of sources.

So the Online Safety Bill,  promises to establish “a new regulatory regime to address illegal and harmful content online”. It would do this by imposing legal duties on providers of specific internet services: search engines, platforms for pornographic content, and “user-to-user services”.

Video Sharing Platforms (VSPs) established in the UK are already subject to Ofcom regulation, which requires them to protect the public from illegal content, and under 18s from “videos and adverts containing material that might impair their physical, mental or moral development”. This means TikTok, Vimeo and OnlyFans are all covered. The new legislation would expand both the type of user-to-user platform, and the scope of content, that might be deemed harmful. It especially targets the kind of user-generated content that has not already fallen under the regulatory net. However, rather than the Government trying to explicitly regulate what is said, shown and shared online, it plans to delegate that task to the platform providers, overseen by Ofcom through agreed codes of conduct.

From the start, the language of the Bill has been that of harm, safety and danger. Service providers must carry out risk assessments, and then have a “duty of care” to take reasonable steps against these risks. This approach was first proposed by Professor Lorna Woods and William Perrin in 2018, drawing on health and safety regulation and the “precautionary principle”, which emerged from German environmentalism in the Eighties, and essentially preaches: first ask about the risks of harm, rather than unforeseen opportunities. Woods and Perrin laid the blame for the internet’s worst features at the door of companies who designed systems to engage ever-larger audiences and make ever-larger profits. They regarded regulation as an opportunity to force those companies to pursue a “harm reduction cycle” — and a more ethical approach to the wider impacts of their products and services.

Woods and Perrin’s proposals, on which the government’s White Paper drew heavily, discussed a wide range of harms, from physical abuse of children to damaging democracy itself. The problem is that, as Lawyer Graham Smith has put it, “speech is not a tripping hazard”. The effects of online content are subjective and social, stemming from an interaction between the post, the person who reads it, and what that person goes on to say or do — to the extent that the law has to take into account the intention of the speaker, writer or poster. The Duty of Care is therefore a completely inappropriate model for improving the impact of technology on our social interactions: somebody responsible for a building has a duty of care to maintain it, to avoid causing injury to visitors, but not to control what those visitors say to one another while in the building. “Duties of care owed by physical occupiers relate to what is done, not said, on their premises,” as Smith puts it.

The kinds of harm described in the draft legislation include very nebulous and subjective harms: psychological distress, or offence caused to a group that is (perceived to be) the target of a joke, for example. This means that putting the onus on technology companies to predict the risk of harm, especially from user-generated material that may not be illegal, is bound to have negative effects. Context, nuance and irony are stripped away on social media. Under the threat of large fines, companies will be incentivised to adopt the precautionary principle and get rid of anything potentially troublesome.

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The virtues of Twitter

By Kathleen Stock

Many social media platforms already remove, hide or downplay content that contravenes their own rules or tastes, shaping the kinds of conversations that are possible in their online “public square”. The Government’s proposed codes of conduct now demand that these platforms reduce the risk of poorly-defined harms to unspecified people. The “duty to have particular regard to the importance of protecting users’ right to freedom of expression within the law” will be far too vague to enforce.

Some of the problems the Bill has faced are very practical ones. It is much easier to say that children should be protected from seeing inappropriate material online than it is to design and implement a reliable system to keep them from it. Bullying takes many forms that can be hard for other people to recognise, let alone automated systems. But the Bill’s fundamental flaw is the philosophical approach that sees online human interactions primarily in terms of danger and harm: something to be solved through risk assessments and the precautionary principle.

Unfortunately, though this Bill is specifically about the digital world, it reflects some wider trends. We’re too inclined these days to see human interaction as inherently risky — something that needs to be regulated, lest it cause harm. Asking service providers to supervise human exchanges on their platforms, as if they’re dinner ladies in a school playground, is simply a formalisation of our general unease with the unforeseeable nature of human communication.

One of the reasons so many interpersonal interactions moved online, even before the pandemic, was that virtual communication is seen as less risky. Dating via an app is more controllable than walking up to strangers in bars, trying to think of a good opening line despite the possibility of face-to-face rejection (or getting into a conversation you’re not enjoying, and from which you can’t politely extricate yourself).

Suggested reading

The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

Our idea of harm has inflated — a fact reflected by the growing tendency to regard unwelcome disagreement as intrinsically damaging. And if disagreement is seen (and felt) as an attack on identity, those who feel attacked will call for the removal of content they don’t like. Enforcing an online regime driven by the precaution against the risk of harm is therefore either impossible — or the path to destroying any pluralist public sphere.

The idea that the internet can be re-engineered around a driving principle of reducing risk is, in my view, completely unrealistic. But it appeals to policymakers and others who view the offline world as beyond control. Even before the pandemic, the precautionary principle was taking over our politics.

Online life is already less risky than offline. The real world has no off button. Face to face conversations can’t be abandoned without notice or with a BRB emoji. Physical danger of harm, accidental or deliberate, is confined to the offline world, though the online world can facilitate it.

But, like the real world, the virtual one cannot be made completely safe. A risk-free, supervised, inoffensive online world is a fantasy. This confused Bill is a distraction that should be ditched, in favour of law-making that focuses on specific activities — ones that can be defined, detected, and prevented or punished. There is plenty wrong with the form that online society currently takes, but most of it is the kind of social problem that Parliament cannot fix.

I am reminded of a trip through Eastern Europe that my wife and I took in 1981. In Yugoslavia one day, we planned to catch a bus in the late morning. The bus and driver were there but the departure time came and went. After an hour we knocked on the station window and the two or three functionaries behind the glass barely glanced up from their hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches. The other passengers remained uniformly inert, neither requesting nor receiving any explanation for what turned into a two-hour delay. It would take years of small humiliations to make a formerly free people this compliant, but that seems to be the goal of the vast coalition of governmental, corporate, academic, cultural, philanthropic, and media powers that has just now fused and hardened, right before our eyes, into an ominous social monster.

There is a common playbook for technocratic control of recalcitrant populations. The Biden administration employs the same siege tactics of declared exigency, deception, division, and intimidation that corporatist progressives used to destroy my former university — Tulsa — two years ago.

After a Left-wing billionaire engineered a hostile takeover of the institution, it was announced that we faced serious crises of finance and accreditation. Faculty were subjected to mandatory training sessions and a blizzard of futile paperwork. The supposedly “data-driven” administration ignored or manipulated information that conflicted with their hidden purposes. While preparing a comprehensive academic review of our department, I learned that the provost had already received the program review committee’s recommendation that our majors in philosophy and religion be eliminated.

The general idea was to overwhelm and exhaust potential opponents of the university’s plan to gut the liberal arts. Surprised by strong pushback, the administration stirred up staff animosity against faculty critics of the restructuring, who were publicly vilified, monitored, and in some cases (including my own) subjected to costly and time-consuming disciplinary actions.

I needn’t belabour the obvious comparisons with the current state of our American union, which has suffered its own hostile takeover. I note rather that the logic of 21st-century technocratic despotism was spelled out long ago in Plato’s Republic. In that dialogue, a class of self-styled experts — the philosopher-kings and their academically-trained ministers — considers its exclusive claim to a science of politics as a title to rule. Contemptuous of what they regard as the ignorant many, they treat their fellow citizens as subjects to be manipulated, and for reasons Matthew Crawford suggested in his essay on the new public health despotism.

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The new public health despotism

By Matthew Crawford

They do so first, because persuasion takes time and effort and is less efficient than other available methods for achieving the desired results. In a democratic republic, this is a fundamental corruption of power. Second, because the notion that governance is an applied science or techne encourages the idea that human beings are basically raw materials to be shaped and stamped, like blanks at the Denver mint. Left unchecked, the state’s fundamentally idolatrous desire to coin young souls exclusively in its own image leads to the destruction of the family. The Attorney General’s attempt effectively to criminalise parental veto over public school curricula is a step in this direction. And third, because technocratic elites are inclined to regard the unsophisticated many as cognitively impaired. In the Beautiful City of the Republic, the rulers’ medicinal lies are justified on the ground that one wouldn’t give weapons to madmen. Just so, Dr Fauci’s supposedly noble lies about Covid presuppose that Americans are too sick to be entrusted with the truth.

It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which the therapeutic idiom of bureaucracies has taken hold in United States. (Here again, the University of Tulsa was ahead of the curve, having installed a safe-space affirming psychiatrist as president in 2016.) It is no coincidence that expressions of the manly confidence, candor, and “masculine independence of opinion” that Tocqueville saw as essential to the health of a democratic republic are increasingly likely to be condemned as “toxic”, a term that tries to square the circle by implying that the problem is simultaneously one of social disease and moral depravity. But this is yesterday’s news.

Tyrants have always attacked the political immune system of the people. Fearing spirited assertions of free thought, ancient Greek ones were known to close gymnasiums and ban philosophical discussion. At that time medicine was unsophisticated, and the psychiatric imprisonment of political opponents was not yet possible. Things have not gone so far in our country, but the identification of unorthodox speech and even of silence with violence — itself a symptom of a contagious political madness — serves the same purpose.

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Such tactics may be effective in the short term, but progressivist technocratic despotism is disastrous as a long-term political strategy in the United States. It will either be decisively repudiated or do great (and perhaps irreparable) harm to the country. For it betrays a fundamental ignorance not only of what one might call the physics of democratic republicanism, but of the unique nature of the American political experiment.

Plato again illuminates matters. In the Republic, Socrates compares individual souls and political communities to spinning tops. This is a rich and suggestive image. Those short-lived wanderers we played with as children, setting them in motion like little gods, had a lifespan that depended on the rotational impetus imparted by a snap of fingers or string. Encountering irregularities on the hardwood floor, they would wobble and sometimes fall; we cheered when they righted themselves and continued to roam, as they often did. Children instinctively understand the allegorical character of such games.

A top that does not lean in any direction — as happens only at maximum energy — is Plato’s image of the healthy soul and city. Such vital rectitude, which the Romans called religio, was traditionally formed by social ligaments of ancestral custom and habit that constrained the wild impulses of the young and made them straighten up, balancing their characters and aligning them with the ancestors below and the gods above. The ancients understood that moral alignment with traditional and transcendent norms optimises the energy of the human organism in a way that is essential for navigation. Lives tend to drift and fall apart without it.

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Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

But punitive doctrinal correctness is no substitute for the basically healthy mores that have long kept the American polity from falling over. Our governing elites fail to understand that courage and moderation are the true and steady foundations of prudent policy. The good kind of political correctness that the Greeks called orthē doxa, upright opinion that furnishes sound premises for political deliberation, is rooted in these virtues and cannot be produced by the moral orthopedics of the propaganda state. The forceful imposition of woke political orthodoxy on the American public can only breed resentment and promote hypocrisy.

While energy is imparted externally to a spinning top, a republic is renewed from within, by the exertions of its citizens. But even well-founded ones eventually fall off kilter. Decline may begin gradually, with minute oscillations, or suddenly, through some external blow, but it always terminates in wild gyrations. Most often, decay results when internal forces move large numbers of citizens, and impede the motions of many others, in ways that throw the whole out of balance.

The chafing humiliations of the Covid police are just part of a surge of social friction that was gestating for years and exploded with the election of President Trump five years ago. Strong political passions, multiplied, amplified, and frequently concentrated on specific targets by corporate media and big tech, have destabilised our essential public and private institutions, virtually all of which, through some demonic Oedipal fatality, now seem intent on repudiating their founding principles and betraying their core missions.

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Some of those who, by reason of experience and accumulated wisdom, might still be capable of righting these institutions have been purged; the rest have mostly retired or retreated under fire, withdrawing much good and necessary energy from our common national life. Depleted and uncharacteristically depressed, the American people now spin and shudder along the edge of the abyss. What future awaits us if we forget how to live and work together in amity, and if, emptied of honest debate on matters of pressing concern, the public square echoes with blood curdling war cries?

I have become convinced that a particular deficit of historical memory lies at the root of all our ills. I think there will be no cure for what ails us unless we can recover the answer to one big question: What is America for? What are we about, as a nation? Lincoln taught at Gettysburg that the United States was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”. The twin pillars of our American story are ordered liberty and individual dignity.

Ours is a unique experiment in mature self-governance, testing whether a nation of citizens who are free and equal under the law — and therefore free to make mistakes, to be wrong or right in their own ways and to stand or fall as they will under the hammer of experience — can long endure. This experiment involves considerable risk; as Tocqueville repeatedly reminds us, every one of our political institutions and practices balances goods against evils. But even when faced with the gravest political exigencies, our forefathers reckoned that the rewards of participation in the story of America were too precious to forgo.

This question of risk goes to the heart of the problem Crawford raised. Failure to comply with Covid regulations is presumed to be irrational because it exposes the populace to unnecessary dangers. But risk is always relative to possible outcomes, which today are seen darkly through a glass of psychological and physical safetyism. To take a real example, does the possibility that a student might suffer psychic injury from a book spine justify removing a volume entitled American Negro Poetry from a high school library? But what sort of injury are we talking about? And how does it compare to the possibility that a student will never hear Langston Hughes sing America or speak of rivers, or dream a world “where every man is free”? And above all, who has the right to decide these matters?

Our technocratic mandarins dislike such questions and recoil from the political uncertainties of democratic debate. Whatever its psychological causes, their longing for certainty in practice leads them to insist on it in theory, and so to end debate by any means necessary. This is an engine of comprehensive despotism because it can be satisfied only with the advent of univocal global answers.

The best outcome we could hope for if we continue down this road is what Tocqueville calls “the type of social well-being that can be provided by a very centralised administration to the people who submit to it”. “Travelers tell us,” he writes, “that the Chinese have tranquility without happiness, industry without progress, stability without strength, physical order without public morality.… I imagine that when China opens to Europeans, the latter will find there the most beautiful model of administrative centralization that exists in the universe.”

This “plan B”, outlined yesterday by Sajid Javid, is grist to the mill of the moralists who rage that everyone must be jabbed. Demands for near-compulsory vaccination have become ever more strident. You might get seriously ill, the argument goes. The hospitals might fill up. You might infect NHS staff. You might deprive someone of a bed. And in any event, the unvaccinated might breed mutations. It’s not about you.

This is all perfectly true. Those bad things might happen. And we do frequently expect each other to limit risk to strangers, even at some cost to ourselves. Indeed, a general principle to that effect was established almost a century ago. The “general duty of care”, set out by Lord Atkin in 1932, states: “You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour.” But the concept of reasonableness — which appears twice in that formula — leaves judges with a heavy burden of interpretation.

Take the 1951 case of Bolton v Stone. Miss Bessie Stone, on the street outside her home, was hit in the head by a cricket ball. It had been tonked over the boundary for six by “an exceptional straight drive”, as the Law Lords put it. The resulting wound became infected, causing serious pain and disability. And so the courts had to decide: had the cricket club taken “reasonable care” to avoid the accident?

“The existence of some risk,” Lord Porter observed, in the final appeal, “is an ordinary incident in life”. The suggestion that it would have been a “wise precaution” to move the wicket to the middle of the ground, further from the houses, found no favour with him: “I do not think that it would have occurred to anyone that such an alteration would have made for greater safety.”

Lord Normand noted that, “it is not the law that precautions must be taken against every peril that can be foreseen by the timorous”. Lord Reid pointed out that not every peril can be foreseen: “Even the most careful person cannot avoid creating some risks and accepting others”. And Lord Oaksey, who five years earlier had led the tribunal at Nuremberg, found that many foreseeable risks “cannot be guarded against except by extreme isolation” — something we’ve all had enough of in the past 18 months.

All four of those men had seen active service in the Great War. The fifth judge, Lord Radcliffe, while agreeing that the injured lady’s claim must fail, did so “with regret”: the hypothetical reasonable man, “if his play turn to another’s hurt”, ought, he felt, to offer something more than the mere reflection that “a social being is not immune from social risks”. As chance had it, on the very same day that Miss Stone was hit — 9th August 1947 — Radcliffe had submitted his final plans for the design of an altogether more problematic boundary: that between India and Pakistan. We can only speculate whether the hundreds of thousands of deaths that followed gave him a more sombre perspective on foreseeable, though unintended, consequences.

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Cricket balls no longer pose a threat outside Miss Stone’s old house — the ground now consists of a Care Home and a Modesty Clothing business — but legal claims of this kind have become more common, and the courts’ attitude to fault-free risk less accepting. As Jonathan Sumption noted in his provocatively titled 2017 lecture “Abolishing Personal Injuries Law – A Project”, the number of personal injury claims grew to about 250,000 a year by the early 1970s. And by 2014 the figure stood at 1.2 million.

Part of the reason for the increase is a feedback loop with the insurance industry. When a defendant is insured — which the vast majority are, mainly because insurance is compulsory for drivers and employers — it doesn’t quite feel like justice to leave a seriously injured claimant empty-handed in a borderline case. And when the courts expand the potential for liability, appetite for insurance grows.

But the crucial insight for understanding the mechanics of Safetyism, and how we have come to threaten students with a no-jab-no-education policy, was a brief, candid aside from Lord Oaksey in the cricket ball case: “It may very well be,” he speculated, “that after this accident the ordinarily prudent committee man of a similar cricket ground would take some further precaution, but that is not to say that he would have taken a similar precaution before the accident.” Daniel Kahneman was barely out of short trousers, and Cass Sunstein not yet born, but the observation neatly prefigures the cognitive bias they later described: the availability heuristic.

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This is our tendency to judge the frequency and importance of an outcome by the ease with which we can call examples to mind. We over-estimate our share of housework, for instance, because we have no trouble remembering when we took the bins out ourselves — but barely notice when someone else does. For the sake of our argument, if the “reasonable man” has recently been told that something he’s planning to do led, on some previous occasion, to a bad outcome, he will be less likely to do the risky thing, because that bad outcome is fresh in his mind. Which, according to Lord Oaksey’s analysis, actually alters how we determine what amounts to negligence.

If this seems like mere common sense, well, in a way it is. But common sense isn’t always right. The ease with which we recall examples of a result is not an ever-reliable guide to its frequency and importance. If, for instance, a determined and creative cabal of your enemies were to follow you around all day FYI-ing you about all the terrible consequences of your acts and omissions — not taking a vaccine, for example — the availability heuristic would likely lead you astray.

Yet this is exactly what millions subject themselves to on Twitter every day — policymakers in particular. Negligence is defined in law as taking a risk that the reasonable man would not. The reasonable man today is someone who has heard all the hostile moralists’ warnings. And so, the reasonableness window has shifted, and the ratchet of risk-aversion takes another click.

And this is why there’s no smoking gun in the law reports — no moment when the courts’ approach to health and safety went mad: a slow and steady reappraisal of what the reasonable man would do will naturally seem, well, reasonable. But something surely changed between Bolton v Stone and, say, the case of Tomlinson v Congleton, half a century later, where the Court of Appeal found in favour of a man who injured himself diving into a public lake surrounded by “Dangerous Water — No Swimming” signs. Warning notices were not enough, they said: the popular beach beside the water should effectively be destroyed. The House of Lords put that one right in the end, but the fact that Lord Justice Sedley felt able to say that if his ruling required the removal of all similar facilities across the country then “so be it”, tells us something about the direction of travel.

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And more recently, in the Age of Lockdown, social media has given the operation of the availability heuristic nuclear capabilities. The “reasonable man” is bombarded with a very particular set of examples of adverse consequences, and so it is these that stand to determine the shape of negligence. Never mind the social benefits of allowing people to judge for themselves what is best for them and their children, or to apply the much-vaunted precautionary principle according to their own tastes: if you don’t get the vaccine, and the booster shots when they arrive, you’re practically a murderer.

There is a clear and enduring downside to recasting the normal business of everyday life as a special privilege reserved for those who will take their medicine as directed by the government of the day. The upside — increasing the proportion of the vaccinated population from 90% to, say, 98% — is nebulous. Let us keep our heads, while all about us others — France, Australia, New Zealand — are losing theirs, and bear in mind the undeniable fact that we are seeking to strike a balance. In the coming weeks, the Government would do well to consider, very carefully, what is really meant by “reasonable”.

Applied across our lives, such schemes may deliver a narrowly defined goal of increasing social utility. At the same time they deplete our lives of meaning, and thereby of value for us. Driving is not just a means to the end of getting from one place to another. For many people it is, or can be, an important part of the good life. “To drive is to exercise one’s skill at being free,” Crawford writes at the close of Why We Drive, “and one can’t help but feel this when one gets behind the wheel. It seems a skill worth preserving.”

Interview

The case for taking more risks

By UnHerd

A research fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and a motorcycle mechanic, Crawford first presented his philosophy of human action in The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing things Feels Good (2010; published in the US as Shop Class as Soulcraft, 2009). He developed his account most systematically in The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction (2016), where he mounted an attack on what he described, provocatively but to my mind accurately, as “autistic freedom”.

In this view, which Crawford finds prefigured in Immanuel Kant’s understanding of rational autonomy, human beings are free to the extent that they are not exposed to contingency and accident. But such an idea of freedom requires an imaginary separation from our bodies, which are inherently accident-prone, and from the instinctive responses for dealing with their fragility that are built into them. Environments designed to eliminate danger from our lives impair abilities that are essential to our humanity. The need for security and risk-control is real enough, and at times overriding. But displacing human skill and agency does not always enhance safety, and when applied across society it has the dystopian effects to be expected from a technocratic ideology.

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Applying this critique, Crawford is sceptical about schemes to prevent reckless driving. In one of many fascinating asides, he notes that though there are no speed limits on much of the Autobahn network in Germany, the country has one of the lowest rates of traffic fatalities in the world. The fact has an interesting backstory. In the 1930s, when the autobahns were being built, the Nazis abolished speed limits. Instead a “traffic community” would practice “chivalry” and “obedience”, and restrictions would no longer be needed. But after the adoption of the Reich Highway Code in 1934, German traffic fatalities spiralled to become the worst in Europe. By 1939 speed limits were back in place.

The lesson of the experiment, Crawford writes, is that “a traffic community cannot be created by fiat. It has to grow organically over time, as it depends on social norms that have worked their way into people’s dispositions.” This is partly a matter of individual traits such as restraint and self-control, but also involves recognising similar traits in other drivers. Low rates of fatal accidents in systems without speed limits require a community in which drivers understand and trust one another. To be sure, not the supposedly innate racial or national community the Nazis imagined. Germans had to learn how to drive fast safely, and did so in the civic order that was reconstructed during the post-war peace.

Lying behind schemes that seek to eliminate risky driving, Crawford suggests, is a dream of harmony. In support of this view, he quotes a passage from Michael Oakeshott:

They tell us that they have seen in a dream the glorious, collisionless manner of living proper to all mankind, and this dream they understand as their warrant for seeking to remove the diversities and occasions of conflict which distinguish our current manner of living…And such people understand the office of government to be to turn a private dream into a public and compulsory manner of living.

Oakeshott (1901-1990) has recently enjoyed a late celebrity as a critic of doctrinaire libertarianism. Few of those who have cited him for this reason can have read a single page of his writings.

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In his seminal Rationalism in Politics and other essays (1962), he explained that by rationalism he meant the belief that a combination of scientific theorising with technical expertise can replace, and improve upon, the tacit understandings of how to live that are embodied in our habits and skills. In ethics and politics, theories and ideologies are always abbreviations of practices we learn by imitation. John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, for example, did not uncover “principles” of which the world had until then been ignorant. Locke was summarising an already emerging way of life. Books like his are distillation from practical experience, not revelations of any truths on which practice is supposedly based.

Oakeshott attacked political ideologies of all kinds, including that of his LSE colleague F.A. Hayek, whose “plan to resist all planning” he thought belonged to the same style of doctrinaire politics. But if those who cite Oakeshott as the quintessential sceptical conservative had bothered to read the Contents page of Rationalism in Politics, they would have discovered an essay entitled “The Political Economy of Freedom”, where he defends a libertarian economic programme far more radical than any contemplated by Brexiteers. (In conversations with me in the Eighties, Oakeshott expressed admiration for Enoch Powell, who he thought articulated an English tradition of limited government.) Oakeshott may have disdained doctrinaire politics, but he was himself a doctrinaire libertarian.

The point is not that Oakeshott was inconsistent, though plainly he was. Rather, a politics of practical knowledge does not fit well into familiar debates about libertarianism and state control. Crawford’s target is a certain kind of modernism, found as much on the liberal Left as on the libertarian Right, which denigrates as irrational, atavistic and doomed ways of life to which many people remain deeply attached. He captures the jargon of this modernist cult beautifully:

‘Rust Belt’ means a place that has failed to adapt to the inevitable, and therefore fell to decay and ultimate extinction. Wrong-side of history-ism is a progressive version of social Darwinism; both invoke inexorable natural processes to cast political losers in a certain light. A sense of inevitability is constantly cultivated in the announcements of the tech firms, and this seems to be a deliberate strategy to demoralize political opposition wherever it appears in response to some new incursion.

Crawford is unequivocal in his rejection of liberal modernism, but he never falls into the trap of identifying his view of practical knowledge with conservatism or libertarianism. This sensitivity to the political dimensions of his subject distinguishes Why We Drive from Robert Pirsig’s bestselling Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), a semi-fictional first-person narrative with long passages exploring differences between “classical” and “romantic” styles of thinking as they apply to the author’s life. Though he writes from his own experience, Crawford is more interested in the public import of what he has learnt from driving than in how it contributed to his own self-development.

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Who'll have the guts to ban cars from our cities?

By Peter Franklin

One of the most original and mind-opening studies of practical philosophy to have appeared for many years, Why We Drive spells out in vivid detail what is wrong with the prevailing idea of the human subject. Seemingly diverging from Kant’s idea of rational autonomy, a utilitarian account of human action has developed in which reason means the calculation of outcomes. In fact this is another version of the disembodied humanity Kant imagined. Most fully elaborated in economics but pervasive throughout much of today’s political discourse, it is a view in which human beings are preference-satisfying machines. These homunculi attach no intrinsic significance to how they live. The quality of their experience is relevant only insofar as it enables them to gratify their desires as efficiently as possible. It is as if their lives were simply means whereby they get from one satisfaction to another.

Rather than rehearsing philosophical arguments against this position, Crawford reveals its limitations through examples. He begins by describing riding a dirt bike off-road on a narrow, rocky, meandering trail in a wooded area in Richmond, Virginia. It is a dangerous business that demands total concentration, and as he admits, “in no way typical of the driving that we do most of the time”. Driving like this requires “a leap of faith” in one’s natural and learned abilities, but the result can be an enhanced trust in the body when it is super-attuned to the world of which it is a part. Whereas collisionless freedom is a sickly dream, steering your way through hazardous territory at high speed can be “a state of grace”.

The book proceeds by examining various automotive subcultures — a demolition derby in the American South, a desert race on southern Nevada, a scramble in Virginia, an “adult soap box derby” in Portland, Oregon. Crawford also describes how he acquired a 1975 Beetle, which over the next eight years he drove, disassembled and reassembled until all that now remains of the original is “the upper portion of the central spine, the rear torsion housing and the upper portion of the body shell”. He accepts that many — including his wife — find it hard to grasp the point of “being loyal to a heap of rusted metal”.

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Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

These rather exotic milieus and pursuits are some distance from the routines of the automotive commuter who buys and drives a car because they have no alternative. But they illustrate the need for agency that can be expressed in driving, and point to its larger reverberations. Mass protests by London taxi-drivers, Crawford writes,

… expressed and contributed to the Brexit mood. This was a fight for economic sovereignty by highly trained professionals against the threat posed by foreign ride-hailing firms that rely on map software, US military satellites, and the subsistence drivers of the gig economy… These movements are partly a response, at once spirited and rational, to a creeping colonization of the space for skilled human activity.

When we recall that Crawford thinks of human freedom as a skill, we can grasp the full meaning of this observation. Green thinkers and many others tend to represent driving as a burden imposed on us by a dearth of mass public transit, and they are not wrong. But as well as being a kind of oppression, driving is also — for some people, some of the time — an assertion of their humanity.