We assume the information our senses feed us is objective — of course we do, because what else do we have to go on? There is something almost vertiginous, then, about Ed Yong’s new book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which confronts exactly how we perceive what we perceive. “Light is just electromagnetic radiation,” he says. “Sound is just waves of pressure. Smells are just small molecules. It’s not obvious that we should be able to detect any of these,” let alone that they should produce the particular subjective experiences that they do.

Your experience of a beach — the turquoise sea, the warmth of the sun, the screeching gull — isn’t what the beach is. The “real” beach is giving off all sorts of stimuli, only some of which a human brain uses to form a mental representation of its surroundings. There are many, many more stimuli that we cannot sense or even imagine sensing. But other species can.

Take the seabirds on the beach, for instance. Many seabird species are finely attuned to the scent of chemicals that give away the presence of the krill they eat, meaning that far from a flat, featureless expanse, the ocean’s surface has “a secret topography” of “odorous mountains and unscented valleys… invisible to the eye but evident to the nose”. Others are able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field, which guides them during migrations. And almost all birds can discriminate between “millions” of colours that humans are unable to imagine — to them, we are colourblind.

Some of the senses Yong details are delightfully surreal. A dolphin is effectively a “living medical scanner”: echolocation allows them to “perceive your lungs and skeleton… shrapnel in war veterans and foetuses in pregnant women”. Incredibly, beaked whales, which also echolocate, have “a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps” on their skulls, which might be a form of “internal antlers” that could allow them to signal to others while retaining a sleek, hydrodynamic form.

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What these alien senses might feel like, we can only guess. Philosophers have long grappled with this problem of subjectivity. Thomas Nagel, in his 1974 essay What Is It Like to Be A Bat?, argued that it is impossible to capture the experience of one sense by analogy to another: for example, “red is like the sound of a trumpet”. “That should be clear to anyone who has both heard a trumpet and seen red,” he wrote. It may be tempting to talk about dolphins “seeing” the inside of each others’ bodies, but in reality, it’s possible that what they experience via their sonar sense may be so different that trying to imagine it as a kind of “seeing” is as futile as describing the colour red in terms of its musical qualities.

Similarly, images meant to show us how ultraviolet looks to the many animals that can see it often render it as a kind of glowing purple. But to birds and bees, ultraviolet is an entirely different colour, one that no human eye has ever seen. These images are chasing the same impossible dream of children who try to invent a new colour by mixing their felt-tips. The only way for humans to see an entirely new colour, as different to our existing palette as red is from blue, would be to evolve a new colour receptor.

The biological term for these unique perceptual landscapes belonging to different species is Umwelten — German for “environments” — in this case meaning not just an animal’s physical environment but the environment as it appears to that animal. The Earth’s magnetic field is not part of our Umwelt as humans — it’s there, but we don’t sense it. A barnacle might exist on the same beach as us, but is oblivious to the peachy clouds in the sky as the sun sets: it lacks the capacity to perceive them. They are not part of its Umwelt.

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The German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll, Yong tells us, coined this usage of Umwelt in 1909, comparing an animal’s body to a house “with a number of windows… a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window, a taste window, and a great number of tactile windows”. It is totally impossible for a mind inside the house to gain information about the outside world except via its windows; from vantage points in different houses, with windows made from different materials or placed at different angles, the same view would appear totally different.

Except, of course, we cannot switch vantage points. Every conscious being is permanently and inevitably stuck inside its own lonely house, through which all experience of the outside world is filtered; all communication with other minds must pass through the windows of their own houses before it can reach them. Our windows aren’t just limited by our bodies and physical senses, but also by our culture and past experiences. I can guess but I can never know what it would be like to have been born blind instead of sighted, or male instead of female, or in Tokyo instead of in London.

I am moderately high in neuroticism: one of the “big five” personality traits that describes a person’s tendency to worry and ruminate. Speaking to (mostly male) friends who are much lower in neuroticism (women are significantly more neurotic than men, on average), I am struck by how alien both ways of thinking are to each other: to have an inner monologue that points out hundreds of possible but unlikely hazards every day, or to be someone to whom these thoughts would never occur. How many more features of our temperaments and histories must there be that give each individual an inescapably different perspective on the same experience?

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Nowhere is this more apparent than in today’s culture wars, when political opponents seem to inhabit entirely separate realities. Despite living through the same pandemic, those who think face masks in schools are a form of child abuse appear to be living on another planet from those who don’t allow their teenagers to leave the house for fear of long Covid. This is true, in a sense: we are all living in our own private Umwelten, with a slightly different view of the world filtering in through our unique windows. Perhaps the surprising thing, in a way, is that there’s so much agreement.

A century ago, we knew far less about the sensory capabilities of animals. Bat echolocation, dolphin sonar, and bird magnetoreception were all unknown — barely even guessed at — before the 20th century. These discoveries are testament to the awe-inspiring power of science, but they are also a much-needed dose of humility, reminding us of how much is out there beyond our perceptions. We hear a lot about the need to understand and defeat our “cognitive biases” — but in reality, our biases can never be escaped. They are our only window to the Immense World outside our own minds, whose full form remains permanently and tantalisingly out of our grasp.

Of the primates, humans spend the most time dreaming: 20-25% of sleep. Sigmund Freud’s probably erroneous theory that dreams are unconscious, censored, unfulfilled wishes, to be analysed and interpreted for their true meaning, has dominated culture for more than a century. But since the Sixties, many other dream purposes have been theorised, tested, and confirmed.

In newborns, dreams stimulate neurons to form networks. In children and adults, dreams rehearse coping behaviours; convert new learning and experiences into long-term memory; assist in problem-solving and creativity; maintain and update our unique identities; and allow for emotional acuity, so that we don’t slip into fear bias, viewing neutral facial expressions as menacing.

My favourite dream purpose is that dreams improve mood. Called the “mood regulatory function of dreams theory”, this covert, complex, antidepressant effect was most researched and elucidated by Rosalind Cartwright (1922-2021), a psychologist and neuroscientist known as the Queen of Dreams.

Over a period of 40 years, beginning in the Sixties, Cartwright did a series of studies on depressed people. “I wanted to study whether there is a natural healing process that could be detected in dreams,” she wrote in The Twenty-Four Hour Mind (2011). She had people sleep overnight in her lab, where she repeatedly woke and interviewed them about their dreams. She found that dreams were filled with negative, troubling material, but that they became increasingly positive throughout the night, “drawing together more and more remote associations”. By morning people felt happier, calmer, and better prepared to live.

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I hadn’t heard of this auspicious purpose, which doesn’t seem to have ever been theorised before the 20th century, until I read Cartwright’s book. When we get a full night’s sleep, our minds tell us around two hours of interconnected stories over three to five dreams, cycling between NREM — non-rapid-eye-movement — and REM sleep. The process “works well only if sleep is intact, regular, and long enough to complete its nightly tasks”, wrote Cartwright. If we interrupt our mind’s storytelling, each night is like one to three disturbing, depressing, nihilistic short stories, instead of one weird, fantastical, autobiographical, ultimately uplifting novel.

Dreams also work on problems over weeks and months. Studying divorcees with untreated depression, Cartwright compared those who recovered after five months with those who did not. The dreams of the people who didn’t recover were simple and brief, with few characters and little to no emotions. The dreams of those who did recover were long and dramatic, with numerous characters and complex plots, involving many emotions, scene changes, and references to past events.

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Dreams are just one benefit of sleep. In Why We Sleep (2017), self-described “sleep diplomat” Matthew Walker shared sleep’s many other benefits. Sleep maintains a healthy microbiome, balances the body’s insulin and blood sugar levels, cleans the brain, maintains healthy testosterone levels (helping us focus), protects our DNA, enhances the function of every major organ, and strengthens our immune systems.

A 2015 study, in which the cold virus was squirted up the noses of 164 people, found that 45.2% of those who’d slept an average of less than five hours the previous week became infected, as opposed to only 17.2% of those who’d slept seven or more hours. Walker wrote: “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer.”

People who chronically under-sleep experience microsleeps, in which conscious perception — in all channels, from visual to audio — shuts down for a few seconds, often without the person knowing it. “A two-second microsleep at 30mph with a modest angle of drift can result in your vehicle transitioning entirely from one lane to the next,” wrote Walker. More car accidents are caused by “drowsy driving” like this than by alcohol and drugs combined.

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Unfortunately, the sleep-deprived do not know they are operating at suboptimal levels. Studies have found that people consistently underestimate their “performance disability”, wrote Walker. The underslept do not know that if they slept a fraction more they’d be physically healthier; less depressed, anxious, irrational, and moody; less dangerous to themselves and others.

Our ancestors slept seven to eight hours a night, beginning at around 9pm, and, except in the cooler winter months, 30 to 60 minutes each afternoon, according to studies on the Gabra in Kenya, the Hadza in Tanzania, and other aboriginal groups. Some modern cultures retain this schedule, with siestas. A Harvard study done in Greece found that individuals who did not have daily naps suffered a 37% increased risk of death from heart disease.

Arguably much worse than death, lack of sleep and dreams can lead to unconscious murder of loved ones, committed while sleepwalking. A 2012 study in Neurology found that 3.6% of US adults sleepwalk, while a survey of around 5,000 people in the UK found that 2.1% had violent behaviours while asleep. Cartwright served as a sleep expert in two sleep-murder cases. In 1987, a 6’5”, insomnia-ridden man named Kenneth Parks drove 14 miles to his in-laws’ house, where he choked his father-in-law unconscious and fatally stabbed his mother-in-law. In 1997, a chronically sleep-deprived, caffeine-tablet-using man named Scott Falater stabbed his wife 44 times, rolling her body into a swimming pool.

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In court, Cartwright argued that Parks and Falater were innocent. Both men were “bewilderingly motiveless”, both displayed “profound remorse”, and both were unconscious of their actions. Falater is now serving a life-sentence in Arizona, while Parks was acquitted by a Canadian court, which called his behaviour “non-insane automatism”.

We are always partly dreaming according to Cartwright. Our 24-hour minds, like our bodies, are self-healing systems, which modern society disrupts. Cartwright wrote that “most of the medications that are prescribed to relieve depression also suppress REM sleep”. Sleeping pills, Walker explained, do not provide natural sleep. Ambien produces a destructive kind of sleep, causing a 50% weakening of the synaptic connections formed during learning. Artificial lights, especially LEDs and electronic screens, disrupt the circadian rhythm.

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A hundred years ago, less than 2% of Americans slept six hours or less a night; now, almost 30% do. Children are sleeping two hours fewer per night than kids 100 years ago. The problem seems worst in the US and the UK. This is good news. It means that life, for many people, can easily be improved. Mental illness and physical health problems can be alleviated night-by-night, at home, in bed.

Walker wrote that Freud made a “remarkable scientific contribution” to dream research by situating them in the mind, but that his theory of “wish fulfilment” had been rejected by modern science. Dreams are not just an epiphenomenon, nor simply a place where we try to fulfil our unconscious wishes. Dreams are “an internal psychotherapist”, wrote Cartwright.

Cartwright was “as much a pioneer in dream research” as Freud, according to Walker. Her research shows that our minds, evolved over hundreds of millions of years, are smarter, more complicated, and more caring of us than anyone ever thought.

But by the end, it was the book’s swirling, ambiguous politics which struck me the most: its class tensions, militant worker rebellion, and aborted revolutions. It spoke to the emotional, often interpersonal motivations behind political actions, the pitfalls of mob anger, and the futility of uprisings against larger, overseeing forces that go much deeper than we could ever see.

Written between April 1884 and February 1885, and published serially starting in December of 1884, Germinal tells the story of a young man, Etienne, who shows up to a mining village one night looking for work. He’s been sleeping out, is broke and hungry. Despite initially getting denied, he’s given a job by Maheu, the leader of the workers. He’s offered lodging under Maheu’s roof, sleeping alongside Catherine, Maheu’s daughter, who also works in the mines, and becomes Etienne’s love interest. But they are prevented from consummating their love due to an almost incestuous, taboo-like proximity caused by their living arrangement, and because Catherine gets taken by another man, Chaval, Etienne’s rival. As the novel progresses, we see Etienne gradually get accustomed to the job. We see what life for these workers looks like, their festivals, how they turn up, how they bathe — each household member taking turns in a single big tub.

But before long, Etienne starts wanting more. He starts reading about revolutionary ideas. He starts asking his fellow workers if they are content with the life they’re living. Some, like Souvarine, an anarchist extremist who was part of an uprising back in Russia, are all about it. Others, like Maheu’s wife, who has a household of children to consider, are more apprehensive to get riled up about a life they could be living. They talk it out at the pub, at Maheu’s before going to bed each night. Etienne starts giving speeches to increasingly receptive crowds of workers. Then the Company docks their pay, and they decide to strike.

What we see next is the gradual frenzy of the mob. Of how ugly things can turn when a single employer monopolises an area’s available work. The striking workers first mob to Hennebeau’s, the local bourgeoisie manager’s house, presenting their demands. When they’re rejected, they mob, on foot, from mine to mine in the area, attempting to prevent other workers from returning to work. They surround and try to break into Hennebeau’s house. When that fails, they turn on the local shopkeeper, Maigrat, attempting to raid his store. Maigrat climbs onto the roof, attempting to protect his goods with projectiles from above, only he slips and falls, bashes his head open. His corpse gets mutilated by the mob in a stomach-turning scene and even Etienne looks on with horror.

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It has long been debated whether Germinal is a revolutionary or a reactionary work. On the one hand, how Zola describes the bleak conditions of these workers aligns him squarely on their “side”. Under constant risk of getting crushed underground by rock falls, or asphyxiated by firedamp, and coughing up huge hunks of phlegm their whole lives, they’re given just enough bread to survive, have no horizon of hope, and “life’s only pleasures [are] getting drunk and giving your wife a baby”. But Zola, interestingly, also shows the other side. After the striking workers surround the bourgeoisie manager Hennebeau’s house, Zola switches to Hennebeau’s point of view, giving the reader a contemporaneous rundown of his day.

We learn that a) Hennebeau doesn’t even have the power to meet their demands — he’s only answering to the higher-up stockholders in Paris, and b) he’s not even thinking about the workers, he’s just discovered that his wife, who hasn’t slept with him for years, has been sleeping with his nephew. Hennebeau spends the day, when workers are rioting and throwing rocks at his windows, feeling silently cucked and in fact deeply envious of the shameless, visceral way these workers live, rioting and drinking and fucking at will. Even Etienne, as soon as he starts getting some power as the leader of the uprising, starts buying new clothes and dreaming of becoming a political leader in Paris. He, too, is looking out for himself.

Are Zola’s visions of what happens once a crowd becomes a mob, what happens when the leader of an uprising gets some power, assertions, or simply true reflections of the world that he’s merely reporting? That is up to the reader to decide. The difficulty the reader has deciding this, in fact, is what makes Zola’s storytelling so strong. What jolts the reader out of empty political theorising.

In the end, the strike does, for a time, seem to work, if backhandedly. The conflict culminates in a clash when the Company brings in foreign scabs and troops, and the local workers surround the mine, throwing rocks at the armed gendarmes. Shots are fired — as, we’re told in a footnote, happened at a mine near where the novel is set, in 1869. It’s only at this point, when news gets out to the rest of the country that troops are shooting workers, that the stockholders do something. Attempting to save face, they abandon their plan to implement foreign scabs and invite the local workers back, promising, in cold corporate speak, that all is forgiven. Most of the workers, beaten down, demoralised, and starving, return to work.

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Only, the night before the miners return, Souvarine, the extremist anarchist, commits a destructive, terroristic act against the Company, sneaking into the mine and rupturing its already compromised main vein. The mine explodes, water bursting through the barriers, swallowing all the mining equipment underground, and trapping Etienne and a few dozen workers down there. Etienne eventually gets rescued — by Hennebeau’s nephew, Negrel, the engineer, who, in a rare subversion of the worker-bourgeoisie binary, risks his life to do so — and ends the book bathed in sun one morning, recovered from his injuries, seeing off his coworkers, who are back working at the mine with pre-strike wages. He’s off to Paris to take an entry-level political job. A type of class mobility, for the few seeds able to make it through winter, is possible. But otherwise: people fight, people die, and those who don’t die, according to cycles beyond our control, endure, continuing their endless striving upwards, out of the earth, into the sun and clean air.

That’s the political conclusion. A sense of futility in the face of larger natural forces. The mine explodes when it wants to, things calibrate once spring comes, everything returns eternally according to its own timetable.

The emotional climax, however, comes during the armed standoff, when it appears that Catherine has been shot. The engine of the book — what pushed me, in any case, to finish it — are the interpersonal threads. The erotic desires, or internal biological forces, driving characters to act. Early on, Etienne accidentally witnesses Chaval taking Catherine behind a shed, despite her not being a woman yet. “You know I’m too young,” Catherine pleads. “Wait till later on, at least till I’m grown up.” Chaval ignores this, continues onto her, and she lets him. Witnessing this fills Etienne with “a kind of jealous excitement”, “together with a furious desire to get his revenge”.

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When Etienne is first getting ideas about striking, he sees the way Catherine looks at him in that position of leadership. When he speaks to crowds, he keeps an eye out for if Catherine is there. These internal, libidinal energies, like the larger, external cyclical forces, drive and orient his political actions. And that intersection between internal, biological forces and external, political ones culminates when, during the armed standoff, Catherine appears to be one of the casualties, passed out on the muddy field out front of the mine, her stomach soaked in blood. Only she hasn’t been shot; she’s finally become a woman. Her mother, discovering this, scoffs at the cosmic irony of starting menstruation the minute the world has gotten too fucked to bring children into. But it seems significant that Catherine, once the Company invites the workers back, is the first to go. She tells Etienne she can’t sit around doing nothing. She’s got to do what she can for the future.

This seems like a more optimistic acceptance of the cyclicality of the world: it’s not just that we’re deterministically led along paths we can’t see or control, according to larger natural rhythms. But each of us are driven by interpersonal motivations within ourselves, to impress a prospective lover, to protect a family, or even, like Souvarine, who lost his wife to public execution back in Russia during a revolt he himself led, to find nihilistic expression for heartbreak. This insight doesn’t resolve any political conflicts we might have, nor justifies terroristic political acts, but could open the door to having compassion for where political differences might stem from — might emotionally, interpersonally, in unseen, cyclical ways, be driven by.

But what was intellectually possible for Westerners in the winter of 1943, when Hitler’s troops and Stalin’s were killing each other by the millions on the Eastern front, is apparently beyond our powers today. In the wake of Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, many Europeans will not be content with anything less than wiping Russia and its culture off the map. In April, novelist Oksana Zabuzhko, writing in the TLS that it was the morality of Tolstoy and other Russian writers that “wove the camouflage net for Russia’s tanks”, urged us to “take a long, hard look at our bookshelves”. In early August, the Russian-language novelist Wolodymyr Rafejenko declared he now felt a “revulsion” when he conversed in Russian, and vowed never again to write in it.

These are Ukrainians — one can understand their anguish and rage. But Western Europeans, who are not even at war, have been even more zealous. A Milan university cancelled its Dostoevsky class last spring. The EU and UK have blacked out the Russian internet channel RT. Russians have been declared unwelcome at venues from Wimbledon to Estonia.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, when Russia was capable of far worse, the Russian-born historian Tibor Szamuely wrote an extraordinary book. The Russian Tradition explained how Russian political behaviour (about which Szamuely was wary to the point of hostility) arose from Russian history and culture (about which Szamuely was respectful to the point of reverence). This is the right balance. It has not been struck so well since. Too bad the book is out of print, because it is strangely relevant to a lot of this decade’s preoccupations: slavery, political correctness and Ukraine, for starters.

Like many refugees from Communism, Szamuely was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919, and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers, which is really saying something. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. In 1964, Szamuely, then nearing 40, was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England. He taught at Reading and befriended Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and Anthony Powell, among other literary anti-Communists. His book, unfinished when he died of cancer in 1972, was edited into its final form by Conquest and published two years later.

The simple question that animates it is how Russia came to be the centre of Marxist revolution and late 20th-century totalitarianism. Did aggressive Communism subvert blameless Russia? Or was aggressive Russia using blameless Communism as a pretext?

The beginnings of an answer lie in geography. Lacking frontiers, Szamuely writes, Russia has faced “a history of armed struggle against invaders that, for length, intensity and ferocity has no parallel in the annals of any other nation”. That is a large claim. Russia is always vulnerable someplace — at least for as long as it takes to gather and concentrate its killing power. And it is always fighting for its life, which tends — at least in domestic Russian debates — to empty of meaning our concepts of just and unjust war. “Despotic government,” Szamuely writes, “was the instrument she shaped to cope with the everlasting emergency.”

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For Szamuely, the central problem in Russian history is slavery. Yes, slavery. Using the word “serf” to describe its put-upon agricultural workers leads us to think of the society as merely backward, quaint, feudal. But this is wrong. Russian slavery was a creation of modernity. Once-free agricultural labourers somehow got buried under debt about 500 years ago, and in the mid-16th century the government bound them to the land, the better to tax them. The owner of the serfs was the state, not the notables on whose land they toiled. There was an equality in this, for the notables were beholden to the state, too. The upper crust owed the tsar military service. Until recent centuries, Russia was one of the rare countries where nobles could be publicly flogged.

But this changed, as Peter the Great tried to modernise the system — Russia got rum, minuets, a navy and of course St. Petersburg. For aristocrats it meant Western connections and new opportunities, for serfs an overload of labour and hard discipline. That was an end to society’s old “mystic unity” and the mumbo-jumbo that had surrounded it. Serfs could now be sold or lost at cards. Russia now had not one people, Szamuely writes, but two: “the Westernised upper classes, and the masses, whose way of life became ever less distinguishable from that of the population of the great Asian empires.” As middle classes in America and France were forging republics, aristocrats were living a Golden Age under Catherine the Great (1762-95). “The most striking feature of 18th-century Russian social history,” Szamuely writes, “was the great expansion and intensification of peasant bondage at the precise moment when, with the emancipation of the nobility, it finally lost any vestige of moral, political or legal justification.”

Szamuely’s preoccupation with slavery anticipates a lot of the “woke” discussion of our own time. If slavery warped the development of the United States (which was one-eighth slave at the start of its civil war in 1861), Szamuely asks, then why has there been so much less soul searching about Russia (which was seven-eighths slave at the time of emancipation that same year)? He may misunderstand the parallel: The difference lies not in the size of the enslavement but in the identity of the rememberer. Progressive white America is wracked by guilt over what it did to “them”. Russia feels no such guilt because the misdeeds were done to “us”. The moral tenor of its soul-searching is more like that of Sicily, or Ireland, or black America.

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But it is not as if Russia had no reckoning with serfdom. As access to higher education and newsprint spread, “gradually the idea began to sink in that every Russian of education and leisure was an accomplice in a crime unparalleled in its enormity”. This was the cause around which a revolutionary and often violent intelligentsia arose in the late 19th century, a class unique in Europe until the rise of political correctness. “The Russian intelligentsia was an instrument of destruction,” Szamuely writes. “Unlike the European bourgeoisie it had no constructive purposes, neither was it equipped to fulfil any such tasks.”

There was something Messianic in the intelligentsia’s role. Szamuely recognises that it used others’ suffering as a rationale for autocracy. But he never entertains the idea that the intelligentsia was an outright racket. He even praises the “intellectual honesty” of the critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who saw that equality would be won only at a very steep price in liberty: “What a contrast he provides to certain Western ‘progressive’ intellectuals, who worship at the altar of egalitarianism yet refuse to recognise that their dream… can only be realised by an arbitrary dictatorial government. Chernyshevsky and his followers, down to the present day, have never harboured any illusions about this.”

He is nonetheless struck that the great 19th-century Russian novelists (“men of sensibility, compassion and humanity”) were almost unanimously contemptuous of the intelligentsia (“with their joyless utilitarianism, their dogmatic intolerance, their fanatical devotion to a messianic vision”).

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The modern enslavement of Russia’s peasantry was not, strictly speaking, a capitalist project. But it felt like one. More than the exploitation undergone in advanced industrial countries, it resonated with the exploitation Marx described. In the end, the Russian revolution was a matter of adjusting Marx’s teaching to powerful Russian folk-institutions, above all the autonomous peasant cooperative known as the obshchina. Marx himself wound up backing peasant “populists” against his own more orthodox followers. It actually turned out to be a piece of good fortune for the revolutionaries that the Marxist spark caught in what Szamuely considers the most conservative country on earth.

That is where Szamuely’s book ends. It is a shame he was never able to write at book-length about the 20th century, of which he was a passionate chronicler. He considered Lenin “the supreme political genius of the century”, and was impressed with the way he and his followers allied Russia’s interests abroad to Asian and African nationalism, not Communism. It was, in a way, the same judgment Marx had made in backing the populists.

Szamuely was fascinated with Ukraine. “Perhaps no other historical experience,” he writes in The Russian Tradition, “has left as lasting an impression on the folk-memory of the Russian people as the horrors of [the] interminable struggle against the slavers and killers of the south. For centuries the steppe remained a source of constant menace, a land of terror, death, destruction and degradation. It was called the Wild Plain, or, as we would say today, the Frontier; the greater part of this region is now called the Ukraine…”

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He was highly sympathetic to Ukraine’s modern struggles. In 1968 he wrote a fascinating and well-informed account of the nationalist protests and ensuing prosecutions that had then been going on in Ukraine for much of the decade. While granting that the Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis as liberators in June 1941, he wasn’t surprised by this nationalist sentiment, given the decade of famine and purges they had endured. He noted, too, the “methodological dilution” of Ukraine’s ethnic composition by Russia, insisting that Russian dominance of the country’s high culture was a recent and unnatural phenomenon. Only 41% of books published in Ukraine were in Ukrainian, it is true, but in 1930, before Russification and famine, that figure had been 84%.

Szamuely never let justified fear of Russia drive out justified fascination. Vastly well read in the country’s history, he still found it ambiguous, describing the policies of Ivan the Terrible at one point as “a strange mixture of farsightedness and paranoia — a combination frequently reproduced by his successors through the centuries”. Few historians have been better equipped than Szamuely to understand the paradoxes of Russia, where the novelists are sublime and the politics are unendurable, and often for the same reasons.

Indeed, their suggestions fairly regularly force me to re-evaluate, if not their intelligence, at least their taste. “Love me, love my dog” is the law of life; and how sad it is to ask how one enjoyed my gift, and to perceive not only their lying endorsement, but the, perhaps preferable, fib that they had read it. I enjoy throwing books in the trash, as I enjoy mixing the various articles the environmentally conscious suggest should be separated for more easy recycling. In 1914, Carl Sandburg saw “the painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys”, and lately I have seen the various separated recyclables re-mixed in the dumptruck.

But we both survived the trauma. Sandburg until 1967, and myself, to this very morning of writing.

My native Chicago built some rather tacky Urban Renewal Housing on the North Side in 1960. The construction was cheap, and the style Talentless Architect, Friday Afternoon; but it was to be dedicated to Affordable Housing for — supposedly — The Worthy. Their identity would be determined, then as now, by the whim of the bureaucrats. The worthy here turned out, predictably, to be the well-to-do who knew someone at City Hall. Where do we not find human perfidy? It certainly is found in the book which is my subject.

It is Kingsblood Royal, written by Sinclair Lewis in 1947. He, like most Western literature, is forgotten today, and it’s a shame, as he wrote some very good and very important books. They, at least, were important to me, as they hipped me to literature.

I used to cut school in the Fifties to go read. I would spend two or three hours in the Public Library Reading Room browsing the open stacks. What a delight; there, as with the old, independent bookstores, one could follow one’s nose without the guidance of a machine electronic or political. In any case, I, 13-years-old, came across a book called Main Street (1920) by Sinclair Lewis and read until I laid it down. It was his breakthrough novel about the dreary life of a Minnesota Town, and it sounded just like my youth in and outside Chicago.

His Babbitt (1922) is the story of a real estate Booster — the progenitor both of Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross. The books are masterpieces. I will not suggest you read them, in the hope that you may. And he, a most prolific gent, wrote a bit of trash, some okay fiction, and a few outliers. Outliers include It Can’t Happen Here (1935), the story of Fascism’s arrival in America, and Kingsblood Royal (1947).

This is a race story. It is not the race porn of today’s literature-adjacent plaints of mistreatment or avowals of white guilt. No. It is the story of a returning white WWII Vet, a rising cashier at a bank, who lives in the country-club set. The set takes up a lot of the members’ time drinking and dissing the servants. Their servants are all black, and their dish is about how lazy, offensive, sub-human and so on black people are, and how they are getting too big for their britches. Neil Kingsblood, our hero, agrees, and joins in the jollity.

But Neil, lamed in the War, can no longer engage in his beloved tennis; and, looking for a hobby, he takes up genealogy. What does he find? He finds that his great-great-grandfather was black.

What to do?

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Note, this is 1947, where a mixed-race couple, walking down a street in the South or the North did so at the risk of their lives; where the entire country was Jim Crow, and blacks, who’d been hired in the war effort were fired at the war’s conclusion. And so on. Not that long ago.

Should he “confess his taint”, he and his entire family will be ruined. He now wonders if the white community in which he lives can discern his black blood; as, indeed, they claim: “I was raised in the South and I can spot a dinge with only one drop of Negro Blood.”

He meets a returning black aviator, a combat pilot and Captain, who is now working in a barbershop. They begin chatting, one vet to another, and Neil, little by little, gets drawn into the black community. He is invited to the aviator’s home, where he is treated with chill reserve. But when he blurts out that he is himself “a Negro” he is enfolded in compassion and love. He comes to realise that blacks are not arrogant or standoffish, but necessarily self-protective among whites, as he is among blacks. But as a black among blacks he finds community.

He falls in love with a black girl, who congratulates him upon being black. He makes the truest friends he’s known since the camaraderie of the war. The book becomes that love story of every new convert. In his decision, his new friends commiserate and advise him to continue to pass, as what good would it do to come out? (The phrase Lewis uses.)

But he hears his new friends, and blacks in general, abused and dehumanised at a stag party, and speaks up for them. His country club cronies start to look sideways at him, and one uses that phrase, well-known to my youth: “what are you, a n—r lover?” He blurts out that he is a “negro”.

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Well, his family turns on him, he loses his job, he is bullied and arrested, his home is taken from him, under a “restrictive covenant” he signed, affirming that he was Caucasian.

Is this polemical, forgotten book important? It is important to me. Here’s why: It is a book about delusion.

Anthony Trollope, a humane and compassionate author, wrote of one of his characters: “When one knew he was a Jew one saw he was a Jew.” This is the wise writer unconsciously revealing delusion. It made sense to mid-Victorian readers who, like Trollope, were unaware their consciousness had been warped into absurdity by prejudice. For the phrase cannot actually mean anything other than: “Jews do not look or act differently from Christians; but I am led to believe so, by their label.”

Neil Kingsblood, an accepted, respected, accomplished, white member of his white community, when revealed he had “one drop of Negro blood”, was found to possess all the unfortunate (and imaginary) aspects of blackness. The accidental revelation of his ancestry led him to the discovery of a community madness, of which he was, previously, unaware, and in which he happily participated.

Will some people today find the book objectionable? Yes. That they will is evidence of another community sickness, that of our own advanced time: that sensitive matters can only be treated by those claiming to be victims, and then only by their indictment of their supposed oppressors. (I will name whites, straights, conservatives, Christians — ingathered into that accommodating portmanteau: “Haters.”)

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Designated Criminal

By David Mamet

Books about black-white relations (as opposed to books about, for example, being black: Native Son, Invisible Man, Passing) can only be written by an author belonging to one of the two groups. The group to which he does not belong will assuredly find humour and likely insult in this author’s ignorance. But what is one to do?

The only book featuring Jews and written by a Christian which I, a Jew, did not find ludicrous or enraging, was Ivanhoe. Everyone else gets it wrong, including George Eliot and her Daniel Deronda.

The Christian authors portraying Jews are like the Hollywood moguls who (with the exception of their casting of Paul Newman, a Jew, in Exodus) always cast a Christian as the Jew because, supposedly, to cast an “actual” Jew would outrage Christian sensibilities.

Returning to American Literature, here are two condign books. The first is Gentleman’s Agreement (Laura Z. Hobson, 1947). Here, a Christian journalist becomes aware of anti-Semitism, and sets out to investigate.

He goes to this and that hotel and restaurant, and tries to receive service as Mr Goldberg and is told to buzz off. His family and his community turn against him, and so on, the mixture as in Kingsblood Royal. In a bellylaff scene, he upbraids his Jewish Secretary, for being insufficiently Jewish, in using an anti-Semitic phrase. It was made as a film with Gregory Peck and won all kinds of awards for the Humanity of His Performance. Joe Mankiewicz said that its moral is you should always be kind to a Jew, as he might turn out to be a Christian.

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Will we escape our age of failure?

By Martin Gurri

Our lives, yours and mine, are full of sanctimony; in fact, a grand tool of self-diagnosis is recognition of the warm joy we take in sententiousness, and its big brother, righteousness. It is a lead-pipe cinch that these sugar-coat complicity.

A second book: In 1961, John Howard Griffin, a white man, took chemicals to darken his skin and travelled two months in the Jim Crow South, writing articles for Sepia about the plight of Southern blacks. These, published in book form as Black Like Me, record his actual experience of the fictive journey of Neil Kingsblood.

Sinclair Lewis’s story might have ended with Kingsblood’s discovery that he had been given the wrong genealogical chart, and that, after all, he did not have that drop of tainted “Negro Blood”. The end, therefore, which perhaps did not need further clarification, would have been that race is a delusion. As indeed it is. Its contemporary pre-eminence to the exclusion of all other human characteristics is our current-day sanctimony, as false and wicked as bussing, segregation, and Jim Crow; and, like them, a mantra in repetition of which one can seek escape from rational thought.

Reading seems to be my hobby; and, as a hobbyist, I am delighted by discovery of the obscure. The majority of the books beloved by their time are trash. Some are rediscovered and embraced, most are, blessedly forgotten. Some few have entertainment or educational value for those with a scholarly bent. Kingsblood Royal is a smorgasbord of the above.

The makeshift labels these people give themselves often have an implicit note of self-satisfaction: “4Runner Environmentalists”, “Green-necks” or “literary Westerners”. The terms denote a mix of cultural and political tendencies that cut across some of America’s great divides. They tend to be pro-gun but pro-environmental regulation, to have deep faith in the American experiment but a deep awareness of its flaws, to be suspicious of both big government and big corporations, and, above all, to hate the twinned power of government and business, which is the force that mostly shapes the West as we know it.

DeVoto is the high priest of this sect. Born in 1897 in Ogden, Utah, he spent most of his adulthood in the East, writing for Harper’s, teaching at Harvard, and occupying a tenuous middle ground in the political wars of his time: he was called a fascist in the pages of The Nation and the Daily Worker, and a communist by the Wyoming Cattlemen’s Association. He was a hunter and an outdoorsman, but he was also urbane and unabashedly sophisticated. His monumental 1947 Harper’s essay, “The West Against Itself”, may be the single most significant piece of periodical writing in the history of the American conservation movement. It exposed and almost singlehandedly blocked a vast scheme to sell off hundreds of millions of acres of public land. It also elaborated DeVoto’s thesis of the West as a “plundered province”, a story retold in Nate Schweber’s recent This America of Ours, a long-overdue first biography of DeVoto.

“He described how the wealth of the West’s natural resources had been systematically siphoned to the East,” Schweber writes, about DeVoto’s first use of this term. “And how — contrary to popular myth — it was Western settlers who learned to work together who halted the liquidation.”

This is the difficult and illuminating thing about reading DeVoto today, because in all of his writings he is resistant to the idea that settlers and small-time workers of the West were the engines of the genocide and despoliation that came to the region in their wake. In DeVoto’s telling, these people were complicated moral agents and often victims themselves, caught up in a churning machine of capital and government that, by the 20th century, had created a Western system defined by “laissez-faire capitalism with socialism, ownership rights without responsibility, investment but not regulation”. It was a picture of the corporatism that now colours every single part of American life, and DeVoto saw it as emerging in its first clear form in the government protection of powerful extractive industries in the Mountain West.

DeVoto’s most disturbing, poignant, and rich account of how we got to this point can be found in Across the Wide Missouri, his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 history of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. It took me several tries to actually finish the book. It is long, frustrating, and at times confusing, both hard to follow and hard to put down once you get into its flow.

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It is easy to see why the book is largely forgotten today. It reads like a history in the old American tradition of Francis Parkman or William H. Prescott, with dense, high-diction prose, and an implicit expectation that the reader is familiar with a set of characters — John Jacob Astor, Jim Bridger — who might have been familiar to Americans in 1947 but are much less so today. It also unfolds in a confusing set of braided personal narratives, telling the story of everyone from a wayward Scottish noble who found his calling in the West to the legendarily beautiful missionary Narcissa Whitman, one of the first two white women known to have crossed the Rocky Mountains, and who ended up living such a brutal and tragic life that it’s shocking no one has made a movie of it yet.

Across the Wide Missouri is so complex and iterative that attempting to describe its “plot” is a fools’ errand. But the book takes shape around a conflict between Astor’s American Fur Company and Bridger’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company, over the wealth of pelts that was beginning to flow from the mountain streams and valleys of the Interior West. This trade was the American West’s first great extractive industry, and it was what drove the exploration of the region. And in this story, you can see the whole blighted future of the region, and to some degree, that of America.

The fur trappers on whose labor the industry relied lived some of the most difficult lives anyone has ever lived, and almost none of them made much money. They were always hard men, often cruel. But they were also joyous, and the best parts of the book involve a series of retellings of the annual summer rendezvous, when trappers and native tribes gathered in drunken comity to trade, party, have sex and marry (intermarriage between whites and natives was the defining social structure of the mountain trade), and load up supplies for the winter.

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The picture here is very different from the one we get about Western history today, one that focuses on whites as the agents of genocide and “settler-colonialism”. DeVoto is interested instead in the brief period when the whites who came into the West did so without an eye to conquest or even settlement. “May we assume that enough has been said about release and debauch at the summer rendezvous?” he writes about one of the last such gatherings. “The trappers drank as many pints of alcohol as ever at five dollars a pint, sang as many songs, held as many horse races, bought as many squaws…. Rendezvous was the mountain man’s Christmas, county fair, harvest festival, and crowned-slave carnival of Saturn — this year as always.”

But it was not to last. The rabid competition between the fur companies kept the trappers in debt and wrecked the supply of beaver pelts. And it brought the tribes they lived and traded among into a system of dependence on the manufactured goods and alcohol that the companies proffered in exchange for the furs. The smallpox epidemic of 1837 was carried up the Missouri River on an American Fur Company supply boat, and the ensuing epidemic killed 90% of some of the tribes the trappers were most intimate and friendly with, like the Mandans, and almost as many among tribes they feared and fought, like the Blackfeet. It destroyed the market structure that the freewheeling trapper culture depended on, and by destroying native populations it laid the ground for the settler conquest and extractive pillage of the West that was to come.

The enduring power of DeVoto, one that makes him vital and not a little subversive today, is in his ability to tell the story of the birth of the extractive Western machine that doesn’t admit for easy culprits: “This narrative will not be suspected of admiring the business ethics of the Company,” he writes, “but it must protest the tendency of 20th-century historians to hold the 1830s in American history to ideas which the 1830s had never heard of, which they would not have understood, and which produce confusion or nonsense when imposed on them today.”

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For anyone who has the tenacity and time to finish it, Across the Wide Missouri ends up being almost inexpressibly rewarding and inexpressibly dark — a portrait of a moment in a part of America that only a few hundred or so Americans ever experienced and that very few Americans today know much about, but that did more than any other to shape our idea of a freewheeling Western frontier. It understands both the trappers and Natives who participated in the Western fur trade in the context of a system which “converted property, manipulated credit, and stripped the plundered province to the sole end of canalising eastward whatever wealth the West might produce”.

DeVoto’s purpose was not to absolve the trappers of their complicity in a system that ended up destroying the free West they inhabited and loved, but to show how the engines of capital and commerce coopted them into that destruction, against their own desires and interests. DeVoto acknowledged and even emphasised the violence between trappers and Native tribes during the fur-trading era. But he understood this violence, which caused many personal and bloody feuds but little wholesale carnage, as something different than what was to come — “the less murderous [and more state-directed] violence that was a condition of white society in the West”.

This was the state-engineered extractive regime that DeVoto spent his career railing against, and it is the force that has lead so many Americans in recent years to conclude that the settlement of the West is a single history of evil acts committed by evil men. But there is another story — one of the strange middle-ground reality that fur-trading era represented — that has hardly had any retelling since DeVoto’s difficult, annoying, brilliant magnum opus.

“This narrative calls attention to the fact that historical judgements must be peripheral or inane,” he wrote, uncannily anticipating the politico-historical debates of our current time, “until the preliminaries of historical statement have been made. And now feels free to return to its job.” We can only hope that more historians of this stripe will emerge today.

In American culture, the role of the cautioning fun-averse parent has been typically played by the political Right. For many years, Republicans were the party of rules and regulations, of just saying no (to drugs, to sex, to a good time in general), of pearl-clutching church ladies waging a perpetual war against smut — a category comprising all sorts of titillating material but also the Teletubbies, who were obviously perverts. The Conservatives of pre-Y2K were out to outlaw everything from skateboarding to South Park to non-missionary-position sex. If you wanted to fight for your right to party, the Right was who you were fighting.

That is not because fun is inherently a Left-wing phenomenon, but rather because it’s anti-ruling-class. The people in power make the rules; the fun-havers have fun by breaking them. “Fun — when your rulers would rather you not have it, and when the agents of social programming insist on stirring non-stop apprehension over the current crisis and the next one, the better to keep you submissive and in suspense — is elementally subversive,” wrote novelist Walter Kirn, as citizens of the US endeavoured to enjoy their first normal summer since 2020.

And if fun is inherently countercultural, then the inverse is also true: when a party finds itself in power, pucker-mouthed puritanism tends to creep up on it.

When it comes to cultural power, the moral majoritarians of my millennial youth have long since been dethroned. Now, the Left holds the keys to the castle, and the punk rockers are all wearing MAGA hats. That the forces of censorship, prudery and conformity have lately shifted their location to the political Left is not a new observation, but The Rise of the New Puritans by Noah Rothman is the first book-length work to identify it explicitly as a “war on fun”. According to Rothman, the progressive impulse toward policing fun is a feature of every puritanical movement, including the original one that gripped the not-yet-United-States back at the turn of the 18th century. History repeats itself: in 1699, Puritan leaders exhorted the public to contain themselves to the paradoxically termed “sober mirth”. In 2020, the height of socially approved comedy was Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, a stand-up special that is intentionally and explicitly not funny. As Rothman notes: “Perhaps nothing is as important to the promotion of a virtuous society as what you’re allowed to laugh at.”

It’s not just what, but also how much. The rule-makers set the parameters for socially-approved fun; they also seek to quash whatever falls outside them. The content of, say, an HBO comedy special from even ten years ago is legitimately shocking to the sensibilities of our current moment. The edgy comedians of the time, like Sarah Silverman, seem to be telecasting their material not just from the distant past but possibly from another planet entirely. A 2013 standup routine features Silverman espousing the greatness of rape jokes, adding: “Who’s gonna complain about a rape joke? Rape victims? They don’t even report rape. I mean, they’re traditionally not complainers.”

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And so the sanitisation of today’s cultural landscape is as much a question of what’s not there anymore: ribald comedy and steamy sex scenes are vanishing from mainstream film. Books are subject to review and rejection at the manuscript stage for “sensitivity”. Fusion restaurants are shuttered for the crime of cultural appropriation — which in many cases is not really about theft, but a lack of reverence for the culture in question. The Rise of the New Puritans keenly points to the prudery at the heart of such complaints, such as the one aimed by journalist Evy Kwong at a Toronto dumpling restaurant whose condiment selections included the cheekily-titled “HOT PHO U” and “JERK ME”. Kwong blasted the restaurant for “sexualizing jerk sauce and pho hot sauce” — which is to say, failing to take these sauces seriously. Irreverent condiment-based sex puns? Not in this house, mister.

Rothman catalogues how the tentacles of puritanism have wound their way into everything from food to film to football to fashion. This insistence on the dead seriousness of everything is one of the defining elements of our present moment. Everything frivolous must be taken seriously, injected with deep urgent meaning; everything fun must be seen first and foremost as a vehicle for danger, if not literal death then life-altering trauma.

Consider the way we talk about sex — and the way we attempt to scare young people out of having it. The puritans of the Nineties had their own approach to this, predicated on the notion that sex was a fun activity but it had dire consequences for those who attempted it outside of marriage (pregnancy or death from a flesh-eating STD). Today’s ideologues would instead have us believe that sex is damaging in and of itself, abetted by consent rhetoric that imagines the act as a tightrope walk over a vast ocean of potential violation. If you are ever less than 110% enthusiastic about what is happening, we tell young women, you are no longer consenting, but being raped. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect recipe for taking all the fun out of intimacy: how can you abandon yourself to the pursuit of physical ecstasy if you must also, at the same time, maintain a state of constant vigilance lest something go horribly wrong?

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And then there’s the pandemic, the impact of which is not addressed in The Rise of the New Puritans, but which certainly helped make the book’s subject go mainstream — much as the Salem witch trials were fuelled by an atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust that arose out of the fear of smallpox. The threat of Covid made explicit the connection between fun and danger, as every enjoyable social activity was recast as a vector for the spread of disease. It’s hard to think of a better example of “sober mirth” than the grim delight of the New Puritans as they padlocked the playgrounds, filled skate parks with sand, or patrolled the beaches in Florida dressed in a hood and a scythe. Forget problematic comedy, irreverent jerk sauce or bad sex. Here was a chance to send the entire world to its room, with a warning: if you attempt to go out and have fun now, you will be literally killing people.

For over two years, the contemporary puritans found their highest calling as pandemic enforcers. But it also seems possible now that this is where the fun police will make their last stand: rather than return to the cancellation trenches, targeting this restaurant or that television show for its offences, many of our most dedicated culture warriors have turned taking Covid seriously into their sole priority, seduced by the potent combination of performative asceticism, high stakes and low effort. Not only can you fight this war from home, your position is that much more unimpeachable if you yourself never leave the house. And they don’t; instead, you will find them online, railing away in the comments sections. Even now, they want to close the schools, ground the planes, mandate the masks. They are, invariably, martyrs to their own cause, which only fuels their righteous anger — if I haven’t gone to the theatre, dined indoors, or hugged my family since March 2020, then why should you?

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Here’s the thing: you can only see them online, and here they are preaching to the choir in an otherwise empty church. It is only the true believers who are left, feeding on and off each other, stewing in fear and resentment while everyone else goes outside and has fun. And as loud as they might seem to themselves, and each other, within the confines of their echo chamber, the truth is that outside of it they’re not just irrelevant, but nearly invisible. Their power, and their numbers, are diminished by the mere existence of normal people living normal lives.

And when this movement collapses under the weight of its own joylessness, as it almost certainly must, it’ll be the proverbial tree falling alone in a forest, unnoticed and unmourned. Because while the progressive puritans among us are, to paraphrase the H.L. Mencken quote, tormented by the notion that someone somewhere might be having a good time, the fun-havers are having too much fun to think about them at all.

In reality, though, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical didn’t premiere until early in 2015, just four short months before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator and inaugurated the age of populism. This means that Hamilton enthusiasm was partially a lagging indicator, and partially just something for stunned liberals to desperately grasp onto, a thread running backward to the cosmopolitan American future they had lost.

I do not come to bury this kind of fandom: the Miranda musical is terrific no matter its ideological baggage. But it still might have been more intellectually productive if the Trump era had inspired its fans to turn from Miranda’s version of the Founding to the one found in Gore Vidal’s 1973 novel Burr.

Burr already had one cultural moment, dropping originally amid the squalor of Watergate, when its dose of cold-eyed iconoclasm was well-received by critics and bookbuyers alike. But today the novel can be read or re-read with new eyes, outside the long shadow cast by its late author’s famous media persona, and in a landscape where its vision has just as much to offer.

That vision is cynical on the surface. Vidal retells the story of the Founding era from the perspective of what one of Aaron Burr’s biographers called the “Fallen Founder” — the almost-president of 1800, the slayer of Alexander Hamilton in their 1804 duel, the man tried for treason for a supposed scheme to detach the western states from the Union.

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The treason trial ended in acquittal but also ended Burr’s public political career; he bounced around Europe unhappily in search of patronage and then ended up back in New York City, where he lived quietly as a lawyer until a late marriage to a wealthy widow in 1837. That’s the point at which the novel picks up, through the agency of its narrator, Charles Schuyler, a young journalist on the make who befriends the aged Burr but also agrees to betray him, by gathering evidence intended to prove that the disreputable killer of Hamilton and famous ladies’ man is also the secret father of Vice President Martin Van Buren, whose pending ascent to the presidency Schuyler’s patrons hope to block.

With this hope in mind, the journalist induces the aging Burr to share his own unfinished memoirs, granting us first-person flashbacks to the Revolutionary War and early republic, in which Burr describes his own rise and fall while settling accounts with all his former friends and rivals.

Compared to the pieties of conservative founder-worship or even of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, these portraits can seem savage. George Washington is an incompetent general who, as president, obsesses over his own quasi-royal dignity. Hamilton, of course, is everything that he accused Burr of being: A man of vaulting ambition, eager for aristocratic style and monarchical power, “capable of any illegality including a military coup”, who actually engaged in an attempt to steal the 1800 election. (Vidal’s Burr writes: “I suspect that when Hamilton looked at me he saw, in some magical way, himself reflected. And so if one is an embryo-Caesar, accuse the looking-glass of that high treason and divert thereby the wrath of the plebes.”)

Finally Jefferson, in Burr’s telling, is expedience and ambition personified — a man who had the gift “at one time or another to put with eloquence the ‘right’ answer to every moral question”, even as in practice “he seldom deviated from an opportunistic course, calculated to bring him power”. A man whose principles committed him to an agrarian and decentralised confederacy, but whose presidency settled “with suspicious ease” on empire-building and executive power. A better Napoleon than Napoleon himself, since his empire-building in the vast Louisiana territory actually endured.

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As readers we need not accept that Burr-the-narrator is reliable in all these details, or buy all of his extensive self-justifications. We only have to accept his unique observer’s position, as a man interested in his own honour and prospects but not especially keen on any grand ideological project, at a time when one of history’s grandest ideological projects — the age of revolution — was getting underway.

From that perspective, Burr’s account is cynical and deflating relative to mythmakers and ideological historians — and one of the points of setting the novel’s framing narrative in the 1830s is to see how quickly American mythmaking took hold. But even through the eyes of the Fallen Founder there is no escaping the fact that what he describes is a political success story: a republic established and then expanded, various disasters and civil wars avoided, the Caesarist appetites of even the most powerful figures checked and limited, and at least some revolutionary ideals put into political practice.

Indeed, the novel’s Burr often circles back to acknowledge as much. All his barbed comments about Washington culminate in the observation that: “He was the supreme creator of his union … [whose] powerful will and serpentine cunning made of a loose confederation of sovereign states a strong federal government graven to this day in Washington’s sombre Roman imperial image.” His war with Hamilton doesn’t conceal his partial liking for his rival, and his sneers at the self-made immigrant double as an acknowledgment of the Horatio Alger qualities celebrated on Broadway.

Even Jefferson, Burr’s final enemy and the instigator of his treason trial, is presented as, well, what he was — a dreadful hypocrite, with a tangle of competing motivations and ideals slicked over by self-interest, but also a remarkably effective politician who adapted himself to the new republic’s presidency rather than being carried into disasters by his radical inclinations.

So what is the novel’s un-cynical message? Perhaps that politics is an always unfinished and ambiguous vocation, whose moments of moral clarity are inherently exceptional, and whose normal workings require a constant balancing-act between idealism and realism, private probity and public vision, the necessary and the possible.

This balance needs to be struck within the individual statesman, first. The reader will observe that Burr falters and falls, relative to the other Founders, not because he’s worse and they’re better, but because he has the wrong proportions: too much concern for his private honour, which makes him miss crucial opportunities and also carries him into the fateful duel, and not quite enough concern for public ideals and great causes, which makes him an insufficiently inspiring leader for any of the new country’s clashing factions.

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But then, in good Madisonian terms, the balance also needs to be struck between competing statesmen. The great good fortune of America in the Revolutionary era, in Vidal’s portrait, was not that all its leaders were uniquely public-spirited but rather that their talents and rivalries interacted in such a way as to mostly stabilise and strengthen the young country. Which is to say, while everyone was accusing everyone else of being a monarchist or Caesar in the making, the republic took form and proved stronger than any individual or faction.

This brings us to the book’s relevance for our own political era, in which accusations of incipient autocracy fly as freely as they did in the United States of 1800. There is a certain relief in recognising this similarity. It’s a reminder, among other things, that periods of stable consensus politics are almost as exceptional as moments of total moral clarity, and that the people who have constantly asserted this-is-not-normal about some feature of the age of populism are mistaken. It’s quite normal for small-r republican politics to be shadowed by the fear of tyranny, corrupted elections, misinformation, destabilising foreign influence, the fate of Rome. (Before there was the reductio ad Hitlerum there was the reductio ad Rubicon — and perhaps the exhausted response: “A Catiline-conspiracy analogy, again, really?”)

These similarities also hint that the politics of the late-18th and 19th centuries may be more relevant to our own fragmented era than the mass movements and ideological tyrannies of the early 20th century. The category to which Burr belongs, the political adventurer — the none-too-principled but also none-too-ideological figure seizing opportunities as they come to him — seems especially relevant to the rise of Trump or, for that matter, Boris Johnson. And of course Andrew Jackson, hovering in the wings of Burr, remains the crucial antecedent for all American populism, past, present and yet to come.

But to the extent that aspects of our own era can be glimpsed in Vidal’s vision of the American Founding, the recognition also brings with it a sense of the depressing difference. We have the adventurers, the fears of Caesarism, the conspiracy theories and fake news, but the qualities of leadership and vision that Burr grudgingly acknowledges in his rivals seem altogether absent. Instead of vaulting ambition counteracting vaulting ambition, our adventurers stand out, clownishly, amid a landscape of greying mediocrity. This is far less dangerous than the alternative, but it is a sign of decay rather than life.

In the years since, the novelist once dismissed as a gutter pulp sci-fi weirdo has steadily climbed the ladder of posthumous literary reputation. The case for Dick’s genius has never rested on his dystopian vision of technology, which he shared in common with masters like HG Wells and Stanislaw Lem, and with hundreds of sci-fi writers since. Good science fiction — as opposed to fantasy novels set on other planets — is defined by a quasi-philosophical examination of interactions between men and machines and other products of modern science. It is part novel and part thought-experiment, centered on our idea of the human.

What made Dick a literary genius, then, was not any special talent for predicting hand-held personal devices or atom bombs the size of a shoe which might have led him to a job in Apple’s marketing department. His gift was for what might be called predictive psychology — how the altered worlds he imagined, whether futuristic or merely divergent from existing historical continuums, would feel to the people who inhabited them. Dick’s answer was, very often: “Not good.”

Dick’s dystopian-psychological approach marks him less as a conventional science fiction writer than as a member of the California anti-utopian school of the Sixties, whose best-known members include Robert Stone, Thomas Pynchon, Ken Kesey, Joan Didion and Hunter Thompson. Seen from this angle, Dick was perhaps the most powerfully and sweepingly paranoid of a group of writers whose stock-in-trade was conspiracy and paranoia, the hallmarks of a society marked — at that moment, and this one — by violent street crime, drug-induced psychosis, and visionary promises gone terribly wrong. Of his anti-utopian peers, Dick’s sci-fi genre background made him the only one who had any particular feel for the proposition that technology was inseparable from, and would therefore inevitably alter, our idea of the human.

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Technology was and is perhaps the most Californian aspect of the American mythos. The idea that the universal constants of human nature were at war with the mutilating demands of technology-driven systems was a very Sixties Californian conceit, to which Dick’s fellow anti-utopians each adhered in their own way: In Kesey’s showdown between man and the castrating nanny-state; in Didion’s emphasis on the vanishing virtue of self-reliance; in Pynchon’s degenerate Ivy League Puritanism; in Thompson’s drug-addled primitivism; and in Stone’s Catholic idea of devotion to a God that might somehow salve the wounds of the survivors once the great American adventure goes bust.

What Dick saw, and what his fellow anti-utopians did not, was that human psychology and technology are not separate actors, and that whatever emerged from the other side of the future would be different to the human thing that entered it.

* * *

Seeing and describing how large numbers of people will perceive reality before anyone else does requires imagining states of consciousness that, in the moment, seem deeply strange. It is no accident that the greatest of works of speculative psychology were written by revolutionaries whose outlook was often bleak to the point of despair. The negative tone of these works often led future generations to describe their authors as conservatives, though artistically and psychologically speaking, they are radicals. Or rather, in their rejection of the dominant order, they are radicals and reactionaries at the same time.

The anti-utopian tradition emerged in earnest in 19th-century Russia. The Russian pioneers of the genre were superior to their rivals in England and elsewhere because the latter’s visions were constrained by attachments to a settled society, which one can argue never really existed in Russia — and because the ideas of revolution and violent reaction have always been so closely allied in the Russian psyche. Fyodor’s Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground struck many of its initial readers as a kind of artless mental vomit, before revealing itself as a Rosetta Stone for the century of Adolf Hitler and Lee Harvey Oswald. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is probably the greatest of at least a dozen weirdly prophetic novels written in the years immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. In We, Zamyatin predicted what a surveillance society run by engineers would feel like to its inhabitants with a nauseating accuracy that did not become fully apparent until the rise of the modern tech surveillance complex.

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The Dick novel that directly predicted our information-addicted, socially-networked 21st-century society, A Scanner Darkly, was both a prophecy of future psychological states and a half-veiled memoir of Dick’s own experiences in the California drug culture. Published in 1977, the book was a detective noir set in a druggy future in which large portions of the population appear to spend their lives scheming and snitching on each other to feed their addictions to a drug called Substance D — the “D” standing for Death, of course.

A Scanner Darkly, a reference to the line in Corinthians in which men at first see God “as in a glass, darkly”, is Dick’s rawest book and the one that reads least like science fiction. The book’s protagonist is simultaneously a narcotics agent known to his peers as Fred and a Substance D addict named Bob Arctor. Fred/Arctor lives in a house — his former marital abode — with two fellow addicts, and is in love with another addict named Donna, who comes to visit him there. Donna helps Arctor obtain Substance D, which he consumes, while Fred uses Donna to attempt to climb higher on the drug distribution ladder. At the end of the novel, Donna turns out to be a drug agent, who is spying on Bob Arctor.

What’s so striking about the book is not Dick’s heartfelt, if futuristically bent, portrayal of the evils of Sixties drug culture. For that, read Stone, who was a master of connecting the physical, mental and moral corruption of drug dealing and dependency, and the fantasies those pursuits inevitably engender to the deeper corruption of man’s nature.

What Dick uniquely captured was something else: The degenerative effects of the split-screen existence of a human brain ceaselessly spying on and doubting and implicating itself while at the same time being spied on by others, all of whom are embedded within machine systems that record everything for reasons that humans cannot understand. Over the course of this machine-and-chemical fed process of human self-contradiction and self-destruction, of which Fred/Arctor is only intermittently aware, we see his thoughts and perceptions being short-circuited and reduced to gibberish.

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Drug-induced paranoia aside, the psychology of Dick’s addicts and narcs is as good a description as exists of the spreading incoherence of today’s information ecosystem, which none of us are able to fully see or understand. As a thought experiment, it doesn’t matter that Dick chose a drug rather than the stories we tell about ourselves and our world. It’s not the technology; it’s the psychology. What Dick saw was that the process of splitting ourselves in two — into subject and narc — was a brutal assault on the idea of being human and would make thoughts and communication impossible.

“What does a scanner see?” Arctor wonders, after examining the surveillance apparatus that has been planted, with his knowledge, in his own home. “I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infra-red holographic scanner like they used to use, or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me – into us – clearly or darkly? I hope it does, see clearly,” Arctor continues, “because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better.” They don’t.

* * *

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, which the English philosopher sketched out in a series of letters between 1786 and 1788 while visiting  the Mogilev district of the Russian Empire, was an architectural system of control in which all inmates of an institution could be made visible to a single guard. Bentham’s utopian-utilitarian idea was widely applied in Victorian England to a range of public and private spaces including prisons, asylums, hospitals, factories and even schools. The unique horror of the Benthamite set-up was not the power imbalance inherent in places like prisons and factories, whose existence is obvious to guards and prisoners alike. It was the attempt to eliminate privacy, which is a necessary precondition for being human.

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Over the last decade, Bentham’s architecture of unfreedom has been replaced by the architecture of machines. This has created a new social reality where everyone is at once inmate and guard; a panopticon where nothing is private and no one is free. The invisible operations of the machines and programmes we use every day to buy books or food or communicate, which are linked to each other and to the surveillance operations of large government agencies in a single net, induces in most sentient beings a kind of free-floating paranoia of the type that destroys the inhabitants of A Scanner Darkly. On the one hand, everyone knows that everyone is being watched. On the other, it is necessary to deny that knowledge in order to appear to be functioning normally.

One of the most unpleasant characteristics of the weird split-screen mentality of our times is how people must routinely speak against themselves — deny what they see, hear, feel and believe  — in order to maintain the appearance of sanity. It is now routine, for example, to hear Americans on the Left and the Right deride their political opponents for believing in far-reaching conspiracy theories — while in the next breath revealing their own.

No doubt both sides are at least half right. During lockdowns, it became normal for public officials in Western countries to issue draconian edicts in the name of “science” for the supposed good of large numbers of people, only to violate those edicts themselves. The meaning of “science”, it turned out, had nothing to do with the “common good”, or with demonstrating a theory through evidence; it was “one rule for me and another for thee”.

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The flagrant doublespeak that is nurtured in the surveillance societies of the West, which have sprung up around us unnoticed, is characteristic of totalitarian societies and mental asylums. The difference is that both totalitarian societies and asylums allow for nonthreatening zones of privacy in order to make life easier for the guards. What we live in today is something else, a set of mirrors into which we are encouraged to look so that our reflections can be distorted and then returned to us. As Bob Arctor puts it, reflecting on the words of Corinthians: “it is not through glass but reflected back by a glass. And that reflection that returns to you: it is you, it is your face, but it isn’t.”

Powerful people in Western societies have lately become convinced of their ability to accomplish great feats of moral and social engineering by controlling these mirrors, altering our reflections and selling them back to us, while undermining our ability to think coherently. The mirrors are not meant to help anyone think; they are systems of control. They are mechanisms of profit, which foster dependence. They are used to mete out punishment, and spy on us.

What’s alarming is that the people who delight in their mastery of these devices seem not to have thought very hard about the damage they are doing to the people who shoot up, a category that includes those who shoot up schools and malls. None of them seem to calculate what creating a miasma of nonsensical conspiracy theories will do to the psyches of their own children, who will inherit “the murk”. They appear to believe that people with minds that have been permanently broken by their gibberish machines will make the perfect workers on their farm. Let’s see how that turns out for them.

Rule Makers, Rule Breakers explores Gelfand’s research into differences between cultures. Specifically, she describes cultures that are (using terms invented by Finnish-American anthropologist Pertti Pelto) “tight” and “loose”. Tight cultures are conformist “rule makers” while loose ones are creative “rule breakers”. According to Gelfand, tight nations include India, Singapore, South Korea, Norway, Turkey, China and Portugal; loose nations include Spain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, the Netherlands and Ukraine. (The UK sits somewhere towards the middle, and is slowly becoming looser.)

Life in tight nations can be strict compared to looser places, which have weaker social norms and a more permissive way of being. Gelfand contrasts tight Japan where “trains almost never arrive late” with loose Brazil where “clocks on city streets all read a different time, and arriving late for business meetings is more the rule than the exception. If Brazilians want to insist on timeliness, they will ask you to arrive “com pontualidade britânica” (“with British punctuality”). In notoriously tight Germany there are “mandated quiet hours” on certain days, during which lawn-mowing, loud music and washing machine use is forbidden. “After one Cologne resident complained about a yapping dog, a judge allowed the dog to bark for only 30 minutes a day in 10-minute intervals.”

What makes all this especially powerful is Gelfand’s understanding that we absorb the rules of our time and place, internalising them so that, to an extent, we become them. The halting but demonstrably true fact is that certain cultures produce, on average, certain kinds of human. We’re a tribal species and our brains are programmed to learn local norms, to follow them and to judge others by how closely or otherwise they conform to them. We need rules in order to live successfully in co-operative groups; they are our “cure for chaos”. And we love our rules. Gelfand quotes the Greek adventurer Herodotus who, in roughly 450 BC, observed our ethnocentric nature: “If one were to order all mankind to choose the best set of rules in the world, each group would, after due consideration, choose its own customs; each group regards its own as being by far the best.”

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It’s not that loose nations don’t have any rules at all, then, but that they take them marginally less seriously than the tight. And so sometimes dramatic differences arise between people of different cultures. Loose types, raised in a more laissez-faire environment, tend to possess less self-control than the tighties. “People in the United States, New Zealand, Greece and Venezuela weigh much more than people in tight countries like India, Japan, Pakistan and Singapore, even taking into account a country’s wealth and people’s average height,” writes Gelfand, adding that, in the US, “over 50% of dogs and cats are overweight or obese, including my own dog, Pepper”. Similarly, loose countries such as Spain, Estonia and New Zealand are some of the booziest in the world, while tight Singapore, India and China are among the most abstemious.

In cultures that have “little tolerance for deviance”, though, life can get rather hatey. Tight nations are often not welcoming of outsiders. China reportedly “ranks in the 90th percentile of countries with the most negative attitudes toward foreigners”, while in Japan “many landlords have a ‘no foreigners’ policy, and certain bathhouses, shops, restaurants and hotels deny entry to foreign customers”. Closer to home, surveys show that “almost 30% of Austrian citizens hold anti-Semitic attitudes”. Research by Gelfand and her team, involving more than 33,000 people in 19 countries, found loose nations to be the most tolerant, being “much more willing to live next to a wider range of people, including homosexuals, individuals from a different race or religion, foreign workers, unmarried couples and those who have AIDS”.

In an especially fascinating passage, Gelfand examines the causes of tightness. Her conclusion is straightforward: it’s a response to trouble. When the going gets tough, groups get tight. Each tight culture her team looked at “had (or has) to deal with a high degree of threat, whether from Mother Nature and her constant fury of disasters, diseases and food scarcity, or from human nature and the chaos caused by invasions and internal conflicts”. Take China: here is a nation that borders 14 countries, each of which it has fallen out with at some point. As well as experiencing “massive conflict throughout its history”, internally and externally, China has suffered terrible assaults by nature, having lost 25 times more lives to natural disasters, over the past 50 years, than the US. It also has relatively few natural resources, when compared with looser nations, and suffers from poor access to safe water and significant food deprivation. (It’s worth noting here that tight and loose differences can also be found across individual states of the US, with looseness found more in the north, and tightness down south.)

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As I read Rule Makers, it occurred to me that you could apply the tight-loose paradigm not just to cultures, but to all human groups. I applied this to the book I was researching, The Status Game, in which I note that some political movements are tighter than others, as are some religions — even some corporate cultures. The tightest groups of all are cults: they’re extremely ethnocentric and demand absolute adherence to their rules with sometimes terrible punishments meted out to deviants. Cult members, like culture-members, tend to internalise their group’s rules. One former participant in the Heaven’s Gate cult wrote (the caps are his): “I WANTED TO BE IN [THE HEAVEN’S GATE] PROGRAM AND WANTED TO ABIDE BY ALL THEIR RULES. [Not conforming] would be tantamount to wanting to be a NASA astronaut but deciding this or that procedure didn’t need to be adhered to.” Another wrote: “We weren’t here to be programmed or brainwashed. We were here to beg to be brainwashed.”

It also occurred to me that it might be possible to view the culture wars through this lens. In The Status Game I note demographic research by More in Common that described a cohort called “Progressive Activists” as those “motivated by the pursuit of social justice” (you know who they mean). Progressive Activists make more contributions to social media than any other group, and are also the wealthiest and most highly educated group in the UK. And they have certainly tightened up over the last 14 or so years, becoming more conformist and less tolerant of those who don’t share their beliefs.

It’s significant, then, that this group has suffered a drop in perceived status: highly-educated millennials are more qualified but 20% less wealthy than Boomers were at the same age: the average millennial’s worth in 2016 was 41% less than those of a similar age in 1989. They’re finding it harder to secure jobs suited to their level of education, or get on the housing ladder, and are burdened with student debt, graduating with an average deficit of £40,000. Since 2008’s Global Financial Crisis, they’ve lived with the sense that the game of life is fixed against them; that there is major trouble afoot for their group.

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Meanwhile their enemies — Brexity-minded, anti-globalisation, anti-immigration nationalists — have also endured a period of trouble. During the era of globalisation, the white working-class communities of Britain have been significantly impacted by incoming populations of black, eastern European and Muslim workers. This group feels ignored and disrespected by highly-educated politicians and much of the media-class, who dismiss them as little more than aggressive, ignorant bigots. So, they tighten up. Of course they do: they’re human, and that’s what humans do.

My analysis here is speculative. While it may be impossible to prove that tightness, fuelled by declines in relative status, is at work in the culture wars, the evidence is there. It’s also a potentially worrying augur for the future. The ramifications of the Covid economy, the invasion of Ukraine and Brexit are descending. It’s possible that all this pressure will tighten us up on a national level, as it did in the Second World War, and we’ll all move closer together; the two sides of the culture war may focus less on their own local battles as their attention moves to recession, fuel bills and winter blackouts. But if these groups continue to look inwards, neither the wealthy, educated activists nor the angry, dismissed white poor will be loosening up their mindsets, or their prejudices, any time soon.

At this particular party, with guests still reeling from Trump’s victory, a professor at an Ivy League university began expounding on the flaws with American democracy — an outdated “18th-century technology” in our digital present. In a world of Russian Facebook ads and Cambridge Analytica, why put our faith in democratic processes? The winner gets the nuclear codes. Should we really leave it up to the manipulable US public? It’s nice giving everyone a vote, but so what? One individual’s vote among millions has little meaning. We need a better system, not sentimental ideas about the inherent value of voting.

Outdated 18th-century man that I am, I was outraged less by his arguments than by his underlying attitude, the blithe aristocratic assumption that democratic outcomes tell us nothing we need know, or nothing other than the hateful stupidity of American voters. That a better class of people should be in charge, the stakes being too high for such decisions to be left to the sorts of people… well… bringing our food in and our empty plates out of the dining room.

As Gordon Wood has noted, the American Revolution was not simply a matter of political change. It entailed a social revolution as well, emphasising equality as a social principle, undermining long-held hierarchies, and promoting an attitude of greater respect for ordinary men. Such attitudes are not always natural. The siren song of hierarchy, power, and authority captivates us even when we’re not recoiling from the monstrosities of populism. And if one would like to observe such attitudes at their most subtle and seductive, one of the best and most elegantly written books from such a perspective is George Kennan’s celebrated Sketches from a Life.

These are the assembled travel writings and letters written from 1927 to 1989 by George Kennan, diplomat and historian, key architect of Cold War containment and the Marshall Plan, a brilliant analyst and a beautiful writer, and an American patriot who long advocated for a less bellicose, less militarist, less hubristic foreign policy. ‘‘George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history,’’ said Henry Kissinger. It’s a marvellous book, with passages of such elegance and insight I was constantly photographing them and sending them to friends. It also filled me with the same outrage I’d felt at that dinner party.

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Those who have read Around the Cragged Hill, Kennan’s political and philosophical manifesto, will know some of the man’s oddities: his hatred of the automobile, his desire to split up America into 12 constituent republics, his belief that widespread use of domestic servants is essential for cultural health. And those familiar with the more unsavoury bits of his biography will know about his speculations that black and naturalised citizens should not be allowed to vote, about his self-declared “soft spot” for apartheid, about his State Department memo (that Dean Acheson refused to circulate) that partly blamed miscegenation for Latin America’s political troubles.

But it is in Sketches from a Life that we get his vision, most clearly and seductively, at the level of sensibility. And likewise, it is where we get almost unbidden notes of American optimism and egalitarianism occasionally polluting that vision. And so, rather than a sourcebook from “one of the wisest men in America” (as the New York Times put it when reviewing the book in 1989), this is a book best revisited as if it were a novel about a tragically limited, albeit brilliant, man who spent his life in service to a country whose spirit was at odds with his own.

Early on in Sketches, we learn that Kennan, 23 years old but already nostalgic for an imagined past, regrets not having been born 100 years earlier:

“Life is too full in these times to be comprehensible. We know too many cities to be able to grow into any of them, and our arrivals and departures are no longer matters for emotional debauches — they are too common. I should like to have lived in the days when a visit was a matter of months, when political and social problems were regarded from simple standpoints called ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, when foreign countries were still foreign, when a vast part of the world always bore the glamour of the great unknown, when there were still wars worth fighting and gods worth worshipping.”

“Such beautiful bullshit,” I wrote in the margins. Kennan was born in 1904, so one wonders which wars he was thinking of (America’s Indian Wars? 1824’s First Anglo-Burmese War? The French Conquest of Algeria?), but specificity here isn’t the thing so much as getting wrapped up in the myth-making power of your own prose.

Indeed, the book is haunted by visions of a perfect past where suffering was justified by higher ideals. In St. Petersburg he notes that the Imperial Yacht Club, once the haunt of dukes, diplomats, and dignitaries, had been turned into a state administration building for internal waterways. He laments the loss of an old playground for the rich: did it not “actually add something of colour and variety to the city for the people of that day to know that here, in these premises, there was being prepared, even if they didn’t eat it, some of the finest food eaten anywhere in northern Europe, that here things were being done elegantly, impressively, to the connoisseur’s taste?”

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Monarchy gets a similar justification, since the trappings of monarchy are “the dream, the vision, the ideal of man as he might conceivably be — of man ennobled”, a theatre without which Europe supposedly couldn’t have produced “good taste”. Elsewhere he declares that men require “a moral order drawn up by those who are wiser and more experienced than the great masses of humanity and are capable of channelling into the body of spiritual law the ponderous experience of millennia of human progress”.

These beautiful visions of a refined world propped up by an impoverished populace are contrasted with Kennan’s disgusted reactions to widespread prosperity. In Scandinavia he sees, or thinks he sees, “the intellectual and spiritual vacuum which the European welfare state produces”. This happens when “the sacrifice of an attractive and gracious form of living on the part of a few is rationalised by the same arguments about better conditions for the many”. And in America, he speculates that when man is given “freedom both from political restraint and from want, the effect is to render him childlike”. In one of his more amusing asides, he compares California to “the popular American Protestant concept of heaven” since:

“There is always a reasonable flow of new arrivals; one meets many — not all — of one’s friends; people spend a good deal of their time congratulating each other over the fact that they are there; discontent would be unthinkable; and the newcomer is slightly disconcerted to realise that now — the devil having been banished and virtue being triumphant — nothing terribly interesting can ever happen again.”

There are some poignant moments, especially during and in the wake of Second World War, when he sees the faces of refugees, or the sites of mass slaughter. In the ruins of Hamburg, he’s struck by the conviction that no military calculus “could have justified this stupendous, careless destruction of civilian life and of material values”. On the border of Finland and Russia, he sketches a picture of birch trees growing above “the remains of some boy — be he Russian or Finnish — who gave up on this spot the privilege of leading a life through, like the rest of us, in all its satisfactions and disappointments”. This is the sensibility which spurred Kennan, in 1950, to write a State Department paper calling for an end to the use of nuclear weapons for offensive purposes, since they cannot be “reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying” adversaries, and since “they fail to take account of the ultimate responsibility of men for one another”.

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Admirable, indeed. Grand suffering clearly moves him. And yet, here too, I find something disturbing. A true humanism would afford common people dignity in life as well as in death. But in Berlin, “the great awesome ruins” of East Berlin stand in judgment of West Berlin, which seems “toylike and trivial: an officious little busybody of a civilisation, fussy and impermanent”. And he cannot look upon a suffering child, a young French girl on a cart, in a torn and soiled dress, with all the youth gone out of her face, without projecting his own notions onto her: “Just try to tell her of liberalism and democracy, of progress, of ideals, of tradition, of romantic love, see how far you get… Do you think she’s going to come out of it a flaming little patriot? She saw the complete moral breakdown and degradation of her own people…”

There are times, though, where the aristocratic lens cracks, and rather than smug if elegantly written dismissals of human beings we get to witness a fine mind grappling with the gap between his perceptions and his ideas about the world. The earliest comes in Hamburg, in 1927, when he encounters a huge Communist demonstration at the Dammtor Station. “For all my contempt for the falseness and hatefulness and demagoguery of communism,” he writes, “I had a strange desire to cry when I first saw those ranks of people marching along the street — ill-dressed, slouching, brutalised people.” Kennan being Kennan, he finds them “ignorant, unpleasant people,” but can’t deny the truth of their humanity: “They were after centuries of mute despair, for the first time attempting to express and to assert themselves.”

Later, while Ambassador in Moscow, he leads into powerful reflections on the stability of the communist regime with a set of observations about the hundreds of thousands of garden plots on the outskirts of Moscow. These plots open up for ordinary Russians “a veritable world of what you might call ‘miniature private interest’, a world in which people devote themselves to, and think about, everything under the sun except the success of communism.” Political discontent doesn’t breed in these spaces so much as a “spiritual breach between the rulers and the ruled…”

Here, after so much nostalgia for the old European order, we see Kennan’s Americanness inflecting his vision. What he sees is not anti-communism so much as human life, unruly and unreconciled to ideological systems seeking its suppression. “The Party has tried to rule out change.” he writes, “but the Party is hoisted here on the petard of its own lack of a genuine democracy, of the loss of organic connection with the emotional forces of the people themselves.” Nothing dramatic looms on the horizon, no coming revolt, but the excitement of the revolution has exhausted itself. Human beings, never quite as mouldable as elites imagine, move unexpectedly, uncontrollably, dangerously.

I must confess, I have a certain degree of nostalgia for the world Kennan inhabited. Hard-earned expertise, like the expertise Kennan had about Russia, is not to be scoffed at, the gutting of the State Department over the past decades is one of the America’s great self-inflicted wounds, and a less hubristic, less militaristic foreign policy of the sort he advocated is one I heartily endorse. But though experts have valuable, if partial truths we need to hear, they should be haunted by the notion that those “ill-dressed, slouching, brutalised people” might have access to their own partial truths as well.

Yet somehow the perception is that nostalgia is the sole province of xenophobes. Well “newsflash”, as we used to say. Those of us on the Left also become more nostalgic as we get older. We too mourn the past. So, at a time of mounting scepticism about the public finance model for our denationalised industries, I commend this bible of calm rationalism: the British Rail Corporate Identity Manual.

The Manual, like the actual Bible, doesn’t need to be read linearly. It’s best experienced immersively, as a trove of browsable scripture. Oh, spoiler alert: both British Rail and the Bible end badly. One in terrifying madness, with everything destroyed by rapacious monsters, the other in a poorly-written Book of Revelation.

The Manual is a beautiful, heartbreaking anthology of design guides issued by BR between 1965 and 1970, the coolest and most swinging period in our modern social history. We had a proper Old Labour government, for a start. We had the Pill and the Mini and rising wages thanks to strong unions headed by people who sounded like us. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was groovy heaven. The Beatles were turning us on, reinventing the future, in those long summery five years from Rubber Soul to Let It Be. The Open University was launched, decades before the internet made remote learning universally dull. Brutalist masterpieces redefined civic space and, along with atheism and cohabitation and drugs and whatnot, it really irritated older people, which made everything so much funnier.

We were a railway household in those days. My dad started as a fitter with British Railways after the war, and ended up working at British Rail’s new-look Euston during its modernisation. He revered The Euston Concourse as others revere St Peter’s Square; VIPs using the same space as the proles. I remember with affection Euston’s pristine egalitarian public space, yet to be slathered in shrieking adverts, yet to succumb to the inevitable rash of franchise buboes. God, I can even remember when the toilets were free.

We were passengers then, not customers. Passenger traffic, not just technical modernisation, drove the new-look BR. For the first time in the history of British railways, passengers had replaced freight as the main source of business; the company had to present itself as a legible, people-centred organisation. How refreshing it all seems today, when a privatised industry treats passengers as freight.

Also — nostalgia klaxon — it’s worth remembering that we weren’t “in Europe” at the time. BR’s assertive corporate identity was a cheerfully patriotic act. Tony Howard, former Head of Design for British Rail, was rightly proud of bringing sleek coherence to a post-Beeching railway system employing an army of 400,000 employees. “The Manual was designed to be a working tool,” he said. “It set the standard for how large corporate identities are implemented but more importantly how they are controlled”. Oh yeah, national identity, taking back control, wasn’t that a thing recently? Seriously, how come we’ve Brexited into a reality where two-thirds of the public support renationalisation yet 70% of our rail companies are currently owned by European states?

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The re-creation of the Manual was a recent labour of love by graphic artist Wallace Henning, who assembled all these volumes of meticulous ring-bound sheets of corporate guidelines — the branding, livery, uniforms, minutiae and miscellany — initially via Kickstarter. Gathered together in a single book, they add up to more than just a quaint historical document. There’s something so utterly confident, so obliteratingly modern about the typefaces, fonts, logos and signage, even if sometimes the typographic notes sound a bit Mervyn Peake — “Where it is impossible to obtain typefaces of the Univers range the following are acceptable alternatives for text setting: Monotype Grotesque 215, Grotesque Bold 216, and Haas Type Foundary’s Neue Haas Grotesque Medium…” Gerald Barney’s iconic double-arrow logo, literally drawn on the back of an envelope on the Tube in to work, is everywhere. And very precisely commanded: “Note that the outer arrows broaden slightly towards their tips. If incorrectly drawn parallel they appear to taper outwards.” Like entasis in Classical architecture, where they fattened columns a bit in the middle to correct an optical illusion.

And oh my word ladies and gents, the Sixties uniforms. My mates and I may have been mincing about in ridiculous jumble-sale clothes on the last train home from Southend Victoria, but in the real world of public-sector service, British Rail staff looked sharp. The guards and train drivers in their worsted serge with silver buttons are the very picture of amiable Stalinism. As for the illustration of the female courier’s uniform, and the female courier within, well. She looks as impossibly chic to me now as she would have looked to me then, in her tailored jacket in worsted fine twill with semi-fit front, straight back and side hacking vents, flared skirt just above the knee, white poplin blouse finished with a kite-shaped cravat, and the sense behind that modest gaze of someone who reads Harold Robbins novels. Pretty sure I never encountered a British Rail courier; I would definitely have remembered.

When the Manual appeared in 2016 it was an instant hit with graphics geeks and font fetishists. I lack the technical expertise to appreciate it fully on those terms. For me, it’s a wormhole to a period I experienced as a teenager, when I could only gaze at the British Rail Catering Menu on Liverpool Street station and dream of a Tartan Plate for seven shillings and sixpence (“Entrecôte steak, fried egg, tomato, chips, roll and butter”). Or when, boarding a train, I’d scan the carriage windows for those clear of “No Smoking” or “Ladies Only” stickers. The new corporate identity offered a public domain of clarity, guiding us through a world of Newspapers, Cigarettes and Sweets. The signage and pictograms remain of course, like the Cheshire Cat’s smile. The rest is dust on the wind. Honestly, I wish I could remember being on a train back then and luxuriating in the knowledge that it was publicly owned. All I can remember is taking it for granted, which in a way I suppose is how we lost it. The last updates to the guidelines seem to have been issued in 1979-80, when it all still looked just as modern as it did in 1965. After 1979, for obvious reasons, our nationalised railway’s days were numbered.

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As a book recommendation, the British Rail Corporate Identity Manual is, I concede, a far cry from Ulysses, that go-to, must-read Citizen Kane of books. Except weirdly the two books do have a resonance. “If Dublin were to be destroyed,” Joyce once drawled, rather grandly, “Ulysses could be used to rebuild it brick by brick.” It’s a glorious thought that we may one day awake from the paralysing hypnosis of battery-capitalism voodoo and say wait, where are we, what is this shit, is our public realm really best managed by succulent perma-tanned pirates with off-shore fortunes and excellent government contacts? Or indeed by other country’s governments?

And we will say to ourselves, no. No, it bloody well isn’t. And if we ever did decide to take back control and have a regulated, accountable, affordable public transport system, here’s a blueprint for what a railway should look like. Modern. Stylish. Ours.

In other words, Biden claimed prophetic insight on inflation because he was advised by experts who had access to vast data sets unavailable to the public. We know how this story ended. The data turned out to be ambivalent. The experts were confused. The presidential prophecy failed by a wide margin — a year later, Biden was telling anyone willing to listen that inflation, which in June reached 9.1%, was his “top economic priority”.

We seem to live in an age of failure. Consider the trajectory of the current crop of leaders in the Western democracies. Less than two years after his election, Biden is a political corpse, with approval rates as low as 31%. Two and a half years after winning a smashing electoral victory, Britain’s Boris Johnson has resigned in disgrace. In France, Emmanuel Macron, though re-elected, now faces a hostile parliament. In Italy, unelected super-technocrat Mario Draghi has been forced to resign by his unhappy coalition partners. In Germany, a cats-and-dogs government is struggling with past policy failures in energy supply and military preparedness.

What are we to make of this? Are elected leaders today exceptionally dim or — as in the plot of a Greek tragedy — have they been raised to power only to be crushed by its impossible demands? The two possibilities aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but those wishing to learn where to set expectations of government would do well to pick up Paul Ormerod’s subversive 2004 book, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction, and Economics. If the central thesis of the book is correct, then the practice of democracy has for decades been stuck in a sterile space between fantasy and hubris.

Ormerod is a British economist blessed with an unusual combination of gifts. He can decode the obscure mathematical models that clutter present-day economics while writing in English that is easily understood and a pleasure to read.

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He begins his tale with a paradox. Economic theory, he informs us, has long been fixated on artificial balance (between supply and demand), structural success (the theory of the firm), and rational behaviour. Yet the economy is a chaotic transactional swirl, the chief feature of which is failure. Of the top 100 American companies between 1912 and 1995, 29 had gone bankrupt by the end date, 48 had ceased to exist as corporate entities, and 52 had survived but dropped out of the top 100 list. Only 19 companies managed to cling to the top over the entire 83-year period. If we look at all US companies with an annual turnover of more than $25,000 a year, we find that 600,000 of them, or more than 10%, go extinct every year.

We tend to lionise winners — but for companies to fail is the rule, not the exception. The same holds true for government policies. Joe Biden may be exceptionally successful at failing, but he should be considered the patron saint for a whole class of political elites who offer “solutions” and deliver failure.

Can government “solve” unemployment? Every candidate for office promises to do so. On this question, however, Ormerod delivers a devastating historical analysis of the British economy, which, uniquely, has kept good records stretching far into the past. Between 1870 and 1938, unemployment in Britain averaged 4.9%. After the Second World War, the size of the government doubled in proportion to the economy as a whole. One rationale behind this expansion was that, unlike an untamed free market, the state could deliver full unemployment. Yet the unemployment rate between 1946 and 2004 was 4.5%, only marginally lower than the earlier period. Government can spend and hire, and in this way inflate employment — but because unemployment is never structurally “solved”, it will inevitably return.

Can government “solve” economic inequality? Massive state investment in education has failed to induce the mobility required in a meritocratic society, Ormerod observes. According to the evidence, developed democracies tend to have lower rates of inequality than poor or authoritarian nations — but at the moment, for unknown reasons, inequality is climbing, and governments have no clue how to reverse the trend.

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Can governments “solve” segregated housing? Decades of anti-discrimination legislation and regulation have had little effect. Neighbourhoods across the West that have segregated along ethnic, racial, or religious lines have, if anything, multiplied. This may have nothing to do with systemic bias or racism — Ormerod can show through game theory how a very slight preference at the individual level for living near one’s group can deliver stark segregation at the level of the system.

This divergence between individual intent and systemic outcomes helps explain the astounding persistence of failure. Human societies aren’t mechanical contraptions that can be redesigned, in whole or in part, by the social engineers of the state. They are complex systems. Government policies seek linear outcomes, treating the citizenry as a passive mass. But we are human: we are causes as well as effects. Individuals will respond to government mandates by changing their behaviour in a range of unpredictable ways. That in turn will nullify the conditions on which the policy was planned. Government intent will get swallowed by complexity and result in failure.

Human systems are often arrayed in a power law distribution: a few power users at the top of the chart followed by a steeply declining long tail of less significant players. The power law describes many social and economic relationships, but Ormerod, in a brilliant tangent that illuminates the failure of Covid-19 preventive policies, applies it to viral infections. In networks determined by the power law, he writes, “if just one single component becomes a carrier of a virus… there is a risk that this will percolate across the entire population”. He continues:

“Policies which try to contain percolation across such networks are very hard to implement. Unless each one of the very small number of highly connected individuals is targeted effectively and immunised, the virus will persist. Immunisation at random of even a large proportion of the population will simply not succeed, unless purely by chance not just some but all of the highly connected are caught.”

Ormerod published these words in 2004. We can only wonder how much isolation and disruption would have been avoided over the last two years if the health authorities of the world, in their expert wisdom, had heeded them instead of chasing the shadow of Zero Covid.

“We do not want to adopt an almost nihilistic view that nothing can be done,” Ormerod warns — and of course he’s right. We can’t predict, but we can react swiftly to overcome our difficulties. Biden and his experts failed to see what was coming with inflation, but the Federal Reserve has slammed the brakes on the US economy and this will hopefully reduce inflationary pressures. We are not helpless cogs in a machine. The very quality that makes our actions so inscrutable in the aggregate — our agency — endows us with the motive power to tackle and fix our troubles.

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One need not be a nihilist, either, to accept that, in the world according to Ormerod, the limits of human knowledge press much tighter to the skin than presidents and prime ministers have been willing to admit. The explanation for the collapse of trust in democratic institutions is a simple one: politicians promise what they can’t possibly deliver, and, in the digital age, their ignorance is constantly exposed. Biden, Johnson, and company are only the latest in a long line of elected leaders who claimed to bring the fire down from the heavens and “solve” the human condition. They mostly failed. The public, having bought into the Promethean rhetoric, can only interpret failure as the consequence of corruption rather than incompetence.

There’s a great deal of vanity involved in all of this. Our political elites, encouraged by a priestly caste of experts, love to pose as miracle-workers. To them, and to us who elect them to office, I would every day recite Ormerod’s final dictum: “We may intend to achieve a particular outcome, but the complexity of the world, even in apparently simple situations, appears to be so great that it is not within our power to ordain the future.” Only when this lesson is internalised will we begin to emerge from the age of failure.

When the first antidepressants were developed in the Fifties, the condition was considered so rare that the drug research seemed like a waste of money. But in a 2017 survey, 12.7% of Americans had taken antidepressants in the past month (and nearly twice as many women as men). It is not to deny the existence of catatonic states of despair to suggest that there may have been a definitional leak.

One might retort that “depression” was simply “under-diagnosed”, but equally present in every earlier stage of human history. Consider, though, the discovery of SSRIs, a class of drugs that combined lifetime use with a better safety profile than earlier antidepressants (just weight gain, sexual dysfunction, and the occasional suicide upon withdrawal). And consider the context of that discovery: a world where pharmaceutical companies fund much of the research used in their own regulation, and that research is easy to skew. In short, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a pharmaceutical company in possession of a new drug shall be in want of an endemic illness. As the GlaxoSmithKline slogan bluntly went: “Does your soul have a cold?”

Still, it would be sophomoric to think that depression was wholly and solely constructed by Big Pharma. Until recently, it was understood that “no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of” melancholy. So wrote Robert Burton, a reclusive life-long fellow of Oxford, four centuries ago, in his freewheeling account of sadness, The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Burton was writing in one of the last periods where the role of the writer wasn’t to express an individual thesis, but instead to summarise everything. As such, his Anatomy has little in the way of synthetic thought. As Burton says, “I have read many Bookes, but to little purpose, for want of good method, I have confusedly tumbled over divers Authors in our Libraries, with small profit, for want of Art, Order, Memory, Judgment.” He can’t even settle on a definition of melancholy — “whether it be a cause or an effect, a disease or symptom … I will not contend about it” — but he does examine some potential causes. Black bread, melons, hot air, cold air, excessive exercise, defective exercise, the stars, God, hot baths, a hot brain, Calvinism, Catholicism, excessive studying, excessive merrymaking, excessive “chamber-making”.

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As for melancholy’s symptoms, “the tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues, as the chaos of melancholy doth variety of symptoms”. Indeed, it’s sometimes difficult to separate cause from symptom, as in the glorious description “lascivious by reason of much wind”. Burton’s aim is to “adventure yet in such vast confusion and generality to bring them into some order; and so descend into particulars”. Many of these loopy excursions come to a familiar enough conclusion: melancholy’s cause is sin, and its cure is God: “We ought to fear our own fickle estates, remember our miseries and vanities, examine and humiliate ourselves, seek to God, and call to Him for mercy.”

But Burton does not deny the importance of strategies to combat melancholia. These include behavioural changes — drink a glass of water upon waking; seek hills or mountains; “be not solitary, be not idle” — and mental ones — avoid prolonging passionate thoughts; avoid believing in predestination; “be meek, merciful, and patient”. There is comfort here, for the post-modern reader. Thanks to the rapid rise of neuroscience and the branding of depression as a “brain disease”, many third-party carriers reimburse doctors for medication management only, and many depressed people are simply handed a prescription by a general practitioner and told to check in in six weeks. In Burton’s day, the old Galenic system of humours did emphasise the physical. But these days depression is treated like heartburn; in more exploring reaches, it’s treated by impersonal, one-size-fits-all cognitive behavioural therapy, now the province of therapy apps advertised by Instagram scroll.

At the extremes, the “chemical imbalance” theory raises troubling questions about human character; and its Brave New World-style treatment can make the human being feel like an unruly dog. No matter how many analogies one can make to infectious disease or broken legs, depression is experienced at a complicated level inextricable from one’s most virtuous traits — sensitivity, self-criticism, ambition — and to think of oneself as merely a malfunctioning machine or a bundle of “trauma reactions” can impoverish the self.

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The experience of The Anatomy is one of overload, and perhaps it is best to read it with the desperation and joy of Samuel Johnson, who “frequently resorted to [The Anatomy] for the purpose of exhilaration” while running his tiny, failing school at Edial Hall. Its very eclecticism and capaciousness is its virtue. Perhaps reading anecdotes about ancient kings won’t cure you: but given that depression rarely is “curable” at all, there’s something beautiful about feeling this continuity of human experience, across time and space, to feel one’s sadness as part of a world history full of delight and variety. Compare the experience of the sad person today, asking their doctor for Prozac or maybe playing with an adult colouring book, to the experience of a Samuel Johnson. The first is made to feel small and simple; the second is made to feel himself more intelligent, more dignified, more ambitious. Moreover, as any reader of Shakespeare’s tragedies will know, the early Moderns had a way of laughing about despair, solitude, even suicide — a kind of manic sad clowning found absent from the way most people talk about mental health now, both infantilising and deadly serious. Burton, after all, wrote The Anatomy under the name Democritus Junior: the laughing philosopher.

I read The Anatomy the winter after my first law school exams, ambivalent about a course of study that was beginning, nonetheless, to gel into inevitability. I was staying on the couch of a family member in Florida, in a condo surrounded by red and orange tropical plants and buzzing constantly with the exertions of a leaking air conditioner. Through the screen door, at any hour of the day or night, I could see the recently discharged woman next door swaying silently in front of a blue-fuzz TV. Against her state, obviously, The Anatomy is of little use. But for the sort of low-grade malaise I found myself in — the sense that my fears would never disappear but my possibilities, one by one, would — The Anatomy made me feel a little bit better. I read it on the beach, I read it over diner milkshakes, I read it on hot and sleepless nights, on that orange leather sofa that congealed to my skin.

The Anatomy clocks in at 1,392 pages — my paperback quickly broke in half — and any paragraph swims through a dizzying array of references, Homeric through Renaissance; medical, theological, and philosophical. On the one hand, its difficulty made me feel accomplished; and on the other hand, it made me feel, basically, that it was fine to be scared, to still be doubting. I could try cabbage one day, clear water another, oranges, opening windows, perfume, walking in fields, sweet-scented baths, confessing to a friend, faith in God, eating earlier, fasting, seeing sunlight upon waking, reading Herodotus, reading Elizabethans. And above all, as Burton’s last section of course requires, truly and steadfastly resisting despair.

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Small consolations, it’s true, but ones that fit into a life well lived — unlike antidepressants, with their dubious efficacy and their near-certain, unpleasant side effects; and unlike so much of self-help, with its individualism, and its transactional focus on convenience and utility. Burton’s salves are enriching, not subtracting. They make the reader feel, in some small way, in control of their condition, an active agent. As the habit makes the monk, the medicine makes the patient, and against the pop psychology and medical cocktails more commonly on offer, there’s something to be said for the demanding and delightful sublimations of The Anatomy. That the book is often baffling only further recommends it. It feels good to do something difficult; and it feels good to get out of one’s own time, to defamiliarise one’s own condition: though people may have always felt sad, they felt differently about feeling sad.

The Anatomy of Melancholy won’t cure depression. But there’s something comforting about this futility: if sadness has always existed and always will, even for those, like Burton, of exemplary learning and unparalleled discipline, even in the most foreign reaches of time and place, even after 13,000 pieces of advice and 400 years, then we might try to make something generative of some of the pain, to “write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy”.

Few today have heard of Novalis, the pen name of Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg. This is a shame for he was an important figure in the developing Romantic tradition and explored in his work the many-faceted dimensions of reality.

The novel’s epigram is a quote from Novalis — Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history — which hints at the nowadays common failure to distinguish realism from naturalism, two conditions which sound alike but are non-identical. The latter is an attempt to delineate life as we live it, while the former attempts something far more inclusive and may explore a less quotidian view of the nature of being. The novels of Sally Rooney are naturalistic, while Fitzgerald’s are realistic; that is to say they explore intangible states that for all their impalpable quality none the less reflect authentic, if less apparent, aspects of real life.

The title of Fitzgerald’s novel is taken from another work of fiction, the mysterious and fragmentary story, The Blue Flower — which became Heinrich von Ofterdingen and the real-life Novalis never completed. Fitzgerald plays with this, stealing the title of her hero’s story and in some sense finishing it without, in a characteristic stroke of genius, finishing either the story of his life or his own fictional creation. This is an example of art reflecting quotidian life but allowing glimpses of something stranger and more impalpable: Fitzgerald transports us to the half-completed life that was Novalis’s (he died aged only 28) and his half-completed work. Her highly individual style — allusive and elusive, fragmentary, dryly humorous — allows the form of her fiction to reflect her own shadowy vision of her hero’s shadowy intimation of reality’s multidimensional, protean nature.

Fritz recounts his fragmentary tale twice, first to his friend Karoline. As in his original story, a stranger arrives out of the dark and poses a question both to the young man, who we guess will become Novalis, and to those who hear the story; and also, of course, to us, the readers. We, the readers, are never vouchsafed the question, but we assume it is one Fritz asks Karoline: “What is the meaning of the blue flower?” She cannot answer; she remains in the dark. In fact, we are all left somewhat in the dark about the meaning of the story, but for Novalis the dark was not a condition of obscurity but a highly generative state. In the Fitzgerald tale, taken from his own, Novalis describes how: “It is as if until now I had been dreaming, or as if sleep had carried me into another world”.

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The second time the tale is told is to Sophie, the unremarkable 12-year-old with a double chin with whom, for no rational or discernible reason, Fritz falls in love, leaving Karoline, the woman whose empathy and intelligence by rights should have won his heart, to a life of lonely spinsterhood. But there are no “by rights” in a Fitzgerald novel. Of all contemporary novelists she best understood the antinomianism of the human heart.

A funny and poignant example of one of the important strands in the book, the generative power of absence and nothingness, occurs between Karoline and Hardenberg. As we the readers know, she is in love with him — and he, manifesting one of the many blanks that the book celebrates, is obdurately insensitive to this. “I see,” he says, when he comes to tell her that Sophie is his “heart’s heart” and she, aghast at his choice, demurs: “there is one thing, the most important of all, unfortunately, you don’t grasp, the nature of desire between a man and a woman.” Stung into a kind of semi-revelation, Karoline retorts: “Not everyone can speak about what they suffer. Some are separated from the only one they love but are obliged to remain silent.”

Fritz radically, comically, misconstrues this by at once envisaging a fantasy lover for Karoline and capturing his non-existence in some dubious verse. So that Karoline’s “lover” becomes a double fixture — he exists in the mind of Hardenberg but also in his verse — and so becomes a genuine prop for Karoline’s pride when she has to bear the fact that the man she loves with all her heart loves not her but the very ordinary — irritating even — Sophie.

Out of a gap in understanding, the unreal has been bodied forth through Fritz’s energetic imagination and given objective form in his art. So we are left asking: what kind of reality has this figure? Is it so different, the novel implicitly asks, from Fritz’s passion for the unremarkable Sophie, who nonetheless becomes his lode star, his “philosophie”? Does love, in fact, require an object at all, worthy or otherwise? Or is the fact of love itself enough? It is Sophie’s very blankness out of which the extraordinary love which Hardenberg feels for her is conceived, although in human terms Karoline is clearly a better match. But it is precisely Sophie’s nothingness, her mind “empty as a new jug”, which summons the love.

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Before he reads Karoline the blue flower fragment, Fritzl tells her: “there is something else I have written and which I want to read you while I still have time… It will not truly exist till you have heard it.” This is another aspect of the question, for which no answers are supplied, of what makes for the “real”. If it is not quite the case that something has no real existence until we apprehend it, it is suggested both by Hardenberg, and his author, that our human apprehension has a seminal role in creating reality; that reality is, it turns out, a co-operative enterprise in which, if we are to live truly, we must be involved.

The significance of the blue flower evolves in the repeated renderings of the story, in the way that the image of a rose evolves in “a rose is a rose is a rose”. Fritz’s young brother, known as the Bernhard, surreptitiously reads the story and we are told afterwards that for “some time” he had recognised the “meaning” of the blue flower, just as the doctor, who attends Sophie in her mortal sickness, would also, we are told, have understood its meaning had he been introduced to the tale. It becomes apparent that Sophie’s life, despite a harrowing operation undertaken without anaesthetics, will be curtailed by TB and we learn in an elliptical Afterword that the Bernhard drowns. The flower we begin to apprehend is our mortality, but paradoxically it becomes, at the same time, the fragile breath of life airing the series of turns, blank walls, cul-de-sacs and twists of fate which make up the novel’s loose and beguiling narrative.

Much of the texture of that narrative comes from its humour. The Bernhard complains to his elder sister about the latest addition to the Hardenberg family: “There are now two younger than myself. It will be hard for me to attract sufficient attention.” “But you love little Christoph,” said Sidonie patiently. “On the whole I hate little Christoph,” the Bernhard replies.

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The mine of wit and intelligence in this slight-seeming book is as wide and deep as the Saxon salt mines for which the young Fritz becomes the unlikely overseer. But for me its peculiar virtue lies in how, without being in the slightest bit solemn or portentous, it conveys Novalis’s intimation that in this world there is no barrier between the seen and the unseen. The question of the meaning of the blue flower is never openly answered. But when the story is told for the second time, Hardenberg suggests: “If a story begins with finding, it must end in searching.” And it’s this sense of an unfolding universe, in which we live with always unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, questions that perfuses the book.

At some point, Hardenberg reflects: “When we catch sight of certain human figures and faces, especially certain eyes, expressions, movements, when we hear certain words, when we read certain passages, thoughts take on the meaning of laws… a view of life true to itself without self-estrangement.” In these increasingly fractured and fractious times, we need to be reminded that the world may be a larger, stranger, like the blue flower both fragile yet enduring, and so ultimately a more numinous place than our limited reason comprehends, but that it is still possible, after all, to have “a view of life true to itself without self-estrangement”.

***

Salley Vickers’s latest novel, “The Gardener”, Penguin, is out in paperback

The first modern revolution was neither French nor American, but English. Long before Louis XVI went to the Guillotine, or Washington crossed the Delaware, the country which later became renowned for stiff upper lips and proper tea went to war with itself, killed its king, replaced its monarchy with a republican government and unleashed a religious revolution which sought to scorch away the old world in God’s purifying fire.

Nearly four centuries on, England and the wider West is again being turned upside down. Again, we are living in the aftermath of a system that is dying or dead: then, the last gasp of medieval monarchy; now the Anglo-American Empire — and perhaps modernity itself. Again, we are living in a period of radical technological change: then, the printing press and the end of censorship, which allowed the distribution of radical pamphlets on an unprecedented scale; now, the internet’s enabling of global dissent and chaos. Again, we are living in a period in which the cultural mores of previous centuries are being upended: then, feudal assumptions governing everything from landownership to the meaning of marriage; now, the endless ructions of a tedious and unending “culture war”.

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The poet and storyteller Robert Bly, who died last year, had his own name for the culture we now inhabit, in the West and increasingly elsewhere too. He called it a “sibling society”. In his book of the same name, published a quarter of a century ago, Bly took a prescient scalpel to the failures of the post-war West and identified what he believed to be a foundational problem: we had forgotten how to produce adults.

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A kind of corrupted cultural Levelling had taken hold, and the result was our culture of inversion, in which rebellion against all and any forms was seen as the only inherent good. And in the desert created by late 20th-century American capitalism, which had decimated communities and households, stripped the meaning from the lives of young generations and replaced it with shopping, little seemed worth preserving anyway. As a result, adults had remained perpetual adolescents: uninitiated, afraid to grow up, slouching towards Bethlehem quoting Marlon Brando in a kind of eternal 1954. ‘Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?’ ‘Whaddya got?’

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

“Our society has been damaged not only by acquisitive capitalism, but also by an idiotic distrust of all ideas, religions and literature handed down to us by elders and ancestors. Many siblings are convinced that they have received nothing of value from anyone. The older truth is that every man and woman is indebted to all other persons, living or dead, and is indebted as well to animals, plants and the gods.”

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Covid was liberalism's endgame

By Matthew Crawford

It is indeed, and even more so. Our cultural elite’s ongoing “deconstruction” of all we once were has deteriorated into a kind of incoherent rage, a culture of inversion on steroids, and it has now elicited its own rising counter-revolution. Nobody knows where any of this will lead, but the primary emotion it is all channelling, on Right and Left, among radical and reactionary, is rage. In our perpetual sibling society — sick with consumerism, eye-glazed with screen burn, confused, rudderless, godless — we have forgotten how to behave like adults, or what adults even look like. The result is that we squabble like children, fighting over toys in the mud.

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The end of secularism is nigh

By Tom Holland

For thousands of years, the empty, spreading steppe, stretching from Hungary to Mongolia, was the home of nomadic peoples, speakers of Iranic, Turkic and Mongolic languages, who drove their herds across the vast plains in search of fresh pastures. They founded great empires, which time and the steppe grasses would soon swallow up, leaving barely a trace. Their constant irruptions into Europe sounded the death knell in turn for other, settled civilisations, part of the endless cycle of growth, invasion and collapse that has shaped our continent’s history.

The war in Ukraine has taken place in two very different climatic and cultural zones: its initial phases saw Russian armour wend its way through the dark forests and marshes of northern Ukraine, the ancient homeland of the first Slavic peoples, to be destroyed in close fighting on the narrow wooded roads in a stunning and unexpected Ukrainian victory. Yet the gruelling war of attrition in the country’s east is taking part in a very different landscape, in the open steppe that was once the home of nomadic peoples.

The expansion of Slavic peoples, both Ukrainians and Russians, into the open steppe was a very recent historic event, broadly contemporaneous with the European settlement of the Americas, its fertile plains, now the breadbasket of the developing world, Europe’s equivalent of America’s Midwest. These open plains, the “Wild Fields” of local historiography have always been a contested space, where great empires wrestled for control: in the great Second World War battles of Kursk, Kharkiv and Stalingrad, Europe’s entire fate hinged on the battle between the two great tank armies wheeling and clashing like nomad hordes.

But then, as The Eurasian Steppe by the archaeologist Warwick Ball makes clear, rather than a semi-wild anteroom to the continent, “the history, languages, ideas, art forms, peoples, nations and identities of the steppe have shaped almost every aspect of the life of Europe”. Europeans from further west have for centuries been prone to viewing the steppe as the haunt of wild tribes, and the source of occasional, fearsome destruction.

But what if the Europe of today is in fact the product of steppe dynamics? As Ball argues, rather than being a product of 19th century nationalism, some historians trace the origin of Europe’s oldest nation states to the steppe, observing that “Peoples newly arriving from the east were also among the first to create nationally defined states, such as kingdoms of the Bulgars or Magyars”. “In some ways,” Ball argues, “the incipient idea of a nation state might have been stronger with the nomadic groups from the steppe, who were bound more closely by tribal loyalties” than among the polyglot peoples of the imperial Roman successor states they conquered.

Did the steppe peoples then create the fractious patchwork quilt of nationalities that we understand as Europe? Ball cites the archaeologist Hyun Jin Kim who claims that: “The political and cultural traditions of Inner Asia brought to Europe by Central Asian immigrants, the Huns and the Alans, were just as fundamental to the formation of western Europe as the rich legacy left behind by the Roman Empire. The political and cultural landscape of early medieval Europe was shaped by the fusion of Roman and Inner Asian influences.”

While Hungary and Bulgaria were directly founded by steppe nomads, the influence of steppe rulers also helped shape the political forms taken by Poland (whose szlachta nobles claimed Sarmatian descent well into the 19th century), Bohemia, Denmark and even, it is claimed, France. Even into the 19th century, as Ball notes, it was the Hungarian awareness of their steppe Magyar ancestry that helped bring about the rise of nationalism which shook apart the great Austro-Hungarian empire. “In the long evolution of the idea of the nation state,” then “from their beginnings in late-antique Europe to their emergence in the nineteenth century, we must look east as well as west”.

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Is Russia winning the war?

By Aris Roussinos

Viewed in this light, the war in Ukraine, a battle between a European nation-state and a vast Eurasian empire, is resonant with all manner of strange echoes of the steppe’s dimly-understood history. The colossal earthern ramparts of the “serpent walls” outside Kyiv, erected by early Slavic kingdoms to guard against invasion by steppe nomads from the Huns to the Mongols, fulfilled their ancient role admirably earlier this year when they prevented the movement of Russian armour towards the capital’s suburbs, corralling the latest wave of invaders into killing zones to be picked off at leisure by guided missiles.

The Cossack heritage both sides claim is the result of earlier Slavic peoples, runaway Ukrainian and Russian serfs, claiming the freedom of the open steppe and adopting the customs, lifestyle and much of the vocabulary of their nomadic Turkic predecessors. The very word Cossack, Ball notes, “derives from the Turk root qaz, ‘to roam’”, and is cognate with the ethnonym Kazakh further east, as the Cossacks “comprised mainly Russians — usually renegades, escaped serfs or criminals — but they also included Turks, Tatars and remnant Polovtsi.” Even now, Ukrainian is sprinkled with Turkic words, a legacy of the two cultures’ long history of interaction and competition. One Ukrainian commander I met went by the nom de guerre “Duman”, or fog, deriving from the Turkic word for smoke or mist. Even now, Ukrainians refer to Russians with the dismissive Turkic epithet Katsab, or butcher.

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The truth about Ukraine's far-Right militias

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On the Russian side, the war effort has been marked by the use of steppe peoples as infantry, with many of the heaviest casualties borne — and apparently some of the worst war crimes committed by — the Buryat Mongols of the Russian steppe, along with the Kalmyks of the lower Volga, Europe’s only Buddhist nation, who once watered their horses as far west as Paris following the defeat of Napoleon. Similarly, among the many subject peoples of the Russian empire deployed to Ukraine are Ossetians from the Caucasus, a tiny Iranic-speaking nation who are all that remain of the Alans, who once fought the Romans across Central Europe, settling as far west as France and Spain: some of their descendants, now Magyarised, still live in Hungary as the Jasz people. Their Iranic speech is now heard in Ukraine’s steppe for the first time in a thousand years, dragged along into a war of European conquest by another great Eurasian empire.

The very concept of chivalry which defined Europe’s medieval history was the product of Iranian-speaking steppe peoples like the Sarmatians and the Alans, whose innovations in the use of cavalry — stirrups, lances and long chainmail coats — changed the face of late Roman warfare and set the stage for the knights of the High Middle Ages. Even our own medieval romances may owe something to their distant steppe traditions, after the border forts of what is now northern England became the garrison home of Sarmatian levies in Roman service. As Ball notes: “Sarmatian warrior worship of a sword fixed in the ground has been suggested as furnishing the origin of the Excalibur legend. This appears to have been a long steppe warrior tradition: Ibn Rusta in the tenth century, for example, describes how the Viking Rus ruler — whom he calls by the steppe title of Khagan or khāqān — would plant a naked sword in the earth pointing towards his newborn son.” Perhaps it is not mere coincidence, then, that the Azov Regiment’s torchlit ceremonies in the southern steppe city of Mariupol took place beneath three giant swords embedded in the ground, a striking symbol that has now become the group’s emblem.

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Boris Johnson broke Britain

By Aris Roussinos

Again and again, these strange resonances between the steppe’s ancient nomad past and its bloody present swim to the surface like long-forgotten memories. The great statue to Mother Russia, sword in hand, that rises above Stalingrad’s Hill 102, where tens of thousands of Soviet and German soldiers were ground into the soil by artillery possesses the grim grandeur of some ancient steppe monument. And indeed, Hill 102, the crucial position of the battle that decided the war’s outcome, is perhaps better viewed by its alternate name as the Mamayev Kurgan, the burial tumulus of a long-forgotten Tatar khagan. From the ancient past to now, Russia’s history was written on the steppe, and without the steppe Russia’s imperial past and present is simply impossible to understand. Indeed, as Ball observes, without the historic domination of steppe nomads, there would be no Russia as we understand it.

As Ball observes: “The future of Russian greatness was both a response to and a legacy of the Mongols… Indeed, to a large extent Muscovite power was a creation of the Golden Horde: the khans required a stable central authority as a client state which could be relied upon to raise auxiliaries for the khan’s armies and to collect and deliver taxes and tribute. Moscow fitted the bill, so the Golden Horde deliberately strengthened it against the other Russian cities and appointed its prince as their chief tax collector.” Without the Mongol-enforced primacy of Muscovy, the land that is now Russia may well have remained a series of disunited kingdoms and city states, just like medieval Italy or Germany: “The Mongols, in other words, brought about the emergence of Russia.”

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Britain needs Macmillan, not Thatcher

By Aris Roussinos

Even the great king Sviatoslav of Kyivan Rus, whose legacy is claimed by both Ukraine and Russia, extended his rule across the steppe by defeating the great Jewish Khazar kingdom and in doing so, “adopted the techniques and warfare of the steppe nomad: in other words, Kievan Rus was at first simply another steppe nomad state, albeit with a Scandinavian element. Sviatoslav never decisively defeated the Pechenegs and was killed by them in 963, and his skull was made into a cup in steppe tradition.” Medieval Russia was, then, as much a steppe polity as a European state, perhaps more so. After all, “up until 1480 Muscovite coins still carried inscriptions in Arabic. As late as 1531 Vasili III of Moscow was still paying tribute to the successors of the Golden Horde: Crimea, Kazan and Astrakhan”, and the eternal symbol of Russian power, Moscow’s St Basil’s Cathedral, was modelled on Kazan’s Great Mosque, in thanks for the conquest of the great Tatar capital.

Tracing Muscovy’s traditions of governance, and then those of imperial Russia, to the Mongol and Tatar customs of the inner steppe, Ball observes that “Even by the fourteenth century the civil and military institutions of Muscovy ‘were overwhelmingly Mongol in origin’… Ivan IV, the first Russian to proclaim himself Tsar (in Russian the title is actually Tsezar), added Ulugh Khan, ‘Great Khan’, to his titles.” Though he dismisses the “Mongol Yoke” hypothesis of Russian historiography, Ball nevertheless traces Russia’s unique and terrible form of autocratic rule to steppe customs, deep into the modern period: “Ivan also adopted the Mongol policy of ‘collective guilt’ where all male relatives and retainers of a guilty man would be executed, a policy even extended to entire communities. Stalin’s similar policy was a continuation of this.” The steppe’s long influence stretches deep into the cultural DNA of our modern world: even such a giant 20th century figure as Lenin, destroyer of one great Eurasian empire and founder of another, was of part-Kalmyk descent, after all.

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Vladimir Putin's fascist fetish

By David Patrikarakos

Imperial Russia’s second largest minority after the Ukrainians, whose post-independence relationship with their giant neighbour is today a source of such bloodshed, was the Muslim Tatars, from whose Russified nomad aristocracy some of the greatest names in Russian culture — Rachmaninoff, Turgenev, Nureyev and Akhmatova — claimed descent. “The list [of Tatar surnames] covers all walks of Russian life: artistic, religious, scientific, literary, military, political and royal. The list is virtually endless,” Ball notes, and even today “the descendants of the Mongol ‘hordes’ — the Tatars — are the second-largest minority in Russia after the Russians themselves, and the Republic of Tatarstan is the second-largest republic in European Russia.”

Written for a general audience, Ball’s book nevertheless synthesises the latest archaeological research and historical debate on the steppe’s ancient and modern peoples, archaeological research on the steppe’s history, delving back into the deepest mists of time. The burgeoning community of esoteric archaeology and anthropology posters on Twitter will surely appreciate his summarising of the latest research on the origins of the Indo-Europeans, the fate of the Khazars and the birth and decline of the great Scythian kingdoms, whose exquisite goldwork was the highlight of the British Museum’s recent blockbuster exhibition.

Noting that St Petersburg’s great Hermitage Museum was founded primarily as a place to store the newfound Scythian treasures unearthed by Russian colonists in Crimea, Mariupol and the rest what is now Ukraine’s contested southern steppe, and alert to the theft of Scythian treasures from Ukrainian museums by their new-old Russian conquerors, we realise that the relentless cycle of history has brought a new relevance to Ball’s book, even since its publication last winter. Just as in the Middle Ages and in the bloodiest battles of the Second World War, the fate of Europe is once again being written on the endless, grassy steppe.