Strangio, who is elf-like and buff, wore a hip button-down, tailored slacks and a very nice pair of what appeared to be Prada loafers ($1,200 for similar, online). He took the stage to robust applause and proceeded for the next hour to evade and shift away from the crowd’s questions. He was received by appreciative nods, thoughtful “mmmms” and occasional applause from the Boomer audience. The crowd was mostly older and well-heeled, wearing pastel beach-tees and sporting deep, early-season tans. Neither the queer anarchist radicals nor the Ptown party vibe was in effect, and there was no visible representation from the trans kids.

It was a strangely oppressive experience, not exactly boring but more soul-crushing. I am the kind of persuadable centrist voter whom the trans movement has lost, but I’d gone to the event hoping for a clash of ideas and the occasional spark of recognition that the other side had a point. Instead, the audience was presented with a leader who didn’t offer direct answers to the queries posed by his most ardent supporters. And beneath the tans and the bonhomie, some of them, I believe, recognized his avoidance tactics.

The event’s host, Celeste Lecesne, founder of the Trevor Project LGBTQ+ youth hotline service, started with a tribute to Strangio’s heroism in defending the rights of trans youth. This wasn’t a surprising choice for a group of super-fans in America’s preeminent gay beach destination, but it makes the independent observer’s brain hurt given that the ACLU’s miscalculation and overreach had just curtailed the potential to fight similar bans in other states. Lecesne asked Strangio about this: Would the Tennessee decision “pave the way for the other 24 states banning trans youth care to do what they’re going to do?” Strangio explained that those states, for the most part, were already banning the healthcare, and the decision wouldn’t change that.

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The statement is true but also blame-shifting and deliberately misses the point. In his opening remarks he’d implied that the ACLU had known all along that the case was unlikely to succeed, saying, “I know exactly what to expect from [the Supreme Court]” and “I’m very used to reading distorted, disingenuous decisions from this court.” But he showed zero accountability for why the ACLU was willing to gamble something they have continuously claimed to be “necessary” and “lifesaving.” Why take the risk?

What did Strangio think the “core of the objection” to this kind of healthcare is? Lecesne asked, in a tone of deep puzzlement. The answer: A mysterious “retrenchment around gender” that often coincides with the rise of authoritarian governments. (A retrenchment that has nothing to do, of course, with sterilized adolescents or aggressive activism.) The objection is also, Strangio speculated, “a manufactured set of concerns” created by the right-wing media. For the latter argument, he pulled out the shifting and contested numbers often used by the Left to suggest that the trans population is minuscule and should be of no concern to anyone. This too is disingenuous and brain-hurting. The percentage of trans kids undergoing medical care is much higher than minuscule in my observable reality (admittedly, Brooklyn). And trans activism has focused precisely on making it affect everyone by framing themselves as a utopian liberation movement.

There was more. Strangio denounced The New York Times for having “contributed more to the anti-trans laws than almost any other thing in this country.” He elided the Cass Report’s findings that the case for pediatric gender medicine is unusually weak even for pediatrics. He mocked the idea that kids are being rushed into care.

Lecesne criticized the social-contagion theory of trans identities and then explained that “I thought I was a gay man for my whole life” until the pandemic, when whilst leading online workshops for LGBTQ+ youth who were discovering their transness, he’d discovered his own and changed his name and pronouns. “They changed me,” he said. Seems kind of contagious, no? Lecesne described watching kids in those workshops as “watching butterflies coming out of their cocoon,” and said the only contagion was “of happiness.” This is a common trope among trans-activist adults. And it’s unfair to place the burden of proof on the trans kids — but still, if unchecked and glorious happiness was really what most adults were observing as trans kids hit their school systems, the debate today might be very different.

The whole event reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism, which both the Left and Right having been turning to lately to explain today’s politics. Even if a comparison between the actual totalitarian leaders of the book and our situation today is too strong, Arendt’s description of the political mechanism is revelatory. She describes the conditions that led to totalitarian rule in Germany and the Soviet Union as those in which the “masses” (meaning the bourgeoisie) lost their class identities because of a new focus on individualism, and because of destabilizing social and economic change after the First World War.

People became atomized, isolated, and “superfluous,” meaning, without social purpose or stable employment. Under these conditions (which sound very familiar), they were ripe for totalitarian leadership. One of the central features of this kind of leadership, Arendt says, is that it doesn’t stand for anything coherent. It’s not a movement of people towards a shared goal, but instead confers membership in a safely correct group, whose goals are by necessity always shifting and “expanding.” Totalitarian propaganda, Arendt says, is under no obligation to be consistent, and in fact it’s better if it isn’t. The important thing is loyalty, which can be demonstrated even better when positions are shifting or incoherent.

Totalitarian movements, Arendt says, do not originate with the masses themselves, but with an alliance between “the elite,” and what she describes as “the mob,” which is a collection of criminals and grifters who make up the lowest elements of society. (Columbia student, meet Albanian looting gang.) In times of social instability, elites — and particularly the best and most idealistic elites, perhaps like Strangio — come to believe that the anything-goes tactics of the mob are refreshingly practical, lacking in bourgeois hypocrisy, and so on. These elites feel intense “nausea” when looking at their messed-up social institutions and are ready to destroy them for change. Or at least, this is what happened in the Thirties, when artists and intellectuals were misled by Stalinism and Nazism in numbers we don’t like to think about.

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Part of the beauty of The Origins of Totalitarianism is how well it applies to both sides of the current culture wars. Trump’s resemblance to a totalitarian leader requires no explanation; and in Leftist circles I’d say the totalitarian trend is led not by a person, but by the social-media zeitgeist, with the correct position being whichever is angriest and most extreme, or the most “expansionist” in Arendt’s terms. It strikes me as an awfully good explanation of how we got to the current incoherence of both theory and strategy on transgenderism, despite the sincere passion and actual best efforts of many people involved. The trans movement is riddled with internal contradictions. It has long been a loyalty test. And as the ACLU strategy shows, it has always been about endlessly expanding activism, rather than the best results for trans people. If they hadn’t brought this case to the Supreme Court, which they knew they’d likely lose, trans people would be better off.

An odd bit of hope for Americans today comes in what is almost a side observation of Arendt’s. She notes that Britain never succumbed to fascist or totalitarian rule, despite experiencing many of the same cultural and economic conditions as the European countries, because, she thinks, its robust two-party political system prevented the total atomization that occurred in countries ruled by more fragmentary coalitions. It would be funny if America’s dueling totalitarianisms were in fact its secret strength. Perhaps our vicious polarization is only thing holding back the deluge. But it’s not so funny that we should rely on it.

Strangio offered hope to the faithful through more of the same — the possibility of unexplored legal strategies, new gender clinics popping up on the borders of friendly states, and the historic ability of the LGBT (and now Q+) community to band together and get along through oppression. I found myself wanting a fair and non-totalitarian resolution to the issue, one notably not forthcoming from the Trump administration. If youth gender medicine isn’t settled, let’s settle it, without evasions and twisting the evidence. Instead of destroying our institutions, let’s use them: democracy, the law, the “both sides” media. The good Ptown bourgeoisie in the Hawthorne Barn seemed at least a little bit on the same page as me. They were warm and friendly to Strangio, but they were asking questions.

One woman suggested that no one should be “assigned” a sex at birth, and that we should always give it a couple of years to see what kind of identity develops. In my view this is a denial of human reality and would be terrible for children, but at least she was honest about her objectives, and somewhat consistent. (Strangio said this would be “doing a service to the child,” but also added “I didn’t do that. I took my child’s sex assignment and went with it.”) Another woman, very politely, raised an article critical of the youth gender medicine orthodoxy, written on the Skrmetti decision by Nicholas Confessore and published last week in The New York Times. She asked about Strangio’s response to “a kind of pulling back in the medical opinions not only here but in England and elsewhere in the world.” Strangio ground-shifted away, but the question was brave, and it went over with the crowd just fine. May this too be contagious.

It’s all too easy to miss the early warnings of an impending disaster. Today’s culture wars are often interpreted as the symptoms of an ephemeral fad. Most can feel the tremors — restrictions on free speech, public shaming of those with unfashionable views, regressive identity politics masquerading as “progress” — but there is a widespread sense that if we ignore the problems, they will simply disappear. But what if these rumblings presage something far worse to come? What if, like the people of Pompeii, we are at risk of civilisational collapse but are misinterpreting the signs?

Further tremors have reverberated recently with renewed attacks on the First Amendment to the US Constitution, perhaps the final bastion of free speech in the West. Speaking at the World Economic Forum earlier this month, former Secretary of State John Kerry argued that when it comes to “disinformation”, the “First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence”.

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The First Amendment codifies a “negative liberty”, not a licence for certain behaviour but rather a protection from government interference. It reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It can function as a kind of barrier to the worst excesses of the illiberal Left, even at a time when their party of choice occupies the White House.

Such challenges to the First Amendment began around 10 years ago with the emergence of the Critical Social Justice (or “woke”) movement, which sought to promote equity according to group identity through authoritarian means. In March 2018, an article appeared on the website of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) which noted that by this point it was “common” for Leftist activists “to call for lower legal protections for speech”. The writer concluded that such calls were misguided, describing the First Amendment as “our most powerful tool to keep the government from regulating the conversations that spark change in the world”.

But other activists took a different view from the ACLU. In 2018, two of the founders of Critical Race Theory, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, republished their 1997 book Must We Defend Nazis?: Hate Speech, Pornography, and the New First Amendment. This version of the book was modified according to the shift in activists’ demands, and the subtitle was now Why the First Amendment Should Not Protect Hate Speech and White Supremacy. In that same year, activist and legal scholar Justin Hansford argued in the Yale Law Journal Forum that, when it comes to race, the “marketplace of ideas” does not apply. “When ideas on race that would disrupt the racial hierarchy of white over Black emerge,” wrote Hansford, “the First Amendment is disproportionately applied to trample that dissent”.

The “woke” movement had always taken a pro-censorship stance, but by 2018 the First Amendment was clearly identified as the key obstacle to their aims. This was developed further in The Cult of the Constitution (2019), in which legal scholar Mary Anne Franks took aim at “First Amendment fundamentalism”. An entire chapter was devoted to what Franks calls “the cult of free speech”, a chilling phrase that recalls Labour MP Nadia Whittome’s belief that “we must not fetishise ‘debate’ as though debate is itself an innocuous, neutral act”. Authoritarians frequently resort to this kind of sophistry rather than admit outright that they find the concept of free speech inherently rebarbative.

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In October 2019, former editor of Time magazine Richard Stengel continued this disturbing trend with an article for the Washington Post entitled “Why America needs a hate speech law”. Stengel rehashed the typical concerns about “false narratives” and “lies”, as though any kind of speech regulator could possibly be immune from deceptive or misleading behaviour. He also repeated the “direct effects theory” which posits that people act on cue from social media posts, even though more than six decades of research into media impact on public behaviour has seen such notions fully discredited. The First Amendment, Stengel argued, “should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw”.

A snobbish mistrust of the masses lies at the heart of the opposition to the First Amendment, a feature that we can trace to the Frankfurt School and the French postmodernists of the Sixties, two groups that have substantially influenced the philosophy behind Critical Social Justice. According to this view, popular culture has created a society of unthinking clones. What Herbert Marcuse described as the “one-dimensional man” is irredeemably blind to his own subjugation and reacts mechanically according to decrees from above. According to this perspective, “hate speech” has the power to rile up one group against another, even though the evidence for this claim is scant.

Those of us familiar with the concept of the “long march through the institutions” will be aware that these theories take time to percolate and to infect the mainstream. John Kerry’s recent remarks would suggest that First Amendment scepticism has finally made the leap from academic activism into the political sphere. Whether it gains traction in its new home should trouble us all.

The signs are not promising. This week, Hillary Clinton weighed into the debate during an interview with CNN. “We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230,” she argued, referring to the section of the Communications Decency Act introduced in 1996 that protects online platforms from liability for comments posted by users. Without these protections, big tech would have little choice but to implement draconian censorship measures. The consequences for free speech, in the de facto public square of our digital age, would be catastrophic.

Clinton stopped short of a call for a ban on “hate speech”, but how long before other mainstream politicians are echoing Kerry’s assessment of the First Amendment as a “major block”? There was a telling moment in the recent vice-presidential debate, in which Tim Walz interjected to claim that “hate speech” is excluded from First Amendment protections. The remark was so fleeting that it was not even included in the official CBS News transcript, but it was perhaps the most significant moment of the evening. If the Democrats are triumphant in the election, Americans will be governed by an administration that does not believe the First Amendment is fit for purpose.

History teaches us that legal proscriptions against offensive viewpoints do not have a mitigating effect; bad ideas that are driven underground tend to fester and multiply. We also know that laws against offensive speech soon become expanded to incorporate any viewpoints that are not approved by those in power. In 1644, John Milton published his Areopagitica, a counterblast to the Licensing Order of June 1643 which decreed that all printed texts be passed before a censor in advance of publication. In this essential defence of liberty, he pointed out that censors do not “stay in matters heretical” but inevitably broaden their remit to “any subject that is not to their palate”.

Once a state has been empowered to set the limits of speech, to introduce legislation against vague and indefinable concepts such as “hate” or “offence”, the groundwork for future tyranny is firmly established. One thinks of Juvenal’s famous question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (who will watch the watchmen?). Kerry, Clinton, Walz et al seem to believe that those in authority can be trusted to distinguish between fact and fiction, but this was roundly disproved during the Covid pandemic when the lab-leak theories, now widely accepted as credible, were censored as “disinformation”.

Any attempt to carve out exceptions to the First Amendment for “hate speech” will inevitably empower the state to curb freedom of expression at will. The hopelessly subjective notion of “hate” means that this will be tantamount to a censor’s charter, a means by which political opposition can be stifled with the backing of the Constitution. As more and more political figures are willing to openly question the validity of the First Amendment, the threat to free speech in the West is now palpable. The tremors are becoming more frequent, and we ignore them at our peril.

Despite themselves, censors point out which books are worth reading. The Soviet Union created a banned reading list that was second to none — Pasternak, Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Nabokov, even Orwell. The very first book condemned by the state’s own Ministry of Truth Glavlit was written by one of their own, the naval engineer and communist veteran Yevgeny Zamyatin. 

The author had impeccable radical credentials. He was a shipbuilder, behind what would become the Lenin icebreaker. He’d taken part in the “whirlwind” 1905 Revolution and made it back from overseas at great risk to the very heart of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Before that, he’d been imprisoned and exiled several times by the Tsarist regime, an experience that had made him a writer rather than breaking him. “If I have any place in Russian literature,” he admitted, “I owe it entirely to the Saint Petersburg Department of Secret Police”

The problem with Zamyatin, for the new regime, was twofold: he was a natural rebel and a mathematician. He had chosen his occupation through sheer belligerence, dedicating himself to the subject he had struggled with at school. And he knew enough of his trade to know that applying mathematical criteria and machine analogies — the abstraction of suffering, the delusion of perfectibility, utopian expediency — to humanity would have horrific consequences.

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It might be thought that Zamyatin would have been free to speak and protected by his Old Bolshevik history. Yet Lenin’s communists showed early on they had little inhibitions about repressing those who’d built the revolution and in whose name the party supposedly ruled. They’d also no aversion to killing troublesome writers, executing the poet Nikolai Gumilev, for instance, under the fictitious guise of the Tagantsev conspiracy.

In such a climate, science fiction offered a tangential way of telling the truth, of demonstrating where the regime was heading, with a degree of plausible deniability. Though it would become an effective tool in the post-Stalin years, with the Brothers Strugatsky smuggling messianic questions past the censors in their astonishing alien visitation tale Roadside Picnic, it was an exceptionally dangerous gamble. Even the Bolshevik hero Mayakovsky found the sky came crashing down on him for tangentially criticising the new order in his futuristic plays The Bedbug and The Bathhouse. Zamyatin, however, was as headstrong as he was prescient. And so, a century ago, the novel We was born, a book that went on to directly or indirectly influence almost every dystopian book and film of the century to follow.

Set in 30th century AD, We takes place in a society that has aimed at and supposedly achieved perfection. This has occurred after the apocalyptic trauma of the Two Hundred Years War, which killed all but 0.2% of the population. In order to prevent conflict, any conflict — anything that differentiates or divides — has been minimised or excised, including identity, excellence, idiosyncrasy, even personality. The society is revealed to us via a curious ruse — part-diary and part-message to future extraterrestrials “to save them by force and teach them happiness”. It’s written by D503, a scientist who is leading the construction, not of an icebreaker but, a spaceship called Integral. He’s a kind of anti-Zamyatin who’s done well under the system and has little friction with it, until he meets the rebellious I-330. His emerging feelings for her threaten everything he believes in. Via the disruptive nature of love, he’s introduced to insurgents dedicated to overthrowing the One State, a chaotic world beyond the Green Wall, and the vertigo of freedom. 

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While dystopian novels such as The Iron Heel and The Sleeper Awakes pre-date We, as do the utopian texts they were upturning, so many dystopian tropes, from Logan’s Run to the Hunger Games, would first emerge here in then-innovative forms. Zamyatin noticed early on the Bolshevik obsession with “modernising” everything, in appearance, and satirised it throughout We. Russian institutions had their formerly archaic titles and heraldry discarded, to be replaced by acronyms, abbreviations and portmanteau (Gosplan, NKVD, Comintern, GULAG etc), which suggested dynamism. There was an ominous obsession too with productivity, alluded to in We with its 24-hour clock, “inspiring” 1984’s opening line: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 

Indeed, many aspects of We made it into 1984, albeit through the grimy prism of post-Blitz London. Surveillance is everywhere, though Zamyatin’s comes from glass buildings and listening devices rather than telescreens. While Orwell did draw attention to the novel in an essay for The Tribune, it’s telling that he covered his tracks by damning it with faint praise, labelling the novel as: “one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age” and having the brass balls to imply that Brave New World plagiarised the book. Where We and 1984 differ is in mood and format. We has a strange avant-garde style that is reminiscent of the not-yet-annihilated Russian Futurist world of Vertov, Tatlin and co, whereas Orwell is more ashtrays and spam. One soars into oblivion, and one sinks.

All great dystopias of the future, the truism goes, are really about the now. Reversing 1948 to 1984, Orwell simply followed the threads of duplicity in contemporary rhetoric and the press, the horrors of ends justify the means in politics, the grotesque moral acrobatics required by any corruptible yet infallible orthodoxy. These things were all too evident after Stalin’s purges. How did Zamyatin know what would come to pass before it happened? Well, for one thing, he was not the first. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin was scathing in his exchanges with Karl Marx  — “the instinct of liberty is lacking in him; he remains from head to foot, an authoritarian” — and correctly foreboding as to where his gospel would lead. Zamyatin had the extra dimension of being an engineer and it might be surmised, in the tenor of our times, that he wrote of how technology corrupts us. But instead he showed how we corrupt technology and wield it against each other. He knew physics for sure, but he knew human nature even more. 

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The portents are dark in We. In Soviet terms, “the war between town and country” in the Two Hundred Years War prophecises the inferno of collectivisation and the Holodomor. The unease we might feel today reading We, however, is one of creeping recognition. He writes of the cult of productivity of Taylorism and how “he didn’t think of extending his method to the whole of life, to every step, to the entire day”, which predicts the unending hustle of today, wherein everything from sexuality to trauma is monetised and branded. In Zamyatin’s characters’ speech, we might see a particular contemporary condition; they continually preface what they are saying with ritualistic explanations and the performance of self-denunciation, which we see today in identitarian catechisms and, for example, land acknowledgements that do nothing to address injustice or land theft. Familiar mantras, internal censors, and in-group signalling is evident throughout the dialogue of We, despite being written a century ago.

We shows us that contemporary phenomena like cry-bullying, purity spirals and safe spaces are not uniquely contemporary, partly because they are simply secularised symptoms of faith. As JS Carr has noted, “The ideal of absolute mathematical order has become so ingrained in the mind of the protagonist… that he now feels actual oppression from that which stands in contrast to the One State’s teachings.” It might offer some comfort to know that the craven have always been with us. Zamyatin rightly points out that the victory of dogma over free expression results in “the entropy of thought”, and he rails against the overt politicisation of literature, which always ends in convention, if not outright servitude. 

It takes love, or rather desire, to fuck up this wretched fabrication of utopia. In a world where everything is problematic and everyone, bar the administrators, is paralysed, the impulse to lust, to have, to possess becomes not just disruptive but revolutionary. Here we find another borrowing by Orwell. In both books, love is transgression and must be defiled and betrayed as it is a threat to the system. In the case of We: “Every number has the right to any other number as a sexual product”, and satisfaction is ticketed and approved by the state. It’s hard to read of this systemisation of sex without thinking of how it’s been commodified in our broken time by dating apps and deluges of porn, resulting not in mass libertinage, but younger generations having less sex than their predecessors.

One notable difference between We and 1984 comes with the fact that, in Orwell’s vision, tyranny is imposed whereas in Zamyatin’s vision it comes as a kind of relief. In this, the latter was more accurate. Zamyatin returns to the Matrix-like choice of Eden: “To live without illusion is to live without comfort, not all cut out for it, few can bear it, but great are those who can.” A wise judge of character, Zamyatin recognised that society was not cynical but infantilised, and most of us are not dissidents-in-waiting but rather responsibility dodgers. When he writes of “unfreedom” being “happiness”, Zamyatin is foreshadowing Orwell, but he is always looking back too, to the supposed Fall of Man from Paradise. His characters touch on this, damning Satan as the “bringer of dissonance, the teacher of doubt”, while his state develops an operation to surgically extract the imagination when it is scarcely necessary. He knows resistance is always a minority position, and yet everything depends on it. 

What of those who ruled and benefited from this warped state of affairs? The abiding feeling by the end of We is fear and neurosis. We know enough about totalitarian history that any attempt to perfect human beings — the Übermensch or the Stakhanovite Homo Sovieticus — ends with inhuman monsters. Yet, the urge to perfect nevertheless continues, from our execrable managerial revolution, the misuse of AI, and the puritan deconstruction of all that’s historically and culturally flawed. Fear is rife in We and it trickles down from above.

Zamyatin would eventually escape the Soviet Union into exile, with the help of Maxim Gorky, and by sending a suicidally confrontational letter to Stalin, who, ever the capricious tyrant, let him go. He would find no peace in Paris, among the fallen aristocratic White émigré he despised. He remained a true rebel and therefore an exile even among the exiled. His imperfection was his making and undoing. 

“To err is human” is not an excuse — it’s a foundation stone. Zamyatin, constructor of ships, knew that humans could not and should not be constructed: “Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken — errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs.” Disturbance keeps us real and honest, while certainty is deadening and antithetical to the human psyche. 

Zamyatin pushes beyond the claustrophobia of dogma into panoramas, a writer who sees that our messiness, clamour, indignities and imperfections are the qualities that save us from ourselves as much as ethics and integrity. In a paradoxical sense, Zamyatin was that most despised and persecuted of Soviet figures, the wrecker, and he absolutely excelled in it. Consider all ideologies as echo-chambers or gated communities, where most of the work goes into maintaining the wall between belief and the encroaching reality outside. In We, the authorities admit “with that Wall we isolated the mechanical, perfect world from the irrational shapeless world of trees, birds, animals”. And there’s Zamyatin, 100 years later, prising open gaps in those walls, chipping away to let the chaos of truth in, like everything depends on it because everything does.

To be fair to Brod, there would be no Kafka without him. As Kafka’s literary executor, Brod did posterity a favour by refusing to consign his friend’s diaries to flames, as was instructed of him. Fifteen years later, in 1939, he did another good turn, ferrying the files to Palestine along with him when Prague fell to the Nazis. By then, however, Brod had already committed his original sin of apotheosising his mate in Kafka: Eine Biographie, which came out in 1937. There, Kafka appeared less the sex fiend that he was in reality, and more the tortured saint that he later became in the public imagination.

Brod set the tone. After the war, he ran his blue pencil through Kafka’s diaries, which appeared in two volumes in English in 1948-9, the second translated by the humourless Hannah Arendt. It was on the strength of Brod’s bowdlerisation that the contemporary TLS reviewer was able to conclude that Kafka’s diary was “one of the saddest books ever written”. Brod himself artfully leaned into the theme. Kafka’s diaries, he wrote in 1955, “resemble a kind of defective barometric curve that registers only the lows, the hours of greatest depression, but not the highs”.

This was, to say the least, utterly disingenuous. If there were no highs in his edition, it was because he had expunged all of them. He had his reasons, of course. In canonising Kafka as a writer with serious pretensions, he was seeing to it that his own star rose. There was perhaps a touch of pudeur, too, in his calculus. Brod may not have wanted kith and kin to find out about their nocturnal escapades to brothels together. Not for nothing did Kafka’s father think Brod was a meshuggener ritoch — a crazy hothead.

Ross Benjamin, by contrast, has no axe to grind. In translating a German edition brought out by the S. Fischer Verlag, he has now restored the diaries to their original form. What we have here is a record of Kafka’s life in all its messy glory. Benjamin has essentially given us a facsimile: 700 dense pages of mid-sentence pauses and spelling mistakes, anachronisms and repetitions, doodles and drafts.

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This is, above all, the portrait of a sex-mad dandy. “Wrote nothing,” reads more than one diary entry. “Nothing, nothing,” reads another. As a writer, I can attest to the inverse relationship between living and writing. What was he doing? Those laconic entries tell us that the man who wrote little knew how to live a little. A trip to Paris finds him and Brod living it up during the last gasps of the belle époque: “how easily grenadine with seltzer goes through one’s nose when one laughs.” Back in Prague, we find Kafka among his friends, all of them cackling heartily as he read aloud drafts of his stories. The Kafka of these diaries is a bon vivant, a man who enjoyed his puerile jokes and Quaker oats, a theatre aficionado who hit it off with a Yiddish theatre troupe, the kind his father — an assimilated German-speaking Jew — disapproved of.

As a law student at Charles University, Kafka desultorily did his doctorate. His rather unoriginal thesis, by his own admission, was “intellectual sawdust that thousands of others’ mouths had already chewed up for me”. His heart evidently wasn’t in it. More important were his literary and sexual pursuits, in which Brod was a partner in crime.

These continued into adulthood proper. Kafka took up a job as an insurance assessor — dealing with workplace accidents and the like — that apparently frayed his grey cells and left him too knackered to moonlight as a writer. But this isn’t quite true, though Kafka himself is in part responsible for the misleading picture. As he has it in the diary: “here, in the office, for the sake of so wretched a document I must rob a body capable of such happiness.” As a result, he sought solace in seedy brothels. It is a sentiment that Don DeLillo was able to pin down later with droll brevity: “talent is more erotic when it’s wasted.” Yet in Kafka’s case, it doesn’t have the benefit of being true.

Far from sucking his energy, his job was in reality a sinecure. He typically clocked off at 2 pm and spent his afternoons writing and whoring. What’s more, there was nothing sordid about his life. Kafka was a known quantity in the beau monde of Prague. As his biographer Reiner Stach shows, Kafka frequented not the shabby establishments of the lower orders but Weinstuben, those permissive wine bars where waitresses joined guests at tables. The draw was harmless flirting, though the chambres séparées held the possibility of deeper connection. Sometimes, Kafka and Brod used to meet at 5 am and, as it were, “have two girls” for breakfast before heading off to work.

These days, we would call Kafka a hipster. He was certainly a faddist. Before the war, he moved about in Lebensreform circles, where ventilation and vegetarianism were in vogue. Kafka took up the creed of Horace Fletcher, “the great masticator” who was given to maniacally chewing food until it turned into mush. Then there was the Wandervögel movement, which turned on coming to terms with vile bodies, au naturel and in nature. Kafka exercised twice daily, naked, with windows open. From his diaries, we learn that he spent two weeks in a nudist colony in the Harz Mountains. He had green fingers, liked spas, and enjoyed rambling and wild swimming. He succumbed to bouts of gluttony: “candies are poured into me like hail.”

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The biggest advance of these unredacted diaries is unquestionably in our understanding of Kafka’s sex life. Brod had prudishly done away with such passages as the one in which Kafka waxes poetic about a hirsute Spanish prostitute, with “hair running thickly from her navel to her private parts”. At a synagogue, Kafka observes a brothel-keeper in attendance; Brod had kept the line, even as he omitted the relevant detail that Kafka knew the man’s occupation not as a finger-wagging busybody, but as a patron of the place.

Brod had likewise censored anything that suggested that Kafka’s sexuality was more complex than what the Hays Code could handle. Now, we have Kafka lustily eyeing up two Swedish boys, their legs “so formed and taut that one could really only run one’s tongue along them”. Then we have him fantasising about the “sizeable member” of a commuter in his train carriage. Posing in the nude at a sanatorium for a friend, Friedrich Schiller, must have no doubt thrilled him; though it transpires that Kafka had been coy about getting his kit off — perhaps on account of circumcision. To Brod, he confessed dreams in which he kissed Franz Werfel, the author of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the epic novel about the Armenian genocide.

But Kafka wasn’t a homosexual as we would understand the word today. For sexuality wasn’t a binary business in 1910s Bohemia. Indeed, he was something of a womaniser, a tubercular lady-killer consumed by an insatiable appetite — “senselessly drawn, senselessly wandering through a senselessly dirty world,” as he put it. His diaries are littered with references to his mistresses. The great love of his life was Felice Bauer, to whom he was engaged twice; though they saw one another in person only on 17 occasions. It was, for the better part, an epistolary relationship. Kafka sent her more than 500 letters. All the same, he was quite disillusioned about the affair. “Blonde, somewhat stiff, charmless hair” was his first observation about her. When they met, he had casually introduced himself as a “gadabout”. To his diary, he confided the main reason for wanting to marry her: his “inability to endure life alone”. The engagement ceremony found him “bound like a criminal”. When they went shopping for furniture together, all Kafka could think of were tombstones.

Then there was his engagement to the tubercular clerk Julie Wohryzek, broken off when he transferred his affections to his Czech translator, the married grass widow Milena Jesenská. This was followed by an affair with the waitress Juliane “Hansi” Szokoll, who called him “Franzi” and had a penchant for living life lockdown-style, Proustianly in bed for days on end.

At some point before that was his fling with Hedwig Weiler. She was “very bright, very Social Democratic”, he wrote to Brod, but she needed “to keep their teeth clenched so as not to come out with a conviction, a principle, at any provocation”. Kafka was wholly uninterested in her politics, which clearly mattered a lot to Weiler, who went on to earn a doctorate in 1914. Needless to say, the affair didn’t last very long.

Finally, there was Dora Diamant, a Jewish Chassid girl on the run from her ultra-Orthodox Polish family; later a prominent communist actress. The two lived together in Berlin during Kafka’s dying days, day-dreaming about opening a restaurant in Palestine. Dora would cook, and Kafka would wait tables. His tuberculosis, with which he had lived for seven long years —“with such a body, nothing can be achieved”, he noted in his diaries — killed him in Klosterneuburg in 1924. Kafka was only 40.

All in all, it had been an uneventful, fairly apolitical life. Later critics made him out to be a raging critic of communism and fascism, but these are posthumous annexations. The fact is that he was too consumed by his interiority to really be preoccupied with politics proper. In his diaries, he devotes some 500 words to the subject of Russian circumcision, but then registers the onset of the Great War with laughable concision. His 2 August 1914 entry can be quoted in full: “Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming school in the afternoon.” Indeed, his indifference to world-historical events is the most striking aspect of his diaries.

Much has been made of Kafka’s pacifism. But this view, too, rests on over-interpretation. Kafka simply didn’t have too strong an opinion on the war. If he didn’t fight, it wasn’t on principle but because he failed to make the cut. Kafka tried thrice to enlist in the Austrian army. Later, he purchased war bonds and visited replica trenches in Prague to vicariously live life on the front.

Kafka was, according to the historian Ritchie Robertson, a “conservative modernist” like Conrad. True, he was fond of Flaubert, but for the most part, the culture he consumed was rather pedestrian. He enjoyed adventure stories. When it came to cinema, he had a preference for Westerns and melodramas. His literary tastes, Robertson writes, were cosmopolitan if “mildly conservative” — as one would expect from a subscriber of Die Neue Rundschau. His themes, both in his short stories and novels, were ambiguity and decline. His protagonists are typically weak men in the throes of existential crises flailing about in a world of bureaucratic intransigence.

It is easy to see why Cold Warriors took so well to his oeuvre. In the age bookended by the rise of Nazism and the fall of the Soviet Union, Kafka’s works were effortlessly appropriated as antitotalitarian pamphlets. At first blush, they appear to be on the money. The Trial, for instance, is the story of the arbitrary arrest, then execution, of Josef K. Hairs have been split trying to figure out whether Kafka had the Soviets in mind when writing the novel or the would-be autocrats closer to home. Some have argued the book is really about colonial violence — about the Herero, who were consigned to German concentration camps in Namibia in 1904-7, an episode generally regarded as the harbinger of the Holocaust.

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It’s a persuasive thesis. But those of us who have caught a glint of Occam’s razor may prefer a simpler explanation: Kafka’s books aren’t about authoritarianism at all. They’re instead about his father. They’re not so much about anti-statist as filial rebellion.

Kafka had daddy issues. The young Franz was mortally afraid of his father, who used to beat him. Hermann Kafka was by all accounts an abrasive and choleric character, given to banging on insufferably about the poverty of his youth, and abusing his employees, who once threatened to resign en masse from his haberdashery shop. It was left to Franz to cajole them one by one into staying on. “All I have written has been about you,” Franz wrote in a letter he never had the courage to send Hermann. “I was oppressed by your sheer corporeality.” Hermann was a huge man, whereas Franz was “a little skeleton”. He developed a stutter in his father’s presence. In his diaries, Kafka workshops a story that was later published as “The Judgement”, about a carefree twentysomething condemned “to death by drowning” by his killjoy father. More famously, in The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect who is, in the end, fatally wounded by an apple hurled at him by his father.

Kafka no doubt had good reasons for being politically passive. The Bohemia of his youth was an intensely political place, brimming with Czech nationalists who had it in for the elite German minority. As a Jew, though, Kafka had no skin in the game. Moreover, he knew from experience that, for all their differences, both sides were united in their antisemitism. In 1897, when Count Badeni made Czech one of the two languages of government along with German, violence broke out between the Germans and Czechs. The biggest casualty, however, was Prague’s Jewish population, whose homes and shops were singled out for attack.

For Kafka, aged 14, it must have been a formative episode, even if the business owned by his parents was spared. It might have been what turned him off politics. It also goes a long way in explaining Kafka’s Zionism, though it must be said he wore these ideas lightly. It seems he was less interested in following the mundanities leading up to the creation of a settlement in Palestine — the tawdry business of lobbying the Ottomans and the like — than in learning Hebrew and dabbling in Jewish history. Indeed, there was no more to his Zionism than a healthy cultural curiosity. As Kafka himself put it, “What do I have in common with Jews? I have scarcely anything in common with myself.” Convictions of any kind he found boring. But above all, he was bored by politics.

Kafka had fun. He liked to épater la bourgeoisie, but beyond that, if his diaries are anything to go by, he was a rather vacuous chap.

Cast your eyes elsewhere and witness another phenomenon. It is to do with how we decide what to think, and it is founded on the idea that no good can come from someone we deem as bad. This sinner commands scant sympathy, no matter their plight. Whatever they say is right is actually wrong, and whatever they say is wrong is actually right. We can set our compass by them.

Now look in a third place, where we find motives and incentives. Here, one is rewarded for coming to swift and certain judgments, no matter how flimsy the evidence. The prizes are symbols of affection and words of praise and a quantifiable increase in influence.

It may seem laughable to cast the above as context for a dispute between a man and his bank, but various currents in contemporary culture have swept us to this point. If only they would leave us here, we could view the episode as trivial, or mildly vexing or wryly amusing. But these currents are strong, and they will not leave us here, and they may destroy something.

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Much discussion surrounding the matter of Nigel Farage and Coutts has been rather like a curious game of ping-pong, one played without a net or even a table. One says this, one says that, and back and forth it all goes. But one has been able to say pretty much anything, because the known facts have been so scarce. Hit the ball wherever you like and your opponent will return it; it can never be called out.

Farage has at least now provided some documentation to support his claims. Minutes from the bank’s “wealth reputational risk committee” stated it “did not think continuing to bank NF [Nigel Farage] was compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation.” It added: “This was not a political decision but one centred around inclusivity and purpose.”

Later, faced with the resulting ire, it responded by clarifying: “It is not Coutts’s policy to close customer accounts solely on the basis of legally held political and personal views. Decisions to close an account are not taken lightly and involve a number of factors including commercial viability, reputational considerations, and legal and regulatory requirements.” Complicating the issue is an apparent offer from Coutts for Farage to bank with its parent company NatWest. So Farage’s claims may not have been entirely debunked, but neither has he been entirely debanked.

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Yet there is surely a question over those minutes, and what they mean in a broader sense. Despite everything, it seems our trust in banks has never been greater. We are only a few years on from the Great Crash and resulting bailouts, and yet the way we pay is becoming vastly more dependent upon them. The drift towards a cashless society and an enormous increase in online transactions have left us at their mercy. Stashes of cash, privately held, are of diminishing use. Living without a bank account is becoming impossible.

We may well think it fine for certain companies and institutions to proclaim certain ethical principles; we may even find it admirable, and give them our custom. And we would expect them to conduct business in accordance with these principles: if their actions told a different story, we might then call them hypocrites. But the more essential the service, the more concerning this becomes.

Coutts may not be an essential service, but normal high-street banks are. And it is easy to imagine such a business boasting of being “inclusive” and driven by “purpose”, a term used in boardrooms today meaning, according to one definition, a desire to be a force for “positive change” in society. In denying its services to someone who failed to comply with its “values”, it could justify itself not only commercially, but morally.

This principle extends into a form of investing known as ESG (Environmental, social, and corporate governance), which, like “purpose”, looks beyond the financial: it encourages the direction of money towards enterprises that the investor believes are moral, and away from those the investor believes are immoral. This may be laudable, and is doubtless well-intentioned. And yet.

The problem is that these are ideologies that fail to realise they are ideologies. To many of their proponents, it is just a matter of being kind, doing good, keeping on the right side of history, and making life better for more people. Their virtue is self-evident, so anyone who opposes them is a creature of vice and must be resisted. And thus we find ourselves in a strange place, where the nice people are coercing us into becoming more like them.

I should be happy about this. I am a Guardian-reading, Remain-voting, lockdown-supporting, double-Covid-vax-boosted Anglican who defends the BBC and wore masks more often than was strictly required during the pandemic. But it is hard to ignore the stirrings of a certain polite and cuddly totalitarianism (it would obviously laugh at the word and create mocking memes, rather than reflect upon itself meaningfully). There are other noxious forces in the world, too — not least a kind of nihilism that seems to be emanating from Russia — and these may be equally destructive, but these tend to be easier for us to identify and thus resist. The evil that wears our own clothes is more able to do its work unhindered.

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And here is where it affects us all, because our economy and way of life more generally will struggle to survive if these currents continue on their path. At its best, the free market is democratic: the free market is obviously ideological and flawed in itself, but in principle it treats everyone the same, regardless of their political views. A financial system that favours certain views over others is obviously a threat to this. And who is to say whether those views currently in fashion will be viewed so favourably in years to come? The progressive Left once advocated for eugenics, after all; which of today’s right-on beliefs will be damned by tomorrow?

Farage versus Coutts, then, is a diverting tale that has added to the gaiety of at least some of the nation. Cashlessness, philosophical shallowness and the warping effect of social media have played their part. But this story feels like a staging post on the way to somewhere else. Sometimes, revolutions come in the strangest ways. A bank for the super-rich may have just accelerated the demise of capitalism.

Bombs are not raining down on our cities; instead, what we are experiencing is the psychological weaponisation of war — and its exploitation as a tool of indoctrination and statecraft in the hands of the establishment.

The Ukraine crisis is undoubtedly a tragedy, but it is merely the latest in a series of geopolitical events stretching back at least 20 years in which the media coverage has been biased, one-sided, and ideological. All of these instances — Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the Afghanistan Withdrawal — were riddled with “structural information traps” that we ignored at our peril.

With each of these conflicts, the coverage gets worse, and the traps become ever more luring and incendiary. In each case, a narrative is constructed and transposed over the reporting, reinforced by sensationalist imagery that could rationalise an intervention and perhaps military action. But none compares to Ukraine. Here, we have witnessed the media of the Free World disseminating dishonest or otherwise uncritical coverage, fake news, Ukrainian disinformation, and propaganda aimed at conditioning the public to internalise the establishment’s Manichean narrative of a deranged madman’s random war of aggression.

Not only has the Ukraine coverage been highly charged, morally self-righteous, and plainly political, it actively demands a collective suspension of disbelief as it cultivates and redirects a natural reaction of sympathy felt by all into a moral outrage that insists on certain retaliation. Some, such as the former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, have irresponsibly vilified the entire Russian population. Others, such as The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, have begun to senselessly demonise prescient realist American academics for daring to shed light on Russia’s basic national security interests and the possibility of a confrontation if they go unrecognised.

So far as the Western legacy media is concerned, we really do live in the post-historical age Francis Fukuyama triumphantly proclaimed in 1989, with liberal internationalism the only acceptable paradigm through which to understand the world. Alternative views are now tantamount to championing tyranny. In each instance, the dictator comes to personify internationally Hegel’s thymotic, if savage, primitive man — the inhumane antithesis of the “last man” —  fighting maniacally against liberal democracy, the march of modernity, and progress itself. Assad, Ghaddafi, the Taliban, and Vladimir Putin all fit this archetype as reactionary actors par excellence necessitating a holy alliance to confront and civilise.

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Such a melioristic framing of international politics justifies and indeed privileges a Manichean narrative of good and evil. In this context, rationality itself is bound to the good, defined as effective conformity with liberal hegemony.

This is how the permanent members of the ruling class view the world. The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, has made the enlightening observation that the years-brewing war in Ukraine was a result of Putin simply becoming “unhinged”, suggesting he might be suffering from neurological problems. Not to be outdone, Condoleezza Rice, one of the architects of the Iraq War and the ill-advised 2008 Bucharest declaration (which affirmed Nato’s “open door” towards Ukraine and therefore helped to spark this most recent conflict), bemoaned Putin’s “delusional rendering of history” and “erratic” behaviour.

Perhaps, given the profound crisis of meaning in the West and the gap in solidarity and social cohesion, we should not be surprised. Living under the conditions of rootlessness, spiritual emptiness, and angst, every crisis is an opportunity for mythopoesis. Tragedy is reborn, and we are easily enthralled by the periodic cycles of worship and hero-making. Our faith in the cult of expertise, meanwhile, blinds and lulls us to the potential dangers of such black and white thinking.

As good Straussians, American neoconservatives were among the first to intuit this fact: that owing to disenchantment and the dissolution of our “sacred canopy”, the myth — or the Platonic “noble lie” — can be used to strengthen the Regime. Through their co-option, they would ensure the inherent power of the “noble lie” would be harnessed to regularly generate casus belli for global liberal imperialism. After all, what better unifying force than the “grand American project” of war to energise one’s desire for national greatness and the need for the regimentation of life in a disordered, chaotic Zeitgeist. Led by America, the grand mission of the Anglosphere would therefore have to be “to advance civilisation itself”. Not to mention, heroes also need villains, and it does help that in the Ukrainian archetype, ‘evil’ is not an intangible virus but can be personified onto an ‘other’ — in this case, Vladimir Putin.

This is the fake, performative, and internationalist nationalism of the American elite class: they use emotional triggers to rally the people behind the flag of the state in the name of lofty humanitarian causes which mask their own self-importance and narcissistic greatness. In fact, the systematic and periodic milking of tragedy to sow mass hysteria and manufacture support for the liberal imperium and its rulers has become the modus operandi in Washington. The consequence is not only further empowerment of the martial state, but also the enabling and even the ennobling of America’s war machine.

But so what? So what if our information ecosystem in the West is substantively flawed and prejudiced? Is this kind of systemic information bias, unbalanced coverage, and outright favouritism not endemic to all culture-complexes, prevalent also across state-run media in China, Iran, and Russia? The answer is certainly yes, but with an important qualification: the latter are not liberal democracies.

Some might say the foreign policy hawks have not learned from their catastrophic regime-change wars in the Middle East. But they have. They learned the importance of narrative control and information warfare targeting domestic audiences: consolidating the media, tightening their hold on information, marginalising the few investigative journalists that remain, and nullifying scepticism as examples of appeasement or Putinism. Undoubtedly, the situation seriously endangers civil liberties and freedom of thought in the Anglosphere, undermining the very foundation of Western democracy.

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But wedded to a disturbing, yet ascendant, neo-McCarthyism, the homogenisation of the Western media environment could ultimately prove more ominous than simple government censorship à la North Korea or Iran. At its core, the phenomenon aims to condition public opinion into “correct” acceptable speech patterns in the service of the “noble lie” — using the good heart of most ordinary citizens and their repulsion at human suffering as bait.

This noxious development, unless fully defanged and neutralised, could yet tear the very fabric of Western society, unleashing the dystopia of internalised totalitarianism, wherein the public-private boundaries disappear and citizens — even informed ones — can hardly distinguish between planted or socially-reinforced information and their own views. In such a world, the only choice is to virtue signal and self-censor.

Gone unchecked, it could amount to mass indoctrination around key national security questions and spell the end of democracy — in spirit if not procedurally. This is the ultimate fog of war.

Despite their litany of failures, the lesson drawn by the foreign policy establishment from their calamitous interventionism under the banner of democracy and freedom (“democratism“) was not to abandon their evangelical crusades for empire and to affirm restraint, moderation, and prudence. It was, instead, a desire not to be caught in the lie, as they were with their patently false claim about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). To achieve this, the military-industrial-congressional complex and the professional-managerial class that runs it had to dominate a new battlespace: information. Not for foreign audiences, in which Western intelligence has had a long track record, but to domesticate, intellectually sterilise, and effectively neutralise their own citizens.

To guarantee the continuation of its globalist misadventurism, the establishment had to control and limit the political discourse at home. It has done so largely in two ways. The first was to claim monopoly over ‘truth’, and to discredit anyone who might not go along with the endorsed narrative by doubting their patriotism and brandishing them as appeasers, apologists, and/or outright traitors. The second was to ensure a total consolidation of national security narratives — so that even when instances of falsehood and misinformation are discovered, this would not receive much exposure but be shunned to the darkest corners of the internet.

Any war is a tragedy. We should work to de-escalate and see it end in Ukraine. But there are always at least two sides to a conflict: two agendas, not counting the designs of external actors. War does not occur in a vacuum. It often betrays (and is the culmination of) a long history of grievances and distrust.

Having claimed over 14,000 lives since 2014, the conflict in Ukraine is not about Vladimir Putin and his character but realpolitik, national interest, and great power rivalry. Countries have genuine security interests, some of them existential. They have real red lines.

“No Russian leader could stand idly by,” Putin told William Burns, now the director of the CIA, and accept Nato membership for Ukraine, Georgia, or Belarus, or allow Western weapons systems into these countries. As one of American greatest strategists and the architect of “containment” against the Soviet Union, George Kennan’s reaction to the Clinton administration’s insistence on Nato’s enlargement is particularly telling: “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

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Almost 25 years on, such sober-minded analysis is increasingly rare. And this sidelining of neutral, dispassionate scrutiny in the Russo-Ukrainian War is particularly alarming because this is not America’s war. The North Atlantic has little vital geostrategic interest in Ukraine other than in trying to avoid a refugee or energy crisis. Yet many in Washington, London, or Brussels have goaded and encouraged, and are now revelling in, the conflict — convinced as they are that an extended quagmire there could become the kind of vulnerability for Russia that Afghanistan was for the Soviet Union, a malignant tumour metastasising to the whole of the Russian body politic and instigating regime change.

While diehards may desire a West-East clash packaged under the tired rubric of Democracy versus Autocracy to prove their machismo, the situation in Ukraine is boiling over — and it is still early days. Things are about to get far more dreadful. Ukraine is a small state neighbouring a great power, a historical buffer and bridge between Russia and the West. “To Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country,” wrote Henry Kissinger in 2014. “Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus,”. The sooner we heed and accept this fact, the sooner we can sensibly gauge the situation as is and review our commitment critically.

Statesmanship is the art of not letting emotions drive policy. Sentimentality is the enemy of reason, all sense of proportion, and limits: in short, it kills realism and breeds wishful thinking. Such utopianism is senseless and dangerous: it will prolong the conflict and get lots of innocent civilians needlessly killed. Meanwhile, fomenting false hope in the public domain could further fan the flames of war, entangling Europe and the US in a confrontation with nuclear Russia — an Armageddon the tale of which we will likely not live to tell.

War is not sports-betting, where one can feel good about siding with the underdog from the comfort of a couch or a bar. It is geopolitics in its most visceral, existential form: wagers have real costs involving human lives, and they are settled only with power and political will.

The point is that this tragedy was entirely predictable and avoidable. We invited (if not compelled) conflict with our politics of intrigue and meddling in Eastern Europe, our disregard for Moscow’s security interests, and our moral grandstanding over items like Nato’s eastward expansion, Ukrainian neutrality, and demilitarisation. Any seasoned diplomat of the Cold War would be left utterly mystified. This was and remains political and strategic malpractice.

The question now is whether we want to put millions of Ukrainian lives in jeopardy simply to keep it as a Western Bulwark on Russia’s frontier and a dagger at Moscow’s throat. The Russo-Ukrainian War must be condemned and brought to an end using diplomacy, but the West must accept a degree of culpability for leading the Ukrainians “down the primrose path” and egging on their showdown with their giant neighbour to the east. Any attempt to escalate and prolong this conflict by giving false hope to the Ukrainian people with tough rhetoric, moralistic bluster, lethal arms, and economic sanctions, the brunt of which will be felt by civilians on both sides, is irresponsible and callous. It would only ensure more death and suffering.

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As former US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor contended in a recent television interview: “I see no reason why we should fight with the Russians over something that they have been talking about for years, [and] we simply chose to ignore… We will not send our forces to fight, but we are urging Ukrainians to die pointlessly in a fight they can’t win. We’re going to create a far greater humanitarian crisis than anything you’ve ever seen if it doesn’t stop.” Only this time, our liberal conceit and messianic delusion could potentially spiral a regional conflict into a global maelstrom that would exterminate humanity in a nuclear apocalypse.

The road to hell, as the wise aphorism has it, is paved with good intentions. Unless we course-correct now, we could soon find ourselves in a Huxleyan Brave New World that exploits the illusion of freedom while normalising the sophistic manipulation of public discourse to manufacture consent around the establishment’s liberal internationalist foreign policy.

When all roads lead to interventionism and war, pause, think, and consider how we got to where we are. Ask yourself who designed this dystopian city of lies and to what purpose — before it is too late.

Yet Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Act is also a bizarre moment. Consider that the law stipulates that the government can fine people violating the act between 500 and 5,000 dollars. On the face of it, these are not numbers that seem commensurate to punish violators of the most powerful emergency law in the Canadian state’s armoury. But the reason these numbers seem so strange is simple: the law hasn’t been updated to keep up with the times, or inflation.

The oddness doesn’t end there. A law that in a real sense was forgotten — and designed to handle the most extreme situations a nation state can find itself in — is now dredged up to deal with a fairly routine political protest. Trudeau, and his finance minister Chrystia Freeland, have also called on financial institutions to freeze or suspend any bank accounts without a court order if they are being used to fund the protests. They believe, as David Frum writes in The Atlantic, that the truckers represent a “form of performative intimidation”.

Compared to the mass burning and vandalism of Catholic Churches in Canada last summer — which Trudeau both denounced and sympathised with, calling the arsons “understandable” at one point — the truckers hardly represent a nadir of public order. Across the border in the United States, the rioting that occurred there in the summer of 2020 involved loss of life, and massive damage to property. Back then Kamala Harris’s response was markedly similar to that of Trudeau — hand-wringing, sure, but also sympathy with the motivations of those who rioted.

Perhaps buildings being burned down, sometimes with their occupants still inside them, is just part and parcel of living in a vibrant democracy. Meanwhile, a protest that has led to zero loss of life and no torched buildings is cast as a grave threat to democracy. Put up bouncy castles for kids to play in and have public barbecues, as the truckers have done? Then, in the words of the New York Times’ editorial board, you are “far-Right”, and represent a “test of democracy” itself.

Or you will be accused of “sedition” by the usually phlegmatic Mark Carney. The former Bank of England governor may support Trudeau’s use of emergency powers, but by all indications it is a spectacularly ill-conceived move. Many provincial leaders are already openly rejecting the necessity of such extreme measures.

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But the presence of open division among Canada’s political class — though fatal enough on its own — pales in comparison to the much deeper issue here. Throughout the protests, it’s been clear that the authorities — from Trudeau’s government down to the city of Ottawa itself — have lost control of the situation on the ground.

Tow truck companies openly refuse to tow trucks, and even the police force has proven itself to be unreliable. After an order came down to cut off the demonstrator’s supply of fuel for their trucks, the OPS did some perfunctory confiscations of jerry cans, but the only real result was that demonstrators started carrying around jerry cans en masse as a form of resistance. Not that they had to resist too hard; few police officers seemed interested in doing any policing in Ottawa — they were too busy being filmed hugging and greeting the protestors.

The same can be said of the Canadian Armed Forces, who do not seem bothered enough to play a role in resolving these demonstrations. In fact, the military is now investigating at least six of its members for actively supporting the trucker protest. Two of those under investigation belong to the elite Joint Task Force 2. Compared to the total manpower of the CAF, this might seem like a trifling matter, but as an indication of overall political reliability, it cannot be dismissed. The US military has seen similar indications of political unreliability with its own Covid mandates, so this is hardly some issue unique to Canada, either.

Where does all this leave the Trudeau government? Critics talk about creeping totalitarianism in Canada — though with the invocation of an outright legal state of exception it’s hard to say whether totalitarianism is actually “creeping” anymore. Others, mainly Americans, mutter darkly about “a certain F-word”. One can sympathise with the alarm informing these remarks, without fully buying into them. It only takes a couple of minutes thinking about the situation in Canada to realise how incredibly weird it is — and that weirdness requires some serious explanation.

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Why the experts are losing

By Malcom Kyeyune

When was the last time we saw totalitarianism associated with a government that has unreliable control of its police? That can’t control the roads of its own capital? A government calling for something akin to martial law but emphatically rejecting using the military — because they probably wouldn’t follow any orders to enforce it that they were given?

Tucker Carlson is calling Trudeau “the dictator of Canada“, but this seems like a very odd dictatorship indeed. One of the reasons given for calling this state of exception was that it allowed Trudeau to draft tow truck companies into performing paid but involuntary work.

This may well prove to be a crisis that undermines yet another plank of the post-Cold War liberal era, but V for Vendetta it is not. In that dystopian society, the state of exception is simply a normal way of life. Here, the police will not hesitate to shoot you the moment you cause trouble, and the fall of the totalitarian government comes after it is no longer able to keep the population in check through violence and intimidation. In Canada right now, however, the truth is much stranger than fiction. The state of exception has belatedly arrived only after clear signs from the police and the military that they are absolutely not going to be shooting anybody to begin with.

In regards to Trudeau’s actions being a form of “fascism”, that is perhaps an even harder case to make. It’s a point understandably overlooked today, but fascism, seen in its own day, was most definitely a forward-looking political force. The official hymn of the Italian fascist party under Mussolini, Giovinezza, literally means ”youth”. In the context of the early Twenties, fascists saw themselves — and were seen by many Western contemporaries, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt and David Lloyd George — as a rejuvenating, revolutionary force, whether for good or ill.

So let’s be honest with ourselves: it is impossible to look at this weak Canadian government — barely capable of enforcing its will on its own security forces — as a Mussolini-style fascist New Dawn. This sputtering display is about as far from a youthful springtime of the nation as it is possible to get. Trudeau seems mostly tired, under siege, and bereft of ideas, and politicians like him — who self-style as “defenders of democracy” — are now clearly becoming a sort of spent ideological force, barely able to muster a lick of respect from their unruly subjects.

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Why Canada's truckers will lose

By Michael Cuenco

But perhaps that is the new day that is dawning. Perhaps we are all headed in the same direction as Canada, where political polarisation between the rural population and the urban managerial classes, between the people who give orders and the people who are supposed to follow them, eventually produces a situation so untenable that the system simply snaps.

Not every part of the system, though. It is notable that Trudeau is calling on the banks and tech firms to help restore public order, while excluding any meaningful role for the military. The banks, as well as various parts of the tech sector, are increasingly looking like the only powerful institution that the managerial classes can expect to count on in a true crisis. Especially once the cops, truckers, firemen, pilots, rubbish collectors, special forces operators, sailors, and meter maids bid their politicians farewell and thanks for all the fish.

Unfortunately (or maybe not), those who derive an almost pornographic pleasure from fantasising about imminent totalitarian dystopia are likely to be sorely disappointed in the days and years ahead. Acts like the one just undertaken by the Canadian government amply illustrate that there’s no ten-thousand year Reich of Technocracy coming anytime soon.

The gulf in our societies between the people who work in the real world — those who keep the planes flying and the power on — and the restive and radicalised “email workers” of the urban class keeps growing more and more ominous and intractable. Trudeau can freeze as many bank accounts as he wants. If he thinks it’s a workable solution to this crisis, then the chaos is just getting started.

But though there has never been a human culture that is anything but flawed, all lasting cultures in history have been rooted. That is to say, they have been tied down by, and to, things more solid, timeless and lasting than the day-to-day processes of their functioning, or the personal desires of the individuals who inhabit them. Some of those solid things are human creations: cultural traditions, a sense of lineage and ancestry, ceremonies designed for worship or initiation. Others are non-human: the natural world in which those cultures dwell, or the divine force that they worship or communicate with in some form.

We need these roots. We need a sense of belonging to something that is bigger than us, across both space and time, and we underestimate that need at our peril. In her book The Need for Roots, written in 1943, the French philosopher and reluctant mystic Simone Weil puts the case like this:

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future.”

Weil was writing from exile in England, as her homeland was still under Nazi occupation. She saw National Socialism’s perversion of the notion of rootedness, and the evil that was being done with it. But unlike many intellectuals of the Left, the Nazis’ racial tyranny did not lead her to reject the human need for roots in favour of some universalist flavour of “global justice.” She saw that notion for what it was: the same flavour of perfectionism that was leading the USSR to roll out a tyranny that matched that of fascism, right down to the barbed wire that surrounded the camps designated for those who did not fit into the model.

Weil saw beyond: when she looked at Hitler and Stalin, she saw two tyrants leading nations that had already been uprooted — by the industrial revolution, by Bolshevism, by the Great War, by the depression, by the wider process of modernity. Both men promised a return to, or a forward march towards, security, power and meaning through the imposition of a totalitarian ideology which they claimed would speak for the masses. Both delivered hell instead.

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Eco-fascism is our future

By Paul Kingsnorth

Weil’s book was commissioned by the Free French in London, led by Charles de Gaulle. It was intended to be a manifesto for the renewal of France, and Europe, after the scourge of Nazism. Her prescription was radical. Europeans, she said, had been uprooted by industry, by the state and by an aggressive form of pseudo-Christianity (Weil was a sometimes reluctant Christian, but was scathing about official forms of the faith which had, she said, in most cases aligned themselves with “the interests of those who exploit the people.”)

Both state nationalism and state socialism were con tricks, according to Weil: exploiters of the people posing as their liberators. The “totalitarian idol” of grand world-saving ideologies such as communism and fascism was the scourge of the twentieth century. The whole game had to be junked, the terms redefined: “The only punishment capable of punishing Hitler, and deterring little boys thirsting for greatness in coming centuries from following his example,” she wrote, “is such a total transformation of the meaning attached to greatness that he should thereby be excluded from it.”

“A transformation of the meaning attached to greatness”: perhaps this has always been the task, and perhaps it has always been urgent. But it certainly is now. Our idols today are economic conquest, unending “growth” built on turning all life into “resources” for human consumption, scientism disguised as objective inquiry, manic forward-motion, and the same old quest for perfectibility. Charles de Gaulle, when he returned to France victorious, was an effective competitor in this game. He never read the book that Weil aimed at him.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Aris Roussinos

What did Weil mean by this “transformation”? Perhaps the answer explains why she is not as widely read as she should be. Her attachment was to the eternal things, and she could never be boxed in. She wrote in praise of God, tradition, roots, peoples and culture; but also of justice, freedom of speech and thought, honour and equality. She could be equally scathing about fascism, communism, established religion, liberal elites, capitalism and mass education.

One minute she is incinerating the “uprooted intellectuals obsessed with progress” who dominated the cultural elite of her time (and who have entirely conquered ours), assailing the Left for its contempt of the peasantry or asserting that “of all the human soul’s needs, none is more vital … than love of the past.” But just when you think you’re dealing with a conservative Defender of the West, you read something like this:

“For centuries now, men of the white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad. If in certain respects there has been, nevertheless, progress during this period, it is not because of this frenzy but in spite of it, under the impulse of what little of the past remained alive.“

Weil wasn’t wrong. We in the West invented this thing called modernity, and then we took it out into the world, whether the world wanted it or not. Once we called this process the White Man’s Burden, and exported it with dreadnoughts. Now we call it development, and export it via World Bank loans and the War on Terror.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

But — and here is the point so often missed, especially by the “progressives” currently leading the charge in the culture wars — before we could eat the world, we first had to eat ourselves. Our states and economic elites had to dispossess their own people before they could venture out to dispossess others. The ordinary folk of the “developed” West were the prototype; the guinea pigs in a giant global experiment. Now we find ourselves rootless, rudderless, unmoored in a great sea of chaos; angry, confused, shouting at the world and each other.

Furthermore, this process accelerates under its own steam, as Weil explained, because “whoever is uprooted himself uproots others”. The more we are pulled, or pushed, away from our cultures, traditions and places — if we had them in the first place — the more we take that restlessness out with us into the world. If you have ever wondered why it is de rigueur amongst Western cultural elites to demonise roots and glorify movement, to downplay cohesion and talk up diversity, to deny links with the past and strike out instead for a future that never quite arrives, consider this: they are the children of globalised capitalism, and the inheritors of the unsettling of the West, and they have transformed that rootlessness into an ideology. They — we — are both perpetrators and victims of a Great Unsettling.

This is not to say that “Western” people alone are responsible for the rolling destruction of culture and nature that is overwhelming the world. We may have set the ball rolling, but the culture of uprooting is global now, and was when Weil was writing. You can see it everywhere you care to look. India has been uprooting its adivasi (tribal) people systemically since independence; its government is currently trying to undermine the power and agency of the peasant farmers of the Punjab, and have triggered a rural rebellion by doing so. The Chinese state is increasingly looking like the most efficient machine ever invented for uprooting, resettling and controlling mass populations. The Indonesian state is systematically unsettling the tribal people of West Papua, in cahoots with a cluster of multinational corporations. African governments are corralling the last of the San people. This is what states do, all over the world. It’s the ancient human game of power and control, turbo-charged with fossil fuels and digital surveillance technology.

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How liberals made the British Empire

By Aris Roussinos

For the past several centuries, this intersection of financial power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies has constituted an ongoing war against roots and against limits. The momentum of the “global economy” is always forward: it demolishes borders and boundaries, traditions and cultures, languages and ways of seeing wherever it goes, and it will not stop until the world has been entirely remade. Record numbers of people are on the move as a result, and as the population increases and climate change bites, those numbers will rise everywhere, churning cultures and nations into entirely new shapes — or, worse, no shapes at all — with all the consequent turmoil and conflict. Even if you are living where your forefathers have lived for generations, you can bet that the smartphone you gave your child will unmoor them more effectively than any bulldozer.

Plenty of people, of course, are quite happy with all of this, and have no time for Romantic Luddites like me when we lament it. Even we Romantic Luddites are here on the internet, lamenting, so perhaps the last laugh is on us. But we are, I think, desperately in need of real culture. We want to go home again, but if we even know where home is to be found, we see that we can’t return. And so a void is created, and into the void rush monsters: toxic imitations of our lost roots. Identity politics, newly rigid racial categories, extreme nationalisms, intolerant strains of religion, endlessly multiplying genders and “identities” constructed online with no reference to reality. The mono-ethnic identitarianism of the far Right or the diversity identitarianism of the far Left: take your pick according to your predilections and fears. But these fake roots can never replace the real thing and the result is an orgy of anger, iconoclasm and rising bile. Meanwhile, the machine of techno-modernity pushes on, relentless.

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Welcome to fully automated luxury gnosticism

By Mary Harrington

In all the time I have spent with people who live in genuinely rooted cultures — rooted in time, place and spirit — whether in the west of Ireland or West Papua, I’ve generally been struck by two things. One is that rooted people are harder to control. The industrial revolution could not have happened without the enclosure of land, and the destruction of the peasantry and the artisan class. People with their feet on the ground are less easily swayed by the currents of politics, or by the fashions of urban ideologues or academic theorists.

The second observation is that people don’t tend to talk much about their “identity” — or even think about it — unless it is under threat. The louder you have to talk about it, it seems, the more you have probably lost. The range of freewheeling, self-curated “identities” thrown up by the current “culture war” shows that we are already a long way down the road that leads away from genuine culture.

When a plant is uprooted, it withers and then dies. When the same happens to a person, or a people, or a planetful of both, the result is the same. Our current cultural — and spiritual — crisis comes, I think, from our being unable to admit what on some level we know to be true: that we in the West are living inside an obsolete story. Our culture is not dying — it is already dead. We turned away from a mythic, rooted understanding of the world, and turned away from the divine, in order to look at ourselves reflected in the little black mirrors in our hands. Now, we are living in a time of consequences. Some day soon, we are going to have to look up and begin searching for what we have lost. I have a feeling that this process has already begun.

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

The phrase is not original to Marx, nor is the idea exclusive to Marxism. Yet, with remarkable economy, it captures the essence of the idealised communist society.

Of course, the reality of communism was best summed-up in the old Soviet-era quip — “the bosses pretend to pay us and we pretend to work,” but let’s stick with the ideal — and what makes it so attractive.

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Are you ready for 'fully automated luxury communism'?

By Peter Franklin

The first half of the slogan suggests a society in which everyone does their bit; and the second half, that there’s always enough to go round. It all seems so fair, so reasonable — until, that is, you notice that what you put into the system (“from each…”) is unrelated to what you get out of it (“to each…”). That’s a problem because “ability” isn’t the only determinant of productivity. In fact, the real difference is made by effort, determination, creativity and risk-taking — all of which respond to reward. So if people don’t get rewarded for the all-important extras they put in, what happens to the economy? Nothing good.

In any case, who decides what each person’s needs are — or, for that matter, what their abilities are?

If you look at Marx’s use of the phrase in context, you’ll see that he was applying it to the “higher phase of communist society” — a socialist wonderland in which material wealth flows abundantly and labour has become “life’s prime want” (because it’s all such fun). So no need for some oppressive state to direct your efforts and distribute the product, you just do what you want and take what you need.

Unfortunately, the path to this “higher phase” has never been clear and the radical Left has struggled with it ever since.

At this point, I ought to say that capitalism, though evidently more successful than communism, has also fallen short. It may be less overtly utopian, but free market economics has its own unrealistic assumptions — rational actors, perfect information, level playing fields etc. All too often, the reality is one in which asymmetries of knowledge and power allow the few to exploit the many.

Hence the enduring appeal of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”: twelve words which describe a clear alternative to a deeply-flawed capitalist system. The interesting thing, though, is that they present as much of a challenge to the contemporary Left as they do to the free-market Right.

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Leftwingery is not, and has never been, a monolith. In the 20th century, communism achieved a position of dominance on the far Left, but had to overcome rival ideologies, like anarchism. In the 21st century, it is just one of many strands of radical thought. It struggles to stand out from and is sometimes co-opted by its rivals.

The old primarily class-based analysis of society now has to contend with other kinds of identity and inequality. A non-exhaustive list includes sex, sexuality, gender, disability (problematic word), race (ditto), religion, language, culture, lifestyle, age, body shape, and all the intersections thereof. It’s all so multidimensional that it’s difficult to decant into neat ideological categories like ‘Leninism’, ‘Trotskyism’, etc. Thus, we have to rely on informalities like ‘Woke’. Yes, it’s a word that been sucked-dry by continual mockery, but it’s useful nonetheless.

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Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

The Woke Left dominates today’s radical politics — yet it is also neutralising it. For a start, we’ve seen the culture wars alienate the Left’s traditional working-class support. I’ll say no more about that, because it’s been extensively documented and debated already. Less appreciated, though, is the failure of the radicals to mobilise mass support along other dimensions of identity.

Look at what happened to the Presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Their failure to enthuse the kind of voters the Democrats need to win back from Trump was bad enough. Worse was the disconnect with black voters — who swung firmly behind Joe Biden, the candidate of the centrist establishment. Neither Warren, nor Sanders, were able to extend their appeal much beyond a fanbase of young, mostly white, college-educated activists. In fact, compared to his 2016 run, Sanders went backwards.

It’s the same story across the Western world. With capitalism in crisis, the radical Left gets a hearing, but the establishment stays in power.

In the 20th century, the Left was able to build history-changing movements because their class-based politics had a clear economic programme. The identity-based politics of the contemporary Left does not. Yes, there are promises of lavish state spending — on free broadband and the like. But it doesn’t add up to a transformation of the economic order.

The old Left had the advantage of having a much simpler and clearer model of the society it wanted to change — i.e. the class system. Furthermore, the components of that system can be concretely defined by their economic relationships to one another — workers and management, labour and capital, etc.

The Woke model of society provides no such clarity. There are many more components, most which are not defined by their economic relationships to one another. The Woke Left has plenty to say about inequality, of course — but it’s expressed in terms of concepts like ‘privilege’ and ‘voice’, instead of the solid language of wages and ownership. The proposal that everyone should be paid the same, though lunacy, is at least comprehensible — but what the heck does ‘check your privilege’ mean?

Further reading

Bernie's failure is a lesson for the Left

By James Bloodworth

Inequalities of whatever kind can have economic causes and/or consequences, but unlike orthodox Marxism, the Woke Left is not underpinned by a unifying economic theory. While Marxist economics is a major school of economic thought, there’s no such thing as Wokenomics.

Or is there?

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While, as I say, there’s no defining economic platform — we have seen ideas emerge from various corners of the contemporary Left that would re-order economic relationships across society.

One example is the proposal that reparations should be paid to the descendants of slaves. It’s the subject of an ongoing debate that’s especially current in the United States. Those opposed say that requiring some Americans to compensate other Americans for something that was abolished in the 19th century is deeply unjust — and, indeed, racist. Those in favour argue that the injustice of slavery is not “all in the past”, but can be seen in racialised patterns of advantage and disadvantage that persist to the present day.

And yet it’s hard to think of anything in the modern world that hasn’t been influenced by some past injustice. The principle of reparations, if seriously and consistently implemented, would certainly reorder economic relationships in a pretty fundamental, if immensely complicated, way.

There’s another branch of Wokenomics that is also about compensating people — only not for some historical legacy, but for unpaid labour carried out in the present.

For instance, there’s the idea that mothers should be paid for the work of mothering. It’s a case made in the New York Times by Kim Brooks:

“…if garbage collectors and grocery store workers and hedge fund managers expect to be paid for their labor, why not those who create and sustain the human race? Why can’t we imagine some form of universal basic caretakers income to support the work mothers (or fathers or other extended kin) do at home?”

To be clear, Brooks is not merely asking for a more generous social security system — she’s demanding to be paid as a worker:

“This work, despite bringing joy and meaning to my life, shared many of the qualities of the menial jobs I’d done before… But there was one important difference: The work I’ve done as a mother I’ve done for free.”

Brooks is far from alone in seeing the world in this way. For instance, she mentions the Wages for Housework movement that dates back to the early 1970s. Then there’s the splash made by Sophie Lewis’s 2019 book, Full Surrogacy Now — which advocates a radically different view of family relationships. If I understand her correctly, all pregnancy in the capitalist system is ‘womb-work’ (though, for the most part, unpaid).

Further reading

The unhappy truth about surrogacy

By Julie Bindel

The issue here is that if the activities undertaken by a paid surrogate, childminder or cleaner are defined as work, then why is what parents do for themselves considered to be something else?

An answer is provided by Oren Cass in a counterblast for American Compass:

“Suppose we grant the premise that child-rearing is work and that by definition work should be paid. The next question would be: paid by whom? Presumably, by the child’s parents. So if Ms. Brooks wishes to charge Ms. Brooks for Ms. Brooks’s work, she is welcome to do so. But she will find the credits and debits in her account cancel out.”

(Also, think of the paperwork — would one have to pay oneself for that too?)

I presume that Kim Brooks thinks that she should be paid by the state, not by herself — on the grounds that mothers “create and sustain the human race”, which indeed they do. But as Cass points out, the state, in taking responsibility for payment, would thereby take control. That, after all, is the thing about getting paid — your employer decides what you do and how you do it. They also get to own what you produce. Is this really an arrangement we want to apply to motherhood?

Even more than the reparations argument, what is being proposed here is a fundamentally different social and economic order. Firstly, there’s the expansion of the state into private life. Secondly, there’s the transformation of family relationships into transactional relationships. And thirdly, there’s the redefinition of voluntary action as work.

One has to ask, where will it end?

One of the tenets of the Woke Left is that “sex work is work” — and therefore must not be stigmatised or criminalised in any way, but rather regulated and unionised just like the older professions. But I wonder if they’re missing a trick. Why not also argue that “sex is sex work” — and, therefore, should be remunerated in all circumstances. If parents should be paid for looking after their own children, and mothers for gestating them, then shouldn’t we apply the same logic to the start of production line?

*

OK, leaving aside the reductio ad absurdum, the fact remains that eroding the distinctions between public and private life, and between work and voluntary action, gets you into all sorts of nonsense.

In a celebrated essay for Buzzfeed last year, Anne Helen Petersen writes about the causes of “Millennial burnout”. She repeatedly uses the word “labour” (or rather “labor”) to describe the never-ending demands made on young people trying to survive in a hyper-competitive economy. She makes a lot of powerful points — for instance, having to respond to out-of-hours work emails is indeed labour, not to mention an intrusion into home life. But she also uses the word inappropriately, for instance referring to self-promotion on Instagram as “the labor of performing the self for public consumption.”

Further reading

The bitter truth about Millennial burnout

By Peter Franklin

Except it very clearly isn’t labour, it’s posting on social media — and you don’t have to do it. I don’t think Petersen is demanding ‘wages for selfies’ or anything like that, but she does go on to ask what can be done “until or in lieu of a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system.” Deleting your apps would be a good start.

The concept of ‘emotional labour’ is another example of seeing everything as work. It was originally used to describe the undervalued emotional content of what a lot of employees (often in female-dominated occupations) do in the workplace — for instance the compassion of a nurse or the friendliness of a receptionist. However, it’s been extended to describe what happens in private life too — not only in caring for children and elderly relatives, but also things like consoling a friend or mediating between feuding flatmates.

Caring for others is not cost-free. Nor is the burden always equally shared — and certainly not between men and women. But there is something deeply dehumanising about applying the language of work to something that should be freely given. Moreover, if it is coerced then that should be treated as the domestic abuse that it is, not a breakdown in industrial relations.

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What a volunteer does for a good cause is, by definition, freely given. But even here we see confusions between voluntary action and the world of work. For instance, well-meant schemes to provide incentives for volunteering — such as discount cards — introduce an element of payment. Other line-blurring elements include the dangled possibility of a paid job with the organisation one volunteers for — or merely the opportunity to embellish a CV. There’s not much difference between that and the exploitative practice of unpaid internships.

Further reading

Which is worse, work or no work?

By Peter Franklin

It may sound corny and clichéd, but the idea of virtue being its own reward is a life-enhancing one. The things in life that don’t get dragged into the transactional sphere of economics are literally and figuratively priceless.

But Wokenomics takes the opposite view, which is that if we do value something then we must value it economically.

In a recent article (also in the New York Times) the Australian economist Justin Wolfers argues that GDP figures should record “the immense value of the sacrifices being made by millions of people who have stayed at home to stop the spread of the coronavirus”. He says that the GDP figures include the “defense services” produced by soldiers going off to fight wars, so why not also put a direct value on the contribution made by those staying at home to fight Covid-19? Why do we include soldiers’ pay in GDP, but not the support payments made to those who can’t work because of the lockdown?

The answer is straightforward: soldiers are doing a job; people staying at home are not (indeed they are supported by the state precisely because they can’t work). They are, of course, doing the right thing — by not engaging in risky behaviours that would cause themselves and others harm. But if we were to consider that as part of economic production, then why not also include what people ‘do’ by not speeding on the roads, not getting addicted to crack cocaine or not eating junk food all day? There’d be no end to it.

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This is the trouble with Wokenomics — it turns absolutely everything into a series of politicised, administrative value judgements. As such it goes even further in its ambitions than Marxist economics. Arbitrarily putting a price on a tonne of wheat or a tractor factory is economic insanity, but doing the same for motherhood, friendship, volunteering or personal responsibility is moral madness.

That people take care of their families, respect the law, show consideration for others — and do so without incentive or recognition — is what makes a society great. We should very much value it, but not within any kind of economic paradigm.

To resort to another clichéd but true sentiment, the best things in life really are free.

In particular, I’ve been considering two haunting observations made by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the outset of The Gulag Archipelago. The first is the question of why people did not resist more when they were taken away in the night. Why did they not scream, tear up the earth, scratch the eyes of the men who had come to take them? And — if they had to leave their home – why didn’t they make sure that the people who had come into their home bore the scars of having done so for the rest of their days? Why did the captured even tip-toe down the stairs, as they were asked to do by their captors, in order not to disturb their neighbours?

The answer to this lies in a question. As Solzhenitsyn puts it: “At what exact point, then, should one resist? When one’s belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner?” In part, the reason nobody resists is the same one we learned from Communism’s evil twin: if people have no conception of what is about to happen to them, then they will do whatever they think is needed to keep themselves alive to the next stage.

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What unites the Nazis and Communists?

By Douglas Murray

When people were rounded up, they still hoped that this was the beginning of a process which would be resolved or righted at some point: that the misunderstanding would cleared up, or that the indignities could not get any worse. Until the whole world knew about what could happen, almost nobody imagined the end they would endure.

Solzhenitsyn relates the tale of one woman in the Twenties, early in the reign of communism in Russia, who was supposed to have been seized in a Moscow street. But she started screaming and fighting, and such was the commotion in the middle of a crowd, that the men assigned to take her away abandoned their task. But even her imagination of what was possible turned out to be limited. For she returned home that evening — which allowed the men to take her away privately, in the middle of the night, and send her to Lubyanka.

Solzhenitsyn’s second question-observation is even more haunting: why did people not intervene more to stop their friends, family or simply fellow-citizens from being taken away? In some ways, this is the more disturbing observation. We may grant that people have the best perspective on their own fate and will know best what might save themselves. But when people see women being plucked off the pavement by agents of the state, why do they continue walking?

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2019: the year the West wised up to China

By John Gray

Solzhenitsyn approaches this question through a bitter counterfactual. “How we burned in the camps later”, he says, thinking how different things might have been if the security operative who went out in the night to make arrests hadn’t known he would ever return to his family again. What if he hadn’t known whether he would return alive. What if, during the mass arrests in Leningrad, when one quarter of the city was arrested, people had lain in wait and attacked the people who had come to arrest them and their neighbours? What if they had waited on the staircase with “axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand”?

You might say that not everybody is given to physical violence or physical courage.  Why, then – and in some ways this is the worse question – weren’t the tires of all those Black Maria sitting with a solitary driver (waiting for the human cargo to be brought out of the building, into the vehicle and from there away) spiked? How is it that a whole public with such a cause (their relatives and friends being taken away in front of their eyes) couldn’t do what hoodlums easily manage with no motivation whatsoever?

It was, says Solzhenitsyn,  because the people “didn’t love freedom enough. And even more — we had no awareness of the real situation.”

It may seem strange, and even slightly obscene, to make a leap from the worst days of the 20th century to the seemingly incomparable situation in developed democracies today. But the behaviour of people under totalitarianism is, I think, recognisable today in the normal behaviour of normal people in our supposedly normal times.

In a culture which is often described as a ‘cancel culture’ — one in which people are liable to be rendered at least unemployable at any given moment — these behaviours manifest themselves still. Anyone who doubts this should read this piece by Mike Tunison on Medium. As Tunison says, he was one of the men whose name was — wholly wrongly — put on a list published online in October 2017 purporting to list around 70 men in the media described by the author as ‘Shitty Media Men’. The document was an anonymous list of unvetted, unchecked claims about dozens of men in the media in America whom the author or authors claimed to have a reputation for being sinister or violent towards women.

Suggested reading

The inescapable misogyny of the modern world

By Tanya Gold

The list did the feverish rounds of the internet in the same way that similar lists did in the UK and elsewhere. The media was high on the octane of exposes. Having been silent about cases of real abuse, nobody had time or interest in questioning documents like the list that Tunison was on. And so, with no apparent justification, other than the misfortune of his having crossed the path of someone with a grudge, Tunison’s life was turned upside down. He was made unemployable in the career to which he had chosen to dedicate his life. Jobs he did apply to could see the claims made against him online and step silently away. Finally, last year, he landed a job as a janitor. Is no one interested in this or the injustice it screams?

A similar scenario will doubtless emerge in the UK, with the dismissal of the broadcaster Alastair Stewart after decades of work for ITV. On the basis of a quotation from Shakespeare, which one person online claimed was clear, cloaked racism, a career of decades is over.

Some of Stewart’s friends will fight for him, perhaps. Others will look away, sufficiently worried about the implications of even being ‘adjacent’ to someone accused of racism. But is nobody interested in the means by which this was done?  Consider the implications of the phrase I wrote above. A case of clear, cloaked racism.  So clear as to deserve the end of somebody’s career. Yet done ‘with the cover’ of a quotation. Meaning that the crime which is so clear, so blazing and so self-evident is also only in the eye of the beholder, only discernible to a particular eye. In other words, not remotely clear.

Suggested reading

Today's voguish communists should remember Budapest

By James Bloodworth

The people who suffer these injustices tend not to come out fighting, screaming and scratching their way back to safety. They tend — like Tunison – to submit to the madness which has washed over them, partly in the hope that they will some day claw their way back. It’s hard to grasp, at the time, that this is it and that they need to fight for everything. Who would believe that a life could be destroyed, every personal relationship shaken or ended, because of an anonymous list published online?

In the same way, when a nationally famous figure is accused of the great crime of the age, they rarely believe that the people for whom they have worked for for decades — the people they gave up their weekends for, their spare evenings, the times they could have been with their family for — would drop them in a matter of hours for a crime which cannot be explained and whose nature is wholly subjective. For that would mean everybody in the world would be able to take out anybody else, if they had sufficient desire to do so. And surely that world would be unworkable.

Well it would be, and it is. But it is possible not only because the victims do not quell and shake and scream enough but because we – the public – allow them to disappear one by one. We do not slash the virtual tires of those who take them away. We do not pick up whatever cudgels we have to hand to beat back their accusers. We just sit, as the anonymous lists and the unprovable complaints pile up and up, simply hoping all the time that the dishonest players and anonymous accusers will never come for us.

If people want to understand why totalitarianism works, the seedlings are all around us.

But our situation in Western democracies today is a novel one. There is no shared religion, and the old customs have been torn asunder by a culture of repudiation, which encourages people to shape their lives according to an “identity” of their own. Socialisation no longer means joining or obeying, but “becoming who you are”, regardless of the surrounding norms. This novel situation, which advertises itself as a kind of liberation, has instead produced in my lifetime a totally new kind of censorship and intimidation.

Thirty years ago I naively assumed that, with the collapse of communism, we would no longer see the persecution of dissidents or the imposition of official doctrines, and so I have been as astonished as everyone else by the mass denunciations and targeted character assassinations that enforce prevailing orthodoxies today. They seem as frequent and comprehensive here in Britain as they ever were in the world of totalitarian government.

True, you don’t go to the Gulag for your opinions; nor are there show-trials of “deviationists”, Zionists or the running dogs of capitalism. Nevertheless, you have to be careful what you say, and the punishments for saying, thinking or implying the wrong thing, even if administered by private enterprise and social media rather than by the state, are real, serious and largely impossible to deflect.

Suggested reading

The truth about hate speech

By Douglas Murray

The archive of your crimes is stored in cyberspace, and however much you may have confessed to them and sworn to change, they will pursue you for the rest of your life, just as long as someone has an interest in drawing attention to them. And when the mob turns on you, it is with a pitiless intensity that bears no relation to the objective seriousness of your fault. A word out of place, a hasty judgment, a slip of the tongue — whatever the fault might be, it is sufficient, once picked upon, to put you beyond the pale of human sympathy.

As Douglas Murray shows in his impressive and lively survey, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, the emerging world of censorship is a world without forgiveness, in which people are condemned for what they are rather than what they do, and in which the real virtues and vices that govern our conduct are ignored altogether as irrelevant.

The crimes for which we are judged are existential crimes: through speaking in the wrong way you display one of the phobias or isms that show you to be beyond acceptable humanity. You are a homophobe, an Islamophobe, a white supremacist or a racist, and no argument can refute these accusations once they have been made.

You might, in your private life, have worked for the integration and acceptance of your local Muslim community, or for a wider understanding of the roots of Islamic philosophy. This will be irrelevant when it comes to rebutting a charge of Islamophobia, just as your record in promoting minorities in the workplace will do nothing to clear you of the charge of racism, once the crucial words are out.

Suggested reading

Is conservatism normalising the alt-Right?

By Eric Kaufmann

For your accusers are not interested in your deeds; they are interested in you, and in the crucial fact about you, which is whether or not you are “one of us”. Your faults cannot be overcome by voluntary action, since they adhere to the kind of thing that you are. And you reveal what you are in the words that define you.

These words may be taken out of context, even doctored to mean the opposite of what you said — as happened recently to me in an interview given to the New Statesman — but this will not affect the verdict, since there is no objective trial, no “case for the defence”, no due process. You are accused by the mob, examined by the mob and condemned by the mob, and if you have brought this on yourself, then you have only yourself to blame. For the mob is by nature innocent: it washes its own conscience in a flow of collective indignation, and by joining it you make yourself safe.

Such is the situation that the brave Murray confronts in his latest book, the title of which (taken from a previous anatomy of human folly by Charles Mackay) implies that it is crowd hysteria, rather than ignorance, that is largely to blame. But, as Murray goes on to show, that suggestion is also too simple. With admirable attention to detail he explores the ways in which the spirit of the mob has entered not only the language of public debate but also the sources of information and the institutions of decision making.

Censorship begins in the media themselves, with the silicon valley elite introducing “machine learning fairness” designed to eliminate “hate speech”, and programmed to recognise as “hate” all those expressions of opinion that violate some norm of political correctness. What Orwell so vividly foresaw — the manipulation of language so as to make heresy inexpressible — is now routine practice.

Suggested reading

Broadcaster bias is destroying public trust

By Douglas Murray

The result, however, is not a culture of gentle conformity, in which “niceness” is the norm. On the contrary, the clamour for recognition involves a constant assault on those who are assumed to be preventing it. These purveyors of “hate” are given no leeway on social media, and the practice of mass denunciation on grounds of race, tribe, class or social milieu is now an accepted weapon in the identity wars.

Murray gives riveting examples of the way in which whiteness has become a moral fault in the eyes of identity warriors on the American campus. It is, for example, now legitimate to condemn people for the colour of their skin, leading some to try to apologise for being white.

Various devices facilitate the emergence of the censorship culture. Three in particular come to the surface in Murray’s carefully constructed argument. First, there is the art of taking offence. Whole sections of the university curriculum are devoted to explaining to students that words, arguments, comparisons, even questions, are “offensive”, regardless of the intention with which they are used.

Invariably, the offence is given by the old majority culture, and is taken on behalf of some privileged minority. Current concerns about Islamophobia are relevant here: it is offensive, for example, to make jokes about the burqa, but not offensive to appear in public with your face entirely covered, even though the face-to-face encounter is at the root of our shared way of life, as important in showing respect as taking off your shoes when entering a mosque.

Suggested reading

Why conservatism is failing

By Mary Harrington

More important, from the intellectual point of view, is the attempt to rewrite hardware as software. As Murray shows, identity politics, which insists that everything relevant to our sense of self lies within our power, so that nothing can be imposed on us without our consent, is at odds with the facts of biology. To get round this problem, sex has been re-written as gender, and gender defined as a social construct. In this way, hardware becomes software, and fate becomes choice.

And the result is the “trans” lobby, determined to make all those areas where one sex was hitherto privileged (for example, female sports or female bathrooms) available to whoever wishes to appropriate that sex as his own. The hardware/software confusion has now penetrated the culture, and Murray shows the devastating effect that it has had on our understanding of human difference.

Finally there is the new scourge of “intersectionality”, which encourages people to explore all the ways in which they have lost out in the pursuit of advantage, and to construct their identity accordingly. A kind of reverse hierarchy of privilege emerges, as you come to see that you are disadvantaged as gay man, and then as a black man, and then as a Muslim man, and so on. The result of this scramble for “virtuous disadvantages” occupies Murray over many partly amusing, partly distressing pages.

As he abundantly shows, the attempt to derive a positive philosophy from this assemblage of negatives leads to absurdity and contradiction at every turn. The problem, however, is that contradiction is not regarded by the mob as an obstacle, but merely as further proof of the great conspiracy by which we are surrounded — the conspiracy enshrined in the old majority culture, which told us that we must accept human nature, find our fulfilment within its bounds, and not engage in a futile metaphysical rebellion.

Suggested reading

How I overcame my class stigma

By Roger Scruton

Murray’s comprehensive survey of the prevailing madness will not persuade every reader. But it raises the real questions of our times, which are these: can we reject the idea of a benevolent God and still hold on to our inherited morality, founded on respect for the other and the absolute authority of truth? Can we adopt the posture of forgiveness that Murray is so keen to advocate, without turning to the supreme example that was once given to us?

Can we re-learn the habits of polite disagreement, and address each other as rational beings, capable of forming real communities in which differences are respected and decencies honoured? I want to answer yes to those questions. But as someone who has suffered more than most from the prevailing madness I have my doubts.

My own solution — which is to ignore social media and to address, in my writings, only the interest in the true and the false, rather than in the permitted and the offensive — confines me within a circle that is considerably narrower than the Twittersphere. But here and there in this circle, there are people who do not merely see the point of truthful discourse, but who are also eager to engage with it. And I cling to the view that that is enough, as it was for the Irish monks who kept the lamp of learning alight during the Dark Ages. They may have thought they were losing, but they won in the end.

Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity is published by Bloomsbury Continuum 

The experience left him untroubled by the prospect of his imminent death by firing squad. At the last moment, he was traded for a prisoner held by Republican forces. But the epiphany of another order of things that came to him in the prison cell stayed with him for the rest of his days, informing his great novel of communist faith and disillusion, Darkness at Noon (1940), his later writings on the history of science, and a lifelong interest in parapsychology.

Koestler was a pivotal figure in the post-war generation that rejected communism as “the God that failed”— the title of a celebrated book of essays, edited by the Labour politician Richard Crossman and published in 1949, to which Koestler contributed. The ex-communists of this period followed a variety of political trajectories. André Gide, another contributor to the collection, abandoned communism, after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1936, to become a writer on issues of sexuality and personal authenticity.

Further reading

The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

Other ex-communists became social democrats, while a few became militant conservatives or lost interest in politics completely. Stephen Spender, poet and novelist and author of Forward from liberalism (1937), morphed into a cold-war liberal. James Burnham, a friend and disciple of Leon Trotsky, rejected Marxism in 1940 to reappear as a militant conservative, publishing The Suicide of the West: the meaning and destiny of liberalism (1964) and eventually being received into the Catholic Church. All of them became communists in a time when liberalism had failed. All were able to return to functioning liberal societies when they abandoned their communist faith.

When interwar Europe was overrun by fascism, the Soviet experiment seemed to these writers to be the best hope for the future. When the experiment failed, and they renounced communism, they were able to resume their life and work in a recognisably liberal civilisation.

Post-war global geopolitics may have been polarised, with a precarious nuclear stand-off between the Soviet Union and the US and its allies. Liberal societies may have been flawed, with McCarthyism and racial segregation stains on the values western societies claimed to promote. But liberal civilisation was not in crisis. Large communist movements may have existed in France, Italy and other European countries, while Maoism attracted sympathetic interest from alienated intellectuals. But even so, liberal values were sufficiently deep-rooted that in most western countries they could be taken for granted. The West was still home to a liberal way of life.

The situation is rather different today. Liberal freedoms have been eroded from within, and dissidents from a new liberal orthodoxy face exclusion from public institutions. This is not enforced by a totalitarian state, but by professional bodies, colleagues and ever vigilant internet guardians of virtue. In some ways, this soft totalitarianism is more invasive than that in the final years of the Soviet bloc.

Further reading

How Thatcherism produced Corbynism

By John Gray

The values imposed under communism were internalised by few among those who were compelled to conform to them. Ordinary citizens and many communist functionaries were a bit like Marranos, the Iberian Jews forced to convert to Christianity in mediaeval and early modern times, who secretly practised their true religion for generations or centuries afterwards. Such fortitude requires rich inner resources and an idea of truth as something independent of subjective emotion and social convention. There are not many Marranos in the post-liberal west.

Some have attempted to revive classical liberalism, an anachronistic project that harks back to a time when western values could command a global hegemony. Others have opted for a hyperbolic version of liberalism in which western civilisation is denounced as being a vehicle for global repression.

In this alt-liberal ideology, the central values of classical liberalism — personal autonomy and the rejection of tradition in favour of critical reason — are radicalised and turned against the liberal way of life. A heretical cult, alt-liberalism is what liberalism becomes when it tears up its roots in Jewish and Christian religion. Today it is the ruling ideology in much of the academy and media.

In these conditions one might suspect self-censorship, since anyone expressing seriously heterodox views risks a rupture in their professional life. Yet it would be a mistake to think alt-liberals are mostly cynical conformists. Since practising cynics realise that the views they are publicly promoting are actually false, cynicism presupposes the capacity to recognise truth. In contrast, alt-liberals appear wholly sincere when they denounce the society that privileges and rewards them. Unlike the Marranos, whose public professions concealed another view of the world, alt-liberals conceal nothing. There is nothing in them to conceal. They are expressing the prevailing western orthodoxy, which identifies western civilization as being uniquely malignant.

Further reading

Deluded liberals can't keep clinging to a dead idea

By John Gray

Of course, civilisational self-hatred is a singularly western conceit. Non-western countries — China, India and Russia, for example— are increasingly asserting themselves as civilisation-states. It is only western countries that denounce the civilisation they once represented. But not everything is as it seems. Even as they condemn it, alt-liberals are affirming the superiority of the West over other civilisations. Not only is the West uniquely destructive. It is only the West — or its most advanced section, the alt-liberal elite — that has the critical capacity to transcend itself. But to become what, exactly? Lying behind these intellectual contortions is an insoluble problem.

In his essay in The God that failed Gide wrote: “My faith in communism is like my faith in religion. It is a promise of salvation for mankind.” Here Gide acknowledged that communism was an atheist version of monotheism. But so is liberalism, and when Gide and others gave up faith in communism to become liberals, they were not renouncing the concepts and values that both ideologies had inherited from western religion. They continued to believe that history was a directional process in which humankind was advancing towards universal freedom.

Without this idea, liberal ideology cannot be coherently formulated. That liberal societies have existed, in some parts of the world over the past few centuries, is a fact established by empirical inquiry. That these societies embody the meaning of history is a confession of faith. However much its devotees may deny it, secular liberalism is an oxymoron.

A later generation of ex-communists confirms this conclusion. Trotskyists such as Irving Kristol and Christopher Hitchens who became neo-conservatives or hawkish liberals in the Eighties or Nineties did not relinquish their view of history as the march towards a universal system of government. They simply altered their view as to the nature of the destination.

Further reading

You're reaping what you sowed, liberals

By John Gray

Instead of world communism, it was now global democracy. Western interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and later Libya were wars of liberation backed by the momentum of history. The fiascos that ensued did not shake this belief. The liberalism of these ex-Trotskyists was yet another iteration of monotheistic faith.

Alt-liberals aim to deconstruct monotheism, along with the grand narratives it has inspired in secular thinkers. But what emerges from this process? Once every cultural tradition is demolished, nothing remains. In principle, alt-liberalism is an empty ideology. In practice it defines itself by negation.

Populist currents are advancing throughout the West and supply the necessary antagonist. The old liberalism that prized tolerance no longer survives as a living force. Iconoclasts who smash statues of colonial-era figures are raging at an enemy that has long since surrendered. An impish avatar of a vanished liberal hegemony, alt-liberalism needs populism if it is to survive.

Resistance to populist movements fills what would otherwise be an indeterminacy at the heart of the alt-liberal project. Privileged woke censors of reactionary thinking and incendiary street warriors are mutually reinforcing forces. At times, indeed, they are mirror-images of one another. Both have targeted the state of Israel as the quintessential embodiment of western evil, for example. Not only do alt-liberals and populists need one another. They share the same demonology.

Further reading

Today's voguish communists should remember Budapest

By James Bloodworth

Viewing the post-liberal West from a historical standpoint, one might conclude that it will suffer the same fate as communism. Facing advancing authoritarian powers and weakened from within, a liberal way of life must surely vanish from history. True, some traces will remain. Even in societies where denunciation for reactionary thinking is a pervasive practice, fossil-like fragments of ancient freedoms will be found scattered here and there. But surely the global liberal order will finally implode, leaving behind only defaced remnants of a civilisation that once existed.

In fact, any simple analogy between the fall of communism and the decay of liberalism is misleading. The difference is that old-style liberals have nowhere to go. To be sure, they could abandon any universalistic claim for their values and think of them as inhering in a particular form of life — one that is flawed, like every other, but still worthwhile.

Yet this is hardly a viable stance at the present time. For one thing, this way of life is under siege in what were once liberal societies. Yet liberals cannot help but see themselves as carriers of universal values. Otherwise, what would they be? Anxious relics of a foundering civilisation, seeking shelter from a world they no longer understand.

There may be no way forward for liberalism. But neither is the liberal West committing suicide. That requires the ability to form a clear intention, which the West shows no evidence of possessing. Nothing as dramatic or definitive will occur. Koestler and the ex-communists of his generation regarded communism as the God that failed because they once believed it to be the future. Today almost no one any longer expects liberal values to triumph throughout the world, but few are able to admit it — least of all to themselves. So instead they drift.

Further reading

Eric Hobsbawm: guiding light or 'evil sod'?

By DJ Taylor

It is not hard to detect a hint of nostalgia among liberals for the rationalist dictatorships of the past. Soviet communism may have been totalitarian, but at least it was inspired by an Enlightenment ideology. Though it has killed far fewer people, Putin’s Russia is far more threatening to the progressive world-view.

China, on the other hand, is envied as much as it is feared. Its rulers have renounced communism, but in favour of a market economy, globalisation and a high-tech version of Bentham’s Panopticon — all of them imported western models. The liberal west may be on the way out, but illiberal western ideas still have a part in shaping the global scene.

When ex-communists became liberals, they shifted from one secular faith to another. Troubled liberals today have no such option. Fearful of the alternatives, they hang on desperately to a faith in which they no longer believe. Liberalism may be the other God that failed, but for liberals themselves their vision of the future is a deus absconditus, mocking and tormenting them as the old freedoms disappear from the world.

Yet there is very little focus on the issue of how this political extremism grows: that it is not something that only happens to other people, but something that can theoretically grow in any of us; that it is worth trying to work out when or if your own side may have gone too far.

One of the best guides we have is the experience of people from history.

Also by this author

The dark games played by political extremists

By Douglas Murray

The diplomat, politician and author Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) was a relatively minor figure in the 20^th century. But a knack for knowing all the right people and being around them at crucial moments helped make him a superlative diarist. He was at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and was a friend of almost everyone of significance in literature as well as politics. One of the most interesting aspects of his life was his friendship with Oswald Mosley.

Mosley was first elected to Parliament, in 1918, as a Conservative – but he soon became an Independent, and by 1924 had joined the Labour Party. In 1929, he was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with special responsibility for unemployment in the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald. It was the Great Depression, and between 1929 and 1931 the number of people out of work in the UK tripled to almost three million. MacDonald’s government was out of money and his socialists had no answers to the unemployment problem. Mosley had his own ideas of how to solve the unemployment problem and in 1930 resigned in frustration from the government. In 1931, he founded the New Party.

The New Party is a fascinating corner of British politics. At this point, Mosley was still a reputable figure. All three main parties were in contact with him, and his personal relations with politicians across the political divide remained remarkably close. It was during this period that Harold Nicolson was closest to Mosley.

It is clear from his diaries of the period that Nicolson was deeply impressed by Mosley and found him an energetic figure who had answers in a period otherwise dominated by enervation and dithering. Nicholas Mosley – Oswald’s son from his first marriage – once told me that he thought that the bisexual Nicolson may have been in love with his father. And it is certainly possible. So, when the New Party was formed Nicolson accepted Mosely’s invitation to join.

Nicolson tells his diary of his decision to join the New Party on February 4, 1931. Soon, he is meeting other prospective members, both with and without Mosley. By May he is telling his diary that Mosley is having difficulty restraining “the more active members of the party” who are begging him to do something dramatic. The party is at risk of attracting “eccentrics and people with a grievance”, in Nicolson’s view. But if they keep their heads, he counsels his friend, “we shall attract more serious people”. On May 30, Nicolson meets Harold Macmillan on a train:

He takes the usual young Tory view that his heart is entirely with the New Party but that he feels he can help us better by remaining in the Conservative ranks. He does not hesitate to admit that if we could obtain a certain number of seats in Parliament, most of the young Tories, all the Liberals and a large proportion of the youngish Labour people would come over to us. He anticipates the present Government being in power for another two years, followed by a Tory administration lasting some three years. He feels that five years from now, the New Party will have its great opportunity.[1. All quotes taken from Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930-39, edited by Nigel Nicolson, Collins (1966), pp 68-115]

But Mosley is not that patient. In June, another party member, Allan Young, invites Nicolson to join the party’s council and confesses to being uneasy about the possibility that the party might swerve to the Right “and be forced into Hitlerism”. Though there is talk of a potential revolution breaking out in Britain, Young “does not approve of the idea that we should meet communist force with fascist force”. Nevertheless, there are problems with the ‘Youth Movement’ of the party and questions start to arise about the ‘active forces’ that they seem to be becoming.

A month later, on July 17, 1931 Nicolson writes: “I think that [Mosley] at the bottom of his heart really wants a fascist movement, but Allan Young and John Strachey think only of the British working man. The whole thing is on extremely thin ice.”

But it isn’t until September that the crucial moment comes.

That month Mosley had a public meeting in Glasgow. One of his colleagues claimed 20,000 people in attendance. But opposition to Mosley had been growing and word came that communists planning to disrupt the meeting had razor blades on them. As Mosley went into the crowd, there were stones and punches thrown. A meeting of the party is called in the aftermath and Mosley says that “this forces us to be fascist and that we need no longer hesitate to create our trained and disciplined force”.

Nicolson writes in his diary on September 21: “We discuss their uniforms.” To his shame he adds, “I suggest grey flannel trousers and shirts.”

Also by this author

'Nazi hunts' are a sign of our hyperventilating times

By Douglas Murray

This is – whether Nicolson could admit it to his diary or not – the central moment. Now that the New Party has not only a youth wing, but a youth wing to protect the leader, and dress in uniform, this is no longer a normal political party or movement.

The realisation doesn’t drop until the next month. On November 2 Nicolson writes that he realises that what he is involved with is not a party but “a rather sly little movement”:

I am loyal to [Mosley] since I have an affection for him. But I realise that his ideas are divergent from my own. He has no political judgement. He believes in fascism. I don’t. I loathe it. And I apprehend that the conflict between the intellectual and the physical side of the New Party may develop into something rather acute.

Which proves astute. Some months later, in April 1932, there is a New Party meeting in Westminster. Mosley says that he has been invited by both the Conservatives and the Labour Party to rejoin their ranks. But he wants to rejoin neither. Instead he wishes to bring together all fascist groups in the country and form “a central fascist body under his own leadership”. Nicolson tells his friend that this is a mistake and that he will never be able to rejoin any of the parties if he takes this road.

Mosely is certain. He is certain that British politics is going to enter a phase of “abnormality” and that he must not be associated with the old parties and the old regime. Besides, he says, more can be achieved as a leader of a fascist movement than as a backbench MP. So, Mosley decides to take the risk. In his diary entry on April 19, 1932 Nicolson describes what he told his friend:

I again say that I do not believe that this country will ever stand for violence, and that by resorting to violence he will make himself detested by a few and ridiculed by many. He says that may be so, but he is prepared to take the risk. I say that on such paths I cannot follow him.

And that is that. Within 14 months the whole trajectory has been achieved. Within those 14 months, everything about Mosley had become clear and everywhere he was heading – from the British Union of Fascists to alliance with Berlin and eventually Brixton Prison and obloquy – had become foreseeable.

It’s easy to criticise Nicolson – now as then. At best, he had put his career recklessly in the hands of a maverick. And we now know where fascism would lead. But he kept his political and moral antennae alert and eventually chose to abandon his friend rather than follow where he was leading.

Certainly, there were greater acts of heroism from that period. But perhaps, since small acts are the only ones most of us will ever be capable of, these ones are just as worthy of study and certainly worth remembering today.

A recent report by Peter Dockrill for ScienceAlert, explains the comprehensive nature of the system:

“For positive personal and social acts – such as paying bills on time, engaging in charity, and properly sorting your recycling – citizens get their score bumped up, which gives them access to perks, like better credit facilities, cheaper public transport, and even shorter wait times for hospital services.

“But if you break the rules, beware. People who are late with payments, or caught jaywalking or smoking in non-smoking areas, will be punished.”

Further reading

China's sinister Social Credit System

By Peter Franklin

Dockrill says that the Social Credit System is “expected to be fully operational by 2020″ and that in some areas pilot schemes are already up and running.

Quite clearly intended as an instrument of social control, the regime is making no attempt to hide that fact:

“According to China’s Communist Party, the system will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step’.”

From a western perspective, the most shocking thing about the System is that it seems to have widespread popular support:

“Back home, surveys show the early system is already popular with socially advantaged citizens who are already enjoying the perks of pilot programs.”

According to Ipsos, 87% of Chinese citizens believe their country is heading in the “right direction”, but 47% see “moral decline” as a major threat. Both of these numbers are unusually high (compared to other countries), which could be interpreted as evidence that the Chinese trust their leaders more than they trust one another.

Further reading

Will the Chinese economy go the way of the USSR's?

By Peter Franklin

It is in the nature of a totalitarian regime to undermine the ‘horizontal’ ties between citizens so that their vertical ties to the central authority can become all important. China is not the totalitarian state that it was, but the era of (economic) liberalisation has been marked by rapid urbanisation and large-scale internal migrations – upheavals that have disrupted the re-accumulation of social capital. This has left a gap, which the artificial substitute of the Social Credit System is intended to fill.

While commentary in the West has focused on how the SCS might be used to punish dissidents and reward the favoured few, that is not the most significant thing about it. A regime that has prison camps on the one hand and the privileges of Communist Party membership on the other, already has the extremes covered.

The most important thing about the system is that it is designed to manage the great bulk of the Chinese population, not just the elites or the ‘enemies of the state’. As such, it needs to keep the majority happy – or at least the bulk of China’s growing middle class. Which is why the carrots offered by the system are as important as the stick.

According to Dockrill, these carrots include better credit facilities, cheaper public transport and shorter waiting times for services. However, it strikes me that these things are secured at the expense of those who don’t qualify for them because their social credit scores are too low. In other words, there is a qualifying in-group that effectively exploits the non-qualifying out-group: the insiders get to queue-jump ahead of the outsiders; and the outsiders pay more for certain items so that the insiders can pay less.

Of course, if you’re redistributing carrots from a small out-group to a much larger in-group, you have to chop them into tiny slices. Thus, for a substantial part of the population to gain noticeable advantages from a zero-sum arrangement, the disadvantaged group also has to be fairly substantial – a deeply divisive dynamic.

Who would be most likely to fall into the out-group? Given the ostensible purpose of the Social Credit System, it would be those most prone to impulsive, anti-social, self-sabatoging behaviour. In all likelihood, therefore, we can expect those with low social credit scores to be disproportionally young, male, poorly educated and under-employed.

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By Isabel Hilton

The Social Credit System will render such individuals officially untrustworthy – and systematically limit their opportunities in mainstream society and the legitimate economy.

It’s hard to think of a more effective way of expanding the criminal population.

As such, his works offer something to the 21st-century reader in a complex, insecure world where the urge to embrace any “ism” that purports to explain everything is ever-present.

Born into poverty in a remote area of French Algeria, Camus began his political life as a man of the Left. He was active in the French Resistance to the German occupation during the Second World War and, from 1943 to 1947, edited the movement’s newspaper Combat in Paris. Camus would later oppose General Franco’s dictatorship in Spain and resigned in principle from his work with Unesco over the UN’s acceptance of Spain as a member.

Yet Camus’ most important contribution to 20th-century thought derived – like Orwell’s – from his attacks on the fashionable theories of the mainstream (French) Left. His suspicion of grand historical narratives – which viewed the individual as disposable – is worth holding on to when the complexity of contemporary life increases the temptation to throw one’s lot in with revelatory, all-encompassing explanations and solutions.

Camus fell out with his fellow Leftist intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre in 1952 over the latter’s acceptance of state terror as an acceptable price to pay in the name of the Communist ideal. In his 1947 novel The Plague, Camus mocked those who, like Sartre, justified the concept of the ‘necessary murder’ for political ends.

“But I was told that these few deaths were inevitable for the building up of a new world in which murder would cease to be. That was true up to a point, and maybe I’m not capable of standing fast where that order of truths is concerned,” Camus wrote sarcastically. By contrast, Sartre likened anti-Communists – with their delicate humanist scruples about the sanctity of human life – to “dogs” .

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By Henry Olson

Predictably, the French Left could not forgive Camus for his anti-Communist heresy, and although The Plague sold hundreds of thousands of copies, the pompous intellectual set orbiting around Sartre and his partner, the feminist author Simone de Beauvoir, greeted subsequent works by Camus frostily. Sartre commissioned a faithful underling to trash Camus’ 1951 philosophical masterpiece The Rebel, a book-length humanist critique of the totalitarian impulse.

In his sordid rejoinder to Camus’ response to totalitarianism, Sartre forgot a point that Orwell had made a decade and a half earlier: that some things are true even if The Daily Telegraph says they are true. “Yes, Camus, like you, I find these camps inadmissible,” Sartre wrote of the Soviet gulag system, “but equally inadmissible is the use that the ‘so-called bourgeois press’ makes of them every day.”

In other words, one ought to stay quiet about Stalin’s gulags, lest the information be used as ammunition by Communism’s enemies. A similar line of thinking, if one can call it that, is discernible today. In our increasingly partisan political climate, lies are frequently given a veneer of truth by political activists if they are considered helpful to one’s own side. Those who have championed particular policies or causes in disparate countries – Venezuela, Yemen, Syria, Iraq – typically fall silent when the time comes to count the pile of corpses produced by those policies or causes. Candidly to account for one’s errors of judgement may discredit the cause. And besides, what’s a little injustice now in the service of justice in the future?

The posthumous recognition of Camus as a great 20th-century philosopher in France hinges, at least in part, on his rejection of totalitarianism when so many of his contemporaries were disgracing themselves by justifying (usually from a great distance) the use of extreme violence to remake society along altruistic lines. In this sense, Sartre and others resembled the Communist fellow-travellers whom Arthur Koestler had likened to peeping toms, “peering through a hole in the wall at history while not having to experience it themselves”. The great feats of the new society were celebrated uncritically, while the horror stories were either rubbished or interpreted as a price worth paying. This kind of historical ignorance/revisionism goes on: just last week students at a London university described the Soviet gulag system – which worked over a million people to death – as “compassionate”.

But Camus’ contribution to anti-totalitarian thought extends beyond the internecine squabbles of the 20th-century Left. His embryonic theoretical approach, which led to his rejection of totalitarianism, is discernible in his early writings on suicide, and these have as much value today as when they were first written. The appetite in life for resolution, unity, and for an absolute reconciliation of life’s various chaotic threads, drives a person inexorably toward one of several conclusions. He or she may attempt to escape altogether from existential anxiety through death, or else by dedicating his or her life to hopes that are projected on to the future (by embracing religion or the urge to embody life with a higher purpose).

This offers a lesson to those who wish to improve today’s world. The desire itself is admirable. However, allowing ‘the cause’ to consume every facet of one’s life (aiming even to “politicise sleep”, as it was joked the Bolsheviks wanted to do) can also be a misguided attempt at negating life’s absurdity.

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By Polly Mackenzie

Embracing the absurd needn’t lead to resignation and depression, however. Camus cannot accept that “refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living”. Instead, he urges readers to enjoy the beauty, texture and ambiguity that ordinary life has to offer, despite its essential meaninglessness. Orwell was aiming at something similar – albeit in a far less theoretical way – in his literary focus on the beauty of “solid things” and small worlds: the art of Donald McGill, the local pub, English cooking.

Camus uses the example of Sisyphus from Greek mythology to make his point – a point that eastern philosophers also make – about the power of acceptance. Sisyphus was punished by the gods for imprisoning death in chains. Once captured, Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to the futile task of pushing a large boulder up a mountain, only for it to roll back down again. He must do so over and over again; there is no escape. In using the example of Sisyphus as the tragic hero, Camus holds up the absurdity of Sisyphus’ fate and his acceptance of it as a wider lesson for life itself. One needn’t passively accept injustice; however, there is no ultimate resolution, no nirvana, paradise or classless society in which all conflict will finally be resolved.

In his later, more explicitly anti-totalitarian treatise, The Rebel, Camus takes aim at those who seek a political antidote for the condition of mankind in what Hannah Arendt had described in The Origins of Totalitarianism as “a suicidal escape from…reality”. The urge to rebel is an inherent feature of modernity, Camus maintains.

“Modern times begin with the crash of falling ramparts,” he writes of the French revolution. But surveyed from amid the rubble and bloodshed of the mid-point of the 20th century – the midnight of century, as the Russian revolutionary Marxist Victor Serge had phrased it – Camus notices that the desire to rebel often comes pregnant with the urge to dominate. “The slave starts by begging for justice,” Camus writes, “and ends by wanting to wear the crown.”

Further reading

Test article

By Geoff Heath-Taylor

The Rebel wasn’t an indictment of rebellion so much as an examination of the way in which revolutions frequently attempt to negate the tension inherent in political conflict, and in life itself. At some point, triumphant revolutionaries abandon pluralism for “complete negation or total submission”. Totalitarian ideologues have an undeviating view of life which seeks to exchange the fragmented duality of liberalism for human perfection.

“Since the world has no direction, man, from the moment that he accepts this, [believes he] must give it one which will eventually lead to a superior type of humanity,” Camus writes. Ideas such as Communism are, as Friedrich Nietzsche described them, merely degenerate forms of Christianity – yet another attempt at forging certainty out of the absurd.

What Camus offers the modern reader is a reminder that the temptation to think of a single political creed as the solution to our deepest longings is a dead end. Not only that, but it is a dead end that comes steeped in blood, however altruistic the proclamations of its adherents. Beware those who say that an ideology or movement has given them “something to live for”, for this is simply another evasion.