The year is 1981, and Herzog, then in his late thirties, is shooting Fitzcarraldo, an epic about a manic dreamer who hauls a steamship over a mountain in search of rubber, in the hope of making enough money to build a glorious opera house in the rainforest. The filming of Fitzcarraldo, chronicled in Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams, was more dramatic than most Oscar-winning dramas. Herzog insisted on shooting in the Amazon, where the starry cast slept in humid tents, fought off snakes, and dodged poisoned arrows hurled at them by disgruntled locals. He also refused to use special effects and insisted on actually pulling a steamship over a mountain — a feat which required months of grueling engineering, and the help of Amazonian tribes.

Few directors have ever gone so far in pursuit of a vision and come out with a cinematic masterpiece. Directing Fitzcarraldo, Herzog gazed into the abyss, but the abyss didn’t dare gaze back at him. His dream was too magnificent, too irresistible. It had to be woven into the fabric of reality.

Since then, Herzog has realized many more dreams. He’s directed feature films, documentaries and even operas; he’s written poetry, essays and a novel. In the process, Herzog, now 83, has become a pop-culture icon, acclaimed for his lyricism and erudition — as well as his hypnotic voice and thick Bavarian accent. Like his countryman Friedrich Nietzsche, he has a knack for coining aphorisms (a favorite: “Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness”). In an era of shallow influencers, he has struck a chord with audiences hungering for meaning.

Now comes a new book grandly titled The Future of Truth. Think of it as DMT in hardback. Beautifully translated from German by Michael Hofmann, it’s a collage of reflections, visions and stories about what constitutes truth.

Look up the definition of “truth” and you’ll learn it is “conformity with fact”. But this doesn’t impress Herzog. “It’s a definition of a complete dimwit,” he tells me when I ask him over Zoom. The director is sitting in his study in Los Angeles, looking down at the camera. “If facts constituted truth, it would be fairly simple, but it is not,” he continues. “We would have the accountant’s truth, and not something much deeper.”

Herzog tells me there exists no scholarly consensus on what truth really is. “It may be related to facts to some degree. But at the same time, the question arises: what are facts? And what is reality?” he says. “Reality is hotly disputed as well. What is the reality of the man in the lunatic asylum who believes he is Napoleon Bonaparte or Lenin or Jesus Christ?”

For Herzog, it doesn’t matter that we have no definitive definition of truth. “It is within the human condition that we know that we are in search of truth,” he says. “We know vaguely where it is, vaguely a direction, and all the rest is nothing but search, an expedition into the unknown, a quest, an endeavor never ending.”

It’s an endeavor that has animated Herzog since he first picked up a camera as a teenager. From the glaciers of Antarctica to the dunes of the Sahara, he’s been on a personal expedition for what he calls “ecstatic truth” — truth beyond facts.

“I’m speaking now purely of art,” Herzog warns, making clear that if you are in the business of political journalism, “you better do fact checks and you better not mislead your audience”. But for artists, he continues, “departing from the clear, understandable, natural facts can enhance the truth of something”.

Herzog gives the example of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture in St Peter’s Basilica which depicts Jesus in the arms of Mary after he was taken down from the cross. “His face is correctly the face of a 33-year-old man,” Herzog explains, “but when you look into the face of his mother, the mother of a 33-year-old man is probably only 15. So I immediately asked myself the question: did Michelangelo try to give us fake news, did he try to cheat us?” Yet the opposite is true. “He gives us a deeper truth, something deeper about the essence of the two figures.”

In a nutshell, that’s Herzog’s approach too. Take his 2001 film Invincible, set in Berlin at the outset of Nazism, which follows the tribulations of Zishe Breitbart, a Jewish strongman who performs nightly in a cabaret. The cabaret’s owner, Erik Jan Hanussen, is a clairvoyant who dreams of becoming Hitler’s Minister of the Occult. Given the rampant antisemitism, Breitbart cannot perform under his own name, since Jews are supposed to be weaklings. Hanussen therefore makes him play the part of a Germanic folk hero — until Breitbart resolves to reveal his true identity.

Though Breitbart and Hanussen were real historical figures, their paths never actually crossed. Breitbart died in 1925, nearly a decade before Hitler gained power. Herzog sculpted a fictional story around their real lives. “Who cares that I invented a meeting that could have not taken place?” he says. “It doesn’t matter. I am a poet, period.”

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In Invincible, poetic license illuminates a reality that eludes facts. The film illustrates the sinister spell Nazism cast on Germany and how it affected Jews. Herzog, who was born during the Second World War and is part of the generation of Germans that had to confront the Nazi past, said of the film: “That’s my answer to the darkest history of Germany.” It’s an answer that doesn’t replace the study of history but completes it.

Watch any Herzog film, and you’ll see the same process at play. Many of them are inspired by true stories, but Herzog sublimates those stories to reveal their essence. Just don’t ask him to explain what that essence is. He once referred to Fitzcarraldo as “a big metaphor”, adding, “but don’t ask me what the metaphor means, because I wouldn’t know”.

Even before he picked up a camera, Herzog was chasing the ineffable. At the age of 13, growing up in the Bavarian Alps, Herzog was briefly a devout Catholic. “There was a deep void in me and a longing for something transcendent, so that was probably the deeper reason behind all this,” he tells me. He then leaps elegantly from his youthful flirtation with Catholicism to his search today for “ecstatic truth”. “Ekstasis in Greek means to stay out, to step outside of yourself,” he tells me. “You see that in late medieval mystics and the kind of insight they have on the nature of faith by stepping outside of their existence.”

Herzog likens this experience to that of ski jumpers. In 1975, he released The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, a documentary about Walter Steiner, a Swiss sculptor and ski-jumping champion. “[Steiner] defies gravity and flies off ramps, and he has the experience of ecstasy, stepping out of his existence and morphing into a bird,” Herzog tells me. “And it’s strange,” he continues, “because I wanted to be an athlete when I was very young, I wanted to become world champion of ski flyers.” He quit after his best friend had a “catastrophic accident”. But “even if I had continued”, he adds, “I wouldn’t have gotten even close to what [the greatest ski jumpers] are capable to do”.

But Herzog’s youthful desire to be an extreme athlete helps to explain his radical approach to filmmaking. For Herzog is to cinema what Steiner was to sport. When Steiner jumped off a ski ramp into the void, he hadn’t lost his mind. He knew exactly what he was capable of. What appears insane to us appeared possible to him. And it was possible. Ditto with Herzog. His career is a masterclass in how to discipline the mind’s eye. He’s a practical visionary; a poet with the discipline of an engineer.

Herzog has long gravitated toward characters who, like him, reject limits, from scientists working in Antarctica to cops who flaunt the law in New Orleans. Then there’s Elon Musk, whom Herzog interviewed in his 2016 documentary about the internet, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World.

“Elon Musk, I think, he’s not one of these imposters,” he says, when I bring up the Tesla and SpaceX CEO. “He’s a serious businessman, but he knows about the power of myth… This is why he keeps insisting on colonizing Mars with a million human beings.”

Herzog doesn’t share Musk’s enthusiasm for the red planet. “Speaking about colonizing Mars with a million is an obscenity by itself, because we should keep our own planet habitable and not try to make a hostile planet habitable for us,” he says. “So there’s something wrong about it… and it is not attainable. It cannot be reached.”

He’s clearly given the project some thought, however. We’d need “to fire salvos of rockets, thousands of them almost at the same time”; we’d need to build “robots who construct huge domes”; we’d need to detonate “atomic explosions at the poles of Mars for melting water”. And if that wasn’t enough, we’d need to build pipelines to transport the water. “Now, please, how do you construct the pipelines?” Herzog asks. “It is ridiculous. We know that. You don’t need to be a chicken to know the egg is rotten. You don’t need to be an astrophysicist to know that.” If the man who pulled a steamship over a mountain calls for time-out, you know you’re in trouble.

But Musk’s Martian hype is cunning PR. “He acquires the aura of the visionary. That’s important,” Herzog says, “because when you buy an electric car, you do not buy it from the Chinese because it’s just a factory in China. If you buy one of his cars, you buy the car of the visionary. It’s an attribute that goes into mythologizing the product. I’m sure he’s aware of that. He’s not a stupid man.”

Musk also dreams of creating a new life form: artificial intelligence. It’s a prospect that unnerves Herzog. In The Future of Truth, Herzog acknowledges that AI will lead to extraordinary breakthroughs, but also foresees “the possibility of comprehensive, mass supervision of disinformation, of manipulation on a vast scale”. This echoes the haunting epilogue of his memoir, Every Man For Himself and God Against All, in which he imagines a world “turning away from thought, argument, and image… a darkness filled with fear, with imaginary monsters”.

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In this dark new world, nobody will read. Herzog has long warned that the decline in reading spelled doom for humanity. New studies highlight how serious it is: reading for pleasure has collapsed, and even elite university students now struggle with long texts. “Students read less and less and less, and young filmmakers do not read at all,” he tells me. “I keep telling them, I keep hammering into them: if you want to become a filmmaker, you may become a mediocre filmmaker at best, but you will only become a good filmmaker if you read.”

“Read, read, read, read, read,” Herzog says, like a mantra. “That’s of fundamental importance for our future.” Only by reading widely can we develop critical thinking. “Your mind engages with the soul in the thinking of someone else, and then you read another book, and you have another worldview, and all of a sudden you start to balance it out… and see our daily reality in critical terms,” he says.

In The Future of Truth, Herzog calls on us to discern fake news by consulting a plethora of sources. Don’t take anything on blind faith. Only then can we hope to build a “more nuanced version of what reality might be”.

“It has to become second nature for us the same way it was apparently second nature for prehistoric men, hunters and gatherers,” Herzog continues in a flight of poetry. “They would go out and pick berries and mushrooms, and I’m certain they did not pick the poisonous ones. Over long, long experience, they would know. And I keep saying: I’m fairly certain that these people did not hate nature because there was poison in it… It’s the same thing today. You do not have to hate the world as it is. You just have to get acquainted with doubt and critical thinking.”

The search for truth, as Herzog tells us in his book, is eternal. Our ancestors looked for it on the walls of prehistoric caves; we can’t now forsake it for the shiny screens of our smartphones. “Truth has no future, but truth did not have a past either,” Herzog tells me. “But we must pursue it. We have to continue, we must, we shall continue to search for it.”

***

The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann, is published by Bodley Head.

In all these cases, the facts will succumb to political agenda. So what’s the point of them? In a world where the fact has been demoted to political point-scoring, the time has come to consider where facts came from in the first place, and what exactly they are. I’m not talking here about the journalistic obsession with verification, nor the relative merits of weighing one source against another — but the fact that there are any facts whatsoever. “There was a time when facts did not exist,” the historian of science, David Wootton, reminds us in his book The Invention of Science. “The story of the fact is a story in which the lowest and most unreliable form of knowledge was magically transformed into the highest and most reliable.”

The problem of the fact had long lingered in the background of politics, philosophy and science until it came roaring forth half a decade ago, blasting through the mediasphere in the now-ancient controversy regarding the size of Trump’s first inauguration crowd, a dispute that inspired the then-presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway to introduce the term “alternative facts”. Legacy media, horrified by this subversive twist on their hitherto unchallenged epistemology, did not know where to start. After a good deal of sputtering, there emerged a solution. What ensued was a golden age of fact-checking the first Trump administration — a parade led by FactCheck.org, Metabunk, PolitiFact, Snopes, RealClearPolitics, to name but a few. The status of the fact has since swallowed enormous portions of resources, money, air time, and attention.

Yet strangely enough, journalism had gotten along for quite a long time without fact-checkers. The first of this exotic new species appeared in the 1890s and early 1900s, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, alongside the birth of the telegraph. It was during this period that the idea that journalists could pinpoint the “objective” truth first caught on, the notion that reporting the news could be closer to science than literature. Unfortunately, as the velocity of news increased, so did the prevalence of what Ralph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, called “honest inaccuracies”. By 1938, a new sub-set of professionals devoted to the cause of accuracy had been officially institutionalized, as Colliers magazine ran its first ad for “researchers and fact-checkers”.

Since then, fact-checking has become part and parcel of news-gathering. At the core of this enterprise was a new definition of truth — journalistic truth — which rests not upon the eternal verities of philosophical or religious truth, but upon the idea that if there’s someone else or something else out there to back up your assertion, it’s fair game for publishing.

The problems with this approach to what has come to be called “verifiable truth” became evident by the end of the first Trump presidency. As the Columbia Journalism Review put it, “while facts are sacred to writers, readers, and, above all, editors, they are sometimes more work than they’re worth”. On the other side of the aisle, Mike Howell of the Heritage Foundation noted precisely the same phenomenon in his criticism of the “fact-check industry”: “When you aren’t winning a policy debate, it’s much easier to appeal to a supposedly ‘third party’ judge who is on your team already.”

For both Left and Right, then, the facts became insoluble conundrums. In a stormy sea of blog posts, clickbait, Substacks, and studies in obscure journals, what constitutes a fact? There is in fact — as it were — a small group of academics who study that precise question, and those are the historians of science. They attacked the question with a great deal of optimism. Their assumption was that while one may endlessly debate the political ramifications of, say, the Battle of Culloden, or the economic consequences of FDR’s New Deal, conclusions become a bit more clear-cut when it comes to the discovery of gravity and the moons of Jupiter. At least that was the hope — soon to be dashed. As the late great historian of science, Thomas S. Kuhn, presciently noted in his 1962 landmark study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “Myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods… that now lead to scientific knowledge.”

Kuhn’s intellectual descendants include Steven Shapin, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, and Simon Schaffer, Professor of History of Science at the University of Cambridge. Schaffer’s best-selling iconoclastic tome, Leviathan and the Air Pump, caused nothing less than an academic scandal. For years, the pair have studied what has come to be called the “social construction” of truth, specializing in the origins of modern biology, chemistry, and physics in early- to mid-17th century Europe. They have come to the conclusion that “The history of science occupies the same terrain as the history of politics.”

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This is the sort of conclusion that outraged physics professor Alan Sokal, sparking his submission of gibberish to the academic journal, Social Text. It was an attempt to embarrass the academics who might publish “an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions”. He then published a book titled Fashionable Nonsense, aimed at blowing the social construction of truth out of the water.

For all his indignation, the years have not been kind to Sokal. The notion that truth is a social construction has not only been normalized but glorified through social media, where like makes right. And, of course, Donald Trump was one of the first to translate the controversial academic idea into a controversial media company, “Truth Social”.

It might be a stretch to call Trump a master of epistemology, but the arguments that Shapin and Schaffer espouse eerily align with his populist approach. The historians of science argue that unlike ancient scientific “facts” — such as Aristotle’s beliefs that spears fly in horizontal lines, and that women have fewer teeth than men — the modern scientific fact does not rest upon logical deductions from unexamined givens and axioms, but emerges from educated and social elites gathered in a privileged space to witness the scene of laboratory demonstrations, after which they might use the tools of printing and publishing to disseminate what these scholars call “virtual witnessing”. In short, it is the idea that if enough people believe in Tinker Bell, publicly vouch for Tinker Bell, and distribute learned treatises about Tinker Bell, then Tinker Bell is, for all intents and purposes, true. Such facts become facts because of their omnipresent acceptance among both the brilliant and the ignorant. On the basis of this insight into the birth of the fact in 17th-century Europe, the historians of science have inadvertently helped us understand how reactionary politics and liberal politics not only create wholly different species of fact, but of evidence and reasoning.

The social construction of truth flies in the face of a tradition many of us take for granted — the idea of scientific progress going hand in hand with the progress of rationality, toleration for civil dispute, and liberalism. “Our goal”, Shapin and Schaffer have acknowledged, “is to break down the aura of self-evidence surrounding the experimental way of producing knowledge.” And to be sure, their deconstructions clarify once and for all why it is fruitless to hail facts and fact-checking as the antidote to MAGA ideation — that if only people understood “science” we would all be good liberals. Indeed, the adage among the anti-vaxxers is the same as the adage of Moderna and Pfizer: “Do the research.”

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Of course, those basement-dwelling, Ketone-IQ-swilling independent internet researchers were not the first people to question the fact’s value. As modern science took its infant steps away from philosophers like Aristotle towards “natural philosophers” like Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, the great conservative and defender of monarchical power, Thomas Hobbes, rose against the dominion of the fact. Much like those today who view corporate science as a form of oppression, Hobbes mocked the artificial and clubby lab-centric experimentalists of his age, claiming that the so-called geniuses of the scientific revolution were “just another conspiratorial group whose interests were in obtaining power over citizens”.

Hobbes believed that the esoteric truths created in the laboratory were entirely unrelated to the ordinary common-sense truths that emerge from everyday reality. He scoffed at the idea of a vacuum created by the air-pump, perhaps because he could not imagine the use of barometers and thermometers, not to mention microwaves and guitar amps. Faced with modern physics, he would surely have asked, what does the quark-gluon plasma created for a fraction of a millisecond in the Hadron collider have to do with us?

It was only as the Scientific Revolution proved its cash value (by way of the locomotive, steamboat, cotton gin et al), that defenders of the ancient fact succumbed to the unbridled sense of awe that marked the early industrial age. Nineteenth-century fact worship would transform into social science, thereby becoming an enduring attribute of liberalism — despite the bothersome irony that facts contravene the most basic of all liberal tenets, namely the freedom to disagree. And who would be foolish enough to disagree with the efficacy of a sewing machine — or an atom bomb? Hence the strange and cockeyed genius of Donald Trump, who perceived how thin the ice had grown beneath the scientific fact that no one really understood, and who grasped that fact had become dogma.

Alternative facts, fake news, and conspiracy theory on one side. Freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to disagree, and an end to all censorship on the other. Again and again the historians of science have proved their prescience: during the height of the Cold War, one of the founders of the field, Herbert Butterfield, was already anticipating the growth of “giant organized systems of self-righteousness — each only too delighted to find that the other is wicked — each only too glad that the sins of the other give it pretext for still deeper hatred”. The solution, of course, was democracy. But as has become increasingly evident, democracy cannot solve the problem of the fact, as democracy was itself a parallel expression of the Scientific Revolution. To prove one by the other descends into the logical inconsistency philosophers dismiss as tautology.

Instead of becoming mired in the ooze of fact and alternative fact, perhaps we would be better off if we were to entirely exclude facts from our political discussions and jettison the 400-year-old fetish. At this point, would anything be that different? Freed from the trivial battle of fact against fact, perhaps we might spend more time on the difference between right and wrong.

Trump’s dust-up in the Oval Office, along much of his behavior this past week, was the perfect demonstration of the United States’s attitude to that disreputable place known as Abroad. A lot of Americans don’t really like “Abroad”, including some of those who actually set foot there, largely because it isn’t America. Not many of them would be able to locate Ukraine on a map; some might even have trouble locating Canada. Trump doesn’t like Abroad either, and has broken with the tradition that as President he’s supposed to have its concerns at heart.

The paradox is that the United States is the most globalized nation in the world and also one of the most parochial. These two aspects of it are, in fact, related. For one thing, the larger a country is, the less it has to rely on others and the more self-enclosed it becomes. For another thing, a country which sees the rest of the world primarily in terms of power and profit isn’t likely to be on familiar terms with its culture and history. The same used to apply to the British Empire, ruled by one of the most insular nations on earth for whom Johnny Foreigner was to be mocked as well as subjugated. It was the great Edmund Burke who reminded these provincially-minded bigots that colonies were to be governed only through an understanding of their ways of life.

In Trump’s eyes, the president of Ukraine is Abroad incarnate. Unlike the unstaunchably eloquent, rhetorically dazzling US President, he can’t speak English properly, doesn’t wear proper clothes, is about half the size of your average American jock, doesn’t grovel at the feet of the powerful and is always on the scrounge. He also stems from an ethnic background about which the Orange Lord may not be overly enthusiastic. So it’s time to stop pretending that America has some God-given mission to save the world, not least when it’s costing you billions of dollars. Nation-states are businesses, not spiritual entities. Trump wants Zelensky’s mineral resources, not his allegiance in the fight for civilization. Ideology must give way to self-interest, bullshit about altruism to the bottom line. The world is divided into winners and losers, not autocrats and democrats, and nobody looks more like a loser than Zelensky. Moreover, he’s losing at the hands of a man whom Trump admires as a fellow member of the Big Boys’ club.

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This is truly a dramatic move. America now has a president who has no time for the sham piety spouted by so many of his predecessors. There was always an embarrassing gap between American talk about liberty, democracy, the city on the hill and the infinite Spirit of Man on the one hand, and screwing over weaker peoples blessed with extractable natural resources on the other. Few, however, have had the audacity to eliminate the gap by abolishing the bullshit. Edmund Burke, naturally enough, saw political power as masculine; but he also saw that in order to be effective it must wrap itself in the seductive garb of the feminine, tempering its coerciveness with grace, beauty, compassion and so on. The aesthetic must come to the aid of the political. In Burke’s view, the French Revolution had stripped those beguiling veils away, laying bare the ugly phallus of power; and President Trump, who is apparently not averse to phallic exposure, has done the same in our own day by dispensing with high-toned talk of the spirit of humanity and the value of civilization.

That other world leader, the infallible Pope Francis, has been in the news because he has been ill, not because he bullied, harangued and insulted a guest before an astonished world. In fact, from what one hears about him he’s a courteous, congenial character, if given to the odd burst of obscenity. A friend of mine used to be Master General of the English Dominican Order, and was invited by the Pope to his private apartment for coffee. Pointing to the stunning view of the city from his window, the pontiff remarked in his heavily accented English: “This is the best view of Rome there is — and that’s infallible.” It’s hard to imagine Trump being ironic about his authority, or simply being ironic.

There is, however, a logical problem about being infallible, which one can formulate as follows. When the papacy first promulgated the doctrine in the 19th century, was this declaration itself infallible? Or was the Pope’s infallibility initiated at that point? If it was, however, why should anyone believe it? Declaring yourself infallible only has real force if you’re infallible already. If you are, however, why bother to declare it? Didn’t everyone know already?

We have here a case of how far back one has to go to explain something. Take the way one might inform a small child about the names of various objects. You point to a carrot and say “carrot”, and the child grasps the fact that the sound you make is the name of the thing you’re pointing to. But this, as Ludwig Wittgenstein argues, can’t possibly be how children learn language. For this to work, the child must already know a great deal: that there are individual objects, that these things have names, that these names are generic and not individual, that to point your finger at something is to single it out, that the sound you make when you point denotes the thing in question and so on. For the child to know all of this it must already live in a world of meaning. Meaning, in other words, is very hard to get behind; or rather, what you tend to find when you get behind it is yet more meaning. For Wittgenstein at least, meaning is inseparable from language. So the child to whom you’re trying to teach language must have a grasp of it already, rather as declaring yourself to be infallible only has force if you’re infallible already. You must be describing a situation which already exists, not just legislating one into existence. Otherwise it’s a purely arbitrary act, like announcing that you’re a humanitarian when everyone knows that you’re a serial killer.

Another example of how far back one can push things is the so-called social contract. According to this theory, first propounded by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, political society is founded by men and women surrendering some of their individual freedom in order to enter into social relations with each other which will ensure their common safety and prosperity. In this way, a bunch of lawless, ruthlessly self-interested individuals with no regard for each other’s welfare is transformed into a commonwealth of shared authority and mutual responsibility. But mustn’t these supposedly uncivilized individuals already have possessed the concepts of contract, sovereignty, responsibility and the rest if this transition could come about? How can you enter into a contract if you don’t already have the concept of a contract?

The doctrine of papal infallibility is much misunderstood. It doesn’t mean that if the Pope announces that Stephen Fry is an alien from Alpha Centauri, all Catholics have to believe it without question. It’s restricted to matters of faith and morals, and rather than pronouncing some new truth, its point is to clarify and define doctrines which the Church has supposedly always held. The Pope exercises this authority not individually but on behalf of the bishops as a whole, and does so extremely rarely, even though he’s known for being infallible rather as Liz Truss is known for not being so. One of the most disastrous papal proclamations of recent times — the ban on contraception — was not infallible. Like most things about the papacy, the doctrine has its roots in the murky political conflicts of 19th century Italy. It belongs to a Church which long ago sold part of its soul for worldly power, a betrayal which is a particular scandal to anyone familiar with the first chapter of St Luke’s gospel.

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To say that a statement is scientific is to say, among other things, that it could be wrong. You must have some idea of what sort of evidence, argument or set of logical moves would count against it, which is not true of statements like “Thou still unravished bride of quietness”, or “Drop the gun now!” Even so, the world is full of statements which are effectively infallible, in the sense that it would be hard if not impossible to see how any rational creature could deny them. It’s obvious how someone could deny the claim that Trump is supremely arrogant, but not how they could refute the proposition that one has a body.

So infallibility is no big deal. It only seems so to people for whom certainty is equivalent to dogmatism, which includes most postmodern thinkers. In such a climate, having convictions is as bad as having typhoid. But you can have convictions without thumping the table to lend them force. In ancient Greek, the word “dogma” simply means “opinion”. You can argue for your beliefs as passionately as you like provided you’re prepared to give them up when confronted with convincing evidence to the contrary.

When Catholics speak of dogma, they are talking about what they regard as truth. This is not so in the world of Donald Trump. What we see in the White House is neither dogmatic truth, nor truth without dogmatism, but dogmatism without truth. Trump is a vulgar Nietzschean for whom truth is whatever promotes his own or his nation’s interests; but since the things that do this aren’t always compatible with each other, or don’t stay the same from one moment to the next, the President tends to hold mutually contradictory positions, and holds each of them in dogmatic style. He moves in a relativist way from one absolute to another.

When a spokesman for the Catholic Church was asked some years ago what would happen to its authority if it changed its teaching on contraception, he replied that nothing would happen to it at all. Instead, he explained, the Church would have moved from one state of certainty to another state of certainty. It’s not beyond question that in some months’ time, when someone asks Trump why he called Zelensky ungrateful and disrespectful, he will reply, wide-eyed, “Did I say that?”

But this is nonsense. As we’ve seen in the wake of the Cass Report, what actually happens is a mixture of magical thinking, conformism and moral grandstanding coalesces under a thin veneer of rational objectivity — and everyone except the most stubbornly reality-oriented falls obediently into line. And amid the chaos of frantic back-pedalling and rewriting of history, this consensus can form and re-form in real time without its basic structure ever changing, or lessons ever being learned.

Most egregiously of all, Ruth Hunt, former CEO of Stonewall, denied to the Times that on her watch Stonewall fostered a stifling climate of “no debate” on gender ideology. On the contrary, she said: “I’m absolutely someone who has always been working in the middle ground, trying to build consensus.”

Let’s leave aside the fact that, as the Times points out, under Hunt’s leadership Stonewall called for schools to “shred” the only schools guidance on gender even remotely in line with Cass recommendations. Let’s ignore the testimony of veteran gay rights activist and one-time Stonewall spokeswoman Anya Palmer, who reports that Hunt promised her Stonewall would never embrace trans activism, before pivoting to focus on almost nothing else. Let’s instead consider, for a moment, what it actually means to “build consensus”, in the Hunt sense.

Perhaps the most succinct literary anatomy of Huntish “consensus” was written more than two centuries before Hunt assumed leadership of Stonewall. In the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jane Austen informs us that “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

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It’s a one-line joke, that juxtaposes two distinct, and very differently coded “ways of knowing”. In the process, too, it reveals that far from being distinct, these two ways of thinking actually operate in lockstep.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged” stakes a claim to objectivity: the kind of fact that, as “classical liberals” such as Ben Shapiro like to put it, doesn’t care about your feelings. This mode of knowing, central to the Enlightenment privileging of reason and objectivity, was (and still is) masculine-coded. It gains its power from asserting that its truths will remain true whether or not you acknowledge them as such.

Austen ironises this, by exposing the process of consensus-formation that lies beneath many such claims: a dynamic less concerned with facts than social, contextual meaning and desirable behaviour, captured in “a good fortune” and “must be in want of a wife”. These phrases are loaded not with objectivity but context: an intricate and intimately feminine world of 18th-century social hierarchies and sex roles, afforded narrative urgency by the real privations that faced unmarried “gentlewomen” excluded by social custom from paid employment.

The punchline lies in the implication that what lurks under the bonnet of “truth universally acknowledged” is often not truth but this feminine-coded matrix of embedded meanings. Any effort at detached objectivity will be leavened by status-signalling and aspirational manoeuvring.

Meanwhile, what holds this together is less the fact of its “truth” but that it’s “universally acknowledged”. That is, we’re reading a normative statement disguised as an objective one. And not just normative but prescriptive: “universal” has a faintly threatening undertone, suggesting that anyone who matters acknowledges this truth, and by extension you probably should if you don’t want to be shunned.

Austen’s one-liner is the gently ironic opener to one of the greatest modern love stories. But it points to a truth that today seems more pertinent than ever: that many modern truth-claims follow this structure, and are enforced through very similar social mechanisms.

Perhaps the most totalising recent instance of this was Covid consensus-formation. It’s dizzying now to read press reports from just before the Great Covid Panic took hold. Before this happened, Ian Bremmer approvingly describes experts doing “an impressive job of calmly and professionally setting out the factual framework behind the government’s coronavirus strategy”, while Boris Johnson accepts the moderate expert advice provided by Chris Witty to wash hands, protect the elderly but otherwise carry on with “business as usual”.

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It’s yet more extraordinary to remember that in the 20 days after this article was published on March 3, we witnessed a screeching media 180 from encouraging “business as usual” to near-universal calls for lockdown.

Over the period that followed, competing Covid claims and counter-claims were all larded with “experts” and “evidence”. Reviewing these now makes one thing clear: Austen’s assessment of TUA remains true. Moral consensus precedes rationalisation. The Covid vibe shift may have been presented as scientific and factual; but what powered it was a chaotic tangle of magical thinking, fear, and the threat of social ostracism. The statement made by epidemiologist Sir Mark Woolhouse to the Covid enquiry captures the social pressures boiling beneath the claimed objectivity: “The emphasis on consensus and clear messaging,” he said, “plus a sense of not wanting to ‘rock the boat’, made it difficult to discuss these issues openly at the time.”

No one likes being ignored, scorned, or shunned. No wonder so many Sensibles fall obediently into line on every TUA. Take TV presenter and quintessential Sensible Kirstie Allsopp, who last year waded vigorously into the what she called “the trans moral panic” on the Stonewall side. Her reward was a pat on the back from the Daily Stormer of gender woo, Pink News, for opinions “backed up by science and facts”. It’s more accurate, though, to describe her opinions as (at the time) robustly supported by the moral hive-mind that determines and then enforces the Truth Universally Acknowledged.

Here, again, the comparison with Austen is instructive. In Austen’s day, genteel moral consensus-formation happened within a social world of dinners, balls, picnics and other social events. Today, though, it’s been professionalised, via what author Matt Goodwin calls a “New Elite” comprising an “epistemic class” which dominates institutions such as TV, journalism, museums, charities and academia, and uses their influence to shape the public conversation in line with approved opinions.

And yet, in some respects, nothing has changed. For many of these elite women who, in Austen’s time, would be eyeing one another over their fans at Lady So and So’s, now work in New Elite industries, many of which are markedly female-dominated. Allsopp is a case in point: her parents are Lady and Baron Hindlip, and she is a Hon., though doesn’t usually use the title. She has parlayed old-elite status into National Telly Treasure status, whence she holds forth on moral issues with an unwavering moral certainty Austen would have recognised, and probably lampooned.

So, now the winds have changed, we find Allsopp also back-pedalling. It was never true, she asserts, that there was “no debate” on the issue of medical experiments on gender-confused children. Puberty blockers, Kirstie informs us, were bad all along. But we could always talk about it: “it is, and always has been possible to debate these things and those saying there was no debate are wrong”. All the people (mostly women) unfairly fired or bullied out of jobs, all the grannies punched in Hyde Park by men with special identities, the no-platforming, the intimidation, the threats, and the censorship — that wasn’t actually a thing.

Allsopp is the clearest indicator yet that at least where child gender vivisection is concerned, at least some of the grandes dames of Truth Universally Acknowledged may have paused broadcasting a TUA in order to convince themselves, in the light of a new emerging groupthink, that the new consensus is what they believed all along. And because moral consensus precedes its “expert” rationalisation, so we also find that those who purport to stand for science and reason are also curiously quiet.

On Sunday, for example, Sex Matters founder Maya Forstater (herself notoriously a victim of the “No Debate” consensus Kirstie Allsopp says never existed) called on science communicator and Humanists UK president Adam Rutherford to defend systematic scientific reviews, against the trans activists spreading misinformation about the Cass Review. Did he come out swinging for science and reason over gender ideology? Reader, he flunked it: “It’s not something I know much about.”

Last November, Humanists UK welcomed a Private Members’ Bill banning “conversion therapy” — in a formulation that would, in effect, ban anything but the “affirmation” approach to gender identity, recently decried by the Cass Review as unsupported by evidence and potentially harmful to children whose sense of self is still developing. Perhaps Rutherford is waiting, as many commentators did during Covid, until it becomes obvious which Truth Universally Acknowledged was always obviously supported by the evidence.

We can hardly blame him. I don’t doubt his vaunted commitment to even uncomfortable scientific truth. But if Covid taught us anything, it’s that scientific truth can be — with the best of intentions — somewhat ductile, especially weighed against the risk of ostracism by every desirable dinner-party hostess in medialand. But should those hostesses resume broadcasting their TUA, having agreed that they always believed puberty blockers were bad, perhaps the Rutherfords of our public discourse will feel able to hop back in the trenches on behalf of science, objectivity, and Dr Hilary Cass.

Overall, though, no lessons will be learned. None was learned from Covid, for all that Woolhouse described the lockdown policy bluntly as a “failure”. Not even a recent report showing the appalling and preventable harm lockdowns did to a generation of children seems to have prompted much soul-searching among those who advocated loudest for such measures.

And this is because the unhappy inference is that we’re still stuck in the same paradigm: the chattering-class two-step of moral groupthink masquerading as science. Just like Johnson in 2020, we’re still looking to “experts” as a means of outsourcing moral judgement — and as someone to blame when things go wrong. Even Hunt, on whose watch Stonewall helped entrench gender ideology in public health, is now busy describing her “regret” at having naively “trusted the experts”.

In truth, though, “experts” are a front for the TUA: the chattering-class moral consensus. And this is manufactured by people who care less about being right than looking virtuous. Career moral entrepreneurs such as Hunt; vacuous grandes dames such as Allsopp; “communicators” such as Rutherford whose job is to make consensus look sciency. Downstream of their posturing, children were irreversibly harmed. They didn’t care; they wanted to look kinder than you. They should not be allowed to forget how wrong they got it.

If there is an infinity of universes, as some scientists speculate, the cosmos may contain an infinite number of Russell Brands. It follows that if there is a God, he must surely be a malevolent one. There is, however, an upside to this nightmare. Several million of these Brands are at this very moment being torn limb from limb on various women-governed planets, while several million others are being hung upside down from lamp-posts.

Doubling has its comic aspects. If a monstrously fat man in pink tights and a sombrero crosses a stage, and a moment later another monstrously fat, similarly dressed man does the same, the audience are likely to laugh. In Freudian terms, they can avoid the mental labour of coping with difference, and by economising on psychical energy in this way they can release it in the form of laughter. Most humour involves a sense of incongruity, and in this case, ironically, it is sameness which is incongruous in the sense of out of step with the way things usually are.

If this were to happen in real life, however, it would probably be more eerie than funny. I was once on a flight to Sydney, waiting for the aircraft to take off, when an enormously tall Japanese man, not a common sight, entered the plane. He was followed almost immediately by another Japanese man well over six foot tall, and he by another, and so on until fifteen or so of them had lumbered down the aisle. This was pretty spooky until I discovered that it was the Japanese basketball team en route to the Australian Olympics.

Pure repetition is unnerving. Exact identities don’t happen in everyday life, which is why Nietzsche thought that words such as “leaf” were fictional because they implied that all leaves are the same. It’s also why identical twins have a sacred status in some cultures, “sacred” meaning both blessed and cursed. The fact that the alien children in John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos all look the same is part of what makes them so sinister. We are speaking of the uncanny, which means something both strange and familiar — familiar because it’s exactly like something else we know, but strange because this repetition is creepy.

One reason we enjoy rhythms and rhymes is that they combine difference and repetition, thus avoiding a monotonous thud on the one hand and a disorientating diversity on the other. “Baa baa black sheep” is fine, but “Baa baa black bull” has a surfeit of sameness. Pure identity is tedious, while pure difference would be unintelligible. Hell is traditionally thought to be less agonising than boring. It has the eternal sameness of shit.

It’s much the same with aliens, who are never very alien. They may have weird eyes, but at least they have eyes. If they were entirely different from us it’s hard to know how we could be aware of them. Perhaps a couple of them are sitting in your lap right now. Aliens may be tiny and greenish and stink of sulphur, but otherwise they look much like Jonathan Ross. More to the point, they bear a remarkable resemblance to both William Hague and Dominic Cummings. In fact, there are people for whom aliens, who touch down on Earth occasionally, are the only acceptable kind of immigrants, given that they presumably don’t intend to take our jobs, houses, primary school places or PhDs.

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Beware the new leviathans

By Terry Eagleton

An interplay of sameness and difference can be found everywhere you look these days, and its technical name is narcissism. To be besotted with yourself is clearly an example of sameness or self-identity, but it also involves treating yourself as though you were someone else, and thus a degree of difference or self-alienation. You treat yourself and your body with exquisite care, as though you were carrying a precious but sickeningly fragile vase in your hands. Putting items in this brittle container, an activity traditionally known as eating, is a particularly fraught affair. There has probably been no civilisation for which food was simply food, but it’s rare to find one like our own where it’s scarcely food at all but invasion, potential poison, crime against non-humanity (eating meat), moral blackmail, emotional manipulation or a slavish surrender to patriarchal demands.

The opposite of treating yourself as Other is treating the Other as oneself. In ancient Greek tragedy, the ultimate other is the monster, some deformed creature which civilisation needs to shut out in order to preserve its sanity and stability. The monster in Sophocles’s plays about Oedipus seems to be the Sphinx, but in the end it turns out to be the blinded, incestuous, parricidal Oedipus himself, the king who is driven out of society and reduced to a homeless beggar. Shakespeare’s Lear is a later version of this tragedy. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, it is the hideous Furies who threaten to subvert social order, while in Euripides’s Bacchae it is the god of orgies and erotic love, Dionysus.

In all these cases, society can only survive if it has the courage to recognise something of itself in the monstrous Other which confronts it. It must acknowledge this thing of darkness as its own, as part of the unspeakable truth about itself, and integrate it into the community. If it can do so, a great power for good will be released. The social order must recognise that its stability rests on the violent repression of these life-giving, death-dealing forces; only then can it be truly secure. When you meet your double, so legend has it, you die; but it might also be the occasion for a transformed existence.

Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger is about her double Naomi Wolf, about whom it is not exactly complimentary; and if Wolf reads the work, as of course she will, and runs into Klein with a knife conveniently to hand, one fears that the legend might turn out to be true. Klein is a Left-wing scourge of corporate capitalism, while Wolf was once a liberal feminist and darling of the Democrats who groomed Al Gore in how to give a convincing imitation of a human being.

She is now a conspiracy theorist who has a cavalier way with the facts, has compared Barack Obama to Hitler and thinks that people who are vaccinated against Covid don’t really feel human. She appears regularly on podcasts with Steve Bannon, who is said to have expressed disapproval of his children going to school with Jews (Wolf is Jewish). One of the two Naomis, then, embraces a paranoid form of politics, while the other does not. As Samuel Beckett remarked of one of the two thieves on Calvary being saved, it’s a reasonable percentage.

Nobody’s afraid of Naomi Wolf, but what she stands for these days is deeply alarming. The real Naomi, i.e. Klein, is regularly confused with the unreal Naomi, i.e. Wolf, and her book is among other things an exorcising of this embarrassment. A similar situation used to exist in Britain, where there was a real Stuart Hall, a Left-wing cultural theorist from Jamaica, and an unreal Stuart Hall, a slick TV performer and fawner on royalty who ended up in prison.

Why do so many conspiracy theories originate in the United States? One answer lies in the vast size of the place. This means that Americans are accustomed to a fair amount of personal space, and are particularly sensitive about that space being “invaded”. An American might say “Excuse me” if they come within six feet of you, which is not true of the citizens of Beijing. Smoking is taboo not only because it can kill you, but because smoke represents a contaminating connection between one hygienically sealed body and another. The model of human contact is infection. Rather as smoke becomes invisible but remains all-pervasive, these apparently separate bodies are caught up in some terrifying web of secret powers, and thus by no means as free and autonomous as they think.

Conspiracy theorists, for whom (like the paranoid) nothing happens by accident, are out to give a name to this system, whether you call it the political state or the work of a bunch of paedophilic Jewish reptiles from a distant galaxy. In doing so, you have the satisfaction of ascribing what seem to be random, anonymous forces (the market, for example) to a purposeful agent, so that the world makes some sense, however sinister, and you have someone to blame.

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By Terry Eagleton

You can also combat the sealed-off bodies syndrome with new forms of bonding and brotherhood like the Proud Boys. When a pandemic breaks out in this situation, it isn’t the virus which a lot of citizens regard as deadly, invisible, infectious and omnipresent, but the state which seeks to protect them from it. At a time when bodies need to be hygienically sealed off from each other in order to survive, they cast off their masks, demand liberty or death and sometimes end up with both. They insist on the right to breathe together, which is the literal meaning of the word “conspiracy”.

In Dostoevesky’s chilling tale The Double, a timorous clerk called Golaydkin is persecuted by a smirking, malicious doppelganger whom he finally kisses in a despairing attempt at reconciliation. In doing so, however, he merely seals his doom, as he is driven away in a coach by a fearful coachman who is no less than Death itself. The real Golyadkin is destroyed by his phantom double.

No observer of the current American scene can doubt that this may happen there too. The Left, after all, is accustomed to defeat: our adversaries have more tanks than we do, not to speak of a lot more money and control of the means by which they can propagate their lies. What the big bad Wolf represents may trump what the real Naomi stands for in every sense of the word. But Klein has one monumental advantage: what she says, give or take a bit, is true. So you must either prove her wrong or create a world in which truth doesn’t matter anyway. That project is already far advanced.

Critical theory was born in Germany between the two world wars. It was founded by a clique of Marxist academics in Frankfurt who were horrified that the grand march toward the communist utopia predicted by Marx wasn’t happening on schedule. On the one hand, communism in the Soviet Union had devolved into a totalitarian nightmare with a reliable habit of mass murder. On the other, the working people of one of the most educated and cultured nations of Europe, who according to Marxist theory should have been flocking to the banners of proletarian revolution, were instead rallying around a weird little man with a toothbrush moustache and an unhealthy obsession with an archaic, bloodthirsty mysticism of race and soil.

Obviously, something had gone wrong, not just with Marxism but with the entire enterprise of Western rationality summed up in the phrase “the Enlightenment”. Consider what that phrase means for a moment. One of the basic credos of the cultural mainstream in Western countries is the rather odd notion that, at a certain point not that many centuries ago, for the very first time in human history, intellectuals in Western Europe saw the universe as it actually is. Before then, despite fumbling attempts in the right direction by ancient Greek philosophers, humanity was hopelessly mired in superstitious ignorance; afterwards, Western intellectuals led a rapid ascent towards true knowledge of humanity and the universe. People still speak of that period using such far-from-neutral terms as “the Age of Reason” and “the Enlightenment”; in Germany, the term is die Aufklärung, literally “the Clearing-Off”.

It is to the credit of the founders of critical theory — Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse — that they didn’t just go on believing in the secular mythology of progress. They grasped that the Enlightenment had failed to accomplish what everyone expected of it, and they set out to understand what had gone wrong. Since they were Marxists, of course, they still framed things in terms of the march toward a utopian society of the future, and critical theory thus set out not just to understand society but to change it. It sought, in Horkheimer’s words, “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” — but it tried to do that by understanding the entire panoply of reasons why those circumstances happen to exist at a given place and time.

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By John Michael Greer

This is what makes critical theory useful. Treat a belief as though it’s timeless and context-free and all you can do is accept or reject it; recognise that every belief has a history and a cultural context and you can understand it instead. Critical theory attempts to do this with the core beliefs of Western society. The first major book to come out of the movement, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, sought to make sense of the way that Enlightenment rationalism had led to the twin tyrannies of Stalin and Hitler. It’s still worth reading today, even though much of what passes for critical theory now is little more than empty propaganda.

In the opening lines of his Guide to Kulchur, Ezra Pound wrote: “In attacking a doctrine, a doxy, or a form of stupidity, it might be remembered that one isn’t of necessity attacking the man, or say ‘founder,’ to whom the doctrine is attributed or on whom is it blamed.” Similarly today, in circles unsympathetic to what critical theory has become, it is common to assail Adorno, Benjamin, et al., because of the current antics of their followers. This is unfair. The founders of critical theory did in fact make a massive mistake, but it’s one that pretty much everyone made in those days and too many people still make today.

That mistake? The failure to recognise that the academic circles to which Adorno and Benjamin belonged — and to which their followers by and large belong today — form a privileged class with an interest in furthering its own influence and grabbing more than its share of wealth and privilege. Critical theory by and large avoids talking about this. A genuine critical race theory would interrogate the discourses concerning race used by Left-wing activists in today’s society, and show how those discourses are used as instruments of hegemony by those activists and the people who pay them. A genuine critical theory would also interrogate the implications of “liberating human beings from the circumstances that enslave them”, and talk about how that rhetoric of liberation is used to replace one set of enslaving circumstances with another. You can read a whole lot of critical theory and never catch the least whisper of this sort of thinking.

This is what makes Jason Josephson-Storm’s work so fascinating. He tiptoes very close to the edge of that forbidden territory, by suggesting that one of the most fundamental assumptions of modern thought — the notion that we modern people are disenchanted, freed from the superstitious burdens of the past and venturing heroically forward into a new world free of myth and magic — is simply another myth. He has applied the tools of critical theory to one of the basic assumptions underlying critical theory, and showed that belief in disenchantment is just another narrative employed to advantage certain people over others. It is an impressive project.

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One of Josephson-Storm’s greatest influences, a scholar he frequently cites, did much the same thing on a bigger scale and to an even more vulnerable set of narratives. This is Bruno Latour, one of the first scholars to study “the social construction of scientific facts”. What does this mean? Well, it’s part of the mythology of science that claims that scientists in their research are simply following where nature leads. In practice, it’s very nearly the other way around.

Consider the steps you’d need to take if you wanted to do some research into any branch of science: reading the relevant literature, crafting a hypothesis, considering the available equipment, designing an experiment, and, of course, finding funding for it. It’s common for such steps to be dismissed as mere details, but in fact they are more significant than that.

For instance, the literature you’ve read is the product of peer review and the evolution of scientific opinion, which has at least as much to do with academic politics as with nature. The hypothesis is a product of your education, and also of current fashions in academia (anyone who thinks that scientists are immune to the blandishments of intellectual fashion has never met a scientist). The equipment available depends on who has invested money into developing certain kinds of experimental gear, and also on what gear is popular and readily available. The experimental design is just as subject to fashion, and it also has to appeal to funding sources. And finally, the decision to grant or withhold funding for an experiment depends entirely on the behaviour of human beings.

On top of this, after conducting an experiment, you’d have to interpret the results, write a paper, get a prestigious co-author or two to sign on, submit it to a journal, wait nervously while it goes through the peer-review process, and revise the paper at least once in response to comments by the anonymous peer reviewers. Then, once the paper is finally published, other researchers will respond to it and potentially adapt their own research projects in light of what you’ve found. All these, again, are social processes.

The end result of such a research project — a half sentence and footnote, say, in some future textbook — is thus almost entirely a product of social interactions among human beings. At the centre of those interactions, the flake of grit at the heart of the pearl, is the fact that you asked nature a specific question and got an equally specific answer. That process of question and answer is the thing that makes science as effective a way of making sense of the world as it is, but it does not erase the effect of social processes on the result — it just means that the result has to have some contact somewhere with nature.

Now take that and multiply it by four centuries or so of scientific effort, and the result is a vast social process built atop a relatively narrow foundation of natural facts. Those facts are carefully selected, curated, and assembled by the social process into a model of the world. Ask different questions, use different equipment, give the results a different theoretical spin, and you can quite easily end up with a completely different model of the world. That’s not something most people want to talk about in the scientific community, because it would weaken their claims to influence, wealth and privilege. That’s why so many scientists were shouting “Believe the science!” at the tops of their lungs not so long ago: maintaining the cultural prestige of science, and thus their own social status and its perks, took precedence over nearly everything else.

If you want another glimpse at just how far the social enterprise of science veers from its imagined ideal, look up the phrase “replication crisis”. One of the essential principles of science is that any scientifically valid finding has to be replicable; it can’t be some kind of fluke. These days, for an astounding number of studies in a very wide range of sciences, that’s no longer true. Very few people in the sciences want to talk about how much of this is caused by experimental and statistical fraud, both of which are pervasive in those branches of science where corporate profits are involved and far from rare even in less lucrative fields of research.

If science were really a matter of following nature wherever it leads, the emergence of the replication crisis would have caused a sudden, frantic search for the causes. We’re talking, after all, about something that challenges the act of faith at the centre of the scientific enterprise. By and large, though, that search hasn’t happened. Instead, scientists have chosen either to ignore the problem or to denounce anyone who dares to draw attention to it — typical behaviour of any elite group faced with a challenge to their legitimacy.

This is the kind of thing Bruno Latour wrote about. In We Have Never Been Modern, he proposed that most people are convinced, or at least act as though they’re convinced, that the modern world is something new and unique in human history because, unlike all others, our sciences really do tell us the objective truth about nature. These people also appear to be convinced that the same thing is true of everything else in our culture.

This is the heart of modernity — the conviction that keeps people today from making use of any of the hard-won lessons of past civilisations, or even learning from our own civilisation’s catastrophic mistakes. It is a fond, false, foolish belief — and Latour and Josephson-Storm have both shown that it can’t be justified except by the most absurd sorts of special pleading and circular logic.

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Why Occultists don’t believe in progress

By John Michael Greer

What does it mean if we give up the myth of modernity, the conviction that we — alone of all the human beings who have ever lived — see the world truly? Surprisingly enough, we don’t have to give up science. That our scientific worldview is not given by nature, but assembled out of data points drawn from nature, does not make science meaningless or false. It simply makes the work of the scientist a product of human society and culture, rather than a revelation handed down from on high.

In a very real sense, science stripped of the myth of modernity takes on the same shape as the study of history. It is absurd to think that history is simply an account of what happened; “what happened” in a month in any small town would fill entire libraries. The historian’s task is to craft a narrative which illuminates some part of the past, using actual incidents as building blocks. A scientist without modernist pretensions, similarly, crafts a narrative that illuminates some part of nature, using replicable experimental results as building blocks. Theories along these lines are useful rather than true; they start by accepting the reality that the human mind is not complex enough to understand the infinite sweep of the cosmos, and then goes on to say, “but as far as we are capable of making sense of things, this story seems to reflect what happens”.

This sort of thinking is doubtless a bitter pill to swallow for those who have founded their own identities on the notion that humanity is or should be the conqueror of nature. Here again, though, the failure of those notions to create a world fit for human habitation is increasingly clear to many of us. And the sooner we accept that the stories told by today’s industrial societies are just another set of mythologies, and that the technologies they’ve created to manipulate the world are just another set of clever gimmicks — why, the sooner we can get to work discarding those aspects of modernity that have failed abjectly, and picking up those older habits and stories and technologies that are better suited to the world we find ourselves facing. Only then, can we begin to do something less inept and foredoomed with our time on Earth.

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

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

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

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Who are the strikers fooling?

By Terry Eagleton

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

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

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

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How woke is Nietzsche?

By Giles Fraser

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

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

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

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

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

One of them is individualism. In a society which lacks any strong bonds between its members, everyone is likely to have their own interpretation of the world, just as everyone is likely to have their own toothbrush. You wouldn’t want to borrow someone else’s version of the truth, any more than you would want to borrow their toothbrush. Truth becomes privatised. It’s a matter of my personal experience, and surely no one can challenge that. 

In fact, personal experience is as open to debate and dissent as the existence of God. There’s nothing absolute about it. One of the key insights of the late modern period, before the birth of postmodernism, is the recognition that human beings are constitutively opaque to themselves. “Constitutively”, because this lack of self-transparency is built into the kind of animals we are, not just some lamentable self-blindness which we could put right with a little more self-reflection.

When Oedipus in Sophocles’s drama finally comes to know who he is, he recognises that he is a stranger to himself. It has taken incest, parricide, pollution, self-blinding and self-exile to arrive at the conclusion that he has no certain grasp of his own identity, and that this is the condition of us all. There must be easier ways of learning this lesson. 

There was a time when we thought that we were transparent to ourselves and that it was others who were indecipherable to us. Nowadays, we tend to accept that we aren’t always in entire possession of our own experience, and that others can sometimes know us better than we know ourselves. Among other things, this is because other people are frequently well-placed to see what we do, and what we do is a surer guide to who we are than what we say or think we are. If someone insists that he’s a passionate lover of animals and spends his spare time dissecting live frogs, then he is self-deluded. It’s the beliefs implicit in our behaviour, not those recorded in our memoirs, that really count. If the truth is what we feel, there can be no place for self-deception in human affairs. It simply wouldn’t be possible for a prime minister to declare himself a pretty straight sort of guy, and probably believe it, yet seek to deceive the public about the invasion of Iraq. 

So I am no infallible guide to the meaning of my own experience. I thought at the time I was furious, but looking back I realise that I was afraid. It’s true that my experience is beyond doubt in the sense that I really am in agony, and no mistake; but to know that what I’m feeling is agony rather than ecstasy, I must have the concepts of agony and ecstasy, and this isn’t something I can achieve all by myself. I can know this only by belonging to a community whose language includes these notions.

In this sense, even the most private of experiences is public. Toddlers don’t spontaneously come up with the concept of unfairness. Rather, they take part in a form of social life in which the idea of unfairness has a function, they watch how their elders behave and listen to how words are used as forces in these contexts. If they have the misfortune to be brought up in Conservative Party headquarters, they will never get the hang of the idea.

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Another insight of late modernity is that experience and reality are in some ways out of sync. It looks as though the sun circles the earth, but this is because the Earth revolves on its axis. (“The sun’s coming up — or as the new theory has it, the Earth’s going down,” as a 17th-century character remarks in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosenkrantz and Guildernstern are Dead). One purpose of science is to close the gap between reality and our experience of it, as well as explaining how the gap comes about. 

Like all concepts, truth is inherently social. There must be public criteria by which we can determine what counts as true or false, and these criteria are nobody’s private possession. The philosopher Wittgenstein imagines someone exclaiming “But I know how tall I am!” and placing his hand on top of his head. He hasn’t grasped the fact that tallness is a comparative notion, one that involves socially agreed modes of measurement. There must also be public criteria for conflicts over truth. Disagreement is only possible if you can agree on what you are disagreeing over. We aren’t conflicting over the value of the pound if you are thinking of sterling and I am thinking of the American poet of that name. 

A certain degree of consensus must underlie the most vehement of altercations. People who cry “Well, it’s true for me” (the #MeToo generation is also the “Me-Me-Me” generation) haven’t grasped this point, either. Rather than making the coldly impersonal idea of truth more warmly experiential, they end up abolishing it altogether. If truth is just what anyone happens to think is true, then the word drops out of use. It becomes impossible to distinguish between what I feel and the way the world actually is. There are people who insist that slavery is one of the most outrageous episodes in Western history, yet put the word “truth” in scare quotes. They tend to do the same with the word “fact”, while maintaining that it’s a fact that women are equal to men. 

Does all this mean that truth is beyond dispute? Certainly not for science. The fact that truth isn’t just subjective doesn’t mean that it must be absolute. The one is just the flipside of the other. Relativists and subjectivists fear that unless they are right, truth becomes dogmatic, infallible and authoritarian. But this is to be afraid of a bogeyman. To say that a proposition is scientific is to say among other things that it could be wrong. It’s the kind of thing that someone might always come along and falsify. It differs in this way from “Put that tiger down!” or “Sorry, make that two tuna sandwiches”.

Science is a never-ending argument, in which one’s conclusions are perpetually open to revision, and argument is fundamentally a political affair. You must make sure that everyone gets a chance to participate in the debate, that they do so on equal terms, that nobody is allowed to impose their own partisan interests on the discussion and so on. None of this guarantees the emergence of truth, but it’s an essential pre-condition of it. People who claim “It’s true for me” tend not to be interested in any of this. What is there to argue about? It is they who are the absolutists, since there would seem no way of disproving what they assert. Anyway, someone can always protest that the “it’s true for me” claim isn’t true for them.

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“It’s true for me” springs from a false egalitarianism. If everyone is to be included in political society, then everyone’s views must be respected as well. So what about the view that everyone isn’t to be included? Is that to be respected as well? And what of the so-called law of contradiction? If you think that reading Agatha Christie gives you prostate cancer and I disagree, then one of us has to be wrong. But postmodernists are reluctant to admit that anyone is wrong. It offends against the law of inclusivity, as well as making some people sound inferior to others. Anyway, from what Olympian vantage point can one make such a judgement? How can I possibly judge that there are some sexist police officers in Britain? Isn’t any such claim a sign of moral superiority or intellectual elitism on my part? 

Such is the addled thinking that passes for genuine argument in certain circles. A fear of sounding authoritarian, when all you’re trying to do is tell the truth, haunts contemporary culture. This is why it’s fashionable to qualify what one says with the word “necessarily” — as in “It’s not necessarily that people are passing themselves off as Tom Cruise, it’s just that there’s a crisis of identity”, where what you mean is that people aren’t passing themselves as Tom Cruise at all. But it sounds offensively dogmatic to say so. Similarly, to say “It’s nine o’clock” sounds unpleasantly absolute, so it’s advisable to throw in a “like”. “It’s like nine o’clock” sounds far more agreeably uncertain. A pervasive sense of uncertainty is one reason why truth has come into disrepute. But there are other reasons, which i’ll return to in my next essay.  

In November 2022, the Wellcome Collection, a museum dedicated to the history of medicine, announced the closure of Medicine Man, an exhibition of artefacts relating to the history of medicine collected by its founder Sir Henry Wellcome. The decision to close this exhibition was itself perfectly reasonable. As a collector, Sir Henry Wellcome was a bit of a magpie, and the exhibition, which was 15 years old, was rather fusty. However, what mainly attracted attention was the statement which the curators published on Twitter that they had closed it because it “perpetuates a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language”. To understand this statement, it is necessary to go back two and a half years to an earlier announcement from the Wellcome Collection in June 2020 in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Under the heading “Anti-Blackness and Racism”, it declared that the Collection was built on “racist and patriarchal narratives” and that institutional racism was enmeshed within its fabric. It went on to suggest that not only the Wellcome Collection but museums generally were “built on a foundation of white supremacy” and had replicated “racist behaviours” for decades. The curators declared their intention of “continually ask[ing] questions about power, representation and the civic role of public museums” and focussing on the “lived experiences of those who have been silenced, erased and ignored”.

What does all that mean? It is palpably untrue that medical history, as presented in Medicine Man, was based on racist, sexist and ableist theories. Certainly, museums reflect the historical outlook of those who assembled their collections and their successors who curated them. In Britain, they were generally able-bodied white males. But museums do not, just by virtue of that fact, replicate racist behaviours. Nor does our culture silence or ignore non-European experience where it is relevant. I think that what the curators meant to say was that the exhibition treated medicine as a western science of which non-white groups were passive consumers with no worthwhile contribution of their own. This, they felt, implied a hierarchy of cultures in which the west was superior to the rest, a notion which was offensive to non-western racial groups.

The Wellcome Collection is not alone. The Museum Association, which represents museums generally, has called on them to “address colonial structures and approaches to all areas of museum work”. At about the same time as the curators of the Wellcome Collection published their June 2020 statement, the Director of the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew, probably the world’s leading institution dedicated to plant science, issued a similar statement on its behalf. He began with the usual cringing confession that its history “shamefully draws from a legacy that has deep roots in colonialism and racism”. The only fact cited to support this surprising assertion is that during the nineteenth century, the Royal Botanical Garden studied the movement of plants around the British Empire as part of its world-wide botanical mission. This is said to have made the Botanical Garden at Kew a “beacon of privilege and exploitation”. The director went on to declare that Kew would in future decolonise its collections and “tackle structural racism in plant and fungal science”, with a view to achieving “transformative and societal change” in modern Britain. The inference is that merely by having existed and collected information and specimens in the great age of imperialism Kew Gardens is in some way complicit in modern inequalities in Britain. Finally this. “There is no acceptable neutral position on this subject [racial injustice;]; to stay silent is to be complicit”. This is a particularly odd thing to say. It seems obvious that one can be an excellent plant scientist and an outstanding plant historian without taking any view at all on racial injustice.

These statements have certain points in common.

The first is that they are proposing a political program for the modern day, supported by a highly selective approach to the past which sees everything through the prism of race. Race becomes the supremely important phenomenon, masking every other aspect of a complex culture. Racial politics provide the framework of values by which every institution concerned with the past is to be judged. There are many important factors in the way that human societies develop. Race is only one of them and not necessarily the most important. Any serious commentator on the current state of historical studies ought to welcome attempts to present aspects of history which have previously been ignored or marginalised. That includes the story of ethnic minorities and non-European societies. But it does not mean that the whole of Britain’s modern history should be viewed through their eyes. It does not mean that the role of slavery or empire in Britain’s economic, cultural and social history should be exaggerated beyond recognition. And it does not mean that current political priorities should determine how we understand the past.

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The second thing these statements have in common, is that they lose sight of the broader evolution of human history. Benjamin Disraeli once observed in response to an antisemitic taunt in the House of Commons, that “while the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon”. Victorian elites undoubtedly regarded their own civilisation as superior to others. This been a universal habit of humanity ever since the Greek city-states and the ancient dynasties of China dismissed the whole of the rest of the world as barbarians. If these prejudices are ever justified, it is only for short periods of time, two or three centuries at the most. Empires and cultures are transient. They have their periods of power and creativity, before fading away. Medicine is as good an example as any. White males have not always dominated medical science. There have been periods when major contributions came from non-European cultures: Chinese, Indian and Arab in particular. Historians have not ignored this. Great books have been written about it, almost all in European languages. The 26 volumes of the History of Science and Technology in China by the Cambridge scientist and historian Joseph Needham is one of the most remarkable works ever written on the multicultural origins of modern science. But this should not blind us to the fact that the three centuries before the Second World War were the European centuries, in medicine as in other sciences.

With very few exceptions, such as the use of some medicinal plants, indigenous non-Europeans contributed very little. If one looks across a broader chronological range, the picture is very different. But calls for the decolonisation of academic disciplines do not do that. They generally focus narrowly on the 18th and 19th century and seek to debunk one of the few indisputable facts about that period, namely that it was a period in which cultural and scientific developments fundamental to the modern world almost all emanated from Europe or from European settlements elsewhere.

Decolonisation has been demanded of many other disciplines which were never in any meaningful sense colonised: the visual arts, music, literature, philosophy and even the physical sciences and mathematics. The only connection between these fields of study and Europe’s imperial past is that the West achieved a dominant position in them during the imperial era. The decolonisation statement of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division at Oxford reveals the same obsession with race and the same tendentious attempt to portray racism as a perennial theme of western thinking. It begins by seeking to discredit its own subject by referring to the scientific racism of the 19th century, which posited a racial hierarchy identified by physiological characteristics, a view which no serious scientist has entertained for many decades and which has no current relevance to the subject.

It goes on to identify science with empire by pointing to the Victorians’ collection of material samples and botanical specimens across the globe. Moving to the present day, it calls for a study of deep-rooted racial biases in digital technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning. One would not have thought that the subject was capable of racial bias. But as the statement proceeds, it becomes clear that the object is to redefine knowledge itself, in a way which artificially devalues western science. “As we work towards greater inclusion”, it declares, “we need to have a broader understanding of what constitutes ‘scientific knowledge’. Among other things, this is said to involve “challenging western-centric ideas of ‘objectivity’, ‘expertise’ and ‘merit’”, and “removing structural hierarchies that privilege certain knowledge and certain peoples over others”. It is clear that the authors of this document believe that the empirical scientific method as conceived in the west since the 17th century is just one of a number of equally valid approaches to the subject, and that it is racially biased to prefer this to any other.

There are two basic ideas behind statements like these. One is about the nature of historical truth. The other is about inherited collective guilt.

The repeated emphasis on challenging the structures of power is an echo of the teaching of postmodernist philosophers such as Michel Foucault. Foucault was the leading exponent of the idea that objective truth is unattainable, because truth is by nature subjective. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), he taught that the structures of power within a society determine what is generally perceived to be true. Few people outside the discipline of philosophy have read Foucault’s opaque works. But many more have read Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism, published in 1978, which applied Foucault’s ideas to the legacy of the great European empires. Said argued that powerful groups control the intellectual framework within which ideas are discussed and determines what constitutes knowledge. Historical truth, he claimed, is not discovered. It is made by historians, in accordance with unconscious prejudices moulded by the power structures of society. The power structures which had enabled Europeans to dominate much of the world between the 18th and the 20th centuries had generated a view of the world based on a hierarchy of civilisations which patronised and marginalised non-European peoples. According to Said, this frame of mind persisted. It led modern scholars to construct a narrative of the past which treated non-western races as representing an earlier stage of human evolution, less valid than the more developed experience of the modern west. The task of the historian was therefore to deconstruct the hegemonist West and substitute a different power structure in which other people’s truth could be acknowledged.

These ideas have been extremely influential among many people who know nothing of their origin and have never heard of Foucault or Said. In 2015, the organisers of the campaign to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from its niche outside Oriel College issued a pamphlet entitled Our Aims. Their purpose, it said, was to suppress the frame of mind which the statue symbolised. It was to “remedy the highly selective narrative of traditional academia—which frames the West as sole producers of universal knowledge—by integrating subjugated and local epistemologies…” When, three years ago, the Director of the Pitt-Rivers Museum decided to ask a Maasai shaman to divine which objects from the Maasai collections of the museum had been stolen from their original owners and to repatriate the items that he designated, she was giving practical effect to the idea that modern historical and archaeological methods are no more valid as a route to truth than mystical divination employed in other cultures. If truth is subjective, then every ethnic group may have its own truth, and the whole concept of objective knowledge disappears.

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As for inherited collective guilt, the argument is that if people once suffered what we now regard as injustice at the hands of our forebears, we owe it to their descendants to make that good. One thing that the study of history teaches us is that injustice as we conceive it has been the lot of much of humanity at most times. Much of the history of the world is a history of the brutal exercise of force: tyrannies, wars, massacres, persecutions. Historically, most people at most times have abhorred democracy, rejected political and religious tolerance and regarded the very idea of gender or racial equality as ridiculous. What should we do about this now that we think differently?

Logically, perhaps, humanity at large ought to atone for its own past. But at that level of generality, the gesture would be largely meaningless. After all, injustice is indiscriminately distributed across the centuries and continents. It would deprive what is really a political program of its political force. So the call for atonement for heritable guilt is directed against some specific sector of humanity, say, white people, the British or Oxford University. This is not only irrational. It is also morally repellent. Historically, the idea that particular groups bear an inherited responsibility for some past iniquity has been the basis of ugly prejudices and vicious persecutions.

The desire to visit moral responsibility for the past on some identifiable sector of mankind has generally focused selectively on Britain’s involvement with empire and slavery. No one would today defend the worst moments of the British Empire: the rapacity of the East India Company before its political and military operations were brought under government control at the end of the 18th century; the Opium wars; the Amritsar massacre, and so on. But it is a gross offence against historical honesty to take all the worst features of some historical phenomenon and then serve them up as if they were the whole.

Throughout history, empire and armed migration have been part of the dynamic of human development. The values which we regard as characteristic of western civilisation were born in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome both of which were founded on slavery and imperial conquest. The bloody conquests of the Arabs in the seventh and eights centuries gave rise to a remarkable middle eastern civilisation, far more impressive than anything to be found in Europe in the same period. The rise of modern Japan as a technical and industrial giant had its origin in the forcible opening up of the “hermit isle” in the 1850s by the American navy. The European colonial empires between the 16th and the 20th centuries had the same catalytic effect on the world.

The British Empire was created and sustained by force or the threat of it, as all empires, indeed all governments, ultimately are. It denied self-determination to its indigenous populations until its final years. Yet it was also a remarkable administrative and cultural phenomenon. Those who governed it were guided by a variety of motives, patriotic, economic, military, geopolitical, evangelical. But at least in the last century and a half of the empire’s existence they were also infused with a strong streak of humanitarianism and idealism. The empire suppressed a variety of barbarous practices which it would have been convenient to tolerate, including cannibalism, suttee, human sacrifice and slavery. It brought spectacular economic development, creating global networks of shipping, railways and telegraph and injecting capital and enterprise into local economies. It brought relative peace, honest administration and the rule of law to much of the world. It built great world cities: Mumbai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney.

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Our forebears believed that good government was better than self-government, and that trade and economic development were better than cultural autarky. These are unfashionable views now, but there is nothing inherently disreputable about them. Would sub-Saharan Africa be better off today if Europeans had left its peoples to their own devices? Would modern India be better off if it had not inherited its subcontinental identity and economic infrastructure from Britain? Would the world as a whole be a better place if Europeans had never settled in the Americas or Australia? I do not think so.

Slavery was once among the most ancient and persistent institutions of mankind. The Arabs and the indigenous rulers of precolonial Africa were probably the greatest slavers who ever existed. The involvement of the Atlantic nations is, by comparison, relatively recent. It began with the Portuguese in the 15th century and the Spanish in the 16th. Britain was the last country to take to slave trading and the first country to reject it. In societies imbued by Christian moral teaching, slavery was only defensible on the footing that black people were not really human. In the late 18th and early 19th century, the rise of evangelical Christianity in Britain led to a major movement of moral revulsion against that idea. In 1772, the Court of King’s Bench declared that the English common law did not recognise property in another human being. The slave trade was criminalised throughout the British Empire in 1807, earlier than any other country except Denmark. Slavery itself was abolished by statute throughout the empire in 1834.

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For the remainder of the 19th century, Britain deployed its considerable diplomatic and naval power in suppressing the practice, initially on the Atlantic coasts of Africa, then in the African interior and the Indian ocean. The polemics surrounding Britain’s involvement in the slave trade concentrate on its participation in the 17th and 18th century slave trade while ignoring or belittling its involvement in the suppression of the trade. Yet historically the latter was very much more significant. The 17th and 18th century slave trade was in line with the conventional moral values of the age. But its suppression was revolutionary. It went against the tide of opinion elsewhere in Europe and against Britain’s economic interest. The global consequences were immense. The sheer size and global reach of Britain’s colonial empire was the biggest single factor in the suppression of a practice that had existed across the world from time immemorial.

To many people, all this is beside the point. Their real concern is with the present, and with those aspects of the past which serve their arguments about the present. Their anger against the past is provoked by a small number of totemic issues, of which race and empire are the most sensitive. These issues are totemic because the position which one takes on them is seen as a symbolic statement of which side one is on in the broader battle to shape the future. When an issue acquires totemic status, the actual facts disappear from view. The issue becomes a mere occasion for political self-expression. Hence the vandalism of statues and the campaigns to rename streets and buildings.

The statue of Edward Colston in Bristol was erected to honour his foundation of schools, hospitals and almshouses in Bristol. Tobias Rustat’s monument in Jesus College Cambridge was put there to mark his generous gifts to his college. All Souls College Library was once named after Christopher Codrington to mark his funding of one of Oxford’s great institutions of learning. All three individuals had some involvement in slavery, but none of these memorials and dedications commemorated that aspect of their lives. The objection to them suffers from the same partial vision of the past as the unbalanced historical accounts of Britain’s imperial record. Once a person or an institution is touched by slavery or empire, nothing else about them matters, however important or admirable. This marks the extreme point which tendentious selection can reach. David Hume is thought unworthy of commemoration by Edinburgh University because he shared the patronising indifference of his contemporaries to other races. Yet this is a fact about Hume which is of very little importance when measured against his stature as one of the intellectual giants of the 18th century Scottish enlightenment. In the eyes of a significant minority of the British population, mostly young, Winston Churchill has become a mere symbol of English imperialism and racism. Far more significant aspects of his life, such as his contribution to Britain’s survival in the Second World War and the destruction of Nazism, are swept aside.

Does this matter? I believe that it does.

The civilisation of mankind since the 17th century has been based on the notion that there is such a thing as objective truth. It may be more or less difficult to identify with confidence, but it exists. In history, the difficulty in discovering the truth is due to the uneven survival of sources and to the problems of interpreting those that we have, not to inherited prejudices or ideological mental blocks. We have traditionally built our intellectual world on the basis that we get closest to the truth by objective study of the available material, by abandoning immovable preconceptions, by logical reasoning and by willingness to engage with dissenting opinion. These are not just western constructs. They are universal principles, which are necessary if we are to discuss controversial issues in the same language. There is no alternative route to truth dependent on different racial identities or different hierarchies of power. Yet these basic principles of rational discourse are now under challenge.

The repudiation of Britain’s past in the name of a modern political agenda is currently a minority position. But there is a serious risk that it will become the orthodoxy of the next generation. It is strong in some important groups, notably the young and politically active, and a vocal contingent in the academic world. It may not be a passing phase. The habit of reinforcing one’s political instincts by adopting whatever facts suit them is too deeply ingrained in human nature. Today, it is intensified by the social media. They are a major source of information, especially for the young. But they are curated by algorithms which amplify views that already exist, suppressing nuance, balance or doubt and giving a misleading impression of a great tide of opinion when the material is often generated by a handful of fanatics.

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Those who believe that knowledge and truth are mere social constructs are almost bound to end up by suppressing competing views. If what we think we know is actually no more than an artificial consensus created by power structures invisibly controlling our schools, universities, publishers and museums, then there is no point in debate. You have to change the power structures, take control of those institutions and create a new consensus. This is what is now happening. It is happening with the enthusiastic support of many of the institutions themselves. They lack the self-confidence to stand up for a rational approach to empirical research and knowledge which alone justifies their existence. I am not going to suggest that modern academic scholars on the British Empire and slavery are all determinists in the mould of Foucault and Edward Said. However, their treatment of the past often shares the three main vices of postmodernist history: tendentious selection, exaggeration and intolerance of dissent.

Oxford’s 2017 “Ethics and Empire Project” was set up to explore the moral and factual basis of the conventional hostility to empire. It provoked vocal opposition from many academics. One opponent of the project, a professor of history at King’s College London, was quoted in The Guardian as saying that “any attempt to create a balance sheet of the good and evil of empire can’t be based on rigorous scholarship”. It is rare to find a serious scholar overtly rejecting the very idea of balance in the assessment of controversial evidence. But it is not as rare as it should be. The fact that his protest was supported by 170 academics in various open letters sends a depressing message about the current state of scholarship on this issue. It also explains why scholars who dissent from the current orthodoxy find it wise to keep quiet about it if they value their careers.

Every human society depends for its cohesion on a sense of collective identity. The French historian Ernest Renan, in his Sorbonne lecture of 1882 “What is a Nation?”, argued that the solidarities which created a nation were primarily historical. Renan’s target was the ethnic nationalism and social theories preached by overt racists such as Johann Herder and Arthur Gobineau. National identity, Renan declared, did not depend on ethnic or linguistic solidarities, but on a history of collective effort, collective sacrifice and collective devotion. It depended on a consciousness of having done great things together in the past, and wanting to do more of them in future. His definition is pithier in French: “avoir fait de grandes choses ensemble, vouloir en faire encore”.

There is a great irony to modern debates about the past. Those who claim to be the champions of ethnic minorities are seeking to undermine Britain’s past as a source of collective solidarity. They are reverting to morally questionable notions of conflicting ethnic identities which can only fragment our society, obstruct the integration of minorities and undermine any sense of community. The problem is aggravated in the case of race by a notion of hereditary moral responsibility, which requires one to recognise an entirely artificial class of modern victims defined by race. The result is to perpetuate grievances on account of past events that have no practical relevance to modern lives.

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Bret Easton Ellis: 'My generation wanted to be offended'

By Bret Easton Ellis

Democratic institutions only work if people accept the legitimacy of their decisions even where they disagree with them. For that to happen, they have to identify themselves with the wider society to which they belong. The fragmentation of a society’s historic identity can only hinder that process. The problem is aggravated by the intolerant and polemical tone that characterises much of what is written and spoken about Britain’s past. The great apostle of Victorian liberalism John Stuart Mill foresaw that the main threat to its survival would come not from the authoritarian state but from the conformity imposed by public opinion. Current campaigns to vilify parts of our history are an attempt to create a new conformity, a situation in which people will not dare to express contrary opinions for fear of provoking outrage and abuse. These are symptoms of the narrowing of our intellectual world. Recently, publication of a book written by the director of the Oxford Ethics and Empire project was indefinitely “deferred” (in effect rejected) by Bloomsbury, the publisher which had commissioned it, on the ground that “public feeling” did not support its publication at the moment. This is the mentality which Mill and other apostles of liberal values dreaded.

We will never understand the past unless we recognise that human beings are light and shade and acknowledge both. Few individuals and no societies have ever been wholly good or wholly bad in any age. This mixture of darkness and light is a critical part of the process by which human societies develop. We can celebrate the achievements of our forebears as well as learning from their mistakes and iniquities. To reject what is wonderful and fascinating about humanity in favour of a monochrome view of the past, dictated by current priorities, is obsessive and fanatical. It is also very bad history

These New Roundheads,with their destructive campaigns against historical objectivity, share a deadly combination of dogmatic intolerance and sanctimonious philistinism with the original Roundheads. The earlier Roundheads ultimately failed in their attempt to produce a uniform culture in England according to their own narrow vision of virtue. A civilised society should wish the same fate upon their modern successors.

This is an edited version of the Pharos Lecture, which Jonathan Sumption delivered on February 27 in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford

You also want to watch the Queen’s speech but know it will be a lightning rod for another argument. The carols on the radio broadcast peace on earth and goodwill to all men — and yet Christmas is a battleground: religion, politics, family relationships, all lubricated with a glass or three of your favourite poison. The first week in January is the busiest week of the year for divorce lawyers. No wonder people fear Christmas as much as they love it.

There are, roughly speaking, two camps when it comes to family disagreements — those in the truth party and those in the peace party. The truth party believes that honesty is the best policy — even if that means upsetting people. The peace party believes that domestic harmony trumps demonstrative displays of opinion sharing — even if that means biting your tongue and not calling things out.

The truth party argues that real peace can only be built on truth, so they say it as they see it. They believe the family peacekeepers are infuriating cowards, preferring the quiet life even if that means enabling foolishness or prejudice by refusing to condemn it. More persuasively, the truth party insists that conflict is a way for people to understand each other, a means of human contact. And indeed, there is something deathly dull about people constantly being nice to each other, skirting round their differences. For many in my family, arguing with one another is how we show our love for each other.

The peace party, however, sees little merit in calling people out when this only leads to rancour and acrimony. Surely a part of what we expect of truth — part of its promise — is that it has a fundamentally uniting quality, that it brings us together around a reality that we all have in common? If it fails at this, why do we even want it so? And what’s more, isn’t what you call truth just another expression of your boorish self-assertion? You call it the truth or the search for truth, but that is just to honour your petty argumentativeness with some comically grand description. The word truth is an alibi for the family bully.

The peace party and the truth party would seem to be fundamental philosophical enemies.

Edmund Burke was interesting on the subject: “Perhaps truth may be better than peace. But as we have scarcely ever the same certainty in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the truth is evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company charity, the highest of virtues.” In other words, given that truth and opinion are so commonly confused, better go with harmony which is easier to recognise.

The problem here is that peace is not always as easy to recognise as Burke suspects. The difference between a family that puts on a show and buries its differences and one that agrees to give Brexit a break, and talk about something else for a while may not be all that easy to spot at first. Peace is not just the absence of battle, or the noise of battle. Harmony cannot be secure when premised on the quiet of lies and deceptions. That’s just as destructive as too much fighting.

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But what if it’s all these military terms that are not helping: winning the argument, peacekeepers etc. The assumption of social media seems to be that truth is a combat sport. But often, when people are serious about it, that’s not what’s it’s like at all. Those who work in laboratories to find the next vaccine for Covid are not endlessly scrapping with each other. One of the most beautiful things about the scientific method is that it enables truth seeking to be a collaborative exercise. And though with many of the things we argue about there isn’t an agreed standard of reference, the idea that truth-seeking could be a communal exercise offers a welcome contrast to that lone ranger Mr Valiant-for-Truth opinion columnist approach.

Here a broadly Jewish Talmudic approach has much to recommend it. On the pages of the Talmud — on the very same page, in fact — different opinions co-exist in a work of corporate collective genius. And part of its beauty is that different takes on things are not seen as destructive or peace-threatening, rather they are a part of the whole conversation of faith, united yet questing. Argument here isn’t about ego or individual self-assertion. To know the truth is to see things from multiple perspectives. And only when peacefully present to each other can such argument take place. Truth requires peace just as much as peace requires truth. Far from being philosophical enemies, the peace party and the truth party cannot get anywhere without each other.

This may have taken us far from the Christmas table. But in essence, the point is just as relevant. We have come together to eat with these people for a reason. Family or friends, we have a bond. And only when we acknowledge what we have in common can argumentative truth-seeking work to enrich us all, rather than descend into tiresome and vexations point scoring or virtue signalling.

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A shared table, at which everyone has a place, is the most democratic and precious of spaces for understanding each other. Here, you don’t always have to be right, you don’t have to be the cleverest. If you are of the truth party, put down your weapons, leave social media aside: this is where we can — and sometimes do — listen to one another. If you are of the peace party, don’t crush the conversation. Life is conversation, and conversation is often contestation. Listen to the bubble of noise, rising and falling and be thankful.

Yes, there may be a few tears. And your self-righteous daughter probably won’t say a word to your pompous uncle. But at least they ate together. Just as people who can’t stand each other can still pray together. You won’t sort out your differences over Brexit either. But thank God that we are all still here, remember those less fortunate, and raise a glass to those who we love and see no longer.

Happy Christmas.

Today, we simply accept that leaders lie; not just occasionally but habitually. Trump did. Johnson does. Putin got there way before either of them. And yet, strangely, part of Johnson’s appeal has always been said to be his “authenticity”. He is a real person. His history of lying did not bother many people, nor his history of betraying everyone he has worked for or every woman he has been involved with. The electorate could not be expected to know the truth about Borisconi’s career.

I started calling him that because he always was — pre-Trump — the only politician with a similarly acute understanding of the incestuous relationship between politicians and the media. Surely he could be king of both? Or so he thought. He could control what he understood to be the most important thing about power, which was not “truth” but “the narrative”. His narrative was “fun”. For Bunga Bunga parties just substitute batshit-crazy Jennifer Arcuri and a Christmas quiz.

But things fall apart. Some lies matter more than others. This must have been a shock to Borisconi because the visual evidence of his lies — the video, the photo — cuts through. No amount of wordplay or random classical references can make people unsee what they have seen. Mirabile dictu!

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Just as the CCTV footage of Matt Hancock snogging his bit on the side did for him, so these photos did for Downing Street. Those who worked for Borisconi were sent out to lie for him, and then he lied about them too. This we know for certain. It is not an idea, an opinion, or an interpretation. It is a fact.

But it’s not necessarily the end for him. He may stagger on until the next wave of the virus has passed. Who, quite frankly, would want to take over right now? He may chuck it in, not because he suddenly acquires a sense of morality or even shame, but because he is skint and there is money to be made in them there hills of after-dinner buffoonery.

I’m so tired of writing about the mendacity and entitlement of the man, though. I would far rather talk about another man who has also made me think about the nature of reality this week (and whom I unashamedly adore): Keanu Reeves.

Normally, press junkets for a new film are nothing more than dull promotion. But in their interviews for The Matrix Resurrections, Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss answered questions about the nature of reality in interesting ways. The Matrix, after all, is an entire world of distraction — and an influential one at that. Who could have known in 1999 how it would infiltrate our culture?

Take “redpilling”, a term which has come to be used by many men’s rights activists, largely thanks to a Reddit thread in which men discuss waking up to the reality that women oppress men. Not all these guys are incels, but redpilling is nearly always talked about online by those on the anti-feminist Right.

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For some, the notion of questioning reality that The Matrix so cleverly explored has morphed into a denial of reality. Sure, men are oppressed — but more so than women? Is that the radical breakthrough that the red pill offers? Apparently so.

Will facts and statistics change their minds? I know now that we are living in a profoundly anti-science moment. Anti-vaxxers do not believe in science. Many trans-activists do not accept basic biology. Grace Lavery talks of a liberated future in which transwomen like herself will be able to have abortions — and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I have fought my entire life for women’s right to abortion. But since transwomen cannot get pregnant, I wonder how this is progressive, how this fantasy of womanhood is in any way radical, and not in some way deeply insulting to women’s actual experience of abortion? Can we really say physical reality has had its day?

Reeves talked in an interview about having dinner with a director who had his three teenage children with him. They had not seen The Matrix, so he explained that it was about a guy in a virtual world who was trying to get back to reality. The young girl asked: “Why? Who cares if it’s real?” Keanu said: “You don’t care if it’s real?” She said: “No”. When the interviewer asked Keanu how it made him feel, he paused and said: “Awesome.”

Are we the 17-year-old girl at dinner with Keanu Reeves who no longer cares what is real? I’m not convinced. Reality TV, itself scripted and managed, may be coming to the end of its cruel reign. Yet it was Ant and Dec on I’m A Celebrity, gunning for our Prime Minister, who alerted the Westminster bubble to the idea that the non-stop pizza, quiz, cheese and wine gatherings during lockdown was ‘cutting through’. A basic unfairness was exposed; a truth about rules not applying to those who govern us.

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It was almost as if reality mattered, that endless lying was no longer acceptable. There is always something that punctures the Matrix. It’s there in The Communist Manifesto: “Man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Sure, it’s more comfortable to be fooled. But in the end, we have to do the work. We can argue forever about subjective and objective truth but hold the hand of a new baby or the hand of a person who is about to die and tell me that everything is virtual and nothing matters.

You can’t can you? The glitch in the Matrix is where we find ourselves. It’s the only place to be.

He likes to quote from two of my books. One follows the unusual fate of Dreyfus supporters who lived long enough to experience the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of France. The second book attempts to understand why so many former “anti-racist” activists from the Left and the far-Left became collaborators and why so many former anti-Semites of the Right and the far-Right took part in the Résistance. Sometimes, Zemmour quotes me accurately. Often, he adds his own selective emphasis to my work and attributes interpretations to me which are his and not mine. On occasion, he will start a sentence with “as historian Simon Epstein says,” before wheeling out a misrepresentation of something I have written or, worse, something I have not written at all.

I haven’t registered my disapproval before. Firstly because I didn’t really care enough. Zemmour, who I didn’t think was such a bad egg, was not alone in using and abusing history for his own ends: this has been part and parcel of intellectual life, and especially of the polemic-obsessed media, for some time. I also used to find it funny — really funny — to see this old Gallo-Roman country, the Church’s eldest daughter, rely on a Jew to fulfil the threefold mission of eulogising France’s lost greatness, bemoaning  its besmirched identity, and proudly raising its old standard once more. At times, it felt Zemmour was the new Joan of Arc. It was he who was holding the sword others had dropped and rallying the troops for battle.

I do not know what mark the man will leave on France’s history. Will it be providential or tragic? Or — and this cannot be ruled out — fleeting and benign? Or perhaps even comical? But that is not why I am writing. What I am interested in here is the position he will occupy — and doubtless already does occupy — in the long and tormented history of the Jews of this country. France’s Jews, like the rest of the diaspora, know they are exposed to anti-Semitism, an intractable problem which alternates between phases of remission, sometimes short and sometimes long, phases of acceleration, flare-ups, and then further remission. Jews also know that some among them — a minority thankfully — cave under pressure and accept anti-Semitism. In some cases, they even help to propagate it.

It used to be the far-Left that best illustrated this problem. In the winter of 1953, Jewish communists in the Soviet Union competed with one another to lend credibility to dark conspiracy theories about Jewish doctors. More recently, Left-wing apologists of Islamism have included Jews, who profess a radical hatred for the State of Israel and the Jewish people. These anti-Zionist Jews try to make themselves useful by mildly scolding their fellow activists — who profess to be humanitarians — for chanting “Death to Jews!” at pro-Palestine demonstrations. They explain, gently, that some demands are best kept to oneself, and that these especially should not be uttered in public — for obvious tactical reasons.

What’s different with Zemmour is that he is on the far-Right and not on the far-Left. He is akin to Trump-supporting ideologues in the US and their Hungarian counterparts and is, in France, at the forefront of this new way of doing politics. His spin on Dreyfus (who, in his eyes, wasn’t really innocent) has a rotten smell. His apology for Pétain (who, in his eyes, wasn’t guilty really) puts him firmly in the camp of the post-Vichy far-Right. It also positions him on the edge of the neo-Nazi, ultra-far-Right (only the edge, of course; as a Jew, he will never quite belong). The same goes for his opposition to the Pleven and Gayssot laws, without which racism, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial would be permissible. And then there were his comments about the Jewish children who were buried in Israel after being brutally killed in Toulouse, which were truly despicable.

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When Zemmour castigates women, immigrants, homosexuals, socialists, centrists, elites, or metropolitan liberals, he does it out of profound conviction, fascinated as he is with the rhetorical heritage of the far-Right — which he has himself expanded, copiously, with his rants.

Media savviness, too, motivates his skewering of Jews. His historical mission, as he sees it, is to reconcile the patriotic bourgeoisie and the working classes. In concrete terms, this means that he is betting simultaneously — and this is difficult — on both traditional Right-wing voters and supporters of the populist far-Right. The fact that he is Jewish reassures the former group (“he can’t be a fascist so we can vote for him!”) The fact that he maligns Jews despite being one himself entices the latter (“there’s no way he’ll be bought off, we can trust him!”).

The former bunch appreciate his harking back to author Charles Péguy and his admiration for De Gaulle. The latter like his scorn for Zola and his rehabilitation of Pétain. His unconcealed Jewish roots help him plot out a march on Paris which, in a complete ideological mish-mash, passes through both London and Vichy.

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If the trend revealed by recent polls is confirmed — in other words, if he manages to definitively capture the two groups of voters he needs to remain a contender — and if he also manages to recruit non-voters by using his swagger to pull them out of their apathy, he will have a supply of votes perfectly sufficient to shake up the 2022 presidential election. Given certain conditions, and with a little luck, he would be in a position to do what both Le Pens failed to do, namely to seduce republican voters without alienating anti-republican voters, and vice-versa. He would be in a position to shatter — or at least crack — the “glass ceiling” which has kept the far-Right out of power for so long. He would achieve this thanks to his patter, his strategic know-how and his stubbornness. But it would also be in part thanks to his Jewishness, which makes it impossible to call him a Nazi or a fascist. It gives him more leeway on everything controversial.

Unlike Henry IV, the French Renaissance King who was born a Protestant, Zemmour won’t have to reason that “Paris is well worth a mass.” Historically, he is perhaps in the tradition of Arthur Meyer, the editor of the Gaulois newspaper, who converted to Catholicism in 1901. He also borrows from Edmond Bloch, who rubbed shoulders with the French far-Right in the 1930s and also ended up converting to Catholicism. But Zemmour, who aspires to lasting renown where these two predecessors enjoyed only passing notoriety, will not have to follow them to the font. Far from being a hindrance to his irresistible rise, his Jewishness is his trump card. Let’s be frank: this is both masterful and unprecedented. As a political observer, I find it fascinating. As a Jew, I must admit I find it disgusting.

This essay appears with the permission of DDV, the journal of the International League against Anti-Semitism, where it was originally published. 

Let’s say that you see that people who rate themselves highly on the scale are more likely to have quit than people who don’t. For example, people who gave themselves an eight or higher were twice as likely to be smoke-free after six months than people who gave themselves a four or below.

What’s your conclusion here? If you are Professor Ian Robertson, a clinical psychologist and author of How Confidence Works: The new science of self-belief, why some people learn it and others don’t, then the conclusion is obvious. Confidence helps you quit. If you believe — if you truly believe — that you have the willpower to quit, then you can do it! You have the “can happen” and the “can do” mentality, and that will drive you over the finish line!

If you’re anybody else, of course, you might point out that all this shows is that people can judge their own abilities quite well. I’m not confident in my ability to beat Magnus Carlsen at chess, and I expect Carlsen would be very confident in his ability to beat me. If we then played and I lost, I don’t think that would be because I was inadequately confident. In the same vein, if I know I’ve got a really bad 40-a-day habit and shitty willpower, then I’ll probably judge that I won’t be able to quit, and I may well be right. But it’s not that I’ll fail because I’m not confident; I’m not confident because I rightly think I’ll fail.

I’ve made up the smoking example, but Robertson uses several similar ones. “Studies have shown,” he says, right at the start of the book, “that you will live longer after heart failure if your partner feels confident about your condition.” If you find the study (not studies) he’s referring to,[1. Which is a pain in the arse to do, by the way, because he doesn’t use SODDING FOOTNOTES. Use footnotes! It’s fine! Readers don’t get derailed by little superscript numbers in the text!] you see that it does indeed find that heart disease patients are more likely to live longer if their spouses have high confidence that they will survive.

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But… if I were to develop heart disease tomorrow, and you were to ask my wife whether she thinks I’ll survive the next six months, her answer wouldn’t simply be a product of whether she’s a confident, happy-go-lucky sort of person. It would also be based on her assessment of my health, my ability to stick to exercise and diet regimes, whether or not I tend to stick my fingers in electrical sockets for fun. She might say: “My husband is relatively young, and reasonably fit, so that’s positive, but on the other side of the ledger he’s a lazy git and eats too many burgers, so overall I’ll give it 60%.”

(To be fair, the study tries to look out for this by controlling for disease severity. But I would imagine that spouses are better judges of a person’s overall health than a four-category NYHA classification.)

For Robertson, though, confidence is everything. It’s the most important thing in the world. And everywhere he looks, science backs this up. It’s astonishing. A Duke University study looking at twins found that if one member of a pair of twins assesses their family’s social status as lower, that twin will likely do worse in life: worse jobs, more crime, etc. For Robertson, “something happened during adolescence that made some of the twins feel that they had lower social status than their sibling. Once they felt that, their behaviour, mental health, education, job and optimism suffered accordingly.”

The possibility that the causal arrow points the other way – that when a twin’s life starts to go down the toilet, they start to assess their (and their family’s) status more negatively – simply does not occur to him.

There are dozens of things like this. People who are pessimistic die young, people who are less confident in their memory are more likely to get dementia, people who walk more slowly are less confident in their health and will therefore die young. The possibility that people are accurately judging their own health status is occasionally raised but then dismissed. (Sometimes the studies controlled for other possibilities, but did they control for enough?)

Which is a shame. There is a fascinating book to be written by someone with a bit more self-reflection — someone a bit less confident, perhaps, in their thesis. Robertson divides confidence into two constituent parts: a “can happen” attitude and a “can do” attitude. If we’re trying to lose weight, say, someone might tell us to eat a healthier diet and take more exercise.

If we believe that salad and jogging will have the desired effect – that we would, if we ate better and ran more, lose weight — then we have a “can happen” attitude. And if we believe that we are personally capable of eating better and running more, then we have a “can do” attitude. Confidence, he says, is a “bridge to the future”: it is our mind’s ability to visualise our ability to get from here, where we are, to there, where we want to be.

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Robertson illustrates the idea with stories of CEOs and sportspeople and so on who have, as he says, this can happen/can do attitude, and how they therefore changed the world. 

But there’s another way of thinking about confidence: it’s just your brain predicting, given the information it has, how likely it is to succeed. You could imagine an AI that was built to perform some task, say image recognition. You train it on eleventy billion pictures of dogs and cats, and then you make it look at some other images of dogs and cats and say which ones are which. You feed it a thousand pictures and it gets 980 of them right.

Then you ask it (it’s also a natural-language AI) how confident it is that it will get the next one right. It says “98%.” Then it gets the next one wrong.

Why did it get the next one wrong? Is it because it wasn’t confident enough? No: it has correctly assessed that it will get it right 49 times out of 50. If the AI had said it was 99% confident, it would have been overconfident. The AI has learnt, from its experience of its own capabilities and the difficulty of the dog-cat-recognition task, that it gets it right 98% of the time.

And if the AI has to make some decisions based on its ability to tell a picture of a cat from a picture of a dog, it can only make those decisions rationally if it assesses its own skill accurately. If you offered it a bet at £1 to £25, it would be rational to take that bet; if you offered it a bet at £1 to £100, then it would not. Similarly, a human being asked “Can you quit smoking?” is making an assessment of his or her abilities, and will take action according to how likely he or she thinks they are to succeed.

Of course, you might say, AIs aren’t human. We do misjudge our own abilities, either overestimating or underestimating them, and it does feel from the inside as though confidence drives success as well as success driving confidence. And there might be some scientific evidence supporting that. This would have been the interesting book Robertson could have written: the book teasing out the difference between confidence-as-assessment-of-skill and confidence-as-motivation.

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Unfortunately, Robertson’s actual book is, again, so confident in the importance of confidence that he overlooks the shakiness of the science he cites. I’ve written and read a lot about the “replication crisis” over the last few years, and you get a bit of a sense for the sort of psychology studies which will turn out to be garbage. And my alarm bells were ringing constantly as I read this book.

For one thing, it repeatedly mentions psychological findings, such as stereotype threat, social priming, impostor syndrome, the “hot hand” effect, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and growth mindset, which have variously either been debunked or at least need some sort of acknowledgment that they’re controversial. 

More generally, it regularly quotes studies which seemed odd — so I went and looked about two dozen of them up. Studies into things like whether wearing a lab coat makes you better at concentrating, or whether being told that you’re smarter makes your brain look different in an fMRI scanner. Time after time, it was an unpreregistered study looking at 27 undergraduates which barely reached statistical significance. I am, I’m afraid, extremely not confident that most of these studies would replicate (and several of them definitely have not).

I have three hypotheses for why Robertson, who as a neuroscientist and psychologist is presumably aware of the replication crisis, might overlook the shakiness of the studies supporting his thesis. One is charitable: the others less so.

The charitable explanation is that Robertson is a clinical psychologist. If this book were a book of robust science, it would be full of caveats and on-the-one-hand-on-the-others. But perhaps it’s not. Perhaps it’s a self-help book: “Get confident, stupid!” Robertson wants to get his readers to maximise their confidence, so he pushes its importance and overstates the effectiveness of various tricks to improve it. It is full of pretty common-sense advice (tell yourself you’re excited rather than anxious, etc); maybe he feels that’ll do more good if it’s backed up with neurobollocks about how it’s all to do with dopamine receptors in the ventral striatum or whatever.

The first less charitable explanation is that Robertson, like many other moderately famous psychologists, has his eye on the lucrative after-dinner speaking market, and the way to get on that is to say that This One Weird Trick is all you need to totally change your life, whether it’s growth mindset or “grit” or power posing or whatever. In this model, Robertson has decided that “confidence” is the new “positive psychology”, and he can get £10,000 a go for 45 minutes talking to postprandial advertising executives in a conference hall in the Runnymede Marriott.

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The second less charitable explanation is … well. Robertson tells the story of Ally McLeod, who took Scotland to the World Cup in 1978, promising not only to win it but to retain it the next time around. Scotland were instead knocked out in the group stages . “Ally MacLeod was what is colloquially known as a bullshitter,” he says. My own understanding of “bullshit”, in the Harry Frankfurt sense, is speech in which the speaker doesn’t care whether he is telling the truth or not; but for Robertson, it’s essentially problematic overconfidence, misjudging your own expertise and abilities. It is possible that one or both of those two definitions might apply to this book.

But this book is what it is. One of Robertson’s key anecdotes is of Padraig Harrington, the golfer, having a moment of doubt while comfortably in the lead in the 2007 British Open, and then repeatedly whiffing his ball into a lake, almost throwing his lead away, and then getting his confidence back and going on to win. There’s a fascinating story there to be told — was the confidence (and its disappearance) a product of how well he was doing or wasn’t, or the other way around? Did they feed back into each other in a complex, self-reinforcing loop? And was that initial moment of doubt even real, or was it added into his mind with hindsight? (It’s not as if memory is infallible.) I would love to have read someone treating that complicated story with the subtlety it deserves.

But for Robertson, the story is simple. Harrington was confident, so he was winning; then he stopped being confident, so he stopped winning; then he got confident again, so he won. The end. Get confident, stupid.

The Matrix is more than two decades old, but its underlying message is very familiar. You are asleep, but I am awake. You are blind, but I can see. You are backward, but I am progressive. You may have come to a nice country house for a cup of tea, a stroll around the gardens and a mooch in the gift shop, but I am going to wake you up. Look around you! Stop listening to the lies! Read some real history! Educate yourself!

In his new book Fake History, the anti-Brexit firebrand Otto English sets out to educate his benighted compatriots — those of you, in other words, who have been wandering in a stupor all these years. For the last thousand years, he explains, history “has been written by white males, about white males, for white males”. Like The Matrix’s machines, these sinister frauds have created a colossal deception, a “fake” past, a tissue of “false narratives”. But now English is on the case, determined to expose the “ten great lies” that have shaped our world. “Fake history runs deep,” he writes grandly. “This book’s mission is to topple it from the plinth and lift up truth in its place.”

In The Matrix, Neo is merely part of a bigger rebel group, led by Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus. And English, too, operates as part of a bigger movement. For although his book makes no mention of it, he is not the first person to notice that our history is a tissue of lies. The BBC’s Lucy Worsley, for example, has made several series about British History’s Biggest Fibs, including revelations such as the discovery that the Prussians helped Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, and the fact that Richard III might not actually have been a hunchbacked monster after all. And another tireless hunter for historical truth, the Horrible Histories author Terry Deary, has consistently maintained that schoolteachers and academics mislead their charges. The people who really made our world, he insists, are hidden from us. “We don’t usually know their names and there are no statues to them — not even grave markers — and they are ignored by most proper historians in proper history books.”

So have history teachers really been lying to us? Have historians been deceiving us all along? And has Otto English really found the smoking guns?

Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but it strikes me that if you’re writing a book about “ten great lies” called Fake History, you probably ought to use your real name. In fact, Otto English is the Twitter handle of a journalist, Andrew Scott, who has attracted some 70,000 followers with his relentless attacks on Brexit. I’m not really his target audience, but I’m perfectly happy to accept that he’s a dab hand at writing 140-character takedowns of Boris Johnson. But as a historian, a seeker for truth, a fearless exposer of lies about our past, he is an utter, utter failure.

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Children don't need woke stories

By Dominic Sandbrook

Far from being a ground-breaking exposé of dishonesty and deceit, Fake History is one of the worst books about history I’ve ever read — and I say that as somebody who made it all the way through Jacob Rees-Mogg’s The Victorians. To give a small but revealing example, one chapter debunks the supposed lie that “Genghis Khan was a pitiless barbarian”. In fact, says English, he was “a far-sighted and accommodating leader”, both “meritocratic” and “inclusive”, which makes him sound like somebody hoping to lead the Liberal Democrats. Throughout, English calls him “Khan”, clearly under the impression that this was his surname. But Khan was his imperial title, not his name. It’s as if a Mongolian Twitter personality wrote a book about German history under the misapprehension that Wilhelm II’s surname was “Kaiser”.

The structure, veering madly from subject to subject, makes no sense. There’s a chapter on Churchill, then a chapter about whether ancient people thought the earth was flat, then a chapter about Dunkirk, then a chapter about the House of Windsor, then a chapter about curry, then a chapter about the Aztecs. But even inside each chapter there’s no sense of analysis or argument, just a series of self-satisfied observations and weird generalisations. In the chapter on curry, for example, English sets out to debunk the supposed lie that “curry comes from India”, but immediately tells us that in post-war Britain “most people ate shit… Most British people stewed the living taste out of everything.”

Now, I can see why you’d say that in a stand-up routine — but in a book about nuance in history? In a book attacking myths and stereotypes? Really?

The fundamental problem, though, is that none of English’s ten great lies are actually lies. His first lie, for example is: “Winston Churchill was Britain’s Greatest Prime Minister.” But that’s not really a lie, is it? How could you possibly prove or disprove it? It’s an opinion, which is completely different. You might disagree with Churchill’s fans, but it would be deranged to call them liars. For instance, when Churchill died in 1965, his old rival Clement Attlee said he was not just “the greatest Englishman of our time” but “the greatest citizen of the world of our time”. If Attlee came back to life and repeated those words today, would English seriously call him a liar?

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Or take another of English’s purported lies: “Hitler was a failed artist.” You might raise an eyebrow at that. Opening my copy of Sir Ian Kershaw’s biography, I read that Hitler had a blazing row with his father about his ambition to become an artist; that he twice applied and failed to get into Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts; and that he tried to make money by painting scenes of Vienna. And to cap it all, on page 73 of my edition, Kershaw, one of Britain’s greatest living historians, explicitly describes Hitler as — you guessed it — a “failed artist”. So would English call Kershaw a liar, too?

The weird thing is that English knows Hitler was a failed artist. He even mentions the paintings and the unsuccessful attempts to get into the Academy. His chapter is trying to say something about Hitler’s invention of his own legend — though I’m not sure what. After some stuff about the First World War, he tells us how terrible Mein Kampf is — as if anybody needs convincing — before informing us that Hitler was a dreadful artist and a diabolical commander. Then he compares him with Enoch Powell and Donald Trump, which is clearly what he’s been itching to do all along. And that’s it. Next lie please!

I could go through English’s book page by page, but what would be the point? It’s so shoddy, so abject I feel a bit guilty even writing about it, like a grown man punching a toddler. Yet it’s important not to let it go. People don’t generally tell lies about history, and the real dishonesty lies in pretending that they do.

Of course all societies have myths, and they always have done. But a myth isn’t the same as a lie, unless you are seriously going to argue that all societies since the Egyptians and the Persians have been barefaced liars. Is it a “lie”, as English suggests, that the Little Ships were crucial at Dunkirk? Surely not. At worst, it’s an exaggeration, a patriotic myth, central to the national narrative both at the time and afterwards. And in any case, there are already hundreds, perhaps even thousands of history books putting Dunkirk into a wider context, and gently debunking the Little Ships story. Is English really so arrogant that he thinks he’s breaking new ground?

Anyway, if a schoolteacher tells the Little Ships story to her charges, so what? Is she a liar? Or is she simply a good storyteller, trying to find the right way to draw a class of ten-year-olds into the study of the past? What about professional historians? They’re not really liars, are they? Yes, they weave their facts into narratives, wear their prejudices very heavily, and sometimes make tendentious claims. But that’s what historical debate is all about. Was Edward Gibbon a liar? Were the historians who wrote in the Victorian era? Were Marxists like Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill? Of course not.

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Even politicians, English’s chief target, don’t really lie about history, whatever the Twitter fanatics may think. Of course politicians pick their facts and tell their stories. But that’s the essence of political communication. To win, you build a narrative. A pluralistic society depends upon competing narratives and competing myths. You can disagree with a particular interpretation of the nation’s past — Margaret Thatcher’s paean to the Victorian period, say, or Boris Johnson’s Churchill-worship — without calling it a lie. After all, who but a fraud claims to have a monopoly on the truth?

This is why books such as Fake History are so depressing. They are the historical equivalent of conspiracy theories, purporting to uncover some hidden, monolithic, indisputable truth. Puffed up with smug self-satisfaction, they reflect a culture that seems increasingly incapable of dealing with democratic disagreement, in which opponents are “gammons”, “melts”, plotters and liars. They deal in the language of certainty, fakery and propaganda, without acknowledging that historical interpretations change all the time, and that ours will seem as prejudiced and partial to our successors as Victorian history books do to us. And though they appeal for “nuance” and “complexity”, their hectoring tone and moralistic assumptions could hardly be more adolescent.

But I suppose Otto English isn’t really writing for me. He’s writing for people who think that history is a simple matter of truth and lies, and that either you’re on the side of good and honesty, or you’re on the side of deception and evil. So if you think Churchill was Britain’s greatest Prime Minister, as Roy Jenkins did; or that there’s such a thing as English food, as George Orwell did, then you must be a liar or a dupe.

For English, as for so many woke activists, it’s all very simple. You’re awake, or you’re asleep. You’re progressive, or you’re reactionary. You think Rhodes Must Fall, or you like having sex with statues. You can see, or you’re blind. You’re with Neo, or you’re with the machines.

But I’m one of the machines, so you shouldn’t trust a word I say anyway.

As a writer, I am haunted by the tremendous impact that stories — particularly myths and folk tales — had on me as a child. That’s partly why I became fascinated with Jordan Peterson, long before he came to public attention and when he was still lecturing in small, shabby classrooms to handfuls of students.

I discovered his “Maps of Meaning” lectures five years ago. I dipped into them and was hooked, watching hours of his talks one after the other. They thrilled me; not only was Peterson charismatic, witty and erudite, but he was addressing an issue that has obsessed me since a very young age: why do people believe what they believe, and how is this connected to narration and storytelling?

That may sound like a curiously innocent query, but the truth is that it has very dangerous implications. Each of us, after all, needs our beliefs emotionally. We often fiercely defend them, to the death in some cases. But if these convictions are merely part of a story — fundamentally flawed or incomplete — what value can we place on them? This, to me, explains a lot of the hostility to Peterson; he touches on nerves we find too uncomfortable to lay bare. He reminds us that our psychological houses are built on sand — that our most cherished beliefs are just stories, not absolute truths.

As Peterson’s fame started to grow, I had a chance to interview him on zoom and met him in person on several occasions. Our conversations were electrifying. I had never come across an interviewee so attentive, at both listening and speaking. Over almost four hours, he talked about his personal vulnerability (he cried more than once as we spoke ), about the inevitable political element of his work, but also religion — in particular Christ’s story and the motif of death and rebirth. He mentioned, for example, that one meaning of INRI — the Latin inscription on Christ’s cross — was “through fire all nature is renewed”, before explaining about the constant renewal of life through suffering and death.

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He talked about how some of these mythological motifs appear in popular culture. Star Wars, for instance, has a lot in common with many of the other mass cultural phenomena of the last 50 years, including Harry Potter, ET and Sleeping Beauty — in particular, the prominence they give to death and rebirth.

But specific content aside, Peterson emphasises how the ideas that we seek to understand cannot actually be communicated in words; they have to be communicated in narratives, in stories. This is as true of the Bible as it is of The Little Mermaid, and is a truth known by every producer of every Marvel and DC movie. It is what lies underneath the action that produces the audience response — or lack of it.

The meaning of action is most clearly revealed in fairy tales and children’s stories. So Peterson focuses a lot of his attention on youth and adolescent popular culture. He briefly references these narrative mechanisms in Lesson Two of his new book, Beyond Order, but sadly not in sufficient depth to render them anything more than superficially intelligible. One has to watch the lectures for that.

Peterson’s central point is this: we do not know what we know. Just as the Old Testament carries ideas too complex to be expressed in words — his Biblical lectures explain how those mysterious verses actually tell the story of the emergence of individual conscience out of herd morality — fairy stories and great literary works translate into images and narratives that cannot simply be “told”, in the sense of “explaining”. They have to be shown. Hence the famous writing trope “show don’t tell”. And what better way to do that than in stories?

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For example, in symbolic terms, Harry Potter is in almost every respect identical to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: the ingénue, an orphan who lives a meaningless life, in suburbia or Tatooine, who has a lost father who is a great magician, and who must face great danger and die and be reborn, rejuvenating the spirit of the dead father. Both narratives, of course, also have a lot in common with the story of Christ.

These are not just stories, but metaphors for what is happening in our individual psychologies: “determining to move forward and upward despite the horrors of life,” as Peterson puts it.

Crucially, you needn’t be aware of this psychological shift for it to happen. Indeed for Peterson, an artist may not even understand their own work: “if you can say what you’re doing, you’re not producing art,” he says. Did Shakespeare really understand the import of Hamlet or was he just channelling a larger force?

Either way, Peterson’s most important lesson still remains: that it is the job of the storyteller to provide a portal to a deeper-felt reality, rather than to relate — as is depressingly common today — an ideological or moral position. True art, poetry even, is trying to create something out of the partially lit darkness. Anything else is just posturing, propaganda or wish fulfilment.

“Your truth”. That phrase slipped off Oprah’s tongue with such ease during her interview with Meghan and Harry. But on this apparently simple construction hangs a question that has divided us with an explosion of animosity: how many truths can there be?

With the new world once again pitted against the old, I find myself reminded of the words of another Royal confidante, those of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “To thine own self be true,” he advised his son. This sentiment seems to encapsulate so much of what is philosophically at stake in this interview, with the Prince and the Princess expressing “their truth”, a truth that was as much a function of the need to be true to who they are, as it was a reference to objective reality.

Put aside for one moment the on-going debate about their claims concerning Royal racism, for it seems to me that there is a troubling tension between two meanings of truth going on here: being true to yourself, something we have come to call authenticity, and truth as an empirical statement of fact.

The former was largely conceived by Rousseau and is often known as “expressivism” — the idea that, as the philosopher Charles Taylor describes in his magisterial Sources of the Self, “the moral or spiritual order of things must come to us indexed to a personal vision.” And this is where we divide. For some their “personal vision” is a hallmark of truth; for others it is very much a reason to be suspicious of it.

Here, too, it’s worth returning to Hamlet — not least because it is impossible not to be struck by the parallels between its title character and Prince Harry. For Freud, Hamlet represented an archetypal example of the Oedipus complex: a kind of childhood compulsion where a son develops an unconscious sexual desire for his mother and a sense of rivalry with his father.

Joseph Schwartz, in his definitive history of psychoanalysis, Cassandra’s Daughter, sees this “sexualisation of the mother-son relationship” as “part of the dynamic of the Victorian patriarchal family”. He continues:

 “This family romance is dominated by an absent authoritarian father who, arriving home, asserts his own needs over his children’s by making overt or covert sexual demands on his wife. The wife, resentful of abandonment by her husband and of his authoritarian attitudes, lavishes attention on her son. And the son, perceiving rivalry for the mother’s affections expressed in sexual terms, responds in kind.”

It is hard to read these words and not be reminded of the relationship between Charles and Diana, a woman “resentful of abandonment by her husband and of his authoritarian attitudes [who] lavished attention on her son”.

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Test article

By Giles Fraser

If Freud has taught us anything, it is that we may not always be the best judges of who we really are, let alone what really drives us. That is the very point of the unconscious; we are run by forces that we do not always properly understand, which are often repressed, working away in the background without us being fully aware of them. And if this is the case, then the problem with “my truth” is not just that it can fail to describe objective reality, but — and this is crucial — that it may fail, just as much, to describe subjective reality too.

That is not to say whether we should or should not believe Meghan or Harry. Instead, Freud’s work simply demonstrates that phrases such as “my truth” are not always helpful, either objectively and subjectively. It presumes too quickly that there is little more to inner truth than simply what you feel. But as the psychoanalytic experience so often demonstrates, “my truth” also requires a kind of discipled critical vigilance — the sort of push-back provided by a skilled analyst.

All of us are complex creatures; we are often a mystery, even to ourselves. And being at the intersection of Royalty and celebrity no doubt makes one’s life confusing in ways that are unimaginable to most of us, especially given that both are objects of considerable projection. It cannot be a coincidence that the stories that Freud most associated with the Oedipus complex — Oedipus Rex and Hamlet — are stories about princes.

None of this would matter so much were it not for the fact that the “truth” expressed to Oprah has the capacity to undermine one of the constitutional foundations of this country. It is one thing to sit on a couch in front of a therapist and work out your issues in private. I have done so myself and recommend it.

It is quite another to sit in front of millions of people, giving a half-interview, half-therapy session conducted by an unchallenging friend and neighbour, and for others to take this on face value. The stakes are far too high to allow “my truth” to go unchallenged. At the end of Hamlet, most of the protagonists lie dead; the court in ruins. “To thine own self be true” may have a nice ring to it. But it remains very poor advice.