Although it has some defenders, the argument has, over the years, been slated on a number of grounds. Critics include Voltaire and Diderot, nearer to Pascal’s own time, to more recent thinkers such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb, whose book Skin in the Game was cited by Giles Fraser in a recent article. Some argue that even if it works, it doesn’t answer the question of which religion to follow. Others, like Taleb, say it encourages the wrong kind of belief – faith without commitment, with no “skin in the game”. In short, it fails to be a persuasive proof of the need for faith.

The only problem is that Pascal never meant it to be that.

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Most of its detractors (and many of its defenders) make a very common mistake. They take it as an attempt by Pascal to convince unbelievers of the benefits of faith. But it isn’t.

As with any text, the Wager needs to be understood in the context of the work as a whole, as well as the fairly long section in which it is laid out. Blaise Pascal was a mathematician and physicist working at the cutting edge of scientific questions in his own age. He was also a deeply religious thinker. The Pensées were the notes Pascal made towards a book addressed to a very particular audience – a work that was never finished due to his early death.

Many think he had in mind the sophisticated “cultured despisers of religion” in France in the 17th century. Pascal knew many such libertins, who enjoyed philosophising, drinking and gambling. When he was younger and less religious, such friends would urge him to use his mathematical genius to work out the odds on bets they were thinking of taking on. Many of them were influenced by the hugely popular philosophy of Pascal’s older contemporary, René Descartes, thoroughly convinced of the power of human reason to master the world; some had gone beyond Descartes to argue that Christianity was illogical and therefore no rational person could believe it.

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Pascal’s beef with Descartes was that he didn’t understand people. Descartes’ idea of the thinking self (“I think therefore I am”) suggested that humans were entirely rational beings, motivated by and capable of cool level-headedness, making decisions on strictly logical grounds. Pascal thought this was nonsense. For him, our anxieties and desires are more powerful than our rationality. As he puts it in one vivid image:

“Put the world’s greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be; if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.”

Our fears and emotions are more powerful than our rationality, our longings more influential than our logic.

So when it comes to the Wager, the whole piece is designed not to persuade these sophisticates to believe, but to reveal the reasons why they don’t believe. The argument really runs like this: “The wager on belief is a bet you have to make – you can’t choose not to – either God is real or he isn’t. And you say that you don’t believe on strictly rational grounds, but do you really? You like a bet, right? OK, then look at the odds on belief. If you bet on God not existing, you don’t actually risk losing much. But if you bet on God existing, you stand to gain a huge dividend.

So looking objectively and rationally at the odds on offer here, a betting man or woman would always bet on belief. But we both know that you don’t. Why? It’s not because you are being rational: it’s because belief is inconvenient; you would rather there was no God; it costs too much, and you just don’t want to believe.”

As Pascal puts it at the conclusion of this section of the Pensées: “At least get it into your head, that if you are unable to believe, it is because of your passions, since reason impels you to believe and yet you cannot do so.”

It’s not that reason has no place – in fact Pascal argues that to exclude reason altogether is as big a mistake as to think that it is only reason that dictates our decisions. Yet only when we realise how it is our desires that influence what we choose to believe can we begin to make progress.

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The Wager was never meant as a cold, logical argument for belief in God. It is, in fact, the opposite: an argument designed to show that we are not the purely logical, rational beings we sometimes think we are.

For Pascal, God cannot be known simply in our minds, as the conclusion of a cogent philosophical argument, but by the heart and soul: “It is the heart that perceives God, and not our reason.” If, then, we are caught between our logic and our desires, how do we get out of this dilemma? For Pascal it is only by making the first step – by taking the risk, not of abstract belief, but of costly commitment: as he puts it “You want to be cured of unbelief? Become like one of those who now wager all they have … They behaved just as if they did believe.” For Pascal, there is no such thing as cost-free faith. Faith means sacrifice. The way to salvation is, in fact, only found by having skin in the game.

These days, the drinking and the gambling are still as prevalent as ever (just watch any advert at half time while watching sport on TV). When it comes to philosophising about God and belief, we are more likely to be influenced by Richard Dawkins than by Descartes. Those who follow that path tend to claim on strictly rationalistic grounds that science and faith cannot live together, that reason rules out religion.

Yet Pascal and his Wager remind us not only of the compatibility of scientific exploration alongside religious faith within an extraordinarily fertile mind but also that we are more complex than the rationalists would have us believe. Pascal’s Wager does not try to prove Christianity, or indeed any religion.

What it does tell us is that when deciding on the deepest questions of life and existence, we need to be mindful not just of our logic, but of whether we are simply convincing ourselves of what we would quite like to be true. As Pascal himself says: “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”

At the time, these two men were widely thought of as the era’s most exciting poets, alongside the modernist-in-chief, T. S. Eliot. Since then, the canon has been significantly kinder to Auden, whom the literary establishment finds more palatable than the famously bawdy Thomas.

Type ‘Auden’ into the search bar of the London Review of Books, and you’ll find 660 results; ‘Dylan Thomas’ by contrast yields just 182. The equivalent figures on the Paris Review website are 181 and 98. Yet a general internet search tells a very different story: there are 6.76 million Google hits for ‘Auden’; but a massive 121 million for ‘Dylan Thomas’.

These stats support a now recognised fact: the literary elites has neglected Dylan Thomas, despite overwhelming popular interest in his work. Why is that? Partly, and ironically, because of that popular interest.

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At first, it was Auden’s reputation that suffered. On the eve of WWII, he abandoned the UK and sailed for America, accusations of cowardice ringing in his ears. Thomas, meanwhile, moved from Wales to London and fashioned himself as a poet doing essential war work. By the end of the decade, recordings of him reading his own work were being broadcast on the BBC, laying the groundwork for his ascent to cult status. By the 1950s, he was doing lengthy reading tours of America, where he died in 1953 aged 39.

“He died at the height of his fame,” wrote Seamus Heaney – one of the most commercially successful poets of the 21st century – in 1993. “Print culture and the electronic media were perfecting their alliance in the promotion of culture heroes,” meaning that even after his death, Thomas’s voice continued to spread, feeding his fame. Heaney continues:

“The records of Dylan Thomas reading his own poems, records which were lined up on the shelves of undergraduate flats all over the world, were important cultural events. They opened a thrilling line between the centre and the edges of the English language collective. For all of us young provincials, from Belfast to Brisbane, the impact of Thomas’s performance meant that we had a gratifying sense of access to something that was acknowledged to be altogether modern, difficult and poetry.”

Heaney, who grew up in a small village in Northern Ireland, is emphasising Thomas’s appeal to the ordinary people who lived beyond the metropolis, where “the English language collective” was centred.

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Up-and-coming “young provincials” were perceived by the metropolitan elite as unfashionable, simple and prosaic. But Thomas forged ahead anyway, proving that “provincials” could succeed despite this snobbery.

But when his cult started to die down in the 1970s, most academics dismissed him as a populist trend. The literary establishment focused their energies not on unpicking his poetry, but on magnifying the persona of the bawdy bard from the backend of Wales who drank too much and spoke nonsense. Implicit was the assumption that any poet so beloved by the young, so stubbornly regional, so interested in sex and so often transmitted by the new-fangled media, couldn’t possibly be good.

This is ironic, because in the Seventies, English faculties around the world were enthusiastically cleaving the personalities of authors from their works. In 1967, Roland Barthes had published the influential essay ‘The Death of the Author’, which encourages readers to disregard the biography, personality or intentions of an author when reading a text, and to instead judge that text based on its intrinsic merits. Perhaps Thomas’s texts were too difficult to judge – they’re known for mockingly evading all kinds of authority.

Besides, the literary authorities were altogether more focused on the death of an author: “after W. H. Auden’s death in 1973, Thomas was the main casualty of a critical urge to make the 1930s solely the ‘age of Auden’,” points out Dylan’s most staunch defender, Swansea-based Professor John Goodby.

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At first it didn’t matter. Each December, the BBC still broadcast a recording of Thomas reading his micro-memoir, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’; his rousing poem, ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ was still read at funerals up and down the UK.

But then the students of the academics who denigrated Thomas became our English teachers, and before long they were writing exam papers and curricula. By the turn of the millennium, the current state of affairs, described in the FT, had consolidated itself: “although the poet is widely celebrated on TV and radio, his poems themselves are frequently left off the academic curriculum.”

This matters. In the Internet age, it’s easy to forget how much control university faculties have over what corners of culture get noticed. With Google at our fingertips, it feels like we have access to every miniscule piece of information, and we have free reign to decide what’s important. But there’s a place where, during our formative years, we spend even more time: school. And the dictates of academia trickle down to decide what voices are included and excluded in our education.

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Maybe it’s not such a tragedy. Thomas is a dead white man, after all – the demographic best represented in our lessons, lectures and literature. But he’s also a case study in how an author can get overlooked not despite but because of qualities we ought to celebrate: mass appeal, resistance to authority and a marginal perspective.

As a master’s student, I wanted to write my dissertation about Dylan Thomas. When I outlined my proposal, my tutor made a face: “There’s not really anyone who’s interested in him in the department” – a department that is, by some measures, the best place to study English Literature in the UK. Stubbornly, I stuck to my topic.

In the course of my research, I discovered that Dylan Thomas has been credited with kickstarting the audiobook industry. His early poems were lauded by T. S. Eliot (unlike Auden’s: Eliot told him to go away and try again). The young Sylvia Plath adored him – and was profoundly influenced by his verse. His words appear in multiple mediums, from blockbusters like Interstellar (2014) to the lyrics of Bob Dylan.

Yet despite his huge cultural impact, universities so often treat Thomas as a minor poet.

Perhaps this is a reflection on academia’s determination to retain its influence, rather than a reflection on Thomas’s actual influence. Ignoring a poet adored by the masses contributes to a general attitude that the elite knows best while hoi polloi are misguided, tasteless, or just plain stupid.

Sound familiar? The gulf between Thomas’s reputation in pop culture and his reputation in academia is a microcosm of our times – times in which teams of well-educated experts continuously underestimate the masses.

It’s a question being asked with renewed urgency at the moment. Is there a way of being Labour that doesn’t fall into the centrist liberalism of the TIG’s new breakaway party – “Blairites” has understandably become a term of abuse – yet one that avoids the excesses of the Marxist analysis?

A possibility could lie in the retrieval of one of the original strands of Labour’s historic formation, now almost forgotten: that of moral socialism. And there can be no better figure to remind us of that once important aspect of Labour socialism than the economic historian and educationalist R H Tawney – a Labour man to his core, and one described by his biographer, Laurence Goldman in his biography The Life of RH Tawney: Socialism and History, as “the most influential theorist and exponent of socialism in Britain in the twentieth century”.

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It was nearly a century ago that Tawney, described the empty moral centre of capitalism in his classic The Acquisitive Society (1920):

“To the strong it promises unfettered freedom for the exercise of their strength; to the weak the hope that they too one day may be strong. Before the eyes of both it suspends a golden prize, which not all can attain, but for which each may strive, the enchanting vision of infinite expansion. It assures men that there are no ends other than their ends, no law other than their desires, no limit other than that which they think advisable. Thus it makes the individual the centre of his own universe, and dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediences.”

Tawney is often described as a Christian socialist, though he wore his Anglo-Catholic faith lightly in public. For him, socialism was primarily a moral project; one, above all, concerned with the moral betterment of all of society. His quarrel with Marxism, and indeed with the utilitarianism of the Fabians too, was that both were unremittingly materialist in outlook, concerned with the redistribution of wealth – something of which he wholeheartedly approved – but without any accompanying interrogation of what money was supposed to be for and the part it played in a fulfilled life.

There is something “devilish”, Tawney insisted, in the idea that “human life, justice etc should be measured as items on a balance sheet”. Like Ruskin, one of his great heroes, Tawney maintained a distinction between wealth and “illth”, as Ruskin called it – the sort of wealth that is not conducive to human flourishing.

“It will be said ‘abolish economic privileges, and there will be enough wealth for all to live, and for all to lead a spiritual life’. This, I take it, is the Webbs’ view. Now economic privileges must be abolished, not primarily because they hinder the production of wealth, but because they produce wickedness.”

In his Commonplace Book (or diary, kept between 1912 and 1914) Tawney also attacks “Marxian socialists” as “not revolutionary enough”. Goldman explains: “By this he meant that they too accepted the conventional ends of life and merely argued over the distribution of spoils.”

Not that Tawney drew back from the need for wholesale redistribution of wealth or from a thoroughgoing egalitarianism. Indeed, he was among the first to recognise that capitalism cleverly seeks to buy off revolutionary politics with the offer of social mobility – the “golden prize” – for a few clever and talented individuals.

For Tawney, social mobility was “merely converting into doctors, barristers and professors a certain number of people who would otherwise have been manual workers” (The Radical Tradition, 1964) – something that is fair enough for those who get ahead, but as a substitute for social justice it is woefully inadequate, since it leaves the underlying structures of inequality fundamentally intact.[1. Professor Diane Reay from the University of Cambridge has done important work in this area.]

As an academic historian, Tawney argued that rot set in way back in the 17th century.

In his classic study, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1922), Tawney described how Calvinists transformed Christianity from a religion that, from its very beginnings, had been (in theory, at least) thoroughly suspicious of money and material wealth into one in which being rich became a mark of inner virtue. For these puritans, wealth was understood as the consequence of hard work and thrift, of Christian asceticism. And thus it became an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace: salvation.

“The shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all human relations by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness which cannot rest while there are competitors to be conquered or profits to be won, the love of social power and hunger for economic gain—these irrepressible appetites had evoked from time immemorial the warnings and denunciations of saints and sages. Plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues. They emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such a philosophy, the question, ‘What shall it profit a man?’ carries no sting. In winning the world, he wins the salvation of his own soul as well.” (Religion and the Rise of Capitalism)

This, argued Tawney, was a pivotal moment in social and economic history – and a disastrous one – his reference to “less enlightened ages” is sarcasm. The world of the middle ages, founded on God and the institutions of the church, ideologically suspicious of individual wealth and its corrupting power, was transformed into the beginnings of modernity where the individual is king and money is the mark of his or her majesty.

Mr Morgan Phillips, when he was General Secretary of the Labour Party, said that the Labour movement “owed more to Methodism than to Marx”. It was an unhelpful and misleading comment. Methodism took many of the Puritan assumptions for granted.

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Rather, it was the Anglo-Catholic/Gothic revival of the 19th century that provided Labour with many of its core values. John Ruskin, William Morris, Charles Gore, F D Maurice and so on – these were the key thinkers. They shared a sense that that the reformation – and the subsequent industrialisation of capitalism that it paved the way for – had broken a whole way of life in which human beings were understood as flourishing within a settled stable and mutually supportive community. They looked back to a world of guilds and collectives, where economic activity was not divorced from a sense of social good and moral purpose. And it was Tawney who became their most eloquent spokesman:

“The revolt of ordinary men against Capitalism has had its source neither in its obvious deficiencies as an economic engine, nor in the conviction that it represents a stage in social evolution now outgrown, but in the straight-forward hatred of a system which stunts personality and corrupts human relations by permitting the use of man by man as an instrument of pecuniary gain.” (The Radical Tradition, 1964)

Can any of this be revived? Or is it a world lost forever? Frank Field is the most obvious inheritor of this tradition. And Blue Labour has its roots here too, though it is rightly more ecumenical in scale. It may be that, as both a churchman and a socialist, I look back with an unhelpful nostalgia to a time when Christianity played a greater role in the thinking of the Left.

But trying, if I can, to set such personal preferences aside, it still strikes me that the Labour party could do with a moral revival of the sort described by Tawney. It certainly needs a moral revival of some sort. “Tawney reminds us that there was a socialism that aspired to ‘the higher life,’” writes Goldman. It would be hard to say that of socialism today.

Indirectly his influence survives in the National Trust whose founders were profoundly influenced by him. And in the lingering aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts movement. He was an important influence on Gandhi.

But now, with the bicentenary of his birth, there’s increased interest in his ideas – a sense that Ruskin’s time has returned. There’s an exhibition from his Sheffield museum at 2 Temple Place in London, The Art of Seeing, to be followed by a series of others over the year. One of the most interesting will be in York, about his influence on modern ecology. Ruskin was one of the first to observe the effects of industrial pollution on clouds. If he were around now, he’d be a David Attenborough figure: campaigner, castigator and national treasure.

So who was Ruskin? He was an art critic, the champion of the Pre Raphaelites, the defender of Turner, the great advocate of the Gothic style of architecture. But he was way more than that: he was a moral art critic, which is to say he thought of art as being expressive of the moral character of a nation rather than anything merely ornamental (though he set great store by ornament).

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He was a social reformer, who believed passionately in the dignity of good work and the importance of beauty in the life of all classes. He was a conservationist (though he could rarely see a medieval manuscript without wanting to dismember it to show off the pictures) and was one of the first to identify clumsy restoration – in Venice – as a danger. One of the amusing bits of the London exhibition is a display entitled 15 Things Heartily Loathed by John Ruskin – he was a very good hater – and they ranged from A Railway Station to Palladio (the great classical architect) to Making Money.

His influence was colossal, much of it disseminated by himself in lectures given to working men’s societies from Tunbridge Wells to Sunderland; printed, they got everywhere, but they still have the flavour of the lecture room, as when he thanks his audience for turning out on a rainy night. “There is”, he felt, “only one cure for public distress, and that is public education, directed to make men thoughtful, merciful and just.” But his lectures were as likely to be about Titian or Turner as about the use of ironwork or reading, or the importance of sculpture in architecture.

In many ways, his time has come: his holistic view of art and architecture, as being expressive of a good society – the Gothic style, he felt, was great not just because it was based on nature but because it was the work of “thoughtful and happy men” – has an awful lot to say to our own day.

Recently, the think tank Policy Exchange launched a Building More, Building Beautiful campaign to make public architecture more beautiful and more acceptable to the public. That was a very Ruskinesque endeavour. At the very beginning of The Seven Lamps of Architecture, he declares that “Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them contributes to his mental health, power and pleasure”.

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He emphasised in his lectures to architects that people cannot help but look at their buildings so they must be made as well as possible. That link between good public buildings, public space and mental health is very much of our time; in fact, it’s prophetic. And the moral responsibility that architects have in creating or destroying the beauty of the built environment, which others have no choice but to look at and live with, was never more strongly put than by Ruskin.

His critique of society is also relevant. Take the concept of fast fashion: inexpensive clothes that date within months or weeks and are replaced in short order by new clothes that are equally cheap, in a never-ending round of consumption. What thoughtful millennials are questioning is how those clothes are produced: for instance, when it transpired that the Comic Relief Spice Girls T-shirts were produced by workers paid 35p an hour there was outrage; well, that is exactly what would have riled Ruskin. Or take the H&M blouse I wore to the launch of his exhibition: a leaf design by William Morris made with synthetic fabric in China.

It was cheap, presumably to keep ahead of the retailer’s competitors and will, in the case of most wearers, be thrown away within the year. Ruskin was a close associate of Morris, who created the design, but he would have taken instant exception to the way that a natural design was printed on an unnatural fabric by workers whose conditions were almost certainly less attractive than those of workers here, let alone the ideal of manufacturing conditions he described in his late work on social reform, Unto This Last:

“Supposing the master of a manufactory saw it right, or were by any chance obliged, to place his own son in the position of an ordinary workman; as he would then treat his son, he is bound always to treat every one of his men…”

In other words, the design would have been diminished for him by the mode of production and by the throwaway clothes culture it’s part of.

Ruskin was born into an evangelical Protestant family – his mother made him learn the Bible by heart – and he had, in many ways, the aspect of an Old Testament prophet; he used the prophets to castigate those he thought were living lives of thoughtless vanity at the expense of the poor.

Even after he discarded his evangelical beliefs (though he would return to broad Christianity), he would invoke Isaiah and the gospels to challenge his audience. In his lectures on domestic architecture, he recommended that houses should be built with porches with little benches inside: cheerfully admitting that homeless people might take shelter in them, quoting Isaiah about giving aid to the poor “in thy house”.

In one passionate passage in Sesame and Lilies in which he quoted an inquest into the death of a boot repair man who died of hunger and cold while trying to earn a living, he printed the account in red, saying: “be sure the facts themselves are written in that colour, in a book which we shall all of us…have to read our page of, some day.”

He would lecture on the inequality and rampant poverty so common to the industrial capitalist age in which he lived, and which resonates so strongly today. He castigated the exploitation of the poor; he suggested reform.

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Despite such strong political views, it was as an art and architecture critic that he was best known, and there is no one now whose views on these subjects represent so coherent a worldview: if he loved Turner, he detested Constable; if he passionately recommended the Gothic, he passionately denigrated the classical as unnatural and inhuman. Cardinal Newman was one who thought this too sweeping: what he mused, was actually wrong about domes? But Ruskin’s philosophy was all of a piece: he felt that architecture based on nature is fundamentally sound, that art and architecture should be premised on honest and good workmanship, that we are all better for beauty in our environment: natural and built.

And he was as zealous for the natural environment as for the built; contact with the natural world was essential not just for art but for human flourishing. In his day it was industrialisation that despoiled the environment as well as thoughtless development. That gave his one and only fairy story, The King of the Golden River, the character of a fable. In it two bad brothers, Hans and Schwartz are brutal to people and animals and nature; their good, downtrodden brother, Gluck, is kindly to other creatures and people and respectful of nature. They get their just deserts.

That aspect of the tale has been captured in a new edition of the story by Quentin Blake who provides new colour illustrations. In the preface he says, “I soon became aware of two remarkable things about Ruskin’s story. One is that, in writing this children’s story, he had also written an eloquent parable of his own view of nature; or, as we might say, the environment. Second, that despite Ruskin’s efforts, the fable is even more relevant today…There are plenty of Hanses and  Shwartzes [the baddies] operating globally; pray heaven that any contemporary Gluck may have the good fortune of his young predecessor.”

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Ruskin not only anticipated most of our contemporary social and environmental concerns; he expressed them far more eloquently than we do. He was a prophet, not just in the sense of foretelling doom but in drawing attention to our moral failings. As he said in Unto This Last: “That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.” He was of his time and ahead of it. Those books of his which were for decades so little read, it’s time to read them again

The opening sentence of Iris Murdoch’s classic essay “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’” is as powerful as it is intriguing – as you’d expect from a philosopher who was also a prolific and successful novelist. Though Murdoch does not name anyone specifically, her bold assertion challenges a litany of thinkers who have held that philosophy is or should be a matter of impersonal investigation.

For Murdoch, however, philosophy concerns itself with us as individuals and with the urgent questions of our times. One such question is how to handle ‘the collapse of religion’ against the growing dominance of science. In “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’”, Murdoch worries that we might be losing something important as religious experience declines. It is not that Murdoch is troubled by lower church attendance – though she was fiercely opposed to changing the language of the Book of Common Prayer in the Eighties. Rather, she wonders whether it is possible to create a secular notion of prayer as attention to a Good rather than God. She also proclaims that we need a moral philosophy in which love, a notion so long maligned by philosophers, is again made central.

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Love, as conceived by Murdoch, is not a panacea for all moral problems. Nor does it offer an easy answer to the question how we can make ourselves morally better. Love is ambiguous. It can be selfish. Murdoch’s novels provide ample examples of characters whose love is possessive and even destructive. In some cases, they literally lock the object of their love away in an inner chamber, as Charles Arrowby does to the love of youth in Murdoch’s Booker Prize Winner The Sea, the Sea (1978).

Sometimes, love does not even come into it, as when, for instance, we simply need to pay our bills. But what Murdoch objects to is moral philosophy’s attention to such matters at the exclusion of everything else. We are not always rational decision makers. Often when we choose, the die has already been cast.

For this reason, Murdoch tries to move the focus away from the moments of decision and towards the inner life – the domain once catered to by religion. Religious practices, as simple as lighting a candle, were designed to redirect energies that are often hidden to us, and in their absence, Murdoch feared that the inner life would be explained away by the sciences.

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It is for this reason too that Murdoch thinks love should be a central concept again. Love can be a force for the good. Love can make us see that other people and other things are real. Nature does not exist for our sake but has its own life and reality. Love is, Murdoch writes, the discovery of reality. As her character explains in Iris, the 2001 film of her life: “Human beings love each other, in sex, in friendship, and when they are in love, and they cherish other beings – humans, animals, plants, even stones.”

To love in this way is difficult, because human beings are selfish. We spend our time consoling our hurt egos. We cannot face any damage to our self-esteem and hide in fantasy or in theological fictions. Through Freud and Plato, Murdoch thus tries to retain some “doctrine of original sin”. Another attempt to secularise (the Christian) religion.

Yet, despite this rather negative view of humans, Murdoch is convinced that humans can be good and can do good. She expresses confidence in the virtuous peasant, the mothers of large families or the aunts. They all ‘know’ and will go on ‘knowing’. She urges her readers to look at art or teach meditation to children, so that they may understand. In her last work of philosophy, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), she is even more optimistic that we know how to think of what is good, as St Paul cautioned. Oddly enough, she writes, we do.

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These different aspects of love and of Murdoch’s moral philosophy are clearly illustrated by her famous example of a mother and her daughter-in-law, introduced in her essay “The Idea of Perfection” (which originated from her 1962 Ballard Matthews Lecture). While the mother-in-law is kind and polite with her son’s new wife, she fears that he has married beneath him. Yet, at some point, she reconsiders her first impressions. As the daughter-in-law is gone, the change of heart is not caused by any change in behaviour, or by any other external reason. She simply reconsiders and finds that her new family member is not “vulgar”, but “refreshingly simple”, “not undignified but spontaneous”.

Murdoch introduces this example to argue for the importance of the inner life against moral philosophy’s focus on decision and action. Even when nothing changes and all behave beautifully, it still matters what we think and imagine. She explains that when the mother looks again at her daughter-in-law, she does so lovingly. It is love that allows her to see her differently and, Murdoch would hold, more justly. For Murdoch, to look at someone with love is not to look at them with rose-coloured glasses, but neither is it to look objectively. To look lovingly is to attend to reality.

What is significant is that before introducing this example Murdoch admits that she could have taken an example from religion, such as for instance ritual. This acknowledgement makes clear how religion is prominently on Murdoch’s mind. It was with her as a constant question, to which she kept returning, rethinking her earlier thoughts, trying out new ones. Her work allows us to continue in the same probing, reflective and creative way.

But there I met the Midgleys, Geoff and Mary – both considerable philosophers, and both with an extraordinary gift for inspiring wayward students. Under their care, I grew up. And graduated with a passion for philosophy and stamped forever by the desire to join the dots between abstract thought and real life. The Midgleys turned me around.

Mary and Geoff had an open house for the mixed bag of students that came within their orbit. Teaching and pastoral care and philosophy all blended together, creating an astonishing sense of solidarity amongst us all. I was the last of this generation – the University closed the philosophy department the year I left. It wasn’t financially viable, they said. It broke the Midgley’s hearts. Geoffrey passed away a few years later. Mary died last week, aged 99.

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CLR James rejected the posturing of identity politics

By Ralph Leonard

The connection between philosophy and pastoral care wasn’t incidental. Mary started teaching in Oxford, but left in 1950 and was glad to have left. She travelled up to Newcastle with a desire, she said, “to bring academic philosophy back into its proper connection with life, rather than let it dwindle into a form of highbrow chess for graduate students”. With this aim, Mary was a part of a number of extraordinary women philosophers who had met at Oxford: Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch among them. Mary was old school. “Huzzar!” she would exclaim, if she approved of what you were saying. Not “hurrah”, not “horray”. She felt like a blast from the past, even back in the 80’s.

Professor Jane Heal, another of the Newcastle teaching staff of that era, summarised Mary’s thought admirably in the Guardian: “She identified the limitations of only trying to understand things by breaking them down into smaller parts and losing sight of the many ways in which the parts are dependent on the wholes in which they exist.”

Mary was suspicious of the idea that an explanation for something could only be found by breaking it up into smaller and smaller questions, thus missing the wood for the trees. Some explanations involve understanding what is before your eyes, open to view. Many explanations for things are hidden in plain sight. Geoff was the more conventional Wittgensteinian, urging students to appreciate that “nothing is hidden”, that the meaning of a thing reveals itself in and through the way we use it. Mary had an equally hostile attitude to reductionism. And her subject of interest was the human animal.

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It was probably this distrust of reductionism that made her so suspicious of scientism – the inappropriate, as she saw it, extension of the scientific method to those phenomenon that do not benefit from it. She famously fell out with Richard Dawkins for offering what she felt to be his highly reductive understand of human beings as being driven by “the selfish gene”, as if selfishness were built into our DNA. This was Thatcherism dressed up as scientific explanation, she thought. From the perspective of the North East of England, with the Miner’s Strike devastating local communities, and the Bishop of Durham thundering from his pulpit about the evils of economic competition determining all value, Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (published 1976) felt like the philosophy of the enemy.

Mary wasn’t obviously religious, but she had grown up in an Anglican vicarage, and to me she seemed like a fellow traveller, sympathetic to the broader Christian ethical impulse. The Midgley house felt like the very best of what an Anglican vicarage should be: welcoming, compassionate, fizzing with ideas. I arrived at university, from a broadly non-religious family, assuming that religion was simply pious mumbo-jumbo, clearly discredited by the likes of David Hume. I emerged, open to giving it a chance. I was less interested in breaking religion down into its parts where confusion and contradiction abounded. I wasn’t interested in the so-called proofs of God’s existence. They didn’t work, for one thing. And that never bothered me.

In terms of the lived experience, looking at the way God functioned in the lives of real believers, Christianity made a great deal more sense to me. Under the Midgleys, I came to see that explanation is not always like the foundations of a building, keeping it up – as if, without a proper explanation, the building falls. On the contrary, an explanation is a way of making sense of what is already there, not a way of re-arranging it. Understanding is after the fact. So St Anselm’s ‘Faith seeking understanding’ – i.e. faith is not built on understanding but goes looking for it – opened up, for me, a way of being a Christian, without having resolved any of the underlying contradictions. And that hasn’t stopped being true. For me, believing in God names a certain sort of commitment, not the conclusion of an argument.

Further reading

Why does everyone have it in for the Puritans?

By Giles Fraser

There is a particular love that a student has for a teacher who made a difference to their lives. I was in McDonalds with my small son when I got a text to say that she had died. I felt like a bit of an idiot ordering a Happy Meal with tears rolling down my cheeks. But this was the end of an era. She was perhaps the last of a generation of moral philosophers that looked as much to classical literature and fiction as to empirical inquiry. Iris Murdoch was more famous, but Mary Midgley was every bit as formidable. Looking back, there is no way my life would have turned out like did if it hadn’t been for the Midgleys. Wonderful people. May they rest in peace.

He was one of the few Leftist intellectuals – as Christopher Hitchens once said about George Orwell – who was simultaneously on the right side of the three major questions of the 20th century: Fascism, Stalinism and Imperialism. But today his praise for ‘Western culture’ would probably be dismissed as a slightly embarrassing residue of a barely concealed ‘Eurocentrism”’

Sophie Zhang in a recent column for Varsity entitled “Not all literature is ‘universal’ – nor does it have to be”, writes that:

“The study of English Literature… has often centred around texts that claim to explore ‘universal’ themes and experiences. Yet what such curricula fail to recognise is that in glorifying the universal, we neglect the particular, because to focus on the ‘Western’ canon would be to ‘to centre whiteness and continually place non-white voices on the margins'”.

Implicit in this view is that only “whiteness” could have access to the universal, and those outside of “whiteness” are intrinsically on the margins, and their views are necessarily “particular”.

Similarly, James’s admiration for Western culture and the Western canon is something many black radicals, who otherwise admire James for his opposition to colonialism, struggle to understand about him. It is rather fashionable, and almost expected, that to be a ‘proper’ black radical today is to be hostile to all that is designated as Western; it is to indiscriminately dismiss the Enlightenment as “white” and “racist”, and disparage the Western canon as not being “relevant” to black people.

James, though, was, to his core, a radical humanist who believed in the collective power of human beings to transform society and be masters of their own future. He held this fundamental principle throughout his life, above any narrow characteristic such as race, ethnicity, or nationality. While James opposed dogmatic, class-reductionist forms of Marxism that didn’t take into account the importance of racist oppression, or were indifferent to the specific struggles of black people for their freedom, he had no time whatsoever for half-baked romantic notions of ‘negritude’, or essentialist black nationalism.

Further reading

Identity politics is a monster. Connection is how we kill it.

By Graeme Archer

James was strongly anti-imperialist, yet he wasn’t anti-Western (a distinction that often gets lost these days), and was one of the few radical Leftists who talked of Western civilisation unironically, without “scare quotes”. James himself, in a 1969 essay called Discovering Literature in Trinidad, was explicit about the influence of ‘Western civilisation’ on his outlook:

“I didn’t learn literature from the mango tree, or bathing on the shore and getting the sun of colonial countries; I set out to master the literature, philosophy and ideas of Western civilisation. That is where I have come from and I would not pretend to be anything else.”

He was, as Farrukh Dhondy observed in his biography, “the only intellectual of the black diaspora to unequivocally espouse and embrace the intellectual, artistic and socio-political culture of Europe”. For James, the emancipation of the black mind would come from embracing the works of “dead white men” such as Socrates, Sophocles, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Thackeray and Dickens, as much as the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Aime Cesairé, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison.

He believed the European canon provided black people with a means of empowering themselves both culturally and intellectually, to broaden their imagination, to liberate them from the tyranny of geography and race, and help them transcend their particularity and enter into a universal conversation across colour lines, based on a shared humanity.

James was once asked, “Should Shakespeare and Rembrandt and Beethoven matter to Caribbean people?”, and replied:

“The Caribbean people are people, and Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Beethoven should matter to all people living in the world today, and who are able by means of their language, or by means of information and communication to understand or get some insight into what Shakespeare and Beethoven mean. I don’t like that question at all… if it means that Caribbean writers should be aware that there are emphases in their writing that we owe to non-European, non-Shakespearean roots, and the past in music which is not Beethoven, that I agree. But… fundamentally we are a people whose literary and aesthetic past is rooted in Western European civilisation.”

This legacy is important for us today, because James understood that the Enlightenment, though conceived and initiated (for historical reasons, not genetic ones) mainly by privileged white European men, is the common property of all of humanity.

Indeed, it was the struggle of those who were initially excluded, like black people, against a background of colonial domination and racial subordination that brought the seemingly abstract Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality closer to concrete reality; the Haitian revolution, which he documented so majestically in The Black Jacobins, is an embodiment of this struggle. What the French started in 1789, the Haitians completed in 1804. For James, then, the Enlightenment, and the struggle to complete it, was and still is a global, and hence a universal, project.

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The noise of victimhood culture has drowned out the plight of the poor

By Jenny McCartney

Furthermore, James recognised – as a faithful believer in the materialist conception of history – that “the race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics” and that to “think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous”. At a time when there is intense debate on the Left around identity politics and “race v class”, this statement may be uncomfortable for some who may misinterpret and mischaracterise it as “class reductionist”.

Not so, as James goes on to say: “But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.” In fact, James even argued that in the United States that black Americans were a kind of vanguard for any progressive revolution in that country, not because black people are special or their melanin levels give them magic powers, but because of their objective position within the structures of American society. He argued that if blacks mobilised en masse for their freedom then the dynamics of the entire society will shift too.

James was creative and intellectually flexible in his Marxism, as opposed to the rigid and economistic forms many of his contemporaries adhered to, which allowed him to have an integrated view of race and class and how they influenced each other within the wider context of capitalist society and international political economy.

In his view, it is not simply class, and not simply race, that matter; because if you don’t understand how the wider political, social and economic structures divide and rule societies in their totality, you will get nowhere.

Further reading

It's not just the economy, stupid. Cultural factors and disdain for politicians also drive "populism"

By Matthew Elliott

This stance goes against both class reductionism and some of the superficial nonsense that masquerades as ‘anti-racism’ and ‘intersectionality’. James rejects it as always tending to personalise power and hence the enemy, and for basing itself on politically correct gesture politics that frets about ‘micro-aggressions’ and ‘cultural appropriation’. That reduces the struggle against institutions and practices to a trivial fight against individuals and attitudes. This facile and essentialist identity politics is counterproductive to any based on solidarity and liberation.

James expressed the core point very simply when he was asked to become a teacher at the department of the newly created Black Studies in Washington DC’s Federal City College (a post he accepted, but with some reservations):

“I do not know, as a Marxist, ‘Black Studies’ as such. I only know the struggle of people against tyranny and oppression in a certain political and social setting, and particularly in the last two hundred years. It is impossible for me to separate black studies from white studies in any theoretical point of view.”

James understood that any successful politics should not reinforce one’s narrow and parochial identity, but help to transcend it. We live in a big world, and it is in this context that our politics must be situated: to restrict people politically in little ethnic and racial silos is not productive to any genuinely progressive project.

It is this radical humanism and intellectual cosmopolitanism that is the greatest lesson we can learn from James. Because in this age, where solidarity has been eroded, where identity politics may seem pervasive, where racist oppression may seem immovable, where the hope that we can change society and create a better world is possible may seem fanciful, the core democratic and revolutionary principles of James can guide us to create new ideas and new movements that can help us emancipate ourselves.

Further reading

New evidence on race and inequality in America

By Peter Franklin

Who was she? It doesn’t really matter. When she wrote – from the 1930s to the 1980s – there were few celebrity journalists and Gellhorn knew that she was not, and should not be, important. She was, in fact, a clever, curious, unwillingly beautiful woman who left a bourgeois upbringing in Missouri and threw herself into the only story in town: the rise of fascism in Europe.

I suppose the equivalent today would be if the child hack of Novara Media or Squawk Box were to travel to Venezuela to describe the monster they instead summon through the magical power of Tweet. But they won’t go to Venezuela. Reality doesn’t interest them that much, and they lack the funds. Gellhorn wrote for Collier’s magazine, a now defunct American weekly which had the sense to pay her well and leave her alone. Some things about the past are better.

Further reading

Analogue dictators are no match for digital detectives

By Ian Birrell

Journalism is often considered a minor art, a tawdry, opportunistic stop-gap between violence and history. Today, with the rise of the celebrity activist journalist with his obvious, insulting lies and his cowardice, it is even less than that. Of course, the narcissists would come for journalism; the bylines are pleasing. But they are, despite their protestations to equality, engaged in a war for attention, not truth. They are tyrannical in tone, and they shed no light – how can they from their lap-tops?

Gellhorn’s journalism, though, is a time machine. It takes you to her side, instantly; you can hear the guns and brush the dust of old Europe from your eyes.

“In war,” she wrote, “I never knew anything beyond what I could see and hear, a full-time occupation.” She watched the Allied invasion of France from a hospital ship in the English Channel, because sexism kept her, initially, from the front lines. “The ship itself was painfully white,” she wrote, “all fixed up like a sitting pigeon.” A better stylist than her sometime husband, Ernest Hemingway – and he knew it too, tried to thwart her and never forgave her – they competed to write the best prose, and Martha won. You cannot write great op-ed without reportage, and you cannot get great reportage without humility.

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How post-modernism killed America's morality

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You need rage too, and rage is very fashionable these days. I am all for rage, but I like it well-hewn, and with footnotes. Martha’s rage was precise, and it came to her young. Here is her rage against how people lived in the Great Depression, written for the US government and her short apprenticeship in journalism: “It is hard to believe that these conditions exist in a civilised country,” [1. Caroline Moorehead, Martha Gellhorn: A Life, Vintage, 2011. Page 94.] she wrote tidily, and promptly tried to incite a small riot, for which she was fired.

Here is her rage at Neville Chamberlain – “a stick figure with a fossil mind”[ 2. Martha Gellhorn: The View from the Ground, Penguin,1988]  – who spoke “to and for the meanest stupidity of his people” after signing away “the life of Czechoslovakia”. She pitied the English – “they haven’t any imagination at all” she said, correctly, which is why we import our greatest novelists from Ireland and Cornwall – but she changed her mind in wartime and saw our character defects turn into something wonderful.

Here is her rage at Dachau: “No one looked out the windows as we flew over Germany.  No one ever wanted to see Germany again.” “We got to talk about it,” says a man sitting near her on the plane, “We got to talk about it, if anyone believes us or not”. I will spare you her observations about Dachau. If you want to read them, they are in her collected works The Face of War.

She could be funny, which was quite a feat in Germany in 1945. She paused in a village near the Ruhr pocket and was told by its inhabitants: “No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about twenty kilometres away was a veritable hotbed of Nazism.” Then someone told her: “I hid a Jew for six weeks. I hid a Jew for eight weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God’s children hid Jews).”[3. Ray Moseley, Reporting War: How foreign correspondents risk capture, torture and death to cover World War II, Yale, 2017.]

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Camus' rejection of tyranny is worth remembering today

By James Bloodworth

Her masterpiece was her coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 – Eichmann and the Private Conscience for the Atlantic magazine – and the best piece of journalism I have ever read. “This man is exempt from our pity, as he was pitiless beyond the reaches of imagination,” she wrote, “We cannot understand him because of this; and we fear him. We have cause for fear, and what we fear is deeper and stronger than the tangible terrors we live with: menacing struggles between rival states, weapons which pre-empt nature’s own rights. We fear him because we know that he is sane.” And that it is, exactly.

She was flawed. Her friend H.G.Wells, vexed by her occasional sloth, insisted she write something, anything, on a lazy morning, so she wrote an account of witnessing a lynching called Justice at Night which she – or someone else, it isn’t clear – then sold as journalism to The Spectator. It was brilliant but entirely fictional.

“I got a measure for my own life,” she wrote, of her reportage, “whatever its trials and tribulations they would always be petty, insignificant stuff by comparison.”[4. Martha Gellhorn The View from the Ground, Penguin, 1998.] When the Second World War came, she rebuked herself for having “an invaluable green American passport. I was perfectly safe…. I felt like a profiteer, ashamed and useless…. I could walk away.” But she didn’t. Instead she compiled a masterclass for future journalists. If only they would read it.

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

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

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

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

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

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By Henry Olson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading

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By Polly Mackenzie

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

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

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

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

Further reading

Test article

By Geoff Heath-Taylor

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

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

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

It is time to revisit Mill’s central philosophy: that it is possible to both support and protect individual liberty through the free-market system, while at the same time addressing social injustices. It is possible to create a freer and fairer capitalist society.

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John Milton: smug liberal and free-speech warrior

By Polly Mackenzie

Almost impossible to place on the political spectrum, Mill’s inability to fit neatly into any of the usual political pigeon holes has, sadly, meant that his work (some of it written with his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill) has been neglected. Writing at a time of immense poverty and inequality, and yet also restrictive Victorian moralism, Mill sought to make capitalism work better, rather than to replace it.

Mill believed in the power of the market – in the benefits of competition and the individual liberties it helped to uphold – and was skeptical of the state, along with revolutionaries who, in his words, had “serene confidence in their own wisdom on the one hand and a recklessness of other people’s sufferings on the other”. Today’s relevance is clear.

Mill’s agenda for improving capitalism was two-pronged. The first and best known was increasing personal liberty, as set out in his book On Liberty. He believed that social injustice could in part be addressed by making sure that people were freer to take advantage of the opportunities of life. The second (and lesser known) prong was Mill’s theory of the mind: his recognition that we sometimes go along with things without properly thinking about them, but that through education and reason we have the potential to change our mind, and in a way that enables greater individual liberty alongside greater social justice. Central to this was how we could reconcile our own individual self-interest – that desire to be free to do our own thing – with the interests of society.

While many economic and politic thinkers suppose that our own selfish interests are fixed and unchangeable, Mill disagreed. For Mill, reconciling individual and social interests can in part be achieved by getting people to think and question, rather than leaving it to the state to force people to do things for the “good of society” that they feel are against their own interests. This, he believed, resulted in an unnecessary trade-off between individual liberty and society.

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Aristotle's answer to identity politics

By Henry Olsen

Born into and educated in the “utilitarian” tradition – one that sought the greatest utility (or happiness) for the greatest number – Mill had an epiphany moment in his early twenties that triggered a six-month period of depression. Asking himself whether the ultimate achievement of a utilitarian reorganisation of the world could make him personally happy, his answer was ‘no’.

While utilitarians focused on rearranging the outside world, Mill argued that we also need to think about the world inside our minds. Bringing romanticism to bear on utilitarianism, and no fan of Victorian moralism, he adopted the idea that the human mind is embedded in culture and history – that much of what we do, think and value is shaped by something other than reason, and can, as a result, be reshaped by its application, making us happier as individuals and as a society. Perhaps the best example is his argument that women’s subservience was not “natural” but was instead the result of unequal liberties (e.g. unequal voting rights, property rights and education) that were blindly accepted because of societal conditioning. Mill believed that “[t]he despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement”.

In The Subjection of Women Mill reasons that fighting the attitudes and laws that render women second class citizens is not only good for women, but is in the best interests of everyone – that men will have more personal fulfilment when they associate with women as educated equals, and that equality in the home conditions us to be democratic rather than autocratic. He also suggested that equal liberties for women would help reduce population growth, thereby increasing wages and helping to achieve greater equality (he was, in fact, arrested as a young man for helping women access birth control).

Further reading

Capitalism is the best guarantee of individual freedom

By Victoria Bateman

This is an example of his two-prongs at work: how supporting individual liberty alongside encouraging reasoned argument can help deliver a world in which there is both greater individual freedom and lower levels of inequality. For Mill, the “emancipation of women and cooperative production, are…the two great changes that will regenerate society”. We have made great strides towards the former, but what of the latter?

This brings us to the third part of Mill’s agenda for reforming capitalism, one that receives even less attention than his theory of the mind, yet has particular relevance to today. Mill was a big fan of the competition, experimentation and diversity that free markets supported, and crucially believed this extended to the form of business organisation itself. He did not see the future as being one of capitalists versus workers: firms in which workers receive wages and capitalists the associated profits. Instead, he anticipated a future that involved an “association of labourers with the capitalist”, or an “association of labourers among themselves” in the form of worker cooperatives.

While communist revolutionaries (then and now) suggest that a fairer future hangs on the expropriation of property from private hands – the nationalisation of “the means of production” – Mill offered an alternative. His was a model that avoided expropriation, where new firms would instead develop to challenge older style firms – new firms in which workers were given shares, or firms that were composed entirely of workers working together in the form of cooperatives. For Mill, such firms had the possibility of being even more successful than traditional capitalist firms, as they would motivate workers (who would now receive a share of profits) and would result in better labour relations, avoiding the angst associated with more traditional firms. As a result, the advantages of the market are maintained, but with a more equal distribution of private property: individual liberty with greater social justice.

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Capitalists – not socialists – are killing capitalism

By Victoria Bateman

For Mill, capitalism would naturally evolve in a way that made this new style of firm inevitable: as wages rose, on the back of women’s liberation (which would slow population growth), he believed profits would fall, reducing the prospects for the older style firm and giving workers more savings to invest in new style enterprises. So far, history hasn’t exactly borne this out – despite, at least in the UK, politicians championing cooperative and mutual business models. And yet with the share of income going to capital increasing at the expense of labour, the idea of workers sharing in the profits should be an attractive one to those seeking to rebuild public faith in capitalism.

Why, then, has Mill’s idea not taken off? Was he wrong that share ownership for workers (or full-scale worker cooperatives) results in better companies, ones that outcompete older style ones and so naturally become the future? Or, are there stumbling blocks in the way of alternative models of business, such as the hold of existing business forms, together with inadequate human and physical capital for challengers? Today, if we are serious about maintaining markets, but at the same time having a fairer distribution of private property, these are questions we should be considering.

In the charged, post-crash era we are living through it is easy to blame capitalism for our ills. But abandoning the free-market model means enabling greater state intervention, and history shows us that leads to less individual freedom – to a “recklessness of other people’s sufferings on the other”. Mill understood this, and provided a middle way.

Be that as it may. William’s razor is a simple philosophical principle, also known as the law of parsimony. It can be expressed in various ways, but essentially, it’s: all else being equal, the simplest answer is probably the right one.

Occam wrote it as “It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer” and “plurality must never be posited without necessity”.

It is a sensible rule. If someone says your car doesn’t run because an internal combustion engine turns a drive shaft which turns the wheels, but because it’s pushed by magical goblins, you can say “but you can’t see the goblins”. He might say, they’re invisible. You say, well, I’ve run my hand around the car, and I can’t feel them either; he says they’re undetectable by touch. The engine looks like it’s running? The magic goblins make it look as though it’s running. The drive shaft is turning? The goblins turn the drive shaft.

Further reading

Aristotle's answer to identity politics

By Henry Olsen

The evidence – a car with no visible goblins – supports both hypotheses. No amount of evidence will falsify the ‘invisible magic goblins’ hypothesis, because it’s unfalsifiable. But Occam’s razor provides a way out: “Sure, the evidence supports both hypotheses. But I can explain it without undetectable goblins, and that is simpler, so I will choose the first hypothesis until you give me a better reason to choose the second.”

Debates like this have really happened. In 1857, the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse wrote a book called Omphalos, in which he argued that all the evidence that the Earth was older than Biblical tradition claimed – all the fossils, and layers of sedimentary rock, and ancient canyons apparently carved by millions of years of erosion – had been created by God already looking ancient.

Again, it’s impossible to falsify this claim with evidence. But we can say “OK, but ‘the universe looks old because it is old’ is simpler than ‘the universe looks old because God wanted to make it look old’.”

But there’s a problem: I’ve just asserted that A is simpler than B in both cases. It’s not always obvious what simple means. For instance, the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, in a 2010 paper, deployed Occam’s razor when he suggested that God is the simplest explanation for the universe, because God is a single thing. “God did it” is certainly simpler to say than “the universe emerged from quantum fluctuations in space-time”. But I would say that Occam’s razor is an argument against the existence of God. Who’s right?

Further reading

How post-modernism killed America's morality

By Giles Fraser

Conveniently, in the 1960s, the mathematicians Ray Solomonoff and Andrey Kolmogorov developed a mathematically formalised version of Occam’s razor. One version of it is known as ‘minimum message length‘, and it asks: what is the shortest computer program that could produce what we’re seeing?

Let’s start with a simpler example than the creation of the universe: producing a string of numbers. I’ve taken this example from a Czech mathematician/computer scientist called Michal Koucký. He gives three strings of numbers: 33333333333, 31415926535, and 84354279521. If you wanted to write a program that carried on those strings for a million digits, what’s the shortest it could be?

The first you could do very easily: a simple bit of code saying “print the number 3 a million times”. You could do it in four lines of the beginners’ programming language BASIC.

The other two look random. But, in fact, the second string is simply the first 11 digits of pi, and you could print it out to a million digits by using one of the many quite simple algorithms which determine the digits of pi.

The third, however, is truly random. To write it out to a million digits you would need the program to specify all one million of them.

According to the ‘minimum message-length’ version of Occam’s razor, the first string is the simplest; the second is nearly as simple; and the third is the most complex.

So what does this mean for Swinburne? Well, the equations needed to describe the Big Bang are certainly complex. But they are sufficiently simple for humans to have written them. The algorithms needed to describe God – an all-powerful, all-knowing being – are not. We haven’t even managed to write software that’s as powerful as a human brain yet. From a minimum message-length perspective, God is much more complex – and therefore unlikely – than physics.

Further reading

John Milton: smug liberal and free-speech warrior

By Polly Mackenzie

The same is true of evolution – you can quite easily write a program that approximates evolution by natural selection. But an intelligence sufficient to design all the creatures that evolution has made would be amazingly hard to program.

It also has implications for arguments within science. The “many worlds” interpretation of quantum theory, which says that every fraction of a second the universe splits into billions of parallel universes, sounds complex. The alternative, the “Copenhagen” interpretation, which says that quantum events aren’t resolved until they are observed, needs only one universe, and so sounds simpler.

But the program you’d need to create millions of universes would be pretty much the same as a program needed to create one universe – just have an extra line in it which says “do that again”, essentially – while a program that had to keep track of what every human in the world was looking at would be much more complex. According to minimum message-length Occam’s razor, a cosmos consisting of infinite universes can be ‘simpler’ than one that contains just one.

None of this means that these arguments are correct. The Copenhagen interpretation might be right despite being more complex. God might still exist; if the evidence shows that intelligent creation is more likely than the Big Bang, then it doesn’t matter how simple the theories are. But it means that you need more evidence for them.

William of Ockham was by all accounts one of the finest philosophical minds of his time, but he was also a friar and a Christian. I don’t know if he would be pleased to see me using his razor as an argument against the existence of God. But I think he would appreciate the simplicity of Solomonoff and Kolmogorov’s update of his argument for simplicity.

He taught that politics is not ultimately about safety or comfort, although he accepted that both are important. Instead, the true aim of politics is to increase happiness and to promote friendship. A government, in his view, did that well if it used laws to inculcate good habits in its citizens, so that they lived good lives in the company of people to whom they were tied by more than simple blood-kinship.

Unlike his teacher, Plato, Aristotle believed this good life could only be lived in what we would nowadays call a republican form of government. While Plato argued, in The Republic, for the rule of an enlightened philosopher-king, Aristotle contended that people should be both ruler and ruled in turn. Finding the right ruler means engaging in debate, which in turn requires treating each other as being equal in the most decisive respect. There are many differences between our liberal democracies and Aristotle’s ideal regime, but one can easily see the common threads that link the two across the millennia.

Further reading

How post-modernism killed America's morality

By Giles Fraser

Failure to engage with others as equals breeds revolution. Aristotle discusses this at length in Book Five of his Politics, and we would recognise many of the causes of revolution that he describes. Insolence, contempt, and the rapid introduction of strangers who “do not acquire at once a common spirit” all are things he cites as causing states to convulse and collapse. All those factors are present and visible in the populist movements of today.

Practitioners of identity politics on the Left and of doctrinaire libertarianism on the Right engage in insolent behaviour and display contempt for many of their fellow citizens, needlessly creating discord, strife, and conflict. Their inflexible and intolerant demands have created today’s populist backlash, which is nothing more than a cry that average, native-born citizens are people too.

Proponents of identity politics implicitly deny the possibility of reasonable discussion that can be conducted in a friendly, or at least civil, manner by all in society. They replace that with the idea that one’s lived experience is irretrievably shaped by race, gender, or innate orientation. If that is true, then political discussion is meaningless, because no group can truly understand an other – they are isolated from one another by the islands of their unique experiences. That is why we hear the epithets of racist, bigot, and sexist thrown about so wantonly – even to question the political demands of a group that feels powerless is illegitimate.

Further reading

Adventures in Trumpland

By Ian Birrell

Proponents of doctrinaire libertarianism share the same principle, although they express it in a different way. The heart of their view is that no one has the right to interfere in a contract that two other people form. That can be true only if there is no common humanity or standard of judgment that people outside the contract – that is, you, me, and everyone else in society – can use to critique it. It’s not that other people are wrong; it’s that they have no standing to make an argument in the first place.

Doctrinaire libertarianism is generally out of favour, but it has become the common wisdom in the arenas of trade and migration. Free trade is often justified on utilitarian grounds – particularly in the assertion that it will make everyone better off – but when that is questioned, the vehemence of the response shows that the true justification is something else. Migration is often justified on humanitarian grounds, but again the vehemence of the response to people who question the need for it exposes the true motive. For the true-believing free-trader or libertarian, it’s simply a right for people to be able to trade with whom they want and to live where they want. There’s no objective standard that people who don’t like the results can invoke to change those policies.

Further reading

Welcome to the populist decade

By Henry Olsen

The result of these beliefs is that people are told they must suffer – lose status, income, jobs, or something else – as a result of identity politics and libertarianism alike, and that they have no legitimate recourse. In effect, they are being kicked out of the political arena and deprived of their common citizenship. To use Aristotle’s terms, they are being treated with insolence and contempt. No wonder they are in revolt!

Traditionalist Christians, less-educated native-born citizens, and others caught up in populist movements want to be heard. Healthy societies would engage them in debate and seek to find common ground, so that all citizens can live together in harmony. That requires civility and respect, even in the face of intense disagreement about public policy. But to do that, one must first believe that we hold something important in common with those with whom we disagree.

Recovering Aristotle’s sense of politics and human nature would do that, and thus go a long way towards calming our turbulent political waters.

Something of an obsessive, he had an unhealthy relationship with women, often fixating upon a particular romantic attachment. He tried to join the Roman Catholic church twice, but both times he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. He loved stray dogs. May he rest in Peace.

My own interest in Wallace was sparked by a brilliant graduation address he gave to students at Kenyon College in 2005, entitled “This is Water: Thoughts delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living a Compassionate Life.” Two fish meet an older fish swimming in the opposite direction. “Morning boys!” says the older fish, “How’s the water?” The two younger fish swim on, then one turns to the other and asks “What the hell is water?”

Further reading

Consumer greed is making suckers of us all

By Giles Fraser

Water, for Wallace, is the ubiquitous cultural presumptions in which we are all immersed, so all-surrounding as to be invisible. They are the beliefs that we all take for granted, that shape and sustain us. But the purpose of a good liberal arts education, Wallace maintains, is that throughout the boring everydayness of queueing at the supermarket checkout or whatever dulling routine our jobs lead us into, whatever the water in which we swim, it gives us the intellectual tools to take a step back and choose what to make of our circumstances.

“You get to decide what you worship” is how he puts it. “Because … in the day-to-day trenches of adult life there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” And a good reason for worshipping some sort of god is that “pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive”.

What follows is like a preacher on fire:

“If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you… Worship power, you will end up weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, you will always end up feeling stupid, a fraud.”

I was rocked by this address. “The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.”

David Foster Wallace was himself a student during the high point of critical theory and post-modern philosophy, a cultural moment that emphasised the need for irony and a kind of self-referential knowingness that looked with suspicion, derision even, at all attempts at moral seriousness. Wallace, though, sought a return to what has come to be called ‘the new sincerity’, an attempt to recapture the sort of “passion, conviction and engagement with deep moral issues that we – here, today – cannot, or do not, permit ourselves”. The sort of moral seriousness that Wallace admired in a writer like Dostoyevsky.

Further reading

John Milton: smug liberal and free-speech warrior

By Polly Mackenzie

Wallace saw his own culture as being trapped in a sort of feedback loop of knowing nods and winks, like one of those Ferris Bueller asides, when he breaks the fourth wall, looks straight into the camera and (apparently) wryly comments directly to those watching the film at home. In such a world, nothing is real, nothing is solid. Everything is exposed as sort of fiction, lacking true bottom. Those who pretend moral sincerity here become the butt of the joke, the rightly object of parody. Sincerity becomes the object of scorn. A laughable credulity.

In such a culture, we all have to pretend our utterances are tongue-in-cheek, even when we are trying to say something important, even when we are crying for help. For Wallace, “irony and ridicule … are agents of great despair and stasis in US culture.”

Irony, for Wallace, does have an important emergency function; it undermines the hypocrisy of authority. It is a shock tactic but it is not basis for culture as such. Because irony is “singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks”.

Here is the core of Wallace’s assessment of his cultural predicament:

“Even gifted ironists work best in sound-bites. I find them sort-of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but … as for actually driving cross country with a gifted ironist or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty, but also … oppressed.”

The ironist is an expert at destruction, at undermining authority, but offers nothing to replace it. We deliberately smirk at ourselves when why try and say something important or venture weighty things, pretending that we only half mean it. Like Ferris Bueller, we too feel we have to wink at the camera.

Two days after Wallace hanged himself, Lehman Brothers went into administration, an event that became emblematic of the global financial crisis that was to come. Wallace had spent his whole literary career trying to revive a form of moral sincerity that he believed had been hollowed out of American culture by the toxic irony of continual mockery. And he defiantly sought to revive the single entendre of moral seriousness from within a culture dominated by the double entendre of not really meaning it. Because, in such an environment, moral values had struggled to survive.

Further reading

Insincere politicians are cheapening public debate

By Giles Fraser

When some people dared to speak of right and wrong, cultural sophisticates smirked knowingly and chuckled at their naivety. Post-modernism had all but cleared the stage of moral sincerity. Looking back, it seems little surprise that the greedy and the powerful of Wall Street were able to fill their boots.

Our moral consciousness had been sabotaged, and, too busy laughing, we hadn’t really noticed. “This is Water” now reads like a warning. The change in our moral environment had been so thorough, deep and all-pervasive as to be invisible. And millions paid the price as houses were repossessed, savings wiped out, and wages flatlined. Governments bailed out the banks with billions and instituted programmes of austerity for the poor. The joke was well and truly over.