What would happen, though, if instead of creating the impression of headlessness, we actually took artists out of the creative process? Well, now we can find out. Researchers are experimenting with applying machine learning to visual imagery, and the result is the unnerving phenomenon of ‘GAN art’.

A ‘GAN’ is a ‘generative adversarial network’, which is to say two machine learning networks programmed to run in parallel. The first is fed a set of input data, such as a type of image, and told to generate new, believable versions of that data. The second is tasked with assessing whether the new, AI-generated data are real or fake.

The aim is for the first network to succeed in fooling the second network more than half the time. As the two models adjust in relation to one another, they become increasingly skilled at predicting and manipulating patterns in the input imagery.

One playful result of this is web or smartphone apps that invite the user to ‘create’ — that is, prompt the AI to create — images based on text. Wombo is a popular one: you can choose from several different ‘styles’, enter your text prompt and watch the machine create an image.

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When you do so, two things become apparent. First, the more abstract the prompt, the more difficult it is to distinguish the output from human-created art. But secondly, there’s something indefinably off about them. That comes more clearly into focus when you give the machine a more specific prompt — as I discovered when I asked Wombo to draw me a cat.

Cat images are so popular and widespread online that one 2013 cat food ad claimed that they make up 15% of all internet traffic. With such an immense dataset, you’d think an AI would find it easy to generate a cat image.

But when I prompted Wombo with ‘Kitten’ I got what looks like the disfigured victim of some deranged scientist’s experimental flesh-sculpting, as viewed through a haze of LSD. Here it is; judge for yourself.

Looking at this abomination, the off-ness becomes easier to grasp.

Everyone — at least, everyone human who’s ever spent time online — knows what a kitten looks like. A skilled artist can convey a kitten’s shape and movement with a few lines of a pencil. But that knowledge is acquired not just by mechanically digesting and attempting to synthesise the aggregate of two-dimensional kitten images, but also understanding what kittens are, and what they mean in our cultural context.

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Without that capacity to filter and actively re-interpret in terms of the wider context, replacing meaning with pattern recognition creates something that’s both eerily almost-intelligible but also deeply disturbing. It is, as Macbeth says, “a tale told by an idiot”.

So what, you might say. GAN ‘art’ isn’t art. It’s a game, to amuse us for a few moments online when we should be doing something else. But absurd as it is, the idea of AI ‘art’ only takes a pervasive contemporary dream to a slightly more absurd conclusion: that of eliminating individuals from human culture.

The positive version of this dream imagines that we could promote equality by minimising the role of specific, individual contributions to human society. You see versions of this in the widespread academic effort, for some decades now, to downplay the study of ‘great’ individuals in favour of mass movements or widespread sociocultural phenomena.

Well-established in disciplines such as history or literature, this has percolated even as far as the quintessential study of great individuals, the ‘Grand Strategy’ course at Yale. Here, the course director Professor Beverley Gage prompted debate last year when she shifted the course curriculum away from individual political actors toward grassroots activism and civil rights.

We see same the effort to de-emphasise leadership in favour of the collective in the rise of technocratic forms of government. This is often well-meant: this study shows populations support technocracy in proportion to how incompetent their elected government is perceived to be. In other words, the more disillusioned we grow with the ability of our elected leaders to govern, the more longingly we look to ‘neutral’, depoliticised ways of running our affairs.

And confidence in human leadership is waning across the board. Angry populists condemn the ruling class as out of touch; critics decry the current government as incompetent; others dismiss the electorate as ignorant or racist. The problem, across the board, is: us.

Faced with our manifestly disappointing powers of human self-governance, the dream of eliminating leadership can’t but seem appealing. And it’s in this light that we should view Tuesday’s vote by our MPs, to entrench vaccine passes in British domestic life.

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This has been presented as a measure to control Covid — or, as George Osborne put it, a matter of “citizenship”. But it’s worth bearing in mind that emergency powers have a way of sticking around. Anti-terror measures enacted in America in the wake of 9/11 massively expanded US surveillance and are still in force. Once the infrastructure and social norms are in place for digital ID, they are unlikely to go away again — especially given the Government has already signalled a desire to introduce such a scheme.

From some perspectives, digital ID is an obvious and sensible move. In a 2020 video, the aerospace and weapons manufacturer Thales offers an enticing picture of how much easier many ordinary interactions could become with a ‘Digital ID Wallet’. Controlled from a smartphone by each individual user, Thales imagines this centralising a user’s personal data, eliminating the messy business of individual assessment and human error from ID checks and record-keeping across all areas of life.

The power of such tools is evident, as is their appeal from a governance perspective. But once they’re in place, the scope is infinite to extend them beyond simply logging driving licence records.

Once identities are held digitally, our behaviour can be tracked — and ‘nudged’ — digitally as well. And our elites, habituated by university courses that highlight the importance of large-scale social and cultural patterns over the specifics of individual experience, already look eagerly toward the potential offered by AI pattern recognition. But machine learning systems are only as good as their inputs. And pattern recognition isn’t the same thing as interpretation.

In an AI ‘art’ generator, this has little impact beyond creating creepy kitten-images. But in contexts that affect people’s lives more directly, machine learning has more serious implications. Imagine, for example, that we embraced a ‘prevention’ oriented public health system, using citizen data collected around a Digital ID Wallet. This isn’t so far-fetched: a data-driven pilot scheme aimed at tackling obesity via measures including tracking scheme members’ shopping history was launched earlier this year.

And while the existing pilot scheme focuses on rewards, a unified ID would make it easy to implement sanctions too. The Health Pass now required for entry into bars, clubs or venues to combat the spread of Covid-19 could without great difficulty be extended to other behaviours or linked with purchase history. What this change means is the arrival, likely for good, of a mode of digital-era governance where for the first-time participation in public life can be made conditional on ‘healthy’ behaviours.

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The mutant kitten is a vivid illustration of what happens when you task a computer with doing something human, without the capacity to understand what humans actually care about. Applied to real lives, the blind brilliant-idiot quality of AI pattern recognition is already causing miscarriages of justice.

Now imagine extending that deep into your life: having your Health Pass suspended because you’ve bought too many units of alcohol this week, perhaps, meaning you can’t access essential services. Never mind that you were shopping for an event at your local social club. The computer sees a pattern. And unlike for a human, for machine intelligence there’s no difference between pattern recognition and meaning.

The slow collapse of social meaning into computer-legible pattern is reshaping us into a post-political, post-individual human order — one resisted most vigorously, to date, by conservatives. It was chiefly conservative politicians and voters who framed Brexit as pushback against technocracy. At Yale, conservative donors including Henry Kissinger forced Professor Gage to resign earlier this year. And on Tuesday 98 Tories — nearly a third of elected Conservative MPs — rebelled on Covid passes. Boris owes his victory to Labour Party support, and is probably a dead man walking within his own party now.

But Boris’s loss of face in his own party is one fraction of a far more deadly bleeding of authority: our downward spiral of disintegrating trust in human government full stop. As long as this continues, the temptation will persist to solve the crisis of authority with ever deeper rule by AI: the only compromise option left when we can’t agree on which human or humans should be in charge.

Fittingly, while writing this, I stumbled on another, current digital art project titled Headless. This one doesn’t depict the impersonal nature of finance — it’s trying to harness decentralised digital technology to human ends, by embracing it as an engine of creativity.

I hope its creators are right to think this can be done. For we’ve just taken another step closer to a world ruled by machines; machines that are brilliant at detecting patterns, but idiots when it comes to understanding what those patterns mean. And unless we’re able to humanise those technologies, this dawning age of digitised governance will digest the patterns of our social order and regurgitate a world of idiotic, inhuman cruelty.

After a bit of encouragement from my usual critics, the Council of Islamic Relations, followed by a petition from a motley array of faculty members, Brandeis rescinded their offer. Frederick Lawrence, who was then the university’s president, rang me just hours before the university issued a public statement.

At the time, I dismissed it as a one-off incident; an anomaly that could simply be brushed off. How wrong I was. That same year, a group of Muslim students tried to cancel my study group on the political theory of Islam at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, part of the Kennedy School. First, they complained to the university’s administration. When that didn’t work, they sent a letter to the funders of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. Then they suggested that I should install an imam in my class to counter my arguments. Unlike at Brandeis, the university authorities didn’t capitulate.

In both incidents, the challenge to academic freedom and free speech was posed by Islamists. But that didn’t disturb me: as an apostate who has spent many years criticising them, and received death threats in return, I was used to their antipathy.

Fast forward to 2021, however, and it seems I was wrong to dismiss this censorious attitude as an Islamist impulse. Hardly a week goes by without reports of a professor being protested, disciplined, and sometimes fired for violating the new and stringent norms of academic discourse. We read of scholars such as Kathleen Stock being driven to resign from their positions after constant hounding and threats. We read of a lecturer being no-platformed for daring to suggest that evaluations should be based on academic merit. We read of a Native American student being forced to apologise by a Yale University diversity tsar for making a harmless joke in an email.

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And that’s just in the past month. We have reached a point where grace and forgiveness are near extinct on American campuses; where reputations built over decades can be destroyed in a week. Some people still describe the phenomenon as “political correctness”. But this is much more like a religious movement. It’s hardly surprising that the Islamists’ opportunity to piggyback on existing illiberal and intolerant forces is now even greater.

Social justice, critical race theory, diversity, equality and inclusion — such terms are difficult to object to when taken at face value. And as a consequence, they have grown and spread like weeds in almost every institution. By the time we recognised the deeply illiberal notions that lurked behind these bland phrases, it was too late; they had already taken over whole departments, embedding their extensive roots into the fabric of academic institutions.

I didn’t see this coming. Seven years ago, I considered those who sounded the alarm to be engaged in histrionics. But today it is impossible to deny that the alarmists were right.

After the Brandeis cancellation, I published my intended remarks, stating that “we need to make our universities temples not of dogmatic orthodoxy, but of truly critical thinking, where all ideas are welcome and where civil debate is encouraged”. At the time, I was hopeful. Yet every passing year, free discourse increasingly became the exception in academic settings.

And while countless academics have been crucified for daring to speak out, it is ultimately their students who have suffered most in this tragedy. Our education system is failing them: rather than being a place of learning, universities have transformed into a place of fear. They demand safe spaces and a life free from all forms of aggressions: micro and macro. They graduate ill-prepared for the future, no longer equipped with the critical skills needed to thrive in a society where safe spaces, trigger warnings and preferred pronouns are not the norm. Their lives as students have been stripped of opportunities to overcome challenges and adversity, to develop inner-strength and confidence.

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Faced with such a toxic climate, riddled with the weeds of intolerance, one might think the solution is to simply give up. But to do so is not only cowardly; it ignores the fact that there is cause for optimism in the future. There are seedlings sprouting that point to renewal.

This is partly because America’s markets remain strong and reactive, bringing supply to wherever there is demand. The American market is hungry for a new approach to education. Demand is high for a university that delivers on academic freedom, merit-based recruitment of students, and is a safe space for people to learn and exchange ideas, not imagined injuries. And the supply is coming.

This week, I joined an intellectually diverse and curious group of professors and scholars in launching the University of Austin (UATX). It is an institution that stands, above all, for the pursuit of truth. It will offer a rigorous, liberal education from leading experts in their fields; a place that will teach students how to think, not what to think; a place where they will be intellectually challenged and, at times, made to feel uncomfortable.

Professors will be able to explore ideas and topics that are taboo elsewhere, without threats to their reputation, livelihoods or well-being. Unlike nearly a fifth of universities, we will not require statements of commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. All we are looking for is a commitment to learning. And that doesn’t seem to be in short supply: within 12 hours of announcing the University of Austin, more than 900 academics submitted inquiries seeking a position.

Their students, once applications open, will be accepted on the basis of merit, based on an admissions exam. The university states: “UATX will not arbitrarily factor in race, gender, class or any other form of identity into its decisions. UATX stands firmly against that sort of discrimination in admissions.” Of course, none of this matters if spaces are only reserved for a wealthy elite. So we are working on a financial model that will help lower tuition costs and provide scholarships or bursaries, providing an equal opportunity for students, regardless of their financial background.

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Starting a new university will no doubt be challenging, but the truth is that this is only the beginning — the first of many new educational institutions. American parents all over the country are in revolt against the increasingly divisive educational opportunities available to their children (witness the results of the Virginian gubernatorial elections). In the coming decade, it is not inconceivable that the market will deliver new grade-school opportunities for students, as well as other new institutions of higher education.

There are those who fear that the political extremes of the Left and Right may one day destroy the republic. But the only way to destroy America is to destroy our market system. As long as individuals have choice and the market self-corrects, we will continue to thrive. Where there is demand — and the result in Virginia prove there is demand — the supply will follow.

This is what the University of Austin symbolises: a new choice for all those disillusioned with the established institutions. For too long we have looked on as universities have been disfigured, blissfully unaware that all we needed to do was create our own. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a new Renaissance.

The habit of mind I term “asymmetrical multiculturalism”, which combines white intellectuals’ hostility to their own group with a romantic celebration of minorities, began not in the 2010s, but in the years following the First World War. Likewise what we call wokeness is a sensibility rooted in a set of ideas I term “Left-modernism”, a hybrid ideology of liberal cosmopolitanism and cultural egalitarianism. This blend crystallised before the War, but spread within US high culture in response to nativist populism in America and nationalism in Europe.

Then, as now, ethno-demographic change had been the catalyst for a populist cultural nationalism. The prohibition of the selling of alcohol, per the 1920 Volstead Act, was motivated by the animus of the country’s “dry” rural Protestant majority against the “wet” Catholic immigrant-descended populations — who formed a majority of most northern cities — and their “smart set” allies among the urban, often Episcopalian, elite.

Anglo-Protestant populism had helped curtail immigration from southern and eastern Europe through the Literacy Test of 1917, and National Origins (Johnson-Reed) Act of 1924 which established immigration quotas for countries based on their share of the 1890 immigration population. The year was deliberately chosen to skew the numbers in favour of north-west Europeans, although it was later adjusted to the 1920 share.

Concurrently, a revived Ku Klux Klan, focused this time in northern states, and anti-Catholic rather than anti-black in focus, enrolled six million members, and controlled several relatively Protestant northern cities such as Indianapolis. As in our time, the radical cultural Left had developed ideological innovations before the rise of Right-wing populism, but was energised by the populist surge.

Meanwhile, the genocidal excesses of Stalinism in the 1930s produced a breakaway anti-communist Left which influenced the post-1945 cultural order. In the 1960s, Left-modernism achieved mass penetration with the expansion of television and the universities, influencing the ambitious members of the new Baby Boom generation and steadily capturing society’s elite institutions in the 80s, 90s, 2000s and today.

The story begins in the 19th century, when nations were still considered an instrument of liberal progress. Cosmopolitanism prior to 1900 was typically yoked with admiration for the nation. Giuseppe Mazzini, for instance, founded both the nationalistic Young Italy and supranational Young Europe, seeing little in the way of contradiction.

American liberals like Ralph Waldo Emerson crowed, in 1846, about the US as “The asylum of all nations . . . the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, of the Africans and Polynesians, will construct a new race.” Yet Emerson was equally adamant about the Anglo-Saxon ethnic basis of America, suggesting that the free population of America was of British stock, and that the “foreign element, however considerable, is rapidly assimilated… [into] a population of English descent and language.”

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In the 1900s, the national-cosmopolitan intellectual synthesis of liberals like Emerson began to decay into its warring components: a universalist cosmopolitanism and a closed ethnic nationalism. In America the former steadily gained ground after 1905; the progressive movement, coalescing around liberal Protestant figures such as John Dewey, William James and Jane Addams, began to spurn the idea that immigrants should assimilate into the Anglo-Saxon Protestant matrix which had defined the melting pot to that point.

Universalist cosmopolitanism was adopted by the country’s liberal Protestant elites of the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) in the 1910s, with the ecumenist New Testament idea that “there is neither Jew nor Greek” in Christ replacing anti-Catholicism and temperance as the organisation’s guiding ethos.

Into this brew came a wholly secular new force in American life: bohemian modernism. Taking root among a small cadre of highly-educated radical WASPs in Greenwich Village, New York, the “Village Renaissance” gave birth to the first fully-formed Left-modernist cénacle, the so-called Young Intellectuals. Among the innovations pioneered by this group in the 1912-17 period were modern art and theatre, “slumming” tours of ethnic ghettoes like the Jewish Lower East Side, and, thanks to Carl Van Vechten, the habit of travelling to Harlem to hear black jazz.

Expressive and interesting ethnics were contrasted with the stale Anglo-Protestant majority. Randolph Bourne, a prominent Young Intellectual, distilled the new ethos into a powerful oikophobia in his seminal 1916 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, “Trans-National America”:

“It is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a vivid American university to-day to find his true friends not among his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign- born or the children of foreign- born parents, he is likely to find many of his old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day.”

Remarking upon New York Times writer Sarah Jeong’s tweets against white people, Reihan Salam wrote in the Atlantic in 2018:

“A lot of them [anti-white intellectuals] have been whites who pride themselves on their diverse social circles and their enlightened views, and who indulge in their own half-ironic white-bashing to underscore that it is their achieved identity as intelligent, worldly people that counts most, not their ascribed identity as being of recognizably European descent.”

Bourne, an old-stock New Englander like most New York writers of his day, established the template for angry Left-modernists of the 1920s, who watched helplessly as Anglo-Protestant populism won the day. Consider H.L. Mencken, who parroted Bourne’s oikophobia in more strident tones in 1923:

“The Anglo-Saxon American[‘s] is a history of… blind rage against peoples who have begun to worst him… The normal American of the ‘pure-blooded’ majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar [ethnic minorities] under the bed… His political ideas are crude and shallow. He is almost wholly devoid of esthetic feeling. The most elementary facts about the visible universe alarm him, and incite him to put them down. Educate him… and he still remains palpably third-rate. He fears ideas almost more cravenly than he fears men.”

The Anglo-American majority was dehumanised as an automaton subservient to authority. Mencken called them “serfs and goose-steppers” or the “booboisie”. Van Wyck Brooks dubbed them “the apotheosis of the average” while Matthew Josephson scorned the “well-fed, indifferent masses”.

In Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, protagonist Carol is trapped in the monochrome confining world of Gopher Prairie, a town in Minnesota. Yearning for cosmopolitan New York, she appreciates the local Scandinavian immigrants for injecting a dose of culture into a town whose Anglo-Saxon element was of “standardized background… scornful of the living…. A savourless people, gulping tasteless food… and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.” The thought of the Scandinavians being assimilated filled Carol with horror.

In Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the villain is Tom Buchanan, an old-stock New Yorker who is suspicious of Jay (Gatz) Gatsby’s ethnic provenance and approvingly cites tracts which are thinly disguised versions of the work of restrictionist intellectuals Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. The sense that Prohibition-era America was a cultural wasteland helped produce the “Lost Generation” of American Left-liberal intellectuals, many of whom left for Europe in disgust.

The difference between the culture wars of the 1920s and now is that the Left is far stronger today. After the Second World War university education exploded, more than doubling between 1950 and 1970 and eventually reaching nearly half the US population. Television sets could be found in just 9% of American homes in 1950, but by 1965, 93% had one. This spread the sensibility of relatively liberal New York, Los Angeles and Washington across the entire nation.

In 1976, Daniel Bell wrote that “the life-style once practiced by a small cenacle . . . is now copied by many . . . [and] this change of scale gave the culture of the 1960s its special surge, coupled with the fact that a bohemian life-style once limited to a tiny elite is now acted out on the giant screen of the mass media.”

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In 1924, ecumenical Protestant clerics and liberal progressives had vigorously opposed immigration restriction but had almost no political clout: the Johnson-Reed Act passed 323-71 in the House and 62-6 in the Senate. Unions like Samuel Gompers’s American Federation of Labour led the battle to limit immigration. Today, by contrast, progressives are powerful in the media, Hollywood, unions, large corporations, government agencies and the universities. So much so that they are now in control of social norms and institutional sanctions.

Where communists, atheists and Elvis alike once felt the sting of conservative moral panic, today’s Inquisition is progressive, enforcing panics over racism and sexism, and concocting such faux-racist notions as cultural appropriation. Indeed, Left-modernists influence the direction of the Democrats to the extent that the party cannot speak of “illegal” immigration, deportation or assimilation, while most primary candidates feel compelled to endorse reparations for slavery.

The populism and polarisation of the 1920s faded in large part because the new immigration laws constricted the flow of newcomers, allowing for assimilation. First, Protestant immigrant groups like the Scandinavians and Germans married into the WASP majority, then, after the 1960s, Catholics and Jews began marrying Protestants, creating a new “white” majority. By that time, the rising influence of 60s liberalism reopened the country’s gates, which has produced a level of diversity that rivals that of the 1920s.

Trump is a response to the ethnic shifts which followed the liberalising 1965 Hart-Celler immigration Act, but will today’s culture war repeat the cycle? Will restriction and assimilation calm passions and heal divides? The power of today’s Left-modernism places that outcome in doubt.

Regardless of what happens in 2020, the Left may eventually prevail at the presidential level as Democratic-leaning Hispanic and Asian voters form an ever larger part of the electorate. These groups have not yet melted into the majority the way white Catholics did after Kennedy’s election, and until they do, they are unlikely to lean Republican.

The outcome in America may therefore be one in which a provincial populist minority bitterly resents a liberal urban majority, obstructing Democratic legislation in the Senate. In Europe, restrictionists are more likely to prevail, but a significant group of disgruntled “Anywheres” will continue to revolt, fomenting cultural division. History repeats itself, but never in quite the same way.