Month: March 2023

This question has caused many an aesthetic philosopher to break out in a sweat. For all the lofty height of their academic attainment, they find it hard to come up with a better answer than anyone else.

And that anonymous individual will probably reply with the cliché “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, or its variant, “I can’t define it, but when I see it I know it.”

Now, since the world houses some eight billion beholders, each with a pair of eyes, either definition effectively means that beauty is anything anyone says it is. That makes beauty undefinable for all practical purposes because it lends itself to eight billion different definitions.

We are none of us nominalists who insist that abstract concepts have no reality whatsoever, other than the names attached to them. If that’s the case, then beauty doesn’t exist.

Yet we know it does, don’t we? We can see it, touch it, hear it, even smell it. The definition may be elusive, but the sensation certainly isn’t.

Enter Ralph Waldo Emerson, who came up with (or at least hinted at) the only definition that makes the concept intelligible. “Beauty,” he wrote, “is God’s handwriting”. The same idea can be expressed less epigrammatically, but the meaning will be the same: beauty is a creation of God and, as such, it’s objective and independent of any individual perception.

Therefore, what’s in the eye of the beholder isn’t beauty, but the ability to recognise it. That ability is otherwise known as taste, a rare commodity these days.

Emerson’s idea of God lay outside any known religion. His contemporary Dostoyevsky, a devout Christian, approached the same definition from another angle. “Beauty will save the world,” he wrote in The Idiot.

Now, Christians associate their hope for salvation with God only. That means that, to Dostoyevsky, beauty was an aspect of God, not just his creation. This he confirmed in many of his other works by treating the beautiful, the true and the good as an inseparable divine whole.

Tolstoy, the greater artist than Dostoyevsky, but, unlike him, a mediocre thinker at best, wrote that any association of beauty with goodness was a delusion. This only goes to show that adhering to any other than the Christian cognitive methodology can make even a brilliant Westerner sound inane.

Divorcing beauty from God also divorces it from intelligibility, turning any aesthetic philosophy into nonsensical speculation. That Tolstoy proved in his writings on the subject, such as his essay What Is Art? Art, according to him, is something equally accessible to everyone. If it isn’t, it isn’t real art.

Thereby he reduced art – and beauty – to the same common denominator to which he reduced everything else: the saintly Russian peasant. So never mind highbrow chaps like Mozart and Beethoven – according to Tolstoy, it’s only simple village songs that qualify as art.

That saves us the trouble of indulging in reductio ad absurdum. Tolstoy managed to reduce his theories to absurdity all on his own. (If you are interested in this subject, look up my book God and Man According to Tolstoy.)

For brevity’s sake, let’s reduce beauty to art only, its tiny part, and see how Emerson’s and Dostoyevsky’s definitions tally with our own observations.

Any suggestions along the lines of “you like Schubert, I like rap; both are beautiful, if different, art” run headlong into the same problem I mentioned earlier: if art is anything anyone says it is, it doesn’t exist. And since we know it does exist, we dismiss such egalitarian statements as intellectually feeble.

However, if we accept that beauty is an aspect of God, then the definitions click into place. Art’s job is to uncover and discover metaphysical beauty the same way that natural science uncovers and discovers the physical plant of life. The better art is at that job, the better art it is.

God can never be knowable completely (Si comprendis, non est Deus, as Augustine put it). But that’s not to say that God is completely unknowable. Variously close approximations are possible, and logic suggests that the closer art comes to God, the better it uncovers the essence of beauty.

The examples of Emerson, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy show that different people and different civilisations have their own notions of God. Yet our Western civilisation was brought to life by one: Christianity. (This isn’t to say there were no other inputs. But they were absorbed into Christianity and baptised by it the way, according to Chesterton, Aquinas baptised Aristotle.)

That’s why, unbeknown to themselves, even rank Western atheists often think about serious matters along Christian lines. Now I’m in the quoting mood, that’s what the poet Mandelstam meant when he said, “Today, every cultured man is a Christian.”

If imitating Christ is the ideal towards which a Christian life strives, then art, even if it’s not overtly religious, has to gravitate towards that ideal. In other words, it has to be true, beautiful and good in both content and form.

Nor can we separate the two: the Incarnation showed that God and man can co-exist in the same breast. Hence the greatness of art is contingent on its ability to approach a perfect symbiosis of content and form. The closer it gets, the more powerful and elevating is its effect on man.

That explains why music expresses the essence of our civilisation more comprehensively than any other art. In music, the link between form and content is absolute and direct, unmediated by words, as in literature, or by images, as in painting and sculpture.

That’s why only in Christendom did music rise to its dizzying height, both formal and spiritual. Thus, comparing the busts of Greek philosophers or Roman emperors with, say, the portraits of French nobility sculpted by Houdon in the 18^th century, one can’t say that sculpture progressed no end in the interim period.

Yet a comparison between what little has survived of Graeco-Roman music and the works composed by, say, Bach in the same 18^th century will show more than just progress. It will show a gigantic upward shift in both culture and civilisation.

Sculpture is limited by the human form, which can change its size but not shape. Music, on the other hand, has no such limitations – it can climb one plateau after another on its way to infinity, elucidating our understanding of beauty every step of the way.

While elevating itself, real music also elevates man by showing how he can soar to greater and greater heights of subtle spirituality and noble feeling. That’s where pop fails: it appeals to the human spirit at its crudest, coarsest and most primitive. If real music pulls man up, pop pushes him down.

Logically then, the closer other genres come to music, the closer they approach absolute beauty. That explains why poetry, the closest relation of music among art genres, is a higher and more enduring literary genre than the novel.

The novel was only born in the 18^th century and, if you believe many experts (which you don’t have to do), it was already dead by the late 20^th. Even at its best (Tolstoy comes to mind again), the novel can’t clarify the essence of beauty as well as, say, a Shakespeare sonnet can.

A quick article is a wrong format for delving deep into such complex subjects as the essence of beauty. Scratching the surface is the best one can hope to do. My purpose was more modest: to show that only Christological cognitive methodology can make our civilisation intelligible.

If you take exception to this observation, try to define beauty in any other way. See how far you get.

How time flies. A mere 10 years ago, Xi and Vlad were happy newlyweds.

Xi had just been elected to his first term, and marrying Vlad was his first priority. Hence Russia became the first country Xi visited – he had to check out his bride. Vlad met his expectations, and conjugal bliss ensued.

By way of trousseau, Vlad (in his female role) offered the alpha male Xi some Russian gas at throw-away prices. And Xi offered Vlad undying love for better and for worse, in sickness and in health… well, you know the drill.

Actually, such nuptials are usually called ‘strategic partnership’ in geopolitical, but a rose by any other name, and all that. Nor was there any doubt as to who played the man’s role and who the woman’s in that new marriage – or, again in geopolitical, who was the senior partner and who the junior one in that partnership.

Xi brought into the marriage a GDP 10 times the size of Vlad’s and, though in matters martial it’s not always the size that counts (as the Ukraine is showing), there too Xi’s was definitely bigger than Vlad’s. Both same-sex spouses were in no doubt about that.

But then, the very next year, in 2014, Xi’s ‘in sickness and in health’ vow got severely tested. Vlad did the dirty to the Ukraine by grabbing her jutting attraction, the Crimea. That gave Xi food for thought, for he was playing big-time economic footsies with the West, while at the same time lusting after Taiwan.

The West began to impose sanctions on Russia, at first only hinting, without saying it outright, at what it would do to China if Xi did you-know-what to Taiwan. Eight years later Vlad really went for broke. He tried to rape the Ukraine so she stayed raped, and the West’s language became more straightforward and eloquent.

It started to support the Ukraine with just enough weapons for her to repel the rapist, without yet being able to bring him to justice. That sent a message to Xi: you do to Taiwan what Vlad is doing to the Ukraine, and you know what will happen. Watch your step, Xi.

So watch his step Xi did. While still trying to keep his marital vow by buying Russia’s raw materials and sending Vlad armaments, if on the sly and through third parties, he still keeps an eye out on the West. One wrong move towards Taiwan, he fears, and the West may well dump on him the way it’s dumping on Vlad – or worse.

But anniversaries are important milestones that must be commemorated. Hence, Xi is going to Russia again, having won his third term and effectively becoming president for life. He’ll also talk to President Zelensky on Skype or some other video link. The message is entirely predictable: Yes, I know Vlad tried to rape you. But now is the time to kiss and make up. Or just make up, and never mind kissing.

If that message isn’t hard to predict, no one knows what Xi will be telling Vlad. There are three possibilities: 1) We’ll supply arms, 2) We won’t supply arms and 3) We’ll supply them, but on the quiet. You spill the beans, and it’s divorce time.

Considering that China’s economy is in dire straits at the moment, it’s possible Xi wants to reiterate his marital vows with Vlad before trying to rape Taiwan. Military aggression is a time-honoured way for tyrants to stay in power in spite of economic difficulties.

If that’s the case, Xi won’t care about the West’s sensibilities. He may well throw his military largesse at Vlad, making sure there’s enough left for his own playing away from home should the Americans decide to take their treaty with Taiwan seriously.

One way or another, the situation is worth watching. The happy couple may yet succeed in blowing up the world.

Speaking of which,  I must have put the jinx in. No sooner had I sung DeSantis’s praises the other day than he said some awful things about the Ukraine.

Awful they may be, but they are certainly not new: the two sides must settle their differences and sue for peace in what DeSantis ignorantly called a “territorial dispute”. After all, both sides are exhausted. And to make sure the Ukraine’s fatigue is really bad, America should stop giving her “a blank cheque”. That’s a coy way of saying ‘no cheque at all’.

My advice would be for Ron to read the history of the 1930s, at least. He’d learn that dictators bent on expansion never stop at the first piece of estate ceded to them. They regard any such concession as a sign of weakness and press on. Since most of Russia’s other European neighbours are Nato members… well, you know what will happen. Americans will start paying with red blood, not just green banknotes.

DeSantis insists he isn’t a Wilsonian, which is another way of saying he is an America First isolationist. That role had already been written out of the script even by the 1930s – and there’s no conceivable way of putting it back in.

If America renounces her role as the leader of the free world, before long the dollar will lose its position as the world’s reserve currency, possibly to be replaced wholly or partly by Xi’s yuan. Then all those trillions of the national debt will come crashing down on the US economy, burying it under.

Really, DeSantis should get a foreign policy adviser who understands such things. And no, I’m not volunteering.

Got you going, didn’t I? If so, let me reassure you that I haven’t yet begun to feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body.

In fact, if that were the case, I wouldn’t use the word ‘gender’ at all, choosing ‘sex’ instead. For, unless I’m quoting someone else, I only ever apply the word ‘gender’ to a grammatical category.

That’s exactly where I have problems. For my first language, chronologically at least, was Russian, in which, as in German, even inanimate objects have three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. My third language, French, got rid of neuter, but perversely kept the other two.

In French, inanimate objects are either masculine or feminine, which gives me nightmares. You see, Russian gets in the way. For the same objects are often different genders in the two languages, confusing me no end. I would be even more desperate if French kept the three genders of its source language, Latin. But even two are bad enough.

Thus table and chair are men in Russian but women in French. Yet fork and spoon are feminine in both languages.

Russian being a morphological language, gender is conveyed by unmistakable inflections. But most, though not all, French nouns don’t help me out that way. So how am I to know? Especially since sandwiched between those two tongues, is my English, second chronologically, first in every other respect.

English doesn’t treat objects as if they were human. All of them, with the exception of ships, are usually sexless and genderless.

Humans are, or at least used to be, known as either men or women, which is why English has kept the personal pronouns needed to differentiate between the two. Yet even human babies are sometimes linguistically neutered, as in “Will it ever shut up?” which I said the other day when someone’s baby was screaming on the bus.

As a linguist by training if not by profession, I’m fascinated by that. Why do Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages stubbornly cling to their genders, while English tosses them away contemptuously? Has it always been like that?

It hasn’t. In fact, Old English, the language of Beowulf, had the same three German genders, which, considering it was a Germanic language, is hardly surprising. Like German (and Russian), Old English added gender suffixes to all nouns, with, for example, the sun taking on the feminine article and suffix to become seo sunne.

Yet, as Old English became Middle English in the late Middle Ages, our nouns began to shed their genders. Why?

Linguists will tell you that the fault lies with those marauding Vikings who turned their own nouns into hermaphrodites by fusing masculine and feminine together, and then used their swords to educate the proto-English. Fair enough: gender loss did start in the northern areas of England that in those days were occupied (or at least often raided) by Scandinavians.

From there, the tendency spread down to the Midlands and then to the South, with Kent the last one to surrender, in the mid-14^th century. The Great Vowel Shift that started in the late 15^th century signalled the arrival of Modern English and the demise of gender.

That’s what the linguists will tell you, but not the philosophers. The latter will point out that England wasn’t the only place invaded by the Vikings. France and Italy suffered the same fate, and yet they wouldn’t let their genders fall into oblivion. How come they were so recalcitrant and the English weren’t?

That’s where philosophy steps in, asking awkward questions dealing with the relationship between national language and thought. Which came first, the chicken of the former or the egg of the latter? Either way, the two are so intimately and intricately connected that we may understand much about one by studying the other.

Endowing inanimate objects with gender is a case of anthropomorphism, assigning human characteristics to things. Another case of anthropomorphism is the Sistine Chapel, with its depiction of God the Father as a bearded man, but that’s a separate subject.

Anthropomorphism was the dominant feature of medieval thought, of which we are reminded mostly by fairy tales. Even in the youthful Modern period, not too far removed from the Middle Ages, Shakespeare makes a forest move in Macbeth, creating a production headache for West End theatres.

The so-called medieval realism in art and thought was, in fact, medieval anthropomorphism, largely a survival of pre-Christian paganism. Even inanimate objects were talked about in the Thomistic (and Aristotelian) categories of essence and being, which was reflected in grammatical categories, such as gender.

Now, could it be that anthropomorphism proved enduring on the Continent but moribund in England? This is no more than a wild hypothesis, but something worth pondering.

If there is a kernel of truth to it, then the English parted ways with medieval thought more decisively than, say, the French. And even the massive post-1066 influx of French into the Anglo-Saxon dialects proved powerless to stop that trend.

It fact, it was then that the English declared war on the gender category, which resulted in almost total victory three centuries later. Moving on from hypothesis to guess, could it be that the pragmatic and empirical English mind refused to accept the reality of fairy tales with their anthropomorphism?

One can just see a young Saxon asking his grandfather: “What do you mean, calling the table ‘she’, Grandpa? It’s not a woman, you know.”

That other aspect of anthropomorphism, one I touched upon in my throw-away reference to the Sistine Chapel, was a sensitive issue in the past, with much blood spilled on either side of the argument. Also much ink, for a vast library could be compiled of books written on the subject.

However, grammatical anthropomorphism is a terra incognita, at least for me. I can’t seem to find any books on it, which makes me rely on my own resources. Meagre though they may be.

The recent clash between President Biden and Governor DeSantis has highlighted the key conflict of our time and I’ll give you a clue: it has little to do with economics.

Back in the 1990s, whenever Bill Clinton’s campaign staff went off on a tangent, his strategist James Carville told them to stay on course. “It’s the economy, stupid,” he’d repeat.

That mantra has since lost some of its pulling power, although the economy remains a hot topic in any electoral debates. But the real demarcation line is drawn elsewhere.

If mainstream parties and politicians differ from one another on the economy, it’s only quantitatively, not qualitatively. Should the taxes be exorbitant or extortionate? Should the state print and borrow money promiscuously or suicidally? Should government regulations shackle the economy or strangulate it?

Voters look at such debates and shrug with indifference and ennui: six of one, half a dozen of the other. They do sense there’s a war going on, but the economy isn’t its pivotal battlefield.

What little is left of Western mentality, morality, legality and even aesthetics is fighting a desperate rearguard action against the onslaught of hostile forces hellbent on annihilating traditional culture, in the broadest possible sense. And those forces inscribe on their banners slogans dealing not with economics, but with race and, increasingly, sex.

They have declared war on the core certitudes of mankind in general and the West in particular. Those certitudes used to be based on religion, but they survived for a long time even as the West was steering away from theism. Common sense, custom and taste took up the slack for a while.

No longer. All those good things are reeling under the blows of modernity, and they are ceding their positions one by one. But there’s still fight in the old tradition left, a point made by Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

I don’t follow US politics as closely as I should but, looking from across the ocean, DeSantis increasingly looks the leader I wish we had. I like everything he does, and I never thought I’d be able to utter such praise of a politician.

That leader of the cultural rearguard in America has recently fired a mighty salvo. DeSantis signed a law prohibiting transgender treatment for children and classroom discussions of such issues. The discussions are banned for children of eight or younger, while treatment with puberty blockers, hormones and surgery is banned for new patients aged under 18.

The shells of decency hit home, and the aggressor came back with a return barrage directed by Joe Biden. Joe has never seen a destructive (aka progressive) idea he couldn’t love, and he wheeled out the big guns.

What DeSantis is doing makes Joe feel just awful. He communicated his disgust with his customary fluency: “It’s as my mother would say close to sinful. I mean, it’s just terrible what they’re doing. It’s not like, you know, a kid wakes up one morning and says, you know, I decided I want to become a man or I want to become a woman or I want to change,” Biden said.

“I mean, what are they thinking about here? We’re human beings. They love, they have feelings. They have inclinations . . . It just to me is, I don’t know, it’s cruel.”

When it suits him, Biden likes to describe himself as a devout Catholic. One has to assume his sainted mother indeed was one, which is why her understanding of sin couldn’t possibly have been the same as her son’s. Had little Joey told her he saw nothing wrong with trans- or homosexuality, she probably would have sent him to bed without supper.

Yet for Biden and his ilk the only sin left is the insistence that any sin other than opposing wokery exists.

One senses that the next US presidential election will greatly affect the fortunes of the on-going battle for our civilisation. If DeSantis becomes the Republican nominee, as many observers think likely, and Biden fronts the Democrats, it’ll be so much more than just a clash of two candidates or two parties.

One urge of modernity is to turn grown-ups into children and children into grown-ups. To that end, adults are deprived of their intelligence and children of their innocence. I mean it’s like, you know, just terrible what the little ones are exposed to – my mother, though, unlike the late Mrs Biden, an atheist, would say it’s close to mad.

If the so-called leader of the free world thinks it’s cruel not to enlighten eight-year-olds about the joys of trans- and homosexuality, then this world is no longer free, nor indeed sane. And anyone who thinks that such teaching can ever be anything other than propaganda is sorely mistaken.

At that age, children should be taught stories about bunny rabbits going hop-hop up the hill, not about the rich panoply of sexual variants. If they do have perverse inclinations, let them sort it out for themselves when they grow up. Any elucidation of such issues is bound to sound like encouragement.

In most cases, the angle of trans inclinations isn’t sufficiently acute for people to fall that way. Hardcore transexuals and homosexuals will find their level one way or another, with or without formal education to that effect. But more people find themselves sitting on the fence, and depending on circumstances they can come down on either side.

There used to be a stigma attached to perverse sexuality, which helped such borderline cases stay on the right side. Now they are taught that neither side is wrong. Both are equally right, and the choice is up to every individual. It takes wilful ignorance of human nature to think that teaching such diabolical nonsense to little tots won’t have an effect.

Transsexuality in particular was a non-issue when I was young. In my whole, lamentably long, life I’ve only met three or four transsexuals, and seen just a few more. That tallies with statistics: in the past transsexuals numbered in the hundreds; today, in the tens of thousands. Britain, for example, boasts 260,000 of them.

What has caused such an inordinate growth? Something in the air? Carbon monoxide? Meat in the diet? Clearly, destigmatising perversion contributes to its numerical spread.

Yet numbers don’t paint the full picture. For in cultural wars, the face value of the banner slogans doesn’t matter all that much. Connotation dominates denotation. Subtext trumps text.

What’s going on is a concerted effort to destroy a civilisation, which isn’t accompanied by any clear idea of any workable replacement. Hence the specific targets in that assault are irrelevant, which is why they can be thrown together at will.

Biden showed how in the same interview. First, he vowed “to protect LGBTQ Americans, especially trans kids who are dealing with all these regressive state laws”.

From there, he effortlessly switched to touting another newly hatched orthodoxy: “People can’t deny it anymore. If we don’t keep the temperature from going above 1.5 degrees Celsius raised, then we’re in real trouble. That whole generation is damned.”   

Eudaemonic bliss will only descend on the world if we busily castrate children in operating theatres lit with electricity generated by windmills. That’s how Biden sees life, but it’s not how DeSantis sees it. I and what’s left of the free world will pray for his victory. It may well be our last hope.

“I feel privileged to help spread awareness of lived queer experiences, partner with charitable organisations, and above all create a sense of community for our LGBTQ+ employees and allies.”

Now, what do you think is going to happen to a bank one of whose top executives has this list of priorities? Correct. Exactly what happened on Friday to Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). It collapsed, burying thousands of investors and borrowers under the rubble.

The reported losses of $1.8 billion make SVB the largest bank to collapse since the 2008 crisis, and one has to congratulate SVB for winning the gold medal. Those directly affected probably don’t feel congratulatory. They must be asking questions, some beginning with the adverb ‘why’.

The statement above, in which I highlighted the key words, may begin to answer such inquiries. It was uttered by Jay Ersapah, the Chief Risk Officer for the bank in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Miss Ersapah uses corporate videos to boast of being a “queer person of colour from a working-class background”.

That pride was transformed into her dedicating her unbridled energy to serving “underrepresented entrepreneurs” and organising a month-long campaign actually called Pride, along with another one called ‘Lesbian Visibility Day and Trans Awareness week.’ She also indoctrinated staff in the spirit of her passion, using ‘safe-space’ catch-ups.

The board of the parent American bank, one of the biggest lenders to the high-tech industry, evidently felt that such commitments in no way encroached on Miss Ersapah’s day job, that of managing operational risks on three continents.

The board’s own approach to that function was rather lackadaisical anyway. Suffice it to say that for eight months in 2022 the bank didn’t have a Head of Risk at all, on the evident assumption that financial services were risk-free, able to tick along nicely come what may.

The CVs of most of the board members hint at the possibility that their own priorities aren’t drastically different from Miss Ersapah’s. Writing in fluent woke, SVB directors specify the pronouns that best reflect their self-identification, which is a dead give-away. Some disgruntled investors say it’s mostly such credentials that helped those executives climb the corporate ladder.

The bank certainly based its hiring policy on woke qualifications above all, as Miss Ersapah’s career suggests. Combined with SVB’s relaxed approach to risk management, the end was likely, although there must have been other contributing factors as well.

Many commentators, including on occasion me, have commented on the moral, social and intellectual costs of wokery, which are nothing short of prohibitive. But it appears that the costs can also be denominated in hard currency.

At the cost of sounding parochial, some of those costs were going to be borne by the British tax-payer. For the Chancellor was planning a bailout, which in this case wouldn’t have come cheap.

More than 3,000 British tech firms have about £7 billion in deposits with the bank’s UK subsidiary. Now Britain’s budding high-tech industry is screaming bloody murder: many companies can meet neither the payroll nor their own obligations to creditors.

By bailing out bankrupt firms, the state violates every fundamental tenet of classical economics. Money should be shuffled around the economic table not by the state, but by what Adam Smith called the invisible hand of market forces. Yet such economics is now seen as a quaint anachronism. The invisible hand is largely atrophied, and it needs regular boosting with steroidal injections of state capital.

We may not like it, and conservative economists may throw their hands up in horror, but such are the facts of life. It, life, has neither a reset button nor a rewind one, and we must accept state interference in the economy the way we accept earthquakes and hurricanes.

In this case, British tax-payers dodged the bullet. At the last moment, HSBC stepped in, bought SVB for £1 and assumed its debts. But the Chancellor was otherwise prepared for a multi-billion bailout, apparently seeing nothing wrong with such generosity. It’s the way of the world, isn’t it?

The state is both referee and player in the economic game, and all games have both winners and losers. If the state wants our money to make sure no one loses too badly, there’s precious little we can do about that.

However, we must be able to analyse why such seemingly successful concerns as SVB go under. And if their wokery is a contributing factor, then we do have some recourse. We can all fight that unsavoury alphabet soup of perversions being shoved down our throats. (Incidentally, when did ‘queer’, as in Q, stop being a pejorative term? It’s now seen as a badge of honour.)

The fight can start with small mano a mano skirmishes, with us standing fast in defence of morality and proper language. We can insist that there exist only three singular third-person possessive pronouns: his, her and its. We can refuse to address individuals in the plural. And, more to the point, we can withhold investment from companies emblazoning wokery in their corporate charters.

We can boycott companies whose hiring policy puts wokery before competence. And we can unite into large lobbying groups, on the assumption that a fist can deliver a harder blow than outstretched fingers.

Or we can do nothing and just sit back, watching wokery destroy what’s left of our civilisation – including its wealth – step by perverse step. Our choice.

Forget Russia’s aggression. Never mind the scandalous state of the economy. Don’t worry about the NHS dropping below Third World standards. Don’t give a second thought to our education churning out cultural savages.

None of this matters, comparatively speaking. Or at least that’s the impression one gets.

For four days now, every newspaper has been devoting most of its front-page inches to Gary Lineker, BBC footie presenter who refuses to see a difference between Tories and Nazis. That lack of discernment got him suspended from Match of the Day, took the BBC to a point of meltdown and kicked off impassioned debates.

What turned an incident into a calamity was a solidarity walkout of all BBC sports hacks, starting with Lineker’s permanent sidekicks, Ian Wright and Alan Shearer. As a result, some sports programmes were reduced to a travesty and others cancelled altogether.

When I wrote about this debacle four days ago, I never thought the resulting din would muffle all other news. Yet I did write about it, and I shan’t repeat my arguments.

But what other people are saying is worth a look because they cover the whole spectrum of opinion, with some totally inane, some moving away from the ridiculous, but without ever reaching the sublime.

Ably representing the inane end was sports journalist Martin Samuels, who recently moved leftwards from The Mail to The Times: “Lineker is still being derided for comparing government rhetoric around immigration to that of the Nazis; except he didn’t mention the Nazis. He specifically referred to 1930s Germany.”

Yes, but I don’t think he meant the Weimar Republic that was replaced in 1933 by you know whom. If Samuels thinks he scored there, he should realise the goal was his own.

Other dim commentators insist that Lineker shouldn’t have been punished because he was right: any attempt to stem the influx of illegal migrants is tantamount to Nazism. Thus spoke Lineker’s acolyte, another ex-footballer Ian Wright:

“They need Gary Lineker to distract everybody because for me it is a human issue, it’s not political. They’ve got no empathy, the vulnerable ones are the ones that suffer, they’re the ones that suffer… On his own platform he should be able to say what he wants to say.”

All issues are political these days, or, as Thomas Mann once put it, “All intellectual attitudes are latently political.” Wright proves that by launching his own assault on ‘them’, which is to say Tories.

The other day I said all I could about the pathetic face value of Lineker’s comment. But Wright’s last sentence makes a free speech argument, which is worth a few words – especially since it has also been wielded by many debaters brighter than him.

Out of curiosity, how would Wright feel if Lineker used “his own platform” to say that any black man having sex with a white woman should be lynched? Couching that in a language that wouldn’t expose him to criminal prosecution for hate speech? Let’s say he’d write something like: “Makes one think of 1930s Alabama, doesn’t it?”

That would test Wright’s commitment to free speech, and I doubt it would pass muster. Like most left-wingers, he believes free speech really means free left-wing speech. They ignore elementary logic that says freedom means nothing if it doesn’t also protect statements we dislike.

That fundamental freedom also protects obvious lies, which latitude was avidly grasped by numerous commentators who have accused the BBC of… – I know you won’t believe this, but I swear it’s true – … a pro-Tory bias.

That’s like accusing today’s Russian TV of Americanism or, come to that, Der Stürmer of Judeophilia. The BBC is so pro-Tory that in the last general election, when the country voted Conservative in a landslide, over 90 per cent of Beeb staffers voted Labour. The Tory voters there were mostly the technical personnel: cameramen, grips, drivers, electricians.

BBC recruitment ads appear only in the Appointments section of The Guardian, our leftmost broadsheet. Sometimes BBC programmes do invite token conservatives to create the impression of balance. But, as I can testify from personal experience, such troglodytes are easily outshouted.

Accusations of Tory bias are based exclusively on the personalities of Richard Sharp, BBC Chairman, and Timothy Davie, its Director General, both Tory appointments who are indeed Tories, if dripping wet.

It’s quite possible they censured Lineker because, unlike Messrs Wright et al., they found his comment abhorrent. But that’s not what they gave as the real reason. Lineker’s diatribe, they said, violated the Beeb’s commitment to impartiality, for which the Corporation is widely known, if only within the narrow circle of those who love its unwavering wokery.

Writing for The Telegraph, Charles Moore typically tried to be even-handed and civilised. His main argument was that Lineker was censured not for the content of his statement, but for stepping outside the BBC guidelines.

I don’t think Lord Moore has seen Mr Lineker’s employment contract, and neither have I. So we have to go by the BBC Charter that does state it must “provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them”.

Since the BBC is about as impartial as the erstwhile chap spouting harangues from a soapbox in Hyde Park, it violates its Charter at will. That apart, Lineker and his defenders insist, correctly, that he spoke not as a BBC employee but as a private individual.

I couldn’t find anything in the Charter that says BBC employees (staffers or freelancers like Lineker) have to keep their views to themselves even in private. It’s possible Lineker’s contract stipulates something along those lines, in which case Lord Moore is right: he was suspended not for his views but for disobedience.

Anyway, the scandal has reached such a fervour pitch that one or both of Messrs Sharp and Davie will probably be sacked. They have the same premonition, which is why Mr Davie has already indicated he’ll be happy to take Lineker back.

But no satisfactory solution to the situation is possible. For, as defence barristers are fond of saying, “It’s society’s fault, M’lord”. As long as society is willing – nay, agog – to listen to any ignorant gibberish, as long as it comes from a celebrity, such problems will recur.

Alas, history has no rewind button which alone could resolve the issue. We could push it and backtrack to the happier times when footballers talked publicly only about football, astrophysicists about astrophysics, and neither trespassed on one another’s fields.

Conversely, today’s voracious demand for celebrity opinion will always produce steady – and increasing – supply, boosted by social media. That’s why I suggested four days ago that Lineker shouldn’t be sacked. Not because such punishment would be unjust, but because it would be pointless.

Now I think the BBC should take him back, but insist that he sign an ironclad contract covering every aspect of his behaviour in and out of the studio. Resistance is futile, as they say in bad films.

“They plunder, they steal and they slaughter: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace,” wrote Tacitus.

Replace “…they call” with “Trump calls”, leave everything else intact, and this quotation reads like today’s reportage.

[Note to Trump, should he accidentally read this: Tacitus was a Roman historian, sort of a cross between a wop and a kraut.]

This little bowdlerisation of the classic has been prompted by Trump’s radio interview the other day. There, for the first time, Putin’s long-time admirer outlined his peace plan for the Ukraine.

[Note to Donald: Ukrainians live in the Ukraine, not in the UK.]

Trump has said a thousand times if he said it once that, had he been president a year ago, the war wouldn’t have even started. And even if it had started, he would have ended it within 24 hours.

Donald has been trying to score points off Biden so hard that once he even held “Sleepy Joe” solely responsible for the war. Dastardly Biden twisted Putin’s arm. “Frankly,” said Trump, “I don’t think Putin wanted to do it. I think he was sort of forced in by the statements being made by Biden.”

Vlad was sort of forced, and Donald could sort of unforce him – such is the recurrent theme. And though Trump’s fans never doubt his omnipotence, some still ask tactless questions about the specifics of his peace plan. Finally, their idol’s natural loquacity burst out.

First Trump reiterated, in his typically elegant style, his subjunctive mantra about what would have happened had he and not “Sleepy Joe” been president last year.

Putin, explained Trump, would have “understood” what’s what. To wit: Vlad “took over nothing” while Donald lived in Pennsylvania Avenue. However, since he tragically no longer lives there, Vlad is going for “the whole enchilada”.

That understanding would have come osmotically: “That’s without even negotiating a deal. I could have negotiated. At worst, I could’ve made a deal to take over something, there are certain areas that are Russian-speaking areas, frankly, but you could’ve worked a deal.”

I might have said this before, but it doesn’t hurt repeating that I detest Trump’s favourite word, ‘deal’, in a geopolitical context. Shaking hands with a chap whose name ends in a vowel on building a Mafia-run casino is a deal. Negotiating a momentous geopolitical development produces a treaty, an agreement or a compact.

But forget semantics, never Donald’s strong point. Let’s see what he is actually saying.

He would have blackmailed the Ukraine into ceding to the invader the whole eastern part of the country, mostly inhabited by Russian speakers. The linguistic argument comes straight out of Putin’s copybook: any place where Russian is spoken rightfully belongs to Russia.

By the same logic, Germany could now claim all of Austria where they blabber away in German like there’s no tomorrow. But hold on a second – Germany did do that, citing exactly the same reason, back in 1938. And the German-speaking Sudetenland also had to belong to Germany, along with the rest of Czechoslovakia for good measure.

[Note to Donald: I’m referring to what happened immediately before and after the Munich deal involving the krauts, the limeys and the frogs. The next year the krauts grabbed the whole enchilada.]

That historical reference clarifies the meaning of the deal Trump has in mind. He would deliver half of the Ukraine, and therefore a resounding victory, to Putin. That would make a mockery of the devastation wreaked on the Ukrainian people by the Russian invaders, the plunder, the slaughter – just reread the Tacitus quote above for the general idea.

Moreover, just like his typological predecessor from whom Putin borrowed the linguistic argument, the Russian Hitler would treat any such deal as only a breather. He would rebuild his army, replenish his arsenal and, a few months later, pounce again.

That time it wouldn’t be just the Ukraine on the receiving end. Like Hitler before him, Putin doesn’t even bother to conceal his far-reaching aggressive designs. He wants to rebuild the Russian or, to be more precise, Soviet empire that, it’s useful to remember, included several current Nato members.

That would put the whole world at risk, not just the low-rent part of Europe. Now, Ukrainians understand all this, which is why they’d never accept any such deal unless forced to do so. And the only way Trump could bend them to his (and Putin’s) will would be to threaten cutting off all American and Nato supplies.

The words ‘Manchurian candidate’ come to mind. Though the term may not be quite accurate, there’s no doubt that, if Trump were president now, Putin would have a de facto ally in the White House – with globally catastrophic ramifications.

Fox News, which can never be accused of anti-Trumpism, reran the radio interview in question. But Trump’s pro-Putin plans were too much even for the Tucker Carlson crowd. Hence they cut off the interview after “I could have negotiated.” Even Fox realised the rest of it was a continuation of Putin’s policy by other means.

Trump enthusiasts among my American friends insist that his domestic policies were, and would be, much better than Biden’s. That’s undeniably true. Yet talking about domestic policies at a time when a global catastrophe looms large is neither moral nor clever.

In the same vein, people praised Hitler for the German economy picking up, Mussolini for trains running on time, and Stalin for industrialising the Soviet Union. That reminds me of the old American joke: “Yes, but apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”

[Note to Trump: President Lincoln was shot dead when watching a play in the theatre.]

Reading Macron’s speech, I couldn’t understand what the fuss is all about. Why state the bleeding obvious? Why promise to make abortions irreversible?

Abortions are already irreversible, aren’t they? Once you’ve cut a foetus out of the womb, you can hardly put it back, can you? And in general…

At this point my bilingual wife looked over my shoulder and reminded me of another blindingly obvious fact: my French needs work (she used a ruder, ego-crashing expression from which neither my French nor my brittle psyche will ever recover).

Turns out Manny doesn’t want to make abortions irreversible. It was back at that Amiens school that Brigitte, his foster mother cum school mistress cum mistress tout court, taught him they always are. What Manny is after is making the right to abortion irreversible.

To that end he is trying to amend the constitution to include that sacred, sorry, laic, right. And it isn’t as if Manny is being a maverick on this one. He enjoys overwhelming support in both chambers of parliament, the National Assembly and the Senate. They just put a slightly different spin on it.

The wording approved by the National Assembly says that the law should “guarantee the effectiveness of and equal access to the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy”. The Senate coyly modified that to say “the law determines the conditions in which the freedom of women to put an end to their pregnancies is exercised”.

A distinction without a difference, I say. One way or the other, France will become the first country in history to include abortion into the main text of a constitutional document.

Manny delivered a rousing oration evoking an image of Demosthenes and Cicero rolled into one. “Think about it, citoyens and citoyennes,” he said. “Had this constitution existed 46 years ago, when Madame Macron got pregnant, you could be spared my toxic presence.”

Just kidding. What Manny did say was that it’s vitally necessary “to change our constitution in order to engrave the freedom of women to have recourse to the voluntary termination of pregnancy to ensure solemnly that nothing will be able to hinder or to undo what will thus become irreversible.”

The lad does have the gift of the gab, doesn’t he? Compliments to his speechwriters. He also has a knack for political diversion.

For France is in the midst of riots yet again, this time over Manny’s decision to extend the pension age. Giving the citoyens and citoyennes a chance to play with the constitution, Manny hopes, will divert their attention from burning Paris to cinders.

He is in for a let-down on that one. Riots are a ubiquitous presence in French life, side by side with baguettes, chitterling sausages and frog’s legs. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if next “engraved” in the constitution will be “the freedom to have recourse to riots, to ensure solemnly that nothing will be able to hinder or to undo what will thus become irreversible.”

Political shenanigans apart, it’s hard to see the point of this constitutional editing job. Abortions have been legal in France since 1975, without the sanctity of any solemn constitutional endorsement.

Mandatory secularisation, laïcité, goes back even further, to 1905. Originally, it was sold to the public as freedom of religion, though the framers knew that it really meant freedom from religion, which in France more or less meant Catholicism.

That policy has been more successful in promoting atheism than anything Britain has ever done. Going by personal experience, I’ve been known to decline tennis dates on Easter Sunday in both countries, but only in France did such retrograde obtuseness cause much mirth. “Bonnes cloches!” laughed my French partners (“Enjoy your chimes”).

Hence Manny’s pet project seems redundant. Yet in fact, it isn’t. For Manny and his fellow fanatics of wokery the world over were scared witless by the US Supreme Court ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Manny fears that a future conservative government may do what the US Supreme Court did and decentralise abortion laws, leaving them to the discretion of local bodies and provinces. By enshrining abortion in the constitution, he hopes to pre-empt any such outrage, unlikely as it may be.

Perhaps I should say ‘impossible’ rather than ‘unlikely’. For conservatism in our sense of the word doesn’t exist in France. Some individual conservative throwbacks do survive, but they don’t add up to a political force, nor even to a political influence. The mainstream political spectrum in France runs from mild socialism to Trotskyism, leaving conservatism beyond the right margin, and nothing really beyond the left one.

But hey, better safe than sorry. Manny obviously wants to hedge his woke bets.

However, he has been so persuasive that I’m ready to make an exception to my abhorrence of abortion. Perhaps I’d be able to support the post-natal variety, up to the age of, say, 46. Provided that procedure would be performed just once.

Gary Lineker, ex-footballer and now the highest-paid BBC employee, came out in defence of illegal refugees braving the rowdy Channel to land on these shores.

Any sensible person would look at the term ‘illegal refugee’ and realise that the magic word there isn’t the noun but the adjective. Anyone doing anything illegal by definition breaks the law which any government, also by definition, is constituted to uphold.

In that spirit, Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced a new policy to stem the flow of illegals landing in Britain. Effectively the policy amounts to a long overdue ban: anyone entering the country illegally will be expelled, blocked from returning in future and disqualified from ever claiming UK citizenship.

I’ve called this measure ‘overdue’ on a purely arithmetical basis. In the past four years the number of such illegal mariners has risen by two orders of magnitude – from around 300 in 2018 to more than 45,000 in 2022.

If the same tendency continues at the same rate, in a few years the homegrown population of London will decrease from its present, already puny, 40 per cent to nothing. London tots will be asking “Mummy, what’s an Englishman?” the way they are already asking “What’s a shilling?”

Yet Gary effortlessly glides over demographic and legal debacles visited on Britain. He doesn’t care about such trivia. What he cares about is sputtering spittle at the Tories.

Hence he effectively accused Mrs Braverman of being a crypto-Nazi. If she were whiter, he’d doubtless charge her with racism as well, but as it is, crypto-Nazi will do to be going on with.

At first, Lineker refrained from drawing historical parallels, simply tweeting: “Good heavens, this is beyond awful.” The Nazism bit was brandished after someone suggested Lineker’s comment was out of order.

That made blood rush to his head, traumatised over the first half of his life by regular contacts with fast-flying heavy balls. “There is no influx,” he wrote. “We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”

I’m not aware of any Nazi official announcing a policy designed to stem the flow of illigal immigrants into Germany. Neither, I’m sure, is Mr Lineker. His point is that all Tories are Nazis, or at least as bad as. That’s the story, and he won’t let facts interfere with it.

Now, Gary is the kind of person known as ‘limousine liberal’ in America and ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’ in Britain. This breed is characterised by half-baked wokery and overcooked social conscience, all mixed with hatred for anything the Tories (or, in America, Republicans) do.

Unlike others of the same persuasion, Lineker has a ready excuse for his idiocy, one I’ve mentioned but he refuses to offer: the cerebral trauma exacerbated each time he smashed a ball with his forehead. He’ll have to think of some other excuses though, for even his employer, the BBC, is aghast.

If you don’t live in Britain, you may not realise that the BBC accusing a journalist of being too woke is a bit like Pravda, c. 1950, castigating one of its reporters for being too Stalinist.

Lineker has always insisted that his Tweeter account is his chattel to do with as he sees fit. A BBC spokesman disagrees: “The BBC has social media guidance, which is published. Individuals who work for us are aware of their responsibilities relating to social media. We have appropriate internal processes in place if required.”

Yet Gary clearly feels that the BBC needs him more than he needs the BBC. If they don’t like it, they can lump it, and he’ll continue to rake in his millions elsewhere. In that spirit, he has always voiced opinions as inane as they are immoral.

Once, for example, when a Palestinian was shot dead in Israel, Lineker accused the Israelis of the same sin he seems to think Mrs Braverman personifies. Yet the innocent victim of those Israeli Nazis turned out to be a Hamas terrorist.

This time around Mrs Braverman made the mistake of trying to argue with Lineker’s comments. Speaking on his own alma mater, the BBC, she said: “I’m disappointed, obviously. I think it’s unhelpful to compare our measures, which are lawful, proportionate and – indeed – compassionate, to 1930s Germany.”

If you aren’t familiar with official British English, in that jargon ‘unhelpful’ is fully synonymous with ‘asinine’, ‘deranged’ and ‘venomous’. I’d also add ‘irresponsible’ to that sequence, and that’s the most important modifier.

For anyone, especially those with high name recognition, committing his thought to public space takes on a responsibility. He must know that everything he says will be subjected to scrutiny because he is an influencer, that awful word.

Thus he should refrain from promulgating views that are both incendiary and manifestly untrue. If he doesn’t realise they are untrue (in this case, Britain doesn’t take “far fewer refugees than other major European countries”), he should check his facts or ask someone else to do it for him.

Lineker has championed the cause of refugees, legal or otherwise, for a long time – to the point of putting two of them up in his home. That’s a nice gesture, even though I suspect he has more than one residence, and the one into which he welcomed the refugees must be so large that he probably doesn’t even notice their presence.

What Lineker doesn’t seem to realise is that at issue here isn’t just the number of new arrivals but Britain’s sovereignty. One of its key markers is control over the country’s borders, which has become an especially sensitive issue after we left the straitjacket of the EU with its suicidal commitment to free movement of people across national borders.

That commitment hasn’t worked out especially well for EU members. Germany, for example, took in a million Muslims within a couple of recent years, which hospitality has created a crime rate from hell. And Sweden, another welcoming refuge, had a few hundred rapes a year before the influx and some 10,000 now.

It hardly needs saying that Lineker bitterly opposes Brexit. After all, it happened under a Tory administration, which seems to be a sufficient reason. Neither is he evidently a great fan of democracy – more Britons voted for Brexit than for anything else in history.

He is welcome to present a well-argued case for a single European state (good luck to him, for no one else has managed to do so yet) or the more plausible one against plebiscitarian democracy (many others have done so). What should be off-limits for any public figure is frothing at the mouth and spewing out vile unfounded invective.

Still, I hope Lineker keeps his BBC job. He’s a good Match of the Day presenter, and I can’t think of an adequate replacement offhand. However, one hopes his employer will be able to muzzle him when it comes to subjects other than football. He’s sorely unqualified to enlarge on them.

Darwin’s slapdash theory is still treated as gospel 160-odd years after the publication of his Origin. Normally, no theory gets as much latitude.

A theory gets 30 to 40 years for it to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. If it is, it stops being a theory and becomes a scientific fact. If it isn’t, it’s consigned to a science museum, the room where quaint but discredited hypotheses are kept.

It has taken a miracle for Darwin to be still going strong, and the miracle has a name: political necessity. Post-Enlightenment modernity needed Darwinism in biology as much as it needed Marxism in economics.

Both created a purely materialist view of life that sounded plausible enough to the masses. Their revolt (so called by Ortega y Gasset) thus acquired a scriptural support, making the old scripture redundant in the eyes of many.

The new gospel developed an army of proselytisers who managed to convince the newly enlightened throng that Darwinism was solid, irrefutable science. Yet even Darwin himself had doubts.

Hence this scathing post-publication comment, dealing with the complexity of the human eye: “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

Yet history suggests Darwin was too reticent even in his most self-lacerating assessments. In the intervening years, science has never proved conclusively a single one of his conclusions of a more sweeping nature.

Unlike Darwin himself, today’s politicised Darwinists don’t even try to see how his assertions tally with the most elementary scientific data.

They dismiss the dearth of any intermediate forms of living creatures in the fossil records. They ignore the empirical evidence supporting not the appearance and development of new species but rather the degradation and disappearance of the old ones.

(Scientists now agree that about 99 percent of the species that have ever inhabited the earth are no longer with us. Really, the book ought to have been called The Disappearance of Species.)

In fact, Darwinism, along with other materialist explanations of the world, has been refuted by every natural science we may wish to consider:

Cosmology has reached the conclusion that our material world hasn’t existed for ever: conclusive evidence shows it appeared more or less instantaneously at the beginning of time. The word ‘God’ burning the lips of modern scientists, they came up with ‘The Big Bang’, but that is a matter of semantics only.

And today’s public, with its knee-jerk rejection of anything religious, doesn’t realise it’s being tricked by semantic legerdemain. Weaned on veneration of science, it salutes at the flagpole flying terms like ‘The Big Bang’, ‘Intelligent Design’ or, better still for being less comprehensible, ‘quantum fluctuations’. What people don’t realise is that they are looking at Genesis, encoded in scientific cant.

The physics of elementary particles has reached the level where some forms of matter (particles and field) can’t always be differentiated. Their material characteristics are now often seen as secondary to their metaphysical properties describable in terms of information only.

Palaeontologists have found and studied millions of fossilised remains of ancient organisms, and yet discovered practically no transitional forms in their development. This applies to all living beings, not just man.

Deep down, scientists know that, if millions of fossils collected over 160 years have shown no evidence of macroevolution, no such evidence exists. In fact, experiments with bacteria (whose lightning-fast propagation rates make it possible to replicate within a few decades the millions of generations normally associated with the length of biological life on earth) show no macroevolutionary developments whatsoever.

Genetics has demonstrated that mutations can only be degenerative in nature. Also, the amount of information in a single DNA molecule is so vast that it couldn’t have been accidentally created even in the time exceeding by trillions of years the most optimistic assessments of the age of our universe.

Biochemistry accepts irreducible complexity as fact: each molecule of living matter contains a multitude of intricate systems that wouldn’t have existed at all in a simpler form. That means they didn’t evolve but were created as they are at present. 

Geology is another example. We were all taught at school that the sequence of geological layers testifies to the gradual, smooth development of life from the more primitive to the more complex forms.

That idea was so firmly entrenched that it became impossible to ask questions that beg to be asked. Such as: If evolutionary development was smooth and gradual, then how is it that we observe sharply defined layers at all, rather than the evidence of some species disappearing, others appearing, and still others evolving gradually?

How is it that specimens of new species always appear in fossil records instantly and in huge numbers, fully formed and lacking any obvious predecessors? How is it that many species appearing in the earlier layers are in no way more primitive than the later ones?

In general, how can we decide which species are more primitive than others? Studies in microbiology have shown that even single-celled organisms believed to be the simplest living beings are in fact incredibly complex systems of interacting functional elements.

Even greater complexity is revealed at the genetic level, accompanied by much confusion in deciding what is primitive and what is advanced. Indeed, if we look at the number of their chromosomes, man, with 46, is more complex than the mouse (40), mink (30), fly (12) and gnat (6).

Yet using this criterion, man is more primitive than the sheep (54), silkworm (56), donkey (62), chicken (78) and duck (80). And the prawn, with its 254 chromosomes, leads the field by a wide margin.

So is man perhaps the missing link between the gnat and the prawn? Actually, even some plants are more complex than we are. Black pepper, plum and potato each boast 48 chromosomes, and the lime tree a whopping 82.

But never mind the hard physical facts. It’s the sheer beauty of the world that Darwinism has been unable to explain. Left out of its cold-blooded and ill-founded musings is something that has to be obvious to any unbiased observer: the world is organised according to aesthetic, not only rational, principles.

And in many instances aesthetics comes before practicality, or even cancels it out. Not only, as Dostoyevsky suggested, can beauty save the world – beauty is the world.

Look at the peacock’s tail for example. At first sight, this is a hindrance: after all, the oversized protuberance reduces the bird’s mobility, thus making it less able to flee from predators.

Darwinists explain this and many other examples of seemingly useless aesthetic characteristics as a factor of sexual selection. The more striking the male’s appearance, the more likely it would be to appeal to the aesthetic sense of a female and thereby pass its own genes on to the next generation.

However, this raises a question that’s rather awkward for Darwinism: whence do animals acquire their aesthetic sense in the first place? In the case of the peacock this comes packaged with characteristics that actively hamper the survival of the species. Clearly, metaphysical aesthetics overrides physical functionality – yet again metaphysics takes the lead.

There are many examples of that: the bright colouring of many species of both animals and plants, the beautiful singing of birds (which not only attracts females but also betrays the male’s location to predators, again jeopardising physical survival for the sake of beauty), and the geometric perfection of physical bodies. The golden section is particularly telling here, for all the negative publicity it has received in Dan Brown’s semiliterate fiction.

The problem with Darwinism is that it clashes with science, not with faith. No contradiction exists between faith and evolution: God can create species slowly, as well as fast.

It’s not just Darwinism but science in general that can happily coexist with religion. “The book of nature is written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics,” wrote Galileo, as if pre-empting the current debates.

The conflict between science and religion exists only in the agued minds of ideologised atheists, who love to cite the story of Galileo as proof. In fact, Pope Urban VIII was Galileo’s greatest admirer and patron.

What got Galileo censured was the arrogance and intolerance with which he spread his views. Even so, he was neither immolated nor imprisoned, as so many modern ignoramuses believe. Galileo was exiled to a comfortable villa in a picturesque part of Italy – those taking issue with atheistic communism suffered a worse fate in Russia and elsewhere.

Giordano Bruno was indeed burned in Rome’s Campo di Fiore, but, contrary to modern mythology, his indictment contained not a single word about his scientific exploits. It’s all about his rude, incontinent attacks on every sacrament and dogma of the Church, accompanied by his refusal to recant.

This type of historical revisionism goes hand in hand with scientific chicanery. Neither has anything to with either history or science – and everything to do with obtuse, febrile ideology. A mark of our times, I suppose.