Month: November 2025

Only 44 million Christians live in China, out of a population of 1.4 billion. This, although Christian missionaries tirelessly worked to convert the country for at least four centuries.

In particular, the Venerable Matteo Ricci almost succeeded in converting China in the late 16^th century. Yet he and his successors ultimately failed, which teaches a useful lesson in any number of subjects, including secular ones.

That Jesuit priest and scholar began his mission in 1582 and continued it until his death in 1610. Ricci was the first Westerner to translate Confucian texts into a European language (Latin), and he compiled the first Chinese-Portuguese dictionary.

Ricci’s scientific exploits made him a highly respected figure in China. The Wanli Emperor sought Ricci’s advice on astronomy and chronology, and even invited him to enter the Forbidden City, making Ricci the first European so honoured.

Fully immersed in Chinese philosophy and language, Ricci was a cultural ecumenist, a great believer in what today is called inclusivity. He sported Chinese dress, could speak and write classical Chinese, and in general displayed none of the superciliousness of some other European visitors.

However, his mission wasn’t primarily cultural. Ricci was in China to guide the locals to Christ, and he embarked on that task from an ecumenical premise. Realising that Chinese culture was thoroughly permeated with Confucianism, he sought to emphasise the similarities between that ancient philosophy and Christianity.

Missionaries from the mendicant Franciscan and Dominican orders took exception to Ricci’s approach, accusing him of compromising Christian doctrine. In response, he restated his commitment to orthodoxy, saying: “Simus, ut sumus, aut non simus” (“We shall remain as we are or we shall not remain at all”).

However, it turned out that remaining as he was, an orthodox Catholic, ran into conflict with Confucianism, much as Ricci tried to emphasise the similarities.

These are numerous. Both Confucians and Christians recognise the value of compassion, empathy, filial piety, respect for elders, friendship, community, social hierarchy, ethics. Such overlaps have always attracted Western atheists and Christian apostates to various Eastern creeds.

Chesterton was scathing about that sort of thing, saying wittily that such people always insist “that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism”. Similarities do exist, argued Chesterton, but they are superficial and peripheral. The core Christian beliefs are incompatible with Buddhism or, as Ricci found out, Confucianism (he, by the way, disliked Buddhism).

Confucianism is humanistic, with man occupying its credal centre. In Christianity, that role is played by God, which shines a different light on the world.

Morality is an important part of Christianity, but it’s derivative from its theocentrism. Thus, while Confucians believe in the innate goodness of man, Christians know that man is sinful.

Original sin is a core belief of Judaeo-Christianity, but it runs contrary to Eastern philosophies and religions. Morality to a Christian is achieved through God’s grace first and proper exercise of free will second. It’s salvation that’s the ultimate goal of life for Christians, not morality, as it is for Confucians.

Ricci tried to downplay the differences and cultivate the common ground. You abhor seeing others suffer, he kept saying – so do we. You emphasise honesty – so do we. You insist on acting ethically – so do we. You value wisdom – so do we.

You promote the Golden Rule – so do we. Look, Confucius says, “Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you”, and our “Do unto others…” says exactly the same thing in almost the same words.

His Confucian listeners listened politely and respectfully, nodded, smiled – and remained Confucian. They too were saying Simus, ut sumus, aut non simus, in their own singsong language, and, a few exceptions apart, they never changed their tune.

Fast-forward to the 20^th century, and a curious phenomenon emerges. When assorted socialist creeds, including the most extreme one, communism, began to hold sway, they found a more fertile ground among Confucians than among Christians.

Communism is compatible only with Christian apostasy, not Christianity. By contrast, Confucianism can comfortably coexist with communism, provided Marxist rhetoric is accepted as its reality.

Paradoxically, Confucianism, an ancient philosophy founded in the 6^th century BC, is consonant in some of its presuppositions with Enlightenment fallacies. One such is insistence on the innate goodness of man, which effortlessly floated from Rousseau to Marx.

(When people are found to fall short of that ideal, communists are so disappointed that they try to kill everyone who has let them down.)

Man is born in primordial goodness; he is, according to Rousseau, a noble savage. Hence any society should be organised in such a way as to open all paths to virtue. Already in Rousseau, and certainly in Marx, it was clear that it was the state’s job to define virtue as it saw fit.

And if some individuals’ understanding of virtue differed from the state’s mandate, Rousseau knew exactly what to do:

“The state should be capable of transforming every individual into part of the greater whole from which he, in a manner, gets his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it. [It should be able] to take from the man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him and incapable of being made use of without the help of others. The more completely these inherited resources are annihilated, the greater and more lasting are those which he acquires.”

The entirety of modern totalitarianism is contained in that quotation. This, I believe, is a logical (though perhaps not inevitable) development of humanism, understood in its meaning of anthropocentrism. Transplant this thought into the soil of Confucianism, rich in veneration of authority, community and man-centred ethics, and you can see how this Rousseauan sapling can grow into a luxuriant Maoist tree.

For a Christian to accept communism, he has to abandon Christianity. Otherwise he must act in the spirit of simus, ut sumus, aut non simus, even if he has never heard the phrase. A Confucian doesn’t face such a stark choice, which gets us back to Matteo Ricci, a sage and saintly man who dedicated his life to a noble but lost cause.

His failure ought to remind us that peripheral similarities should never blind us to the existence of core incompatibilities. We should be able to coexist with those of other cultures, but our central beliefs can’t coexist with theirs.

Multiculturalism, in its present meaning of a large menu of equally tasty dishes from all over the world, is thus civilisational suicide, a sort of Dignitas for deracinated societies. The more deracinated a society is, the more likely it is to insist that all cultures are equally valuable – meaning that its own has no special significance.

When this malaise sets in, it usually proves fatal. Thus R.G. Collingwood:

“Civilisations sometimes perish because they are forcibly broken up by the armed attack of enemies without or revolutionaries within; but never from this cause alone. Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself, the form of life which it tries to realise, is worth achieving.”

Matteo Ricci’s failure is actually his success in that his life teaches us a valuable lesson. We ignore it at our peril.

The British state took (only my innate moderation prevents me from saying ‘extorted’) 44.4 per cent of GDP last year.

That was before our Marxist government embarked on a new offensive in its class war, so you can confidently expect that proportion to grow fast. In fact, 44.4 per cent is merely a point of departure – for the moon.

In France, that proportion was already higher last year, standing as it did at 57 per cent. Theirs is vectored the same way as ours, so France is taking giant steps on her way to the 85 per cent proportion that existed in Stalin’s USSR. One shouldn’t overwork this analogy, but the trend is unmistakable.

When the state accounts for nearly or over half of a nation’s economy, that economy is no longer free. And, if you believe Hayek, neither is the nation – old Friedrich saw freedom as contingent on, and directly proportionate to, economic liberty.

Though Hayek had a point, I think he pushed it too far. I call that type of thinking totalitarian economism, which is less harmful than other forms of totalitarian thought, but still not sufficiently nuanced for my taste. However, an argument can be made that a state that controls much of the people’s livelihood gains concomitant control over the people.

Hence the 60 per cent of GDP in France and 50 per cent in Britain (with both levels probably to be reached this year) empower the state way too much. But that, after all, is the ultimate goal of socialism, and few will deny that both countries are socialist to a most lamentable degree.

However, it’s not just the size that counts, and I can’t believe I’ve just uttered this clichéd innuendo. It’s also how the money taken away from the people is used. And there the French are clearly getting much better value out of their state’s rapaciousness.

Put me blindfolded into a car (ideally a passenger seat), and I’ll instantly tell you whether the road I’m on is in Britain or in France. The surface on French roads is much smoother, and one seldom encounters a pothole. Moreover, roadworks aren’t nearly as ubiquitous there.

French roads also drain much faster and they are often bone dry an hour after a downpour, as heavy as a rain turning British roads into waterways. And their central reservations are designed to block off the blinding lights of oncoming traffic much more efficiently than ours.

It’s true that French motorways are toll roads raking in millions every year, whereas, one or two exceptions aside, British roads are public. But French N, D and C roads are public too, maintained by different tiers of local government. And they too range from good to impeccable.

Moreover, any roadworks that do happen in France are completed much more quickly. A few years ago, for example, a new 15-mile motorway bypass near us was built in just over two months. If you’ve ever observed similar projects in Britain, I can see you smiling sardonically.

Even assuming that roadworks are done by private contractors, this still shows that French civil administrators are better at their job than their British counterparts. We have much fun tittering about the backhanders taken by corrupt French officials, but our own administrators seem to be corrupt in more fundamental ways, those affecting their core duties.

When I wrote my first book back in the late 1990s, I mentioned that, during the 17 years that I’d lived in the King’s Road, its entire 2.5 mile length hadn’t been free of some roadworks for a single day. Seventeen years have now turned into 37, but the numeral is the only thing I have to change in that statement.

Nor is it just the roads. French healthcare is also better than ours, although it’s doing its level best to catch up, or rather down. Again, I’m speaking from personal experience. Not only have I done thousands of miles on French roads, but I’ve also had the misfortune of spending long enough in French hospitals to be able to compare them to our private and NHS ones, which I also know not from hearsay.

While not quite as good as the former, the public insurance-funded hospital in provincial Auxerre is better than NHS hospitals in London. Moreover, it doesn’t take as long to get to hospital there, this though we live in the middle of nowhere, if Burgundian woods can be so described.

When I needed an ambulance, one arrived in 10 minutes, which would be pretty good going even for London with its profusion of medical services. French firemen are also trained as paramedics, which allows the French to roll both services into one, at least in the provinces. This administrative legerdemain saved my life on a couple of occasions, which gets me back to the question in the title, slightly modified.

Why are French public services so much better than ours? Yes, the French have to pay more for them, but at least they seem to get their money’s worth.

I can’t really answer that question, at least not in a few words. What saddens me is that even in the generation preceding mine, the British public administration was the envy of the world. Now it’s rapidly becoming the world’s laughingstock, and the same goes for British education.

The system of state-funded grammar schools, supported by secondary moderns with a greater accent on practical skills, and privately funded public schools, ensured that 25 per cent of the people were well-educated and the rest competent enough to look after themselves in the economic rough-and-tumble.

One could say that most Britons were educated well, if not equally well. But that inequality was a burr under our socialists’ blanket, and they got rid of most grammar schools in the name of equity, that E in today’s pernicious DEI. Parents were thus faced with the choice of either sending their children to moron-spewing comprehensives or paying public-school fees.

Since the law of supply-demand was still in force, public schools, liberated from comparable state-funded competition, began to raise their previously modest fees to a stratospheric level. Fees at Eton and other top public schools, for example, are now around £65,000 a year and growing, but even minor public (meaning private) schools are becoming too expensive for most families.

At the same time, the level of state-funded education remains high in France, although not as high as it used to be – socialist erosion exists there too. Still, French youngsters don’t seem to have reading problems after finishing secondary education, which is often the case in the UK.

Everywhere one looks, it’s not just the roads but public services in general that are better in France, which suggests that socialist corruption is making greater and faster inroads in Britain. And, as our American cousins would put it, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Now our government isn’t just old-style socialist but downright Marxist, the brutally competent and efficient civil service of yesteryear is rapidly receding into a fond nostalgic memory. The fact that the French are going the same way is little consolation – and schadenfreude isn’t a commendable emotion anyway.

Both the British and the French are rapidly cutting off their nose to spite their face, but the British are even better at that metaphorical surgical procedure. Well, at least we are better at something.

It saddens me to report that one of the two principal political parties in the US shows signs of most unfortunate disunity. Not that the Democratic Party has ever spoken in one voice, but these days the sound is especially discordant.

In my day, the Democrats used to split more or less along the Mason-Dixon Line. Those to the south of it overlapped with the bulk of the Republican Party, while those to the north tended to be what Europeans oxymoronically call democratic socialist, and Americans misname ‘liberal’.

The good news for those who, like me, favour political harmony is that such a geographical demarcation no longer exists. The bad news is that it has been replaced with a different split: one between Trotskyists and bog standard socialists.

Neither group bears any relation to what used to be seen as a mainstream political party in the West in general and America in particular. And the Trotskyist wing is most visibly championed by Zohran Mamdani, who in a couple of days is likely to be elected mayor of New York.

President Trump routinely refers to Mamdani as “100 per cent communist lunatic” and “total nut-job”, which, contrary to Trump’s usual tendency to hyperbole, is an understatement, or rather a misstatement.

True enough, Leon Trotsky would have happily signed his name to every political idea Mamdani campaigns on, except perhaps those that reek of anti-Semitism too much. But it’s a mistake to ascribe extreme political views to mental instability.

Neither Lenin nor Stalin nor Hitler was insane. Lenin’s cannibalistic ideas had been fully formed in his mind and put into practice long before syphilis made final inroads on his mind. Stalin developed some paranoid tendencies in the last few years of his life, but he had been perfectly rational in his criminal policies until then. And Hitler, although somewhat hysterical, kept his marbles almost to the end.

People who ascribe evil to madness should brush up on their theology, ideally, or moral philosophy, at a pinch. They’ll find out that evil has full residency in human nature, if only negatively, as the absence of good. The choice between the two is thus perfectly normal either way and it’s always free. Evil people are simply those who have chosen wrong. They aren’t insane – and neither is Mamdani.

Trump, however, is half-right: Mamdani is definitely 100 per cent communist, with a distinct Trotskyist bent. He describes capitalism as ‘theft’ and the police as ‘evil’. Consequently, he plans to crush the former with taxes and replace the latter with social services.

He also wants to freeze the rent for millions of apartments, even those that are already rent-controlled or rent-stabilised (I know a difference exists, although it escaped me even when I lived in Manhattan). New York landlords will respond the same way they always do when the local government plays silly buggers: they’ll keep their properties vacant and put repairs on hold.

To compensate, Mamdani wants to create 200,000 union-built, “100 per cent affordable” apartments, and fair enough, they would be affordable for the prospective tenants. But at a total cost of $100 billion over ten years, they would be zero per cent affordable to the city.

By comparison, his other project, free buses for all, costs a mere pittance of $800 million a year, while his plan to subsidise food to the tune of $60 million a year sounds dirt cheap. Both are likely to end up as a pie in the sky.

But it’s another brilliant idea that especially intrigues me since it illustrates both the economic difference between our two countries and the ideological similarity between Mamdani and our own dear government.

He wants almost to double the minimum wage to $30 an hour. In our money, it adds up to the magical number of £46,000 a year that holds a particular significance for PM Starmer and Chancellor Reeves.

They won their landslide partly on the promise not to raise taxes on “working people”. Since it’s obvious that neither doctors nor lawyers nor stock brokers, many of whom put in 90-hour weeks, do any work, analysts struggled with establishing how HMG defined that category.

Now, as the autumn budget is rapidly approaching, Rachel in Accounts has helpfully elucidated the issue. She won’t raise taxes for the “working people”, meaning those who are on – are you ready for this? – less than £46,000 a year. The fat cats who earn more than that will be “squeezed till the pips squeak”, as one of Rachel’s illustrious predecessors, Denis Healey, put it so robustly.

And there’s the rub: what the American Marxist Mamdani sees as the minimum wage, our homegrown Marxist Reeves regards as untold riches to be expropriated. Just think how much wealthier the US is – and hence how much richer the pickings for their communists.

Another difference is that Mamdani is more honest: he openly talks in rank Marxist terms, such as “public ownership of the means of production”, whereas Rachel still couches her Marxism in pseudo-democratic cant. However, when Marx talked about the means of production, he had in mind the burgeoning factories of the Industrial Revolution which in those days accounted for most of the economy.

By contrast, today’s New York City doesn’t produce much apart from services. The only NYC products I can think of offhand are pastrami, bagels and dill pickles, but I don’t think Marx would have counted these as industrial output. Mamdani ought to bring his Marxism up to date.

Of course, another difference between him and Rachel is that she’ll be able to act on her plans, whereas Mamdani will probably be held back by the harsh reality of New York finances or, barring that, by the state government. But it’s the thought that counts, and Mamdani’s is to the left of common or garden socialism – and way to the left of even such ‘liberal’ mayors of yesteryear as Lindsay, Beam or Koch.

But there is every indication that one law of socialism is still inviolable. The law says that, when Marxists take over or are even about to, people run away, and to this law there are no known exceptions. Apparently, this is already happening in New York, with many wealthy people and corporations fleeing to places like Florida and Texas.

As a former 10-year resident of the Lone Star State, I’m pleased to find out that it already boasts more bankers than New York. I look forward to the time when Wall Street ups sticks and moves lock, stock and barrel to, say, Sugar Land, Lubbock or San Antonio.

What I find amazing is the ethnic aspect of Mamdani’s meteoric rise. This Uganda-born Muslim is seldom reticent when spouting toxic pro-Hamas and anti-Israeli propaganda, with thinly veiled anti-Semitic overtones.

Jews tend to be sensitive to that sort of thing, and open anti-Semitism is seldom a way to electoral success in a city where Jews make up over 12 per cent of the population. Yet a curious phenomenon is unfolding, and not only in New York. Many Jews vote for those who hate them, thus going Jesus Christ one better.

After all, Jesus only said “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”. He didn’t say vote for them, and yet ‘liberal’ Jews do just that, by casting their ballots for candidates loyal to ‘Palestinians’, meaning Jew-hating Hamas.

This, I believe, is to some extent a reflection of a phenomenon widely described in psychological and psychiatric literature: Jewish self-hatred. Englishmen may hate England, and Frenchmen may hate France, but neither people are likely to hate themselves for being, respectively, English or French.

Some Jews seem to be different, and I for one struggle to see any other explanation of why so many of them support that virulent anti-Semite, as simple arithmetic suggests they must. Moreover, it appears that George Soros, himself Jewish, bankrolled Mamdani’s campaign. Some things seem to matter more than ethnic solidarity, and I wonder what they might be.

One way or another, I hope New Yorkers defy the polls and spare themselves what’s likely to become the most destructive administration in the city’s history. My thoughts are with them: one has to renounce the devil on this All Saints’ Day.