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Thus, according to Boswell, spoke Dr Johnson in response to some specious statement. Our great savant clearly didn’t anticipate the arrival of Edward O Wilson two centuries later.

Prof. Wilson, who died at 92 on Boxing Day, wasn’t exactly the founder of sociobiology, as some describe him. But he certainly was its tireless populariser and glorifier.

His original field was myrmecology, the study of ants, and he made seminal contributions to that science. How seminal, I can’t judge. But judging by the 150-odd scientific prizes Wilson won, he was highly rated by his fellow professionals.

Being a rank amateur, I’m more interested in the second phase of his career, when he extrapolated onto humans his knowledge of ants. Essentially, he found that all animals, from ants to us, have their behaviour not only skewed but indeed predetermined by heredity.

Free will is then a dangerous illusion propagated by the likes of Dr Johnson, ignoramuses who had never studied the social behaviour of ants. And they get their cue from religion, that dangerous exercise in deception.

“So I would say that for the sake of human progress, the best thing we could possibly do would be to diminish, to the point of eliminating, religious faiths,” Wilson said in 2015, displaying refreshing ignorance about the history, and also the meaning, of progress.

Prof. Wilson didn’t suggest expedients by which that laudable end could be achieved. Experience, however, suggests that the best, if short-lived, way of eliminating religious beliefs is to eliminate religious believers, but to his credit Prof. Wilson advocated no such measure.  

He famously used a photographic simile to make his point. A man’s personality, and consequently his behaviour over a lifetime, he explained, is like an undeveloped photo negative. It contains the whole picture, with no detail omitted.

In the course of his life, a man may develop all of the negative, some of it or none of it – but he can neither add anything to it nor take anything away (Wilson was writing in the pre-Photoshop days). He thus added his name to the list of determinists who have had a founding, and pernicious, effect on modernity: Marx, Darwin and Freud.

When Wilson first unveiled that theory in 1978 he became a target for vicious attacks from the Left, especially ‘progressive’ students. They were appalled by any suggestion that human behaviour is in any way affected by biology.

They gobbled up Marxist determinism, hailed Darwin’s and especially welcomed Freud’s because it dealt with their itchy naughty bits. But Wilson’s genetic determinism smacked of racism too much for their liking.

Wilson himself never even hinted at the possibility of some races being inferior to others, but the noses of enraged youths possess nothing short of bloodhound acuity. Prof. Wilson started to be cancelled long before the term was coined.

He was a Nazi, personally responsible for genocide! A racist! A eugenicist! So screamed those progressive students, as they picketed Wilson’s lectures. “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” sang the chorus of young firebrands.

One girl emptied a jug of water over the scientist’s head, and I’m only amazed he was never subjected to a less symbolic but more wounding attack.

For it’s an article of faith for the progressives that every person starts out as a tabula rasa, on which economics and sociology then scribble their messages – and progressives have been known to kill defending their right to that patently unscientific opinion.

Now, I don’t mind dismissing scientific theories, but dismissing scientific facts betokens the kind of stupidity that doesn’t even merit a refutation. That we are all, to some extent, a product of heredity is one such fact, and one doesn’t have to be a scientist to know it’s true.

But ‘to some extent’ are the operative words. To claim that we can’t act against our genetic predisposition isn’t just to deny our religion. It’s to deny our humanity.

Wilson’s determinism reduces people to puppets whose wires are pulled by their ancestors’ traits, or else to fish swimming in their genetic pool and lacking both the need and the ability to come up for air.

It’s from this intellectual premise that one could launch a devastating attack on Wilson’s soulless determinism. Accusing him of genocide is so perverse that it’s hardly sporting to aim one’s slings and arrows at those who mouth such gibberish. They should be told to shut up and stay silent until they’ve extricated their brains from the cesspit of bubbling emotions.

Yet it’s that unsporting target that Daniel Finkelstein has picked in The Times. Wilson, he writes, “was achingly, obviously right. How likely is it that human beings are the one species whose capacities and behaviour aren’t largely influenced by biology? If every other animal’s behaviour demands an evolutionary explanation, how can it possibly be that ours does not?”

Do you notice a copout? Wilson didn’t just maintain that our capacities and behaviour are “largely influenced by biology”. According to him, they are so influenced wholly.

That is a folly as glaring and, if you will, ‘progressive’ as the insistence on the genocidal nature of genetics. This folly springs from the materialist obscurantism involved in treating man as just another animal.

An animal man may be, but he is “achingly, obviously” not just an animal. Unlike a cat, a dog or for that matter an ant, man isn’t a walking replica of his genetic make-up. He is “achingly, obviously” endowed with faculties that transcend materialism.

Christianity uses terms like ‘soul’ and ‘free will’ in this context, while neuroscientists prefer talking about consciousness. They have spent untold billions in any currency you care to name on all those Genome Projects and Decades of the Brain, trying to find a material explanation for that extra-material factor – and predictably failed.

If anything, they’ve uncovered new barriers on the way to that destination. It was like a desert mirage: the closer neuropsychologists got to the oasis of knowledge, the farther it moved away.

Tarred as they are with the brush of our materialist, deracinated modernity, those scientists resort to the cardsharp’s trick of saying that yes, unfortunately they can’t yet prove that consciousness has a purely material explanation. But since we all know that’s the case, they’ll find the truth sooner or later.

The only thing they’ve found so far is that sometimes their scanner screens light up, and sometimes they don’t. It’s political bias, not scientific integrity, that prevents them from acknowledging that Dr Johnson, unburdened as he was by oscillographic technology, was right in his a priori statement.

Lord Finkelstein is commendably merciless to those brainless youngsters who didn’t see much difference between Wilson and Hitler. Yet he doesn’t realise that, by accepting the premise of man being just a bigger ant or a cleverer ape, he is one of those ‘progressives’ in every way that matters.

“We must defend good science against bad politics,” he writes. I agree. So do let’s start by defending good common sense against crude, hare-brained, demonstrably defunct materialism. As exemplified by Edward O Wilson, his gonadic detractors – and Lord Finkelstein.

I can’t claim to have studied the case in any detail. Then again, I don’t think such perusal is needed to reach the conclusion in the title.

Merely on general principle, these days it’s impossible for anyone accused of crimes involving sex (of any variety), rape or race to be judged fairly.

A fair trial is one in which truth comes out – or at least every attempt is made to ensure that it does. Yet when the defendant’s crime touches on the cherished – and typically transient – tropes of modernity, truth retreats, tail between its legs.

Many roads lead to truth, but there is one guaranteed to lead away from it: ideology. And in this age of a total, not to say totalitarian, avalanche of information, no one can possibly remain untouched by ideological afflatus. Not the judge, not the jury – and certainly not ‘public opinion’, a term I’m always compelled to put in quotation marks.

That said, I’m sure Ghislaine is ghastly, her ego and sense of self-worth blown out of all proportion by her birthright to entitlement. On the folk theory about an apple and the tree, any progeny of Robert Maxwell would have to clear an insurmountable barrier of heredity, for he was an inveterate villain.

Moreover, he was a man trained in the dark arts of indoctrination, which he had to practise on his children. Under such circumstances, Ghislaine would have had to be touched by God to escape Robert Maxwell’s malignant influence. Instead she was touched by Jeffrey Epstein.

I’m sure that those who have followed the story more assiduously than I have know all there is to know about the perverse relationship that has proved the undoing of both parties. But even a cursory glance at newspaper articles leaves one in little doubt that Ghislaine indeed procured for Jeffrey.

Some of the girls in her stable were underaged, or close to it. That’s of course naughty, but none of them strikes me as an innocent lamb led to debauching slaughter at the hands of Jeffrey and his friends.

One such victim particularly caught my eye. She was a trainee masseuse who catered to Ghislaine’s need to be kneaded. Impressed with the service she had received, Ghislaine then invited the girl for a weekend at one of Jeffrey’s love nests.

There a tragedy occurred: Jeffrey raped the girl. Rape is a crime, but these days it’s not like any old crime, is it? Utter the word, and it instantly acts as a magnet attracting ideological shibboleths lodged in people’s minds.

Women have been house-trained to believe that rape is the worst possible thing that can happen to them. Worse than a beating, mutilation, even death.  

No doubt our masseuse grew up with that indisputable knowledge. She fell victim to a crime than which nothing worse exists. So what did she do?

Did she call the police? No. Did she complain to her family and friends? No. Did she at least escape from that den of iniquity, taking a vow to give it a berth at least a mile wide in perpetuity? No.

Instead she continued to visit the house on multiple occasions for four (!) years, getting raped each time. Queried by the perplexed defence, she explained that the memory of her ordeal was so awful that she blanked it out.

Oh well, that happens. My doctor friends confirm that a deep psychological trauma can produce amnesia. As a credulous man, I therefore accept that she had forgotten the first rape when she paid Jeffrey a second visit. But what about all subsequent rapes, spaced out at regular intervals over four years? Did she push the amnesia button each time?

I don’t believe that, you don’t believe it, no sensible person will believe it. But it’s not sensible people who sit on modern juries but automata programmed by ideological agitprop. They are predisposed to believe any nonsense once they’ve heard one of the key words: rape, racism, hate, homophobia, transphobia.

These words are magic wands. When waved, they sweep away common sense or indeed any understanding of what constitutes reasonable doubt. At best, they create a slight bias. At worst, or perhaps most normal, they doom the defendant.

Once again, I’m not trying to vindicate Ghislaine. I really don’t care about her, although it takes a madman to accept that her crimes, such as they are, merit the prison terms bandied about. Sixty years, in effect meaning she’d die in prison? Even many killers don’t get that.

Just put manslaughter on one side of the scales and inviting girls for a romp or two on the other. What’s that doing to the balance?

I repeat: I don’t care about Ghislaine. But I do care about justice, for without it the West will stay Western only in the purely geographic sense. It’s not democracy but justice that is the salient, formative aspect of our civilisation.

When justice isn’t done, especially when it isn’t done for ideological reasons, we all lose, not just the defendant. That’s why I feel some sympathy for Ghislaine, something I never thought I’d ever feel for a Maxwell.

When I opened our conservative broadsheet this morning, I had to rub my eyes to make sure I hadn’t misread. No, there it was, in large bold type on the front page: Apologia pro imperium nostrum.

I translated mentally, to come up with Vindication of Our Empire. But as I read on, the article went far beyond a mere vindication.

“Lest we forget,” it said, “few of our colonial possessions were acquired strictly by military conquest. Yet even those that were derived infinite benefits from what Lord Palmerston so aptly called ‘liberal interventionism’. However, whatever method of entry into the Empire, each of its members was infinitely better off in it than at any time before or since…

“The other day I spoke to a prominent member of the Indian parliament, who told me he blamed the British for all of his country’s woes. ‘How so?’ I asked, readying myself for a heated argument. ‘I blame you for leaving,’ he explained…

“We have a moral and I daresay legal right to reclaim the Empire we lost, much to the chagrin of its former subjects. India and Pakistan, much of Africa (including the RSA), most of the West Indies received from Britain the priceless gifts of parliamentary democracy and independent judiciary, free markets and free elections – above all, the most precious gift of the sublime English language.

“And let us not forget the delights of Anglicanism, the true Christianity for our time and of all time – the confession for all seasons. It is the Anglican English who are the God-chosen people, and we must restore our mandate of the territory currently inhabited by those with an unsustainable claim to that distinction…

“Instead of besmirching the reputation of our empire builders, we should worship their names – the names of Drake and Nelson, Gordon and Roberts, Rhodes and Napier…”

And so on in the same vein. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Can you believe yours? No? Good. Because I made this up. No such article has appeared in the British press, broadsheet or tabloid, nor even on one of those loony-fringe websites.

Yet this wasn’t just a puerile prank on my part. I simply wanted to give you a little taste of what the Russians read in their papers and watch on their TV.

Replace the British Empire with either the Russian or Soviet equivalent; British empire builders with Ivan III, Ivan IV ‘The Terrible’, most of the Romanov tsars, plus Stalin and Zhukov; Anglicanism with Orthodoxy; former British colonies with the Russian possessions; multiply the volume by any factor it takes to exclude any contradicting information, and you’ll begin to get some idea of the propagandistic swamp in which the Russians are immersed around the clock.

Stalin in particular is hailed for leading the Soviet Union to victory in the great war, which achievement is supposed to outweigh the tens of millions murdered, starved to death or “turned to camp dust”, as the popular idiom went.

Proving yet again that Russia’s past is unpredictable, the media omit to mention that the Soviet Union entered the Second World War as Hitler’s ally. Nor have I seen too many references to the 1.5 million Russians serving in the Wehrmacht and the SS, or indeed to the tens of millions who perished in the war due to Stalin’s incompetence and brutality.

Their brains scoured to blankness, many Russians gather together in fair imitations of the Nuremberg rallies and scream themselves hoarse, shouting “We can do it again!” What exactly? Murder tens of millions of other Russians? Plunge half of Europe into a tyranny as revolting as the Nazi one, but outdoing it in the body count?

It’s not just the media that does the brainwashing either. The same jingoistic, bellicose messages come across in films, plays, novels, poems – and of course songs.

Over the past century and a half, but especially since 1917, Russian singers have been blessed with a vast repertoire of drum-beating, bugle-blowing, nationalistic, racist and anti-Semitic songs to warm the cockles of every heart disconnected from a brain.

Specifically, the songs’ number and frequency always increased immediately prior to Russia’s pouncing on yet another neighbour. For example, before Soviet aggression against Finland in 1939 the radio waves were inundated with a song specially commissioned for that event.

Alongside a promise to help the Finnish workers mete out reprisals on their capitalist oppressors, the song featured a poetic refrain, saying “Do accept us Suomi, you beauty, into the necklace of your limpid lakes.” Suomi chose not to, and the song stopped blaring from every loudspeaker.

One of today’s most celebrated purveyors of that genre is Zhanna Bichevskaya, People’s Artist of the Russian Federation, frequent performer at Kremlin concerts, Putin’s favourite, ubiquitous star on radio and TV, host of her own TV show, one of the most recorded and best-selling singers, laureate of numerous… – please tell me where to stop: the list of the lady’s medals could go on and on.

Since we are in a tasting mode today, I thought you’d like a soupçon of Miss Bichevskaya’s delicious output. Here I am translating excerpts of her current hit Kulikovo Field.  

For the outlanders among you, especially those who never studied Russian history, Kulikovo Field was a battleground that has been turned, for no sound historical reason, into a Russian shrine. There, In 1380, a contingent of Russians and Mongols under Prince Dmitri Donskoy and the Tatar Khan Tokhtamysh defeated another Tatar contingent under Mamai.

Soviet pupils (and Russian, both pre- and post-Soviet ones) were taught that thus ended the Tatar-Mongol yoke of Rus, which is a mythological solecism. For, two years later, Moscow surrendered to Tokhtamysh, who took Donskoy’s son Vasily I hostage. Muscovy remained a vassal of the Horde for another two centuries.

But never mind history, feel the patriotism. Kulikovo Field has become a symbol of Russia’s martial grandeur, her mighty response to enemies. It’s against that background that you can fully appreciate these excerpts from Zhanna’s song (I’m translating just the words, not the rhyme and metre).

“How did we allow this to happen, brothers? Russia again is moaning under the yoke of black locusts. That means the Russians must take up arms again…  

“We’ll sweep the vampires from the body of our land, and there won’t be any zones [another word for Stalin’s concentration camps], camps or prisons, all the enemies of Russia will be slain…

“Russia will reclaim the Russian Sebastopol, the Crimean peninsula will again become Russian, as will the majestic Bosphorus, our Constantinople and the world’s shrine Jerusalem! And, to spite the Masons and other villains [no prizes for guessing who the other villains are], all those who are seething with hatred of Christianity, we’ll remember Kulikovo Field, and the scales will fall from our eyes, and this shrine will unite us.”

Rousing stuff, that. Now imagine an ordinary Russian, not much given to exegetic contemplation, who hears the same message round the clock, blaring at him through every medium and every genre.

Then imagine a country where something like that is standard fare, the regular spiritual and cultural sustenance. Have you done so? Splendid. Now imagine a British journalist who thinks that country is “the most conservative and Christian in Europe”. But enough about Peter Hitchens…

On either side of Christmas, I made two points. First, few people these days even understand what conservatism means. Second, because atheism is fundamentally unsound, it diminishes people’s ability to think straight.

Hence I have for The Times columnist Matthew Parris that special feeling I reserve for people who vindicate my assertions by illustrating them vividly and irrefutably.

This time around he has regaled us with a jumbled attempt to go Nietzsche one better on the subject of good and evil. He reiterates (without attribution) Nietzsche’s point that good and evil men aren’t as sharply polarised as some philosophers think.

They both have the same natural impulses, and the difference is that evil men express the bad ones more directly and comprehensively. Somewhat incongruously, Nietzsche then dismissed traditional, Christian morality – even though that concept of good and evil doesn’t negate it at all.

Quite the contrary, Christianity rejects the notion of moral determinism because it contradicts the notion of free will, making an uncoerced personal choice between good and evil. Christianity also recognises that every man is capable of making either choice.

Mr Parris takes this basic idea and turns it into the cat’s cradle of a convoluted mess: “Friends, there are no demons, no Heaven, no Hell, no cosmic forces of good and evil, no battle between darkness and light. There is only us.”

There he conflates the Christian idea of free will with the Manichaean heresy of an externalised evil independent of good and deriving from a parallel deity. This view sprang from the dual cosmology of the world of light being in perpetual conflict with the world of darkness.

Mr Parris seems to think that, by dismissing Manichaeism, he is also dismissing Christianity because they are roughly similar. But Christian theology never treated evil as an external phenomenon emanating from some competitor to God. Good is primary; evil, strictly derivative. Evil is merely the absence of good.

So why drag in the Christian concepts of Heaven and Hell? What on earth do they have in common with Mani’s gnostic nonsense? Neither heaven nor hell predetermine our free choice between good and evil – they merely emphasise, inter alia, the reward for the right choice and the wages of sin.

Having dug himself into an intellectual hole, Mr Parris spurned folk wisdom and went on digging his way into unalloyed drivel: “Manichaeism goes with the grain of human nature. Fear of the unseen is a natural product of evolutionary biology: self-preservation favours the suspicious and, at its extreme, suspiciousness leads to paranoia, of which there’s a streak in us all.”

So not only is he a theologian and a moral philosopher – he is also an evolutionary biologist. I get it: when Darwin created man, he imbued him with an irrational, paranoid belief that evil may imperil man’s self-preservation, whereas in fact all sensible people, exemplified by Mr Parris, believe that evil… what?

Doesn’t exist? Isn’t dangerous? I wish, as Byron wrote about Coleridge, he would explain his explanation. If Mr Parris wanted to say that he detests Manichaeism and Christianity alike, then he should have said so, thereby sparing me the trouble of trying to untangle his intellectual mess.

Apparently, he has been exploring such ideas from an early age: “As a student I was struck by Aristotle’s rejection of the idea that moral qualities can be lodged within us like downloaded apps.”

Mr Parris, who is roughly my age, must have been infinitely more precocious. When I was a student, we didn’t yet download apps. We read books and had no premonition that one day they would be replaced by Wikipedia. Yet Mr Parris (and presumably Aristotle) was in command of computer-age terminology long before the advent of the computer age.

But back to Mani and Christ. “Nobody expressed it better than St Augustine 17 centuries ago, describing (in his Confessions) the error of his earlier thinking: ‘I still thought that it is not we who sin but some other nature that sins within us . . . I preferred to excuse myself and blame this unknown thing which was in me but was not part of me’.”

One has to infer that St Augustine, hereby conscripted under Parris’s banners, also rejected heaven and hell. In fact, he merely says that, as a youngster, he was a misguided Manichaean. However, as he grew up, chronologically, spiritually and intellectually, he became a Christian – meaning a person who believes in free choice between good and evil, and also in the existence of heaven and hell.

Mr Parris acknowledges that, for which he must be commended. Yet he must be rebuked for then adding: “But the heresy is woven into the very fabric of popular and informal Christian and Muslim belief.”

I’m not sure what popular and informal Christian belief is. Is it at odds with Christian doctrine and dogma? If so, it’s poorly informed or even dubiously Christian. Is that what Mr Parris is lamenting? Is he out to return those stray sheep into the fold of doctrinal rectitude?

Not at all, as it turns out. He is merely drawing far-reaching conclusions from colloquial usage: “Behind every red-top or middle-market tabloid headline about the presence of ‘evil’ or (worse) ‘pure evil’ in our midst, you can discern this thinking. You could hear it in George W Bush’s speeches about ‘terror’, the ‘war on terror’, waged against the forces of darkness.”

Yes, people sometimes use words loosely and emotively. One makes mental allowances for that tendency and, for example, a man doesn’t call the cops every time his wife shouts: “If you don’t wipe your feet, I’ll kill you.”

Sometimes speakers also rely on shorthand for brevity’s sake. Any sensible listener would have known that what Bush meant was that he was out to prevent terrorist acts by waging war on those who have made the evil choice of committing such acts.

Is that how Mr Parris wants our politicians to talk? If so, I’m not surprised his own parliamentary career was so short-lived.

Shining through Mr Parris’s prose is the underlying belief, typical of atheists, that good and evil are nebulous concepts even when internalised. In his own example, doesn’t he believe that blowing up public transport is an evil act?

If it isn’t, what is it? An honest mistake? And if it is evil, what’s wrong with describing it as such? On the contrary, such usage has allowed Mr Parris to parade his enviable erudition by referring to St Augustine’s Confessions, even if out of context.

As a journalist, Mr Parris can’t indulge in philosophising for long. A segue to quotidian politics must be instant and smooth.

So here it is: “At the root of this corrosive philosophy is a pull we all feel and to which I wrongly succumbed during the Brexit debate… It’s the impulse to imagine malign forces behind wrong-headedness.”

In the interests of full disclosure, Mr Parris should have added that “during the Brexit debate” he succumbed to that “corrosive philosophy” so thoroughly that this “natural conservative” switched to the LibDems, the most pro-EU party we have. Clearly he regarded any regaining of British sovereignty as evil and European federalism as good.

He then went on to strengthen his conservative credentials: “Natural conservatives like me are pulled likewise by a Manichaean account of the struggle between Labour’s wicked (we assume) Momentum-inclined Corbynites and what we see as the enlightened Blairite centre-left.”

Well, natural conservatives like me detect only tactical differences between the two wings of socialism. But it’s Mr Parris who interests me here. Does he not regard “Momentum-inclined Corbynites” (communists in all but name, for the benefit of my foreign readers) as wicked? Is it Manichaean or Christian to see them as such?

Oh well, picking on someone like Mr Parris is hardly sporting. It’s just that he illustrated my recent points so exhaustively that I couldn’t resist.

When Pilate asked Jesus “What is truth?”, the question was rhetorical.

Pilate didn’t expect an answer and neither did he believe a universal answer was possible. He was a Hellenic Roman, and truth to him was strictly relative. What’s true for the goose might not be true for the gander, and vice versa.

Thus the good Procurator held it as true that Jesus wasn’t guilty of the charges brought up by the Sanhedrin. However, he acknowledged that Annas and Caiaphas perceived truth differently, and they were entitled to enforce their own version.

Pilate’s truth was relative; Jesus’s was absolute. That gives us two possible starting points for any ratiocination, and the choice of one or the other will eventually get us to very different intellectual destinations.

Western civilisation, which term I use interchangeably with Christendom, based its thought on one metaphysical premise; the civilisations that both preceded and followed it, on another.

The Christian metaphysical premise was based on the certainty that there is such a thing as absolute truth. Not everyone knew it, but everyone knew it was knowable.

That certainty started in the church, but it didn’t end there. Belief in ultimate truth gave Western thought in general a discipline unique to it. It channelled the intellect into a teleological conduit, one not only with a beginning but also with an end.

Christendom gave Greek philosophy a new, probably longer, life, by streamlining it into a shape that fit the new conduit. It was in that sense that “Aquinas baptised Aristotle”.

The art of rhetoric is an essential adjunct to philosophy, or thought in general. Rhetoric turns knowledge into argument – it’s the cutting edge of thought, lopping off everything extraneous to the truth or detrimental to it.

The realisation that there exists such a thing as the ultimate and universal truth affected rhetoric as well. It acquired a new reservoir of energy, more clout to its punch.

All this is seldom talked about. People acknowledge effortlessly that Christianity created a new way of life. Yet they sometimes fail to realise that it also created a new way of thought – and it continued to provide that service long after the original inspiration was no longer acknowledged.

Natural sciences, for example, owe so much to Christian thought as to owe it practically everything. Even scientists who don’t believe in the existence of a universal, rational law-giver still have to believe in the existence of universal, rational laws, for otherwise their work would be impossible.

That’s why scientific progress is a uniquely Western phenomenon, or as near as damn. Like the light of a faraway star reaching the Earth millions of years after the star died, Christian thought continued to sustain the Western intellect for a long time after Christianity lost its commanding influence.

Yet for a long time doesn’t mean indefinitely. As the Western intellect moved further and further away from its source, the gravitational pull of that source weakened. Weakening in parallel with it was the intellect itself – not to cut too fine a point, Westerners were becoming dumber.

Ignoring Thomas à Kempis’s entreaty to imitate Christ, modern people choose to imitate Pilate instead. They too are perfectly capable of asking Pilate’s sneering question. They too have allowed the absolute truth first to be smashed into the fragments of little relativities, and then to be buried underneath them.

Not everyone can diagnose the resulting intellectual malaise, nor understand its aetiology. But everyone can observe its symptoms: most people happily spout rubbish on every subject under the sun.

The phrase “I’m entitled to my own opinion” has gained the currency it never used to have. Such entitlement used to be contingent on knowledge and wisdom. It wasn’t a natural right held by everyone equally.

That phrase can be transformed, without changing its meaning, into another: “There is no such thing as truth; there’s only individual perception of it.” You have your perception, I have mine, they have theirs, and those are all equally valid because each of us has an equal right to his own opinion. Let’s agree to disagree.

I’ve seen studies showing a steady decline of median IQ scores over the past few generations. I’d be surprised if this weren’t the case, but it’s not IQ scores that matter. For IQ measures the potential, not the actual ability, to think – and certainly not the knack for basing judgement on sound ratiocination.

Without that ability the cutting edge of thought, rhetoric, becomes hopelessly dull. Listening to most people argue these days, one realises that they don’t differentiate feeling from opinion, opinion from judgement and judgement from argument.

Yet these are all unskippable stepping stones on the path to truth. Anyone trying to jump over them will splash down into an intellectual mire every time. And anyone will launch himself into such a daring leap who doesn’t believe truth exists – ultimate, universal and unvarnished.

If you insist that I illustrate such sweeping observations with specific examples, all I can suggest is that you pick at random any of my posts over the past 10 years. They all focus on examples of idiocy in public life and in public media.

Having closely followed the Western press for half a century, I’m struck by a steady decline in its intellectual content – this irrespective of the publication’s politics. Rhetorical fallacies, specious arguments, illogical conclusions, slipshod argumentation abound, the way they didn’t 50 years ago.

And the process has an accelerator built in. Western thought is like a snowball rolling down the mountain slope and getting bigger and bigger until it goes over the edge and disintegrates down below.

My new year’s wish is for more people to stop imitating Pontius Pilate, even if they aren’t ready to imitate Christ. And to my readers specifically I wish a Happy New Year marked by looking for and finding the truth.

What’s the ubiquitous instrument of tyranny?

Firing squads? No, some tyrannies are quite vegetarian. Concentration camps? No, some tyrannies don’t have them. Torture? No, some tyrannies don’t do that.

There’s only one stratagem they all pursue: control of language. Despots know in their bone marrow that he who controls language controls thought, and he who controls thought controls the populace.

Yes, they all use it, but, because not all tyrannies have totalitarian aspirations, they use it to different extents. And in modern times totalitarian aspirations are only typical of socialist tyrannies, either national or international.

Acting in that spirit, the Welsh Labour ‘government’, née Assembly, has banned its civil servants from using the word ‘Brexit’. Instead it has mandated a snappy term that really rolls off the tongue: “transition period to refer to the time between February 1 and December 31, 2020”.

Why? It’s pointless asking socialist governments this question. They do things for the same reason dogs lick their privates: because they can. If socialists can put their foot down, they will, and that’s all that matters.

It’s also pointless looking for some sensible rationale behind their actions. What’s wrong with the word ‘Brexit’? They may hate the concept, but that shouldn’t affect the terminology. I may hate socialism, but I don’t try to call it something else, do I?

Even more incomprehensible is the next Welsh fiat: ‘able-bodied’ is out, ‘non-disabled’ is in. Whatever next? Shall we call healthy people ‘non-ill’, tall ones ‘non-short’ or thin ones ‘non-fat’?

Disabled some people may be, the erstwhile Assembly will allow, but they are never vulnerable. That is, they may be vulnerable, but civil servants are prohibited from using that word.

In this case, the language guide does proffer an explanation, but it leaves me unsatisfied: “Anyone can become vulnerable for different reasons at different times in their lives. Disabled people are often described as vulnerable and this is often wrong and does nothing to promote equality.”

I hate to break the news to the Welsh supremos, but promoting equality isn’t a traditionally recognised function of words. It isn’t even a traditionally recognised function of governments. Hence when governments do use words ostensibly to that end, they seek to tyrannise, not to equalise.

Tyrants don’t mind using and enforcing patently idiotic terminology. In fact, the more idiotic it is, the better it serves their purposes. That way tyrannies override people’s own good sense, to drive home the salient point: they can do so and therefore will.

The same guide tells civil servants never to refer to Her Majesty’s government as such. Only the term ‘UK government’ is allowed.

I understand that the Welsh ‘government’ is devolved, but to the best of my knowledge devolution doesn’t mean secession. Hence Her Majesty the Queen is still head of the state that includes Wales, and the government of that state is thus Her Majesty’s. What part of HMG don’t they understand?

Again, socialists of any kind, and those in the Celtic fringe especially, loathe monarchy in general and our monarchy in particular. That’s their privilege – but playing fast and loose with the English language isn’t.

Now, in common with about half of her subjects, Her Majesty is a woman. But not as far as Welsh ministers are concerned. Last week they banned the use of the word ‘women’ in sex education classes.

I’d rather they banned sex education classes, though I’m aware how unrealistic and objectionably reactionary this wish is. But out of curiosity I’d still like to know what alternative designation meets Welsh requirements.

‘Non-male’? No, that doesn’t work. Out of the currently known 72 sexes, 71 are non-male, which makes that term imprecise.

‘Persons self-identifying as women’? That’s better, but what this term gains in propriety it loses in concision. I mean, one has to be a member of Welsh ‘government’ to prefer “frailty, thy name is a person self-identifying as a woman” to what Shakespeare actually wrote.

Some 20 years ago, the TV presenter Anne Robinson caused an outburst of indignation by refusing to see the point of the Welsh. “They are always so pleased with themselves, aren’t they?” she said. “I’ve never taken to them. What are they for?”

That’s clearly a joke when applied to the Welsh people in general. However, when applied to the Welsh ‘government’, it becomes a serious question. To which there doesn’t seem to be a serious answer.

Brigitte ‘Jean-Michel’ Macron is suing unidentified defendants for libelling her good name.

According to the rumours spread on social media, Mme Macron is a trans woman, born male under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux.

The rumours are certainly at least half-right: Brigitte’s maiden name definitely was Trogneux.

Her family has owned a patisserie next to Amiens Cathedral since 1872, and their celebrated speciality is macaroons, macarons in French (I can testify to their superior quality). I once suggested that it was Manny’s surname, almost homophonic with the source of her family’s riches, that first attracted the 40-year-old Brigitte to her 15-year-old pupil.

Since Brigitte hasn’t sued me so far, either that theory is true to life or she doesn’t consider the suggestion damaging. It may also be possible that she has never heard either of me or of my musings, but my brittle self-esteem can’t accommodate this option.

As to the Jean-Michel innuendo, Brigitte is indeed suing over it, which may be a mistake on several different levels.

First, the legal action means she takes the allegation more seriously than the mainstream publications think she should. That in itself gives the rumour some credence.

Suppose for the sake of argument that an on-line publication observed that Brigitte looks like a senescent kitten, insisting on that basis that she was born feline under the name Tubby. Would she sue then? Would she produce a body of evidence proving she was born human, if with a heightened taste for macaroons?

She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t dignify such ridiculous rumours with any response at all, not even the odd catty remark. So is the trans allegation less ridiculous?

Also, for a contention to be classified as libel, it’s not enough for it to be false. It must also be demonstrably damaging.

For example, if someone wrote that Brigitte doesn’t look a day older than her hubby-wubby, that would be untrue, but it wouldn’t be actionable. On his way to the ophthalmological clinic, the writer might justifiably insist he was paying Brigitte a compliment.

The lawsuit proves that Brigitte regards the trans allegation as defamatory, injurious to her reputation. One can infer that she thinks gender dysphoria is hideous, and transsexuality is a bad thing.

Now that’s what I’d call real damage to her reputation. Did Brigitte hurt her head when she fell down from a faraway planet?

Here on Earth transsexuality is a badge of honour, proof of the bearer’s courage in striking a blow against the establishment and for the sacred freedom to choose. This badge is to be displayed with pride, tactfully concealed by false modesty.

This issue is close to my heart. As a man trapped in a body that increasingly acquires female characteristics, I identify with the suffering of the trans community – and welcome whatever suffering it inflicts on the square community, be it social, mental or aesthetic.

I also support drawing a thick line of separation between the trans community and the homosexual community, even though I’m not always sure exactly where that line should be drawn, nor what ‘community’ means when it’s at home.

But enough about me. It’s not my feelings but Brigitte’s that are coming under the microscope. And one doesn’t even need that optical instrument to realise that Brigitte is – brace yourself – a transphobe. Because she thinks transsexuals are freaky sideshows, she is ready to sue anyone who as much as mentions the name Jean-Michel.

Does she remember that the presidential elections are just round the corner? If she does, Brigitte must do everything necessary to protect Manny’s reputation from such reflected infamy.

True or not, she must come out and shout from the roof of the Elysée Palace that yes, sacré bleu, she is trans and proud of it.

Henceforth she wishes to be called Jean-Michel-Brigitte Macron or, better still, Madame-Monsieur La/Le Président(e). And of course she must drop that lawsuit like a pomme de terre chaude. Blow with the wind, Brigitte – it’ll take you in the right direction.

The Polish government increasingly resembles those young girls who happily allowed themselves to be seduced by Jeffrey Epstein’s money, only then to moan about being used and objectified.

What did they expect? A quid without a pro quo? Life isn’t like that.

Extending the simile, when Poland complains about the EU’s “bureaucratic centralism”, that’s like those girls complaining that Jeffrey had a penis. The nature of the beast, that.

This brings me to Jarosław Kaczynski, head of Poland’s ruling party, PiS. Mr Kaczynski has made a startling discovery: if Brussels can overrule the Polish government, then Poland is “not a sovereign state”.

Hello? What else is new, Jarosław? Of course, Poland isn’t a sovereign state. None of the EU members is – that’s the whole point of that political contrivance, as it was in 2004, when Poland joined. From its very inception, the manifest objective of the EU has been the creation of a single European state.

In the early 1950s, one of the EU godfathers, Jean Monnet, explained both that objective and the smokescreen designed to conceal it:

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

Words to live by. All the members are to pool, or rather dissolve, their sovereignty in a Brussels bureaucracy dominated by Germany and France. For the EU isn’t a German project, but a Franco-German one. It was hatched in the dying days of the Third Reich, when the Nazi and Vichy administrators realised they were so much in love they had to stay together come what may.

Mr Kaczynski went on to say that Germany is trying to turn the EU into a Fourth Reich, which was both imprecise and unnecessarily emotive. That said, there are indeed some similarities between Nazi Germany and the EU.

These come from the traditional German quest to be the dominant continental power. Ever since Prussia unified Germany under her aegis in 1871, the country has been seeking to lord it over Europe. The Germans felt their talents and industry entitled them to pursue that quest at the expense of nations less gifted or driven.

However, apart from the 1918-1939 interbellum, Germany also was by far the most muscular military power in Europe. She was so strong that, in the years outside that demarcated period, it took the combined efforts of the rest of the world to subdue her. Since 1945, however, Germany’s war machine has had its speed artificially limited.

The Federal Republic may be the most virile economic power in the EU, but she certainly isn’t the strongest military power. France’s Fifth Republic is. The two countries dovetail naturally, with Germany perhaps the senior partner, but France not far behind.

Hence Poland has nothing to fear from German panzers. They aren’t going to roll towards Warsaw to turn Poland into a Generalgouvernement Mark II, and nor is Germany going to establish another network of death camps in Polish places like Oświęcim, Sobibor or Treblinka.

If Mr Kaczynski sought an historical parallel, he should have cited the less emotive but more accurate Zollverein, the customs union used by Prussia to bring all German principalities under her sway. They eagerly traded their sovereignty for the bribes Prussia was generously dispensing, and no coercion was needed.

The only exception was Schleswig-Holstein, and there Prussia had to flex her military muscle. But by and large the technique of bringing Germany together provided a useful model for the EU.  

Poland’s sovereignty wasn’t wrenched from her at gunpoint. At play there was a business transaction, not conquest. And any business contract, including the one in question, has to have a clause for its termination.

If Poland wishes to regain her sovereignty, all she has to do is activate Article 50 of the EU Treaty, thereby starting the process of leaving the EU. Britain showed the way in 2016, and Poland can learn both from our achievement and our mistakes made along the way. Is this what Mr Kaczynski wants?

Well, not quite. Although Europe’s variously named ‘populist’, ‘conservative’ or ‘right-wing’ politicians huff and puff about the loss of their sovereignty, they judiciously stop just short of calling for exit. They may dislike the EU, but they still like the euro (the Deutschmark by another name).

Such parties also like the rouble, which currency, suitably converted, either pours or at least drips into their coffers. Putin bankrolls, partly or wholly, all European forces he sees as disruptive, which, in Mr Kaczynski’s case especially, creates a cognitive dissonance.

In 2010, the plane carrying his twin brother Lech, Poland’s president, and other high officials crashed trying to land in Smolensk, killing all 96 people onboard. The Poles were flying there to commemorate the 24,000 Polish officers murdered by the Soviets at Katyn and elsewhere.

Jarosław Kaczynski immediately declared that the crash was no accident, and he was right. A meticulous analysis conducted by the Russian historian Mark Solonin, an aircraft engineer by training, showed beyond any doubt that the plane was blown apart by an onboard bomb.

Mr Solonin’s analysis doesn’t show who planted the device, but the ancient cui bono principle should make the conjecture fairly easy. Yet, though Mr Kaczynski is confident that his brother was murdered, he doesn’t press the case with much persistence. His party, and that of his Hungarian ally Orban, needs Putin’s support.

His cognitive dissonance thus becomes mine as well. On the one hand, I welcome every tectonic tremor threatening to engulf the EU in an eruption. On the other hand, I see Russia as the greater evil, one I wouldn’t like to see strengthened by the EU weakening.

I don’t know if Mr Kaczynski’s animadversions are helping Poland, but they are certainly not helping me.

Messe de nuit is the midnight mass at Christmas Eve, which in France is hardly ever celebrated at midnight. That’s why these days it’s simply called ‘night mass’, but even that is a misnomer.

At our local church, night is defined as 6 pm, which was the kick-off time yesterday. The church is quite modest, by French standards.

We used to go to one of the most glorious churches in Christendom, Abbaye de Fleury at St Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire. Since the seventh century, the Abbey has housed the relics of St Benedict, whose name the French perversely gallicise to St Benoît.

The midnight mass there starts closer to midnight, at 11 pm to be exact. The monks sing Gregorian chant, not quite to professional standards, but movingly nonetheless.

That Romanesque church has two drawbacks though. It’s an hour’s drive away from us, and it’s unheated.

Since people come there from all over central France, one has to arrive at least an hour in advance to have any hope of a seat in a pew. The mass itself lasting over two hours, that’s three hours to be spent in a fridge at its maximum setting.

Those factors combined to trump our aesthetic longings, so off to our local church we went. Modest it may be, but it’s nearby and heated, which is nothing to sneeze at when one is no longer in the first flush of youth nor, truth to tell, even the second.

A quarter of an hour before the start, L’Eglise Saint-Ferréol was already filled to the gunwales with the local worthies in their finery. Ten minutes later it was standing room only.

At six on the dot, the amateur choir conducted by its own ever-present worthy went into a rendition of Silent Night. The accompaniment was provided by two guitarists and an electric keyboard player, whose mind was perpetually open to the variety of keys he was using, sometimes within a single phrase.

Still, a mass isn’t a concert. Music is merely a side dish to the meat and potatoes, and we waited for the arrival of the main course: the priest and his retinue.

Half a dozen songs and twenty minutes later, we were still writhing on tenterhooks. There was no priest anywhere to be seen, no one to tell us in whose name we were gathered.

Finally, we examined the order of service only to realise that the mass, though advertised as such, wasn’t a mass. There was no priest, no communion – no anything that makes a mass what it’s supposed to be. We felt cheated.

No one else seemed to mind. The worthies joyously sang along, and they commendably knew all the lyrics by heart. We didn’t, but that wasn’t the real problem.

We were seething, but Penelope, whose delicate nature balks at rocking the boat, was reluctant to leave in mid-song. But then we remembered that there was a mass in another village, some 15 miles down the road.

So we left, walking up the aisle under the weight of the disapproving glances our fellow non-communicants were casting at those two obvious heathens who didn’t even look French.

We hopped in the car, and I went on to break not only the speed limit but also conceivably the speed record on the D956. The other church turned out to be full too, but it was blessed by the presence of not just one priest, but two.

One was its usual curé, a man who has served the parish since before the Catholic Church suffered the indignity of the Second Vatican Council (c. 1962). Now in his nineties and extremely frail, he was assisted by a locum sent over by the diocese.

I shan’t describe the ensuing Christmas mass, lovely as it was. If you’ve ever attended one, you’d be bored. If you haven’t, you’d be uninterested. But in either case, I hope you’ll lament the collapse of Christianity in one of its erstwhile strongholds.

France officially went secular in 1905, when the law on the Separation between the Church and the State ushered in laïcité. That was simply codifying the fait accompli: the Enlightenment had reigned supreme for almost two centuries, and that’s plenty of time to brainwash people in the delights of materialism.

Now church attendance in France is about as low as in the UK. But there is a salient difference: in Britain people who don’t go to church don’t mock church-goers. In France they do.

A couple of years ago I was invited to play doubles on Easter Sunday. I wish I could, I said, but I’ll be at mass. That caused an outburst of mirth among my partners, none of whom was a youngster. “Bonnes cloches”, they laughed (have good bells, literally).

Rural France suffers from a dire dearth of priests. One curé has to cover 20, 30, sometimes even 50 churches. That’s why regular masses are a rarity, though until now high festivals have tended to be celebrated properly.

That leads to situations straight out of Catch 22. A few years ago, a friend of ours, the local châtelain and a devout Catholic, died. Since he was the mainstay not only of the village church but of the whole diocese, the Vicar General himself wanted to officiate at the funeral mass.

But the bishop said non. There are so few priests, he explained, that not everyone can have his last rites. And if everyone can’t have them, no one will. Our friends’ soul must have cried foul.

Isn’t modernity wonderful? Perhaps French Catholics should do what their ancestors did to save their churches during the Revolution. They declared them Temples of Reason, reconsecrating the churches to the new deity. Many churches, including the magnificent Chartres Cathedral, were saved that way.

Now there’s an idea. I don’t know if Richard Dawkins speaks French but, if he does, I can’t think of a better priest to celebrate Reason, as defined by strident atheists. Do you know his phone number?

Anyway, Merry Christmas!   

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting,” wrote Chesterton. “It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

The great man was right in every absolute sense. No society has ever organised itself in complete agreement with Christ’s commandments. But there used to exist palliatives, little relativities that still had some mitigating effect on human nature.

People might not have spent their lives imitating Christ, but a residual fear still gnawed at the back of their minds. What if? What if they’ll really have to pay for their sins in perpetuity? Perhaps it’s better to take Pascal’s wager and assume God exists. If he does, we have a lot to gain; if he doesn’t, we have nothing to lose.

Oh yes, people still killed – they always kill. They kill in the name of Mohammed and Moses, Buddha and Confucius, they kill in the name of every political creed you care to name. And of course they killed in the name of Christ. Give them a killing opportunity and they’ll find a cause.

Yet one has to believe that, but for that fear of God to whom many of them paid only lip service, they would have killed more. In fact, one doesn’t have to believe that. We know. We’ve confirmed that supposition empirically.

For at some point, 300 or so years ago, people decided that God didn’t merit even lip service. The Enlightenment shone its light on them, and they turned their backs on their tenebrous past. They emerged out of the shadows full of self-confidence.

They didn’t need God any longer. They could rely on their own resources to squeeze as much as possible out of this life, for there was no other. Nothing higher than human reason existed, and it could guide people to higher morality than that incomprehensible Sermon on the Mount. It’s not the meek who shall inherit the world, but the strong, clever and enterprising.

Yet Darwin created man in such a way that, no matter how clever he is, or how materialistic, he still needs to believe in something higher or at least grander than himself. Having discarded God, Darwin’s creatures had to look for surrogates.

Those they found in blood and soil nationalism and socialism, ineluctably born out of the original slogan of liberté, égalité, fraternité. No longer united by their faith, people decided to come together on the basis of their politics or their blood.

Both strains have flourished since then, sometimes singly and at odds with each other, sometimes in a happy union. That ultimate experiment on human nature has had three centuries to produce tangible results – and tangible results it has produced.

The first century that was atheist from beginning to end, the 20^th, densely covered the earth with more mangled corpses than all the previous centuries of human history had managed. Without God, wrote Dostoyevsky, everything is permitted – yet even he couldn’t envisage the full scale of that everything.

In hindsight, some people are beginning to think that, though of course God doesn’t exist, perhaps paying some lip service to him wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. Maybe, just maybe, the church has a useful social function to perform, if no other.

The anticlerical believers of yesterday have given way to the clerical atheists of today (the late Roger Scruton is a good example of the breed). Christianism has replaced Christianity, but it’s a poor substitute.

Since our clerical atheists don’t believe Christ is the truth, they want to build a new society on a lie. But that foundation is always termite-eaten from the very beginning. Any structure built on it will sooner or later start tottering within an increasing amplitude – and then it’ll come tumbling down like the walls of Jericho.

There is no substitute for truth, and there is no substitute for Christ. Here in the West our choice isn’t between a Christian civilisation and some other. It’s between a Christian civilisation and none.

Merry Christmas to all of you – and a Happy New Year, unsullied by Covid, inflation or the gremlin in the Kremlin.