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Tracing back the roots of today’s rampant atheism, many analysts believe that the rot set in with the Renaissance. I agree. By reviving the aesthetic standards of Hellenic antiquity, the artistic giants of that period also brought back the pagan sensibility animating Hellenic art.

Greek gods busily copulating with human women on the slopes of Mount Olympus began to demand equal pictorial time with Christian imagery. As a result, art soared to new heights of brilliance, whereas people’s perception of God plummeted to new depths of vulgarity.

Let’s illustrate this observation by juxtaposing three acknowledged masterpieces by that sublime Renaissance artist, Michelangelo. We’ll end up with the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel on one side and the two Pietàs, in Rome and Milan, on the other.

The one in the Vatican was finished, the one in Milan’s Sforza Castle wasn’t, but here’s an interesting thing about Michelangelo. His unfinished sculptures tend to be more moving.

The finished Slaves exhibited at the Louvre are perfect, so much so that they leave me appreciative, admiring even, but cold. By contrast, his unfinished slaves at Florence’s Accademia touch me deeply.

(I know this isn’t a valid criterion of art criticism, but after a lifetime of contemplating art I usurp the right to equate my emotional response with the object’s quality.)

The two Pietàs are different, in that both are heart-rending. But the one in Milan, on which Michelangelo worked until a few days before he died, conveys the tragic scene even more poignantly than the other sculpture does. Still, this isn’t the comparison relevant to my subject today.

Bracketing the two sculptures together, let’s then follow the ubiquitous herds of tourists and have a look at that celebrated ceiling. I’ll try to consider its substance, not form, although it’s worth mentioning that, though Michelangelo was one of history’s greatest sculptors, I don’t think he was one of history’s greatest painters.

Then again, while his sculptures are now exactly as he left them, that Sistine Chapel ceiling has been retouched, restored and generally altered so many times (the last time from 1984 to 1990) that it’s hard to know how far the present has deviated from the past.

Yet the subject-matter certainly hasn’t changed, and the Catholic Church endorsed it enthusiastically. The scenes depicted all over the Chapel, including The Creation of Adam, were accepted as appropriate, theologically sound illustrations of doctrine.

Personally, I could have done without the depiction of Adam’s flaccid penis, but Michelangelo never did manage to conceal his amorous predilections even when broaching sacred subjects. However, the real damage was done by his portrayal of God the Father.

Judaism bans graven images of any kind, and creating pictures of God was a stonable offence in Palestine. It was the Incarnation that made iconography possible.

After all, Jesus Christ lived as a man for thirty-odd years, and painting or sculpting men wasn’t seen as creating graven images. Jews, and to a large extent Protestants, never issued such licence, but the two Christian orthodoxies, Eastern and Western, encouraged religious images both in and out of church.

But not the images of God the Father. Christian artists avoided pictorial depictions of the Father throughout the first millennium. Gradually, some such portrayals began to crop up in late medieval art, but only in the Renaissance did artistic representations of God the Father gain wide currency. (The Russian Orthodox Church banned that practice in 1667, during the Great Schism.)

Had the Catholic Church been blessed with foresight, it would have nipped that tendency in the bud. But the Church didn’t anticipate the massive assault on Christianity throughout Europe in the centuries following the Renaissance. That’s why it inadvertently armed the attackers.

More and more the masses shifted towards times heathen by imagining God just as Michelangelo and his contemporaries depicted him, as a muscular old man with an unkempt beard. That was straight Hellenic paganism, except that God’s living quarters were moved from Mount Olympus to a fluffy cloud in the sky.

Fast-forward to 1961 and the hysterical festivities all over Russia on the occasion of Gagarin’s flight. I remember Khrushchev, habitually tipsy, screaming from the tribune of the Mausoleum in Red Square that Gagarin had gone 327 kilometres up into space and seen no God. No fluffy cloud, no shaggy beard – hence no God.

Unlike Newton, Khrushchev stood on the shoulders of dwarfs, not giants. One such dwarf was Lenin’s Commissar for the Enlightenment, Lunacharsky, who staged a debate with a pro-Soviet prelate who was a neurophysiologist by previous trade.

The debate was held at the Bolshoi and it was well attended. A crowd of Red Army soldiers with an average of two years of schooling cheered Lunacharsky on. So encouraged, he shrieked: “Where is your God? Who has ever seen him?!?” The audience roared its approval, but the bishop came up with a good retort.

“I’m not only a priest,” he said, “but also a neurophysiologist. In that capacity, I’ve often held a human brain in my hands. I touched it, I felt it, I saw it. But a mind I’ve never seen.”

Communist godlessness was an extreme manifestation of a widespread phenomenon: malignant anthropomorphism vulgarising God and leading directly to atheism, via neo-paganism. But both Lunacharsky and Khrushchev built on a tradition going back to the Renaissance.

Even such accomplished thinkers as Hume demanded proofs of God’s existence. Creating his notorious ‘fork’, Hume postulated that all justifiable beliefs fell into two categories: provable either by logic and mathematics or by empirical experience. Religion was neither. Ergo, God doesn’t exist.

Unlike Lunacharsky and Khrushchev, Hume wasn’t a vulgarian, but that thought was vulgar. A man can neither prove the existence of God nor comprehend him by definition. A higher system can understand a lower one, but not vice versa.

Had Hume known how to think about such matters, he’d have realised that God doesn’t exist. It’s because of God that everything else exists – God is an unfathomable, life-giving force that can only be worshipped but not understood. Even a mind as intricate as Hume’s was inadequate to that task.

Such is the orthodox Christian response to demands for the kind of proof one expects in a laboratory. However, an anthropomorphised God, that bearded old man on the cloud, acquires a physical shape, thereby adding validity to demands for physical proof, especially if such demands spring from atheistic zealotry.

Getting back to Michelangelo, could it be his metaphysical premise that explains why, to me, his two Pietàs are artistic triumphs and that anthropomorphised ceiling an artistic failure? The two sculptures depicted the depictable, whereas the fresco didn’t.

Michelangelo’s genius was better revealed in a different, three-dimensional medium. However, even a truly great painter, such as Leonardo, could only show what the eye could see. Had he been given the Vatican commission, Leonardo would have been as stymied.

No, it wasn’t all Michelangelo’s fault, I wrote that in jest. But some of it was – he and his colleagues pushed the button, and the countdown is rapidly approaching zero.

Before he died of cancer in 2001, Nigella Lawson’s first husband, the journalist John Diamond, had chronicled his demise in his newspaper column and then in a best-selling book.

Since I was suffering from the same disease at around that time, a different version but a similarly late stage, my publisher had a bright idea. Why don’t I do a John Diamond and write a book about my ordeal? Anything he could do, I could do better.

My reply “Absolutely not!” came before he finished that sentence, which proves that no prior thought was involved. It was a visceral reaction whose origin wasn’t intellectual but aesthetic. It was for considerations of taste that I turned down my shot at publishing stardom.

Now, I’m not a tight-lipped introvert who wouldn’t talk about his troubles even to friends and family. I admire such people, the salt of the English earth, but I’m not like them.

That’s why my family and friends knew exactly how my cancer progressed, if that’s the right word, and whether my “prognersis” remained as “puer” as my Scottish haematologist had declared in an upbeat tone and with a scary gleam in his eye.

(I hope my Scottish friends will forgive this attempt to reproduce their accent. That’s a notoriously hard task in writing.)

However, the thought of vouchsafing any such information, however sketchy, to all and sundry, complete strangers, was abhorrent to me – whatever the potential rewards.

But then regular visitors to this space know that I am a fossil, a troglodyte, perhaps a fossilised troglodyte. Time hasn’t just outpaced me but lapped me several times over.

Those who keep pace with modernity tend to be free of such old-fashioned inhibitions. Among many diseases afflicting today’s world, the pandemic of exhibitionism is perhaps the most pervasive.

Not just ‘celebrities’ but ordinary folk take to the social media to share urbi et orbi variously pornographic details and images of their lives. Some pornography is just old-fashioned exhibitionism: women and, incomprehensibly, men take full-frontal selfies of their bodies and put them on the net for universal delectation.

This is portrayed as pride in the human body, a feeling that animated antique art. Now, the Greeks had two words for pride, one of which was hubris. And it’s this kind, known as a deadly sin in some shrinking quarters, that our YouTube nudists suffer from.

Most of them fall short of the aesthetic standards established by Venus de Milo and Apollo Belvedere, but even those who don’t are still tasteless, narcissistic exhibitionists. Still, far be it from me to deny people the pleasure of ogling bared female flesh (the less said about bared male flesh, the better). Not all of us are lookers, but most of us are voyeurs.

Medical exhibitionism is much worse. If public nudism caters to instincts wired into our DNA, the medical kind appeals to morbid curiosity, or else to the spirit of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ (with ‘God’ used strictly figuratively, as I hope you understand).

Even that isn’t so bad as the universal acceptance of such medical pornography as an honest, brave attempt to help others in the same boat. Chaps, you aren’t helping anybody. Medical help is provided by medical personnel, not by a bunch of self-centred exhibitionists raised in the belief that any private problem has a public appeal.

The underlying dishonesty is emetic, but by the looks of it not many people suffer from that reflex. Nor do they suffer from that rapidly disappearing condition: good taste. Just look at this excerpt from an article in today’s Mail:

“Yet in recent years, a selection of celebrities have bravely been sharing their deeply personal and often heartbreaking stories in order to help others. 

“Just this week, model Kelly Brook reflected on the heartbreak she faced when she suffered a miscarriage while six months pregnant. 

“And she isn’t alone in sharing her experience, with Lena Dunham revealing her pain at undergoing a double hysterectomy at just 31 years old, while Jennifer Aniston has detailed her 20-year battle to conceive.” 

I don’t know Miss Dunham from Adam or for that matter Eve, but I admit to having had impure thoughts about Jennifer and Kelly in the distant past. Hence, I’d suggest that, if those ladies have an unquenchable thirst for denuding themselves, they should stick to baring their bodies, not their souls. But only if they must.

Otherwise, I can’t imagine who in his right mind would care whether famous models and actresses are impenetrable, impregnable and inconceivable.

One would expect that mindless ‘celebrities’ (and most actors I’ve ever met were mindless – comes with the territory, I suppose) can’t realise how cosmically tasteless such medical striptease is. But that even our conservative papers should encourage that vulgarity is worrying.

P.S. Speaking of modernity’s madness, tastelessness and vulgarity, here’s a headline in today’s Times: “UK troops to be trained on ‘consent, misogyny and incel’ culture.”

Apparently, “unacceptable sexual behaviour” is rife in the military. Male soldiers routinely bang on the doors of their female comrades and demand sex. Fancy that: young men pursue young women with whom they share cloistered lives, who has ever heard of such indecency.

One has to assume that training in more traditional military subjects has been so successful that our defenders can spare the time for woke indoctrination, whose only conceivable outcome will be another tick on the DEI agenda.

The only reliable way to save female soldiers from harassment is not to have female soldiers, but I did tell you I am a fossil. Conscription could then plug the holes in numerical strength, with young ladies looking for other conduits to channel their patriotism.

Still, I’m grateful to that article for enlarging my vocabulary. Thanks to the author, I’ve learned a new word: ‘incel’. It stands for ‘involuntary celibacy’, in case you’re wondering. 

Consent of the governed is one of those political clichés that people utter without thinking. They refuse to go through the exercise I call ‘the art of the next question’.

In this case, the next question is: “Yes, but what does it actually mean?” The question isn’t rhetorical – I genuinely struggle with the concept.

And I’m sure many people must have felt the same during the centuries the term has been either used or alluded to. Quite a few centuries, actually.

Thus, for example, Tertullian (d. 240 AD), the first major theologian to write in Latin: “It is not enough that a law is just, nor that the judge should be convinced of its justice; those from whom obedience is expected should have that conviction too.”

Tertullian, however, didn’t express that attractive idea in political terms. That achievement had to wait until the Enlightenment that, among its other failings, sought to redefine the source of a government’s legitimacy.

As it did with everything, the Enlightenment replaced something concrete and time-proven with a freshly baked abstraction.

In the past, it was widely accepted that political power derived from some sort of hereditary claim, sometimes but not invariably expressed as the divine right of kings. People generally regarded dynastic rule as just and only rebelled when kings turned into tyrants.

However, words like ‘divine’ and ‘kings’ were repulsive to Enlightenment thinkers, starting with their guiding light, John Locke. Locke argued that a government is only ever lawful if the people agree to be governed.

They express that agreement in a social contract, thereby they consent to be governed in exchange for the state’s undertaking to protect their natural rights to “life, liberty and estate”. The first state constituted on Locke’s principles, the US, changed ‘estate’ to ‘happiness’ and protection to ‘pursuit’, which I don’t think was an improvement.

Still, like most abstract ideas, this sounds good in theory, but what does it mean in practice? Let’s leave the past for the present and look at Britain, circa 2025.

Starmer and his accomplices are running the country into the ground, which is now clear even to most people who voted Labour in last year. Starmer’s current approval ratings make him not only the most unpopular prime minister in British history, but even the least popular leader in today’s West.

Yet he won the election with a 174-seat majority, which is supposed to give him the mandate to reduce the country to a Third World status. By voting Labour, the people honoured their part of the social contract and agreed to be governed.

But how many people? I’m not going to compare our electoral system of first-past-the-post with proportional representation. Both have pluses and minuses, and in this world we aren’t blessed with perfect systems.

Still, it’s worth mentioning that Starmer got his mandate from only a third of those who exercised their right to vote (33.7 per cent, to be pedantic about it) and just over 20 per cent of the whole population. Neither I nor any of my friends nor, more important, almost 80 per cent of the people voted Labour, yet those who did expressed consent on our behalf. Does this strike you as odd? At all?

Labour’s vote share was the lowest any majority party has ever received on record, which makes it the least proportional winner in British history. Thus, if we use words in their real, rather than virtual, sense, consent of the governed was neither given nor really sought. A small minority sufficed.

Most people will just shrug their shoulders. This is the way the system works, live with it. Any system is bound to malfunction now and then, such is life.

The problem with this system is that it malfunctions not occasionally but invariably. The minority of those who feel entitled to give consent on behalf of the majority may at times be higher than in 2024, but it hardly ever gets to even 50 per cent.

Thus Thomas Jefferson was right substantively but not numerically when he wrote: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” (Parenthetically, Americans who see Jefferson as a champion of their democracy ought to read what he actually wrote on the subject of what Aristotle called a “deviant constitution”.)

Fifty-one per cent? You wish. What about twenty? My point is that the very term ‘consent of the governed’ has glossocratic value but no other. The same goes for ‘social contract’, first mentioned by Hobbes if I’m not mistaken.

It’s not a real contract, is it? Any contract I’ve ever seen or signed had a cancellation clause, conditions under which it could be terminated. So how can the British people, most of whom realise they made a terrible mistake in 2024, withdraw their consent?

They could vote Labour out, but the next opportunity to do so will present itself in 2029. Once elected with a large parliamentary majority, a government can do as it pleases for five years. This brings back times olden, when a city taken by military assault was given over to the victorious soldiers for three days of rape and plunder.

In theory, a government could be driven out by a parliamentary vote of no confidence, but this isn’t going to happen when the majority is as high as it is now. If another general election were held today, most Labour MPs, including cabinet members, would lose their seats. Hence, anyone who thinks MPs could ever vote for their own political suicide shows a touching but misplaced trust in human goodness.

A revolution becomes the only choice. Not to cut too fine a point, by pushing their theory Hobbes and Locke were issuing a carte blanche to arbitrary violence as the only option for withdrawing ‘consent’ never given in the first place.

You may argue that, although it’s next to impossible to oust a particular government laying waste to the country, the social contract endorsing our system of governance remains valid.

This sounds even more preposterous. In effect, it means that a small minority of the population may issue consent not only on behalf of all their contemporaries, but also for the generations to come. So let’s say that, when the perpetrators of the Glorious Revolution agreed in 1688 to a certain constitutional arrangement, they effectively removed the right of the people to terminate the contract centuries later. Sounds illogical, doesn’t it?

A wise man once told me that, when there is always something wrong with the way a system works, there is probably something wrong with the system as such.

Yet anyone who these days suggests there may be something systemically wrong with democracy (‘consent of the governed’, ‘social contract’ and so on) is likely to hear Churchill’s pronouncement that: “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

However, it’s useful to remember that Churchill’s view of democracy was formed in Victorian and Edwardian times, when only a third of the men and none of the women were qualified to vote.

Surely, Churchill’s less publicised statement, that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter” was closer to the truth, which is another example of a putative admirer of democracy either having second thoughts or not being such a fervent admirer in the first place.

You’ve doubtless noticed that my thinking on the subject contains more questions than answers. But then that’s the case with any serious thought on political subjects, as opposed to that dread word, ideology.

Talking about his tortuous journey to the truth of Christian orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton wrote: “I am that man who, with the utmost daring, discovered what had been discovered before.”

The International Olympic Committee could say the same thing, if less wittily and on a less momentous subject, ‘transgender women’ competing as women.

The IOC has finally discovered the pre-discovered fact that a) men have physical advantages over women, b) such advantages are physiologically innate, and therefore c) male and female athletes compete in separate events and should continue to do so.

The IOC reached these conclusions after a long, and doubtless expensive, scientific study, which makes me sad. All that time and money could have been saved if only the Committee had asked me first.

I could have told them for a fraction of the cost that men are naturally stronger, faster and more aggressive. Hence, even though professional athletes of both sexes go through the same training regimens, the men will win any direct confrontation.

Had I not been available, the Committee could have picked any random man or woman out of a crowd and got exactly the same reply – provided those respondents weren’t habitual Guardian readers.

If the sports administrators had still remained unconvinced, all they would have had to do was compare world records for men and women in the same sports. In the 100m dash, for example, the men’s record stands at 8.58 seconds, whereas, at 10.49, the women’s is almost two seconds slower.

What the Committee had difficulty getting its collective woke head around was that it was all nature, not nurture. Everything else being equal, XY chromosomes will beat XX every time – predictably and ineluctably.

The XY creature, otherwise known as a man, may call himself a woman or anything else he fancies. He may wear skirts without being Scottish, he may grow up to his parents’ chorus of “Who’s the gorgeous girl then?”, but he’ll remain a man in every characteristic relevant to sporting contests – even if some irrelevant characteristics have been lopped off.

That’s why every man taught in his youth that he shouldn’t beat women had to wince watching two burly chaps, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, pick up Olympic gold medals in women’s boxing last year.

I’d ban women’s boxing altogether, but those deaf to the difference between ‘equal’ and ‘the same’ insist that young ladies have a sacred right to bash one another’s brains out, destroying one another’s nasal cartilages, turning one another’s faces into scar tissue and courting breast cancer.

Fine, if they insist. But at least they shouldn’t offer their bodies as men’s punching bags.

If a man can’t resist the urge to punch a woman, he should do so in the privacy of his nuptial home, not in the boxing ring. However, if he does do that at his nuptial home, he may receive a prison sentence, not a gold medal. Yet last year’s Olympics allowed men to beat up women with impunity, which upset me.

Now the IOC finally seems to have seen the light. If rumours are to be believed, its new president, Kirsty Coventry, is going to impose a blanket ban on newfangled women in all sports. Better late than never and all that, but one has to suspect that geography had something to do with that change of heart.

The 2028 Olympics will be held in Los Angeles, when, barring accidents, Donald Trump will still be in the White House.

Say what you will about him, and I’ve said a fair amount, but he has no more time for wokery than I do. That’s why Trump has banned all XY athletes from competing in women’s events. Of course, a US president has no jurisdiction in international sports, but, knowing Trump’s truculent nature, he can make life difficult for the IOC should it continue to allow male violence against women.

Still, the IOC’s mind being more nuanced than Trump’s or mine, the Committee, while banning ‘transgender women’, still refers as ‘controversial’ to the issue of DSD (Differences of Sexual Development). This describes athletes who have male chromosomes but were raised as female. It was through this loophole that Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting climbed into the Olympic ring to abuse women.

My primitive mind operates in straight lines on this issue. An XY girl is a boy, not a tomboy. However that boy was brought up and whatever pronouns he favours, a boy he remains. If he wants to do professional sports, he should man up and compete against men.

While we are on the subject, I’ll climb farther out on a limb and point out that the relevant differences between men and women aren’t only physical but also psychological. And the psychological differences are largely predicated on the physical ones.

Numerous studies have shown an irrefutable link between testosterone and aggression. Thus, female mice injected with the male hormone began acting like males, doing the rodential equivalent of “Wha’ you lookin’ at, mate?” and attacking other mice.

And aggression is essential not only in such obvious sports as boxing, but in just about any confrontational activity, even chess. This is one reason only Judit Polgar has ever been able to compete with top male players (since I can’t afford a costly divorce, I shan’t mention some of the other reasons). This, though thousands of women play chess professionally and, in places like China, receive unlimited state support.

How times have changed since 1977, when Renée Richards (né Richard Raskind), a strong amateur player as a man, made it to the finals of the US Open women’s doubles, thereby proving it was possible to play tennis without balls.

That was a solitary such case at the time, and it caused a furore. Renée (the erudite Richard took that name after his transsex surgery because it means ‘re-born’ in French) had to sue the United States Tennis Federation to force his way into the women’s draw.

I wonder if Messrs Imane Khelif, Lin Yu-ting et al. will do the same to the IOC. If they do, things could turn interesting in 2028, but I trust Donald Trump to put his foot down. I also hope he acts on his threat to sue the BBC for a billion dollars, but this is a separate subject.

P.S. Speaking of tennis crossing sex barriers, world number one, Arina Sabalenka, will play an exhibition match against Nick Kyrgios, currently world number 652 (actually 1,292 on the up-to-date computer), in December.

Miss Sabalenka is making macho noises about planning to “kick Nick’s ass”, and I’m sure this latest instalment in the Battle of the Sexes saga will be lucrative for both players and entertaining for the spectators. But it’ll prove nothing.

For the match won’t be competed on equal terms. Since men have been calculated to be nine per cent faster than women, Kyrgios’s half of the court will be nine per cent larger. And both players will have only one serve, to negate the extra 25 mph Nick can put on his first delivery.

Now Kyrgios was once ranked number eleven in the world, but he hasn’t played much for two years due to injuries. Still, the organisers correctly decided that some adjustments were necessary for the women’s number one to stay in the match for a while.

I wonder if the IOC has heard about this. Tennis, after all, is an Olympic sport too.

Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday, when the nation fell silent to commemorate those who died defending our… what exactly? That question can’t arise in relation to the Second World War, but Remembrance Sunday has more to do with the First one.

And there a question implying doubt is legitimate. What did those millions die for? There was no real reason for the First World War, apart from words. It was to glossocratic messages that the masses responded, not to any fundamental need.

Such messages can’t be dismissed easily. Their power is irrational and therefore has to be absolute to have any effect. And nothing promotes absolute power as effectively as a war can, the bloodier, the better. “The strongest chains for the people are forged from victorious swords”, as Clausewitz put it.

Neither side was averse to making cosmic claims. They were both fighting to save civilisation, making the world safe not just for democracy (the demented Wilson was welcome to that one) but also for true faith, world commerce, family, security, children, church and prosperity. Both sides were out to defend those in their own eyes, and to rape them in the eyes of the other side.

Almost instantly the war acquired a character that went beyond any national grievances or economic interests. The world was rife with proposals for unifying the control of global resources in a single body that could also administer international taxes aimed at levelling inequalities among nations.

The air was dense with phrases like ‘World Organisation’, ‘The United States of the Earth’, ‘The Confederation of the World’, ‘A World Union of Free Peoples’ and, finally, ‘The League of Nations’. And both sides saw themselves as defenders of international law.

The British, for example, eschewed self-interest as the reason for joining the conflict, opting instead for depicting the war as a holy crusade for the law of the nations. Not to be outdone, the French organised a Committee for the Defence of International Law.

The Germans were at first taken aback by this sudden outburst of affection for global legality, but they quickly recovered to fight back. Belgium, according to them, wasn’t neutral in the international-law sense of the word. It was conducting secret military negotiations with the British aimed against Germany. The British weren’t squeaky-clean either. They were systematically violating the trading rights of neutrals on the high seas.

So Germany was really fighting for the freedom of the seas and the rights of smaller nations to engage in peaceful trade without being harassed by the dastardly Royal Navy. However, the Entente wouldn’t allow Germany to claim the monopoly of defending the small and weak.

It was the allies who were after liberating the oppressed nations, by which they no longer meant just Alsace and Lorraine. This time they meant the oppressed minorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Polish minority in Germany (not to be confused with the German minority in Poland, whose plight was a casus belli for Germany’s next war).

Funny you should mention oppressed minorities, replied the Germans who hated to be outdone by anybody, especially the British. It was they, the Germans, who were fighting to liberate the small nations of the world. More specifically, such small nations as India, Ireland, Egypt and the entire African continent.

Each side was out to save civilisation, nothing less. A week after the war began the London Evening Standard was already carrying headlines screaming Civilisation at Issue. France was fighting a guerre contre les barbares, while Germany was laying about her for her Kultur.

Germany, the nation of composers and philosophers, had established a spiritual ascendancy thanks to her industry, fecundity, wisdom and morality. The British were usurers (a role they were to cede to the Jews before long); the Germans were Teutonic heirs to Arminius and Alaric. The British were unable to see beyond their utilitarian little noses, as demonstrated by their philosophers; the Germans had the sagacity to penetrate the meaning of life, as proved by their thinkers. The war was fought for heroic, self-sacrificing Bildung and against the pecuniary British.

Not at all, sale Boche, objected the French. The war was waged by one (good) race against another (bad) one. The Gauls of France and Belgium were fighting the Hun, and never mind Bildung. This racial argument secretly appealed to the Germans who decided to store it for future use.

While every belligerent country claimed that God was on her side, La Croix in France made the case with a forthrightness not normally associated with the French: “The story of France is the story of God. Long live Christ who loves the Franks.” “La Guerre Sainte”, echoed L’Echo de Paris, and La Croix agreed in principle but wanted to expand: it was “a war of Catholic France against Protestant Germany”.

Hold on a minute, the British begged to differ. The French, though on the side of the angels in this one, couldn’t claim exclusive possession of God.

The Bishop of Hereford explained this succinctly: “Amidst all the burden of gloom and sorrow which this dreadful war lays upon us we can at least thank God that it brings that better day a long step nearer for the generations in front of us.” (Which generations were to lose, conservatively, 200 million in assorted wars and purges, but then, to be fair, the good bishop had no way of knowing this.)

To a British musical promoter, that was really a war between different types of music: “The future belongs to the young hero who will have the courage to exclude from his library all the works of Handel, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Brahms and Richard Strauss…, who will draw from the depths of his own being tone pictures of all that is beautiful in the wonderful poetry of Great Britain, and find the vigorous rhythms that will tell of the dauntless spirit of those who go to death singing ‘Tipperary’.”  Or rap, as it eventually turned out.

Still, the impresario displayed much insight: the underlying aims of the war weren’t geopolitical but cultural.

America’s role is instructive. President Wilson wasn’t bashful about his desire to replace the traditional order with a modern world led by America.

That’s why the message spewed out by the Creel Committee (the world’s biggest propaganda outfit) went beyond amateurish attacks on the bloodthirsty Hun. Every piece of promotional literature put out by Creel, every speech by Wilson, was an incitement to revolution, both political and social, across Europe.

Thus America had no quarrel with the industrious people of Germany; it was the oppressive Junkers class that was the enemy. No peace, no armistice was possible until the existing social order and political arrangement were destroyed – in other words, until a revolution took place.

Likewise, Wilson had no quarrel with the quirky people inhabiting the British Empire; it was the Empire itself that he abhorred. Even though for tactical reasons that particular message couldn’t yet be enunciated in so many words, dismantling the offending institution was clearly one of Wilson’s, and later Roosevelt’s, key objectives.

A fanatic of a single world government, Wilson was at the same time a great champion of national self-determination. Anticipating a possible confusion on the part of the reader, there was no contradiction there at all. The first was the end; the second, the means.

The marginal peoples of the empires, all those Czechs, Poles, Finns and Serbs couldn’t make good any promise of self-determination without first destroying all traditional states. QED.

Thus, when the Tsarist regime collapsed in Russia, Wilson was ecstatic. Here was another democracy hatched out of the dark recesses of absolutism. That the new ‘democracy’ was so weak that it couldn’t keep her troops at the front mattered little. This wasn’t about winning the world war but about winning the war for the world.

That’s why Wilson, Lloyd George and their followers constantly downplayed the risk of Bolshevik takeover, and failed to respond to it properly once it took place. They had much greater affinity with the Bolsheviks than with any traditional empires.

The Great War is often described as Europe’s suicide, and in some ways it was just that. Above all, however, it was the murder of Christendom within Europe’s borders, the triumph of crass, soulless modernity.

Whatever trust had existed between Europeans and their governments was gassed out of existence in Flanders and shot up to pieces in East Prussia. Trust was replaced with cynicism at best, hatred at worst. As a result, Europe was left at the mercy of glossocratic tyranny, which in short order ushered in the two most infernal regimes in history.

So yes, we must remember our fallen heroes, thank them posthumously, pray for them. But every time we fall silent on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we must also remember the only way to make sure they didn’t die in vain.

And that’s learning the lessons their tragic fate taught. Lest we forget.

Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán are birds of a feather, although neither looks particularly avian.

They feel a natural affinity for each other, and also for Putin. Putin is in some ways an aspirational figure for Trump and Orbán. They both envy the Russian dictator’s freedom of action, unrestricted by parliamentary pressure, judicial oversight and other annoyances.

However, because of such irritants, neither Orbán nor especially Trump can be too effusive in their admiration for that indicted war criminal. A few years ago, Trump could still afford the luxury of lauding Putin’s ‘genius’ in public, but now that Putin has reminded the world in Bucha and Mariupol that ‘genius’ and ‘genocide’ are cognates, his Western admirers have to be more restrained.

Moreover, they have to bow to the pressure exerted by their legislatures and impose tougher and tougher sanctions on Russia (Trump), or at least to go along with them (Orbán).

In that spirit, Trump has slapped a virtual embargo, supported with secondary sanctions, on the imports from Russia’s two biggest oil companies, Lookoil and Rosneft. The idea is to limit the flow of money into Putin’s war machine, which that ‘genius’ uses to commit genocide in the Ukraine.

As Cicero explained some 2,300 years ago, “Infinite money is the sinews of war” (nervi belli, pecunia infinita). Other thinkers have expressed the same idea in slightly different terms, referring to money as the lifeblood of warfare. Hence the idea behind the sanctions is to exsanguinate Putin’s aggression.

The idea is sound, but an attack on Russia’s oil exports creates collateral damage. Countries that depend on cheap Russian oil for their energy sustenance now have to get it elsewhere and pay considerably more.

Hungary could suffer more than most. The country gets 86 per cent of her oil from Russia, which explains why Orbán hopped on the plane and flew to the US to scream bloody murder, hoping that Trump’s hearing is acute enough to hear.

The route is Orbán’s well-trodden flight path. Even when Trump was between presidencies, Orbán, with the foresight of an intuitive apparatchik, often flew to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Ferney.

During those pilgrimages, the two men found out they spoke the same language, even if one did so in crude English and the other in Hungarian (which, looking at Orbán, I suspect, though can’t verify, is crude too).

Orbán realised that Trump saw politics as a global extension of his property development business, transactional and based on personal relationships. The kind of personal relationship the president favours is the other chap paying gluteal respects, and Orbán was happy to oblige.

He’d return home with sore lips but high hopes for the future, provided Trump got back into the White House. The latter obliged, and Orbán’s osculatory investment began to pay off.

It again did so the other day, when Trump granted Hungary a one-year exemption from the new batch of oil sanctions. “It’s very difficult for [Hungary] to get the oil and gas from other areas,” Trump said at the joint press conference. “They don’t have the advantage of having sea. … They don’t have the ports. They have a difficult problem.”

The US could easily solve that problem, and in fact has begun to do so by selling Hungary $600 million worth of liquefied natural gas, of which the US has a practically unlimited supply thanks to fracking. Doubling the volume of gas exports and perhaps lowering the price would go a long way towards relieving Hungary’s land-locked ordeal, but sanction-busting seems easier and cheaper.

“Pipelines are not an ideological or political issue. It’s a physical reality …,” said Orbán, proving he has nothing to learn about demagoguery from his idol. Another lesson he has learned well comes easily to all populists, Right or Left. They, nationalists or globalists, believe their audience is generally stupid and, judging by their electoral success, they may have a point.

Pipelines, and economy in general, are always a “political issue” – it’s not for nothing that economy uses ‘political’ as its forename. This is the case even in peacetime, and infinitely more so at wartime.

It’s for political, or rather geopolitical, reasons that sanctions on Russian oil were imposed in the first place, and surely Orbán understands this. So the “physical reality” of the oil pipeline from Russia is as irrelevant as it is indisputable.

Orbán has been a consistent Putinversteher, one of the sincerest and most passionate among European leaders. According to him, Putin is right when blaming NATO for provoking the conflict, and this is something other Western leaders “misunderstand”.

The Ukraine, explains Orbán, can’t win the war in the battlefield, so the West might as well stop propping up the regime both his role models, Putin and Trump, dislike. Like Trump, Orbán wants to put an end to the war immediately, and if that can only be done on Putin’s terms, then so be it.

Orbán is a fierce opponent of the Ukraine joining European alliances. He has said he’d veto her joining the EU, and the very idea of that long-suffering country ever joining NATO makes him shudder with revulsion.

Viktor feels deep empathy for Vlad not only for emotional reasons but also for pragmatic ones. Both he and Putin have to stay in power in order to survive, and not just politically. Should they lose office, both Orbán and Putin are certain to face charges of corruption, and the latter also of war crimes.

Putin is in the enviable position of not being accountable to the electorate – he can only lose power to a coup, in which case he may not live long enough to face those charges. Orbán, on the other hand, has to win elections, and the next one is in April.

Had Hungary not got Trump’s exemption, Hungarians’ living standards would have dipped immediately, and people usually make their leaders pay for that at the polls. Thus Trump has done Orbán a life-saving favour, but then that’s what friends are for.

That exemption is wrong on many different levels, from moral to geopolitical. Ukrainians pay with their blood for every barrel of oil Putin manages to flog, but neither Orbán nor Trump cares about that. Their electorates may, but not as much as they care about the price of petrol and heating oil.

Still, I haven’t seen a single printed word of opprobrium of this latest exercise in the art of the deal, to borrow a phrase. Even if our conservative press no longer thinks in terms of good and evil, or even right and wrong, we are all in even deeper trouble than we know.

The advertising bomb went off in 1970, producing tremors that spread all over the world.

Charlie Saatchi created, and the Family Planning Association ran, an ad showing a pregnant man, with the headline asking: “Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?”

The ad was so daring, so outrageous, so shocking that even advertising veterans couldn’t quite believe their eyes. When they finally caught their breath, they began to give Saatchi every accolade, every award the industry could bestow.

But why was the effect so powerful (despite the dubious grammar in the headline)? Why were people shocked? Why couldn’t they believe their eyes? Simple. Because their eyes had never seen a pregnant man, and their minds couldn’t even fathom one.

Tempora mutantur and all that. If the ad made people gasp in 1970, in 2025 it would only make them shrug. What’s the point? Of course, men can get pregnant, everyone knows that. Especially everyone who reads The Guardian and watches BBC News…

Hold on. Even BBC viewers may be frustrated if they expect its newsreaders always to talk about male pregnancy with deadpan insouciance. One such newsreader, Martine Croxall, let the woke side down.

Earlier this year Miss Croxall was reading an autocue script with her usual fluency. However, when she reached the phrase “pregnant people”, she rolled her eyes ever so slightly and corrected herself, saying “pregnant women” instead.

That was more than both her employer and some viewers could bear, as it were. Not that many viewers, mind you, because only 20 complaints were filed. But that was enough.

The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) upheld the objections yesterday, saying the newsreader had breached its rules on impartiality:

“The ECU considered the facial expression… laid it open to the interpretation that it indicated a particular viewpoint in the controversies currently surrounding trans identity, and the congratulatory messages Croxall later received on social media, together with the critical views expressed in the complaints to the BBC, tended to confirm that the impression of her having expressed a personal view was widely shared across the spectrum of opinion on the issue.”

Please read it again. Miss Croxall received not only 20 complaints but also “congratulatory messages”. The BBC didn’t say how many, but, five gets you hundreds, there had to be enough to reach the conclusion that her “personal view was widely shared across the spectrum of opinion on the issue”.

Miss Croxall thus went along with the overwhelming majority of viewers whose licence fees fund the BBC. That was a borderline criminal transgression, one so egregious that she was lucky to get away with a reprimand. Another such slip and she may hear from the Crown Prosecution Service.

This is a matter of principle that should be impervious to numbers. Still, some 657,000 perfectly binary women gave birth in the UK last year. How many non-binary sideshows did?

Seeking that information, I went to the official website of the Office for National Statistics, only to receive a polite, but otherwise unsatisfactory, reply:

“Thank you for your request. Unfortunately, we do not hold the information requested, as the birth certificate information we receive from the General Register Office (GRO) does not provide information on gender identity.”

So let’s just say only a few and leave it at that, but the issue is about ideology, not arithmetic. Miss Croxall would have been censured even if there had been not a single non-binary birth in the UK, ever. That’s what impartiality means.

Sorry for being so unsporting. Rebuking the BBC for Left-wing bias is like accusing Stalin of communism, Hitler of Nazism and Ed Miliband of eco zealotry. Doing so at any other time would be stating the bleeding obvious, which is a rhetorical sin.

But doing that this week is a whole different story. For the BBC has chosen to strike a blow for impartiality just as it’s embroiled in an embarrassing scandal.

Reporting on the January 2021 Capitol riot in Washington DC, editors at the Panorama news show doctored Donald Trump’s speech to make it sound as if he had called for insurrection. Technically, the task was a doddle. Just take a few words from the beginning of the speech, splice them with a few words from the end, and Don’s your uncle, never mind the context.

That’s like taking the words “the BBC” from one place in this article, the words “may hear from the Crown Prosecution Service” from another and come up with a suggestion that the Beeb is under criminal investigation. Oh well, come to think of it… No, forget it.

Hence, rather than saying what everyone knows anyway, that the BBC is a coven of woke witches and a hotbed of Left radicalism, I must instead compliment it for its blockbusting nuclear-strength cynicism. The BBC reasserting its commitment to impartiality at this time is like Donald Trump advocating elegant elocution or Rachel Reeves preaching fiscal responsibility.

I’m not going to join the chorus of demands that the BBC licence fee be abolished. The choir is already strong enough without my contribution. Let’s just say that a corporation which only ever runs appointment ads in The Guardian is unapologetically Left-wing and doesn’t care who knows it.

We’ve known for decades which side in the culture war the BBC not so much supports as spearheads. The Beeb has been able to get away with that so far, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t continue to do so in perpetuity. Obviously, the BBC can afford wokery without jeopardising its existence.

The monarchy can’t. When royal personages join the destructive cultural crusade, they betray their vital function of maintaining the diachronic continuity of the nation. In essence if not necessarily in form, the institution of our monarchy has been co-extensive with the nation itself, going back so far that not even an eagle eye can pinpoint the moment it began.

Thus the royals can’t play favourites: the past ought to be at least as important to them as the present and the future. When the royal family acts or speaks in ways that betray tradition, it stands in default of its mission, putting its continued existence in peril.

Thus, one has to lament that His Majesty overreacted when throwing his brother under the bus. The last time a royal prince was demoted to commoner, Cromwell was in charge, and the full implications of that precedent ought to make our royals wary.

What’s important isn’t just that the king overreacted, but also why he did so. Some censure of the prince bringing the monarchy in disrepute was called for, but the punishment meted out was so excessively severe largely for woke reasons. I just hope the king will be able (or willing) to block his brother’s extradition to the US.

Cultural warriors led by the BBC have downgraded the importance of some crimes, mainly those against property, and upgraded the significance of others, such as those of a sexual nature.

While in no way condoning amorous misdeeds, the hysteria following Andrew’s alleged hanky-panky with a 17-year-old girl was so out of proportion to the act itself that it was clearly motivated by ideological diktats. By pandering to woke shrieks, the royal family showed weakness, encouraging republicans to pounce.

Then just yesterday, HRH Prince William gave us the benefit of his climatological erudition. Speaking at the COP 30 UN Climate Summit, HRH opined that “We are edging dangerously close to the earth’s critical tipping points…thresholds beyond which the natural systems we depend on may begin to unravel”.

How does he know that? Has he studied the matter extensively? Never mind extensively – has HRH read a single scientific study on climate? I doubt that, and he couldn’t have read Ian Plimer’s seminal book Heaven and Earth.

Prof. Plimer, a renowned climatologist, provides reams of scientific data, with each bit referenced to dozens of sources, showing that the brouhaha about climate owes more to ideology than to science. Hence, in the very least, the issue must be treated as debatable.

And so it is, outside the ideological stormtroopers of the cultural war supported and personified by the BBC. The heir to the oldest and most significant throne in the West shouldn’t act as the dummy to woke ventriloquists if he doesn’t want that throne to totter more than it already does.

Both the monarchy and the BBC are key British institutions, albeit of different provenance, function and importance. We may or may not love them equally or at all, but we must all acknowledge their vital importance. When they go astray, pandering to subversive sensibilities, we are all in trouble – even those of us who may not recognise it.

Yes, I know that every word in that triad is misspelled. But who cares?

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson certainly doesn’t. It’s those hallowed concepts that matter, not how you spell them. Whatever the orthography, the new triad of DEI should replace the old one of 3Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic.

Now, Mrs Phillipson is a good-looking woman, which would normally rank her high on my list of human attainments. But then I look at her plans for Britain’s primary schools, and she not so much goes down to the bottom of the list as drops right off it.

However, I wonder if she too is a chess player like her accomplice Rachel Reeves. Mrs Phillipson’s thought follows the impeccably logical path from the general to the specific. Like the champion junior player Rachel never was, Bridget first lays down the overall strategy and then looks for the best tactics to carry it out.

Can’t fault her on that. I can, however, lament that such a sound intellectual apparatus is put to the service of wicked goals to be achieved by subversive means.

The strategy is easy to discern. Mrs Phillipson and her accomplices don’t care if children learn how to read, write and add up. As far as they are concerned, the purpose of education isn’t to educate. It’s to indoctrinate.

To that end, she has announced that all pupils will get compulsory ‘citizenship’ classes. My first reaction was positive, although we are really subjects, not citizens. Still, no doubt children should study the nature and history of the British constitution, learning the roles played by the crown, the two Houses of Parliament and the judiciary.

But then that’s not what Mrs Phillipson has in mind. Citizenship to her means learning the sacramental significance of DEI (however spelled), media literacy (whatever that means, but don’t tell me — I’m happy in my state of ignorance), gender studies (and she isn’t talking about grammatical categories) and climate change (caused by Brexit, the Tory establishment and Nigel Farage).

I’m appalled. Such subjects will take up precious school time, which is already crammed to the gunwales with sex education, condom studies and birth control techniques. Oh yes, the three Rs will suffer too, but do remember how Mrs Phillipson et al. define the goal of education.

In pursuit of her real objective, Mrs Phillipson will abandon several Tory policies that she is certain amount to nothing short of child abuse. Specifically, she’ll scrap the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), what with its accent on such obsolete subjects as maths, science, humanities and foreign languages.

Such subjects, she believes, do untold harm to children’s education. If they do maths, they’ll be able to figure out that Labour’s spending plans don’t add up, and what kind of citizenship is that? Learning science may make them see the whole net zero brouhaha for the scam it is. If they really get into British history, they may find out it’s not all just racist colonial oppression, which discovery may traumatise them for life.

And yes, Mrs Phillipson would dearly love us to re-enter the EU, but a Briton doesn’t have to know foreign languages to be a true European. All those continentals speak some English patois, so why bother?

She also wants to simplify grammar, and I’d suggest that the best way of doing so is to abandon it altogether. However English is spoke, that be fine, innit?

However, it appears that Mrs Phillipson isn’t quite prepared to go that far yet. All she wants is to get rid of posh-toff grammatical terms, all those subjunctives, predicates, adverbs and some such.

At first I wondered whether she advocated an extensive use of structural grammar techniques, which indeed dispense with much of the traditional terminology. But no, what she means is an emphasis on practical, as opposed to ‘theoretical’, grammar.

As a former teacher of English in the neolithic past, I sympathise with my British colleagues. Their task has just been made well-nigh impossible, but that’s no skin off Mrs Phillipson’s shapely posterior.

While lackadaisical about pupils’ basic education, she is touchingly concerned about their mental health. To that end, she is reducing the amount of time spent on GCSE exams, those tortuous ordeals subjecting tots to intolerable pressure.

Exams will be greatly simplified to make sure everyone passes, if not always with full marks. Children don’t need to learn how to handle pressure because they’ll face none in grown-up life. No, scratch that. The real pressure will come from assorted conspiracy theories, and trust Mrs Phillipson to teach pupils how to recognise and reject those.

What kind of conspiracy theories? Need you ask? Things like global warming denial, that infernal plot to undermine Ed Miliband’s net zero fanaticism.

Speaking of Mrs Phillipson’s accomplices, one such is Labour MP Helen Hayes, chairman of the Education Select Committee. (Sorry, I’m one of those fossils who find ‘chairperson’ jarring and who regard ‘chair’ as strictly a piece of furniture.)

She supports the new curriculum implicitly. Explicitly, she said:

“I welcome the proposed changes to the curriculum, which are designed to ensure access to a greater breadth of subjects including within science and the arts, and that children and young people leave school with the skills they need to succeed in the modern world, particularly the focus on citizenship, digital and media literacy, climate science, oracy and enrichment.”

I’m confident that the new curriculum will teach pupils how to express themselves with Miss Hayes’s coherence, lucidity and, well, oracy. They could then look forward to lucrative careers as welfare recipients, Labour voters, net zero activists and tireless fighters for gender rights.

Messrs Mamdani and Trump cordially loathe each other, correctly sensing that their political views are incompatible.

However, they are dizygotic, if not identical, twins in one key aspect that’s more significant than things like raising or cutting taxes. Both are populists, although they appeal to different segments of the populorum.

Populism has many definitions, but I use it in the sense of going over the head of traditional institutions to derive power directly from popular support.

I see this as a fatal flaw regardless of any short-term gains, and the flaw is systemic because it points not to the abuse of the existing political arrangement, but to its congenital defects. Moreover, these defects were already known 2,500 years ago, but then no one has ever accused people of heeding the lessons taught by either sages or history.

Both Plato and especially Aristotle identified the three core political systems: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. None, they warned, was going to succeed in its unadulterated form.

If their purity is intransigently maintained, a monarchy will turn into a tyranny, an aristocracy into an oligarchy, and democracy into an ochlocracy, mob rule. For a political arrangement to last, and for justice to thrive, a state must combine the elements of all three known forms of government.

Their faithful and undeservedly maligned disciple, Machiavelli, repeated that thought in his Discourses, published posthumously in 1531. That’s why, he added, the synthetic constitution of Lycurgus lasted longer in Sparta than the purely democratic constitution of Solon in Athens – this, though the latter was more virtuous.

Instead of a monarchy, Machiavelli talked about a principality, but that’s only a semantic nuance. Where he deviated from the Greeks substantively was in his interpretation of mob rule which he saw as anarchy, a total disintegration of governance.

However, hindsight vindicates the Greeks’ view: our modern democracy produces a different, perhaps even more sinister, form of ochlocracy. The empowered mob turns into what Tocqueville called a tyrannical majority. It then holds the government beholden to its tyranny, rendering the state itself tyrannical in the mob’s own image.

Now I’m on a name-dropping binge, allow me to drop another one: Edmund Burke. Writing towards the end of the 18^th century, Burke insisted that MPs should be people’s representatives, not their delegates. Once elected to the Commons, they should act according to the people’s interests even when these don’t coincide with their wishes.

That deep idea hasn’t aged well. It’s contingent on two essential premises, both of which pertained in Burke’s time, but neither does in modernity.

We no longer have politicians able to identify people’s interests and how best to serve them, especially when such interests diverge from their own. And nor do we have a population ready to have its wishes ignored because it trusts elected officials to serve its interests.

Burkean democracy couldn’t survive contact with the Enlightenment ethos of equality. The balance of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy that existed in Burke’s time, and was hailed as ideal by the Greeks, was obliterated in modernity.

British democracy was aristocratic in the 18^th century, in that franchise was limited, and powerful aristocrats could affect the results of elections by influencing their tenants to vote for their preferred candidate. The Reform Acts of the 19^th century expanded the franchise, but in the early 20^th century women and about a third of all men still didn’t qualify to vote.

The idea of one vote for each man, woman and increasingly child was still seen as an indigestible pie in the sky. However, when the Enlightenment injected the egalitarian venom into politics, England held out longer than, say, France and America.

Since both the French and American republics are constituted on Enlightenment principles, they have no in-built restraints to prevent galloping egalitarianism from riding roughshod over mixed government. Add a measure of egalitarian passion to democracy, and neonatal socialism will steadily grow to maturity, weaned on the poisoned milk of the deadly sins.

Aristotle defined a just society as one in which the people accept inequalities as a necessary factor of the common good. But today’s ochlocrats no longer wish to accept any inequalities, which is why they’ll stamp out all vestiges of a just society.

Power mechanisms designed to counterbalance democracy by competing with it either fall by the wayside or else become artifacts, relics of the past nostalgically kept on the collective mantelpiece but no longer used.

Both Britain and the US pay lip service to division of power, but in reality power in both countries is becoming less and less divided, if at different speeds. People’s votes, often only surveyed and not even yet cast, hold sway. Only those politicians come to the fore who can successfully put blocs of voters together by pandering to their wishes or at least promising to do so.

Since public education in both countries ill-prepares the electorate to understand where its true interests lie, people’s knees jerk this way or that, and they insist that their wildest demands be met – or else.

At the same time, political egalitarianism is good at churning out demagogues ready to make any promise likely to garner more votes. It’s not so good at producing statesmen capable of acting on Burke’s prescriptions, or indeed understanding them. Today’s politicians are more likely to sweep the aforementioned mementos off the mantelpiece, watch those institutional relics smash to smithereens, and then start an unmediated dialogue with the rampaging mob.

However, the mob isn’t united in its demands. It’s divided into two large groups, each subdivided into smaller ones. This is caused by the siren song of socialism, sung by the mob, heard by the state and rendering both insane.

The promises of socialism add up to a clinical picture of madness, which precludes uniformity. Some people are mad enough to believe and cherish those promises; some are still sane enough not to.

Since no compromise between madness and sanity is possible, the two groups drift wider and wider apart, with neither, however, ready to relinquish its power. Hence politicians, who are at the beck and call of public whims, also have to split into two groups, each listening intently to the rumblings of opinion within its part of the mob.

Not every member of it can speak though, at least not loudly enough to make himself heard. We all like to talk about public opinion, but there is really no such thing. The only thing that exists is the loudmouthed opinion of the more impassioned and hence extreme faction within each group.

As a result, politics inevitably becomes more radicalised at both levels: the mob and its servile government. This is observable on both sides of the political divide – the irrational and relatively rational people begin to see one another as implacable enemies.

Power passes from one group to the other at more or less regular intervals, but overall it never escapes the mob’s clutches. Whatever little is left of traditional institutions is crushed in its tightening grip.

Whichever group screams its wishes more loudly gets to push its figurehead into government. The sub-mob of crazed Left-wing egalitarians has prevailed in New York City and Britain, the other sub-mob, that of more rational zealots, in the US federal government and Italy.

But the two together add up precisely to what Aristotle et al. saw as a great evil: ochlocracy, mob rule. Those really sane if silent individuals who hope for a return to a civilised political normality should stop their reveries. Once the Rubicon has been crossed, there is no going back.

When you flip a coin, you get either heads or tails – but you don’t get two separate coins. The coin remains one, and it doesn’t matter if one side of it shows Mamdani and the other Trump. The madness of ochlocracy will continue to rend the world asunder, that’s what populism is all about.

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.