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The Russian government, enthusiastically supported by its KGB church, is planning to rid school curricula of Darwin’s theory because it “contradicts religion”.

I don’t see how. Since we can’t know God’s ways, we have to assume he could in his omnipotence create things not just fast but also slowly.

Nor do I believe Darwin’s theory, slapdash though it is, should be excluded from curricula. It may be bad science, but no good science can compete with it for sheer influence. The same, incidentally, goes for Marxism: bad economics, worse philosophy, yet extremely influential and hence to be studied.

I’d definitely teach Darwinism, if only to train pupils how to think critically. They should be taken by the hand and gradually led to the realisation that the theory doesn’t hold water, certainly not as an all-encompassing explanation of life. It takes someone as philosophically ignorant as Dawkins to say that Darwinism “explains everything”.

I’d start by offering pupils this quotation: “Not one change of species into another is on record… we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.” Who wrote this? Some fundamentalist preacher? No, it was Darwin himself, in My Life And Letters.

And, considering in his Origin the complexity of the human eye, he went even further: “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

Unlike their idol, today’s Darwinists don’t even try to see how his assertions tally with the most elementary scientific data, such as the dearth of any intermediate forms of living creatures in the fossil records. In fact, Darwinism, along with any other materialist explanations of the world, has been refuted not only by logic but also by every natural science we may wish to consider:

Cosmology has reached the conclusion that our material world has not existed for ever: conclusive evidence shows it appeared more or less instantaneously at the beginning of time.

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

Palaeontologists have found and studied millions of fossilised remains of ancient organisms, and yet discovered practically no transitional forms in the development of species. If millions of fossils collected over 180 years have shown no such evidence, one can safely assume it doesn’t exist.

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

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

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

Microbiology has shown that even single-celled organisms believed to be the simplest living beings are in fact incredibly complex systems of interacting functional elements. Even greater complexity is revealed at the genetic level, accompanied by much confusion in deciding what is primitive and what is advanced.

Indeed, if we look at the number of their chromosomes, man, with 46, is more complex than the mouse (40), mink (30), fly (12) and gnat (6). Yet using this criterion, man is much more primitive than the sheep (54), silkworm (56), donkey (62), chicken (78) and duck (80). And the prawn, with its 254 chromosomes, leads the field by a wide margin.

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

Much has been written about the universe obeying rational and universal laws, which presupposes the existence of a rational and universal law-giver. But rationality apart, look at the geometric perfection of physical bodies.

Particularly telling here is the golden section, which is obtained by dividing a length into two unequal portions, of which the shorter one relates to the longer one as the latter relates to the overall length. Any length can be divided into an infinite number of portions, but only one division will produce this geometrically perfect ratio.

Modern scientists discover the proportion of golden section in the morphological makeup of birds and man, plants and animals, in the structure of the eye (which so baffled Darwin), in the location of heavenly bodies, in brain biorhythms and cardiograms.

Scientists are united in their conclusion: because this phenomenon goes across all levels of material organisation, it conveys a deep ontological meaning. But science is unable to explain it, and honest researchers have to admit their inability to account for the aesthetic aspect of the world.

After all, aesthetically perfect shapes add nothing to the organism’s survivability and may often endanger it. Why, for example, do cereal plants need stalks with joints arranged according to the golden section? Such an arrangement does nothing to make the stalk stronger. Why do the bodies of dragonflies relate to the length of their separate parts according to the principles of the golden section?

The aesthetic arrangement of nature points at a metaphysical, rather than physical, purpose that’s not of this world. And this is revealed in so much more than just the golden section. Just listen to birdsong, to name another beautiful example, or look at the peacock’s tail that jeopardises the bird’s survival by revealing its location to predators and making it slower in trying to get away.

Examples of this kind, and every branch of science can provide thousands, would have been sufficient to put paid to any other scientific theory a long time ago (and even evolutionary fanatics never claim that Darwinism is anything more than that). Generally, if a theory doesn’t become fact within one generation, or at most two, it’s relegated to the status of a museum exhibit. Yet today’s world was prepared to throw its whole weight behind Darwinism because it needed it even more than Marxism.

The two theories dovetailed neatly and, if anything, Darwinism went even further. Not only did it attack religion more effectively than Marxism did, but it also rivalled Marxism for wide-reaching social and economic implications.

One no longer had to leave the realm of seemingly objective biology to explain both socialism, with its class struggle, and capitalism, with its dog-eat-dog competition for survival. Even more fundamental is Darwinism’s demotic insistence on the purely animal nature of man.

No, I definitely wouldn’t excise Darwin’s theory from school curricula. Instead, I’d use it as an introduction to natural science, philosophy, rhetoric and religious studies.

But then I believe in debunking false theories by rational arguments, not cancelling them or their exponents. That’s because I’m not a fascist of any hue: brown, black, red, green – or Putin’s.

The salaries of employees reflect their relative value to the employer. Hence, if someone receives double the salary of someone else, the former is deemed to be twice as valuable.

Starting from this unassailable observation, we can then assess properly the current Wanted advertisement run by the Church of England, London diocese. The job advertised is that of a “head of racial justice priority”. (Is it possible to be a head of priority? You tell me.)

The salary on offer is £66,646 a year, which happens to be more than twice the stipend received by parish priests. The inescapable conclusion is that to our established church a chap capable of mouthing woke twaddle is twice as valuable as someone who preaches the word of God. Vox DEI speaks louder than vox dei.

The ad says that the successful candidate will “foster a culture… built on love, fairness, equity, justice, collaboration and integrity”, enlightening people on “the injustice and impact of racism”. He will “break down mental, cultural and institutional barriers… to engender true race equality,” thereby helping “address the historical legacy of slavery and challenge systemic racism”. 

I’m sorry, am I missing something? I thought equality before God is an integral part of any Christian message to the multitudes, and it’s the job of a priest to deliver this message from the pulpit. On the other hand, the sermon of secular DEI in relation to race or anything else is properly delivered by social workers, left-wing dons and Labour politicians.

A Christian minister and a Labour minister are jobs not just different but diametrically opposite, although DEI propaganda compromises both. But at least a politician indulges it in a secular context.

God knows it’s wicked enough even there, but in our democracy run riot securing 20 per cent of the electorate is supposed to give politicians a mandate to do as they please. Hence we may huff and we may puff, but we can’t argue that a woke politician is corrupting his mission.

He is, but this isn’t an argument we can ever win. However, when our established church misappropriates its finances to fund DEI propaganda, the church isn’t just going beyond its mission. It makes a mockery of it.

This isn’t to say that the church should never comment on worldly affairs. Not at all. It should sit in judgement and cry foul whenever a government acts in ways inconsistent with Christian morality. But it should steer clear of any faddish ideology specifically because it’s a) faddish and b) an ideology.

Fads come and go, but a church should overlook the transient in favour of the transcendent. Governments these days act as weathervanes, turning this way or that depending on the way the wind blows. But because the church’s mission is eternal, it should be impervious to political vicissitudes.

When it comes to committing itself to an ideology, the church should remind itself what all ideologies are. The term first appeared in France at the very end of the 18^th century, and new words are coined when they are needed to denote new concepts.

The need for this particular concept sprang from the very nature of the Enlightenment, which, when stripped of its sloganeering cant, was a mass revolt against Christendom – not just its founding religion but the civilisation it had produced. When troops go into battle, they need to inscribe something on their banners, and ideology is what provides the text.

An ideology was to the philosophes a system of rational convictions designed to supplant irrational superstitions, which is how they saw Christianity. However, it was understood even then that such rational convictions may be held for reasons other than purely epistemic, that is based on evidential reasoning. Irrational was the new rational.

In other words, an ideology isn’t a philosophy but a secular creed perceived to be in competition with religious faith, which it sees as its mortal enemy.

Now, Christianity is a rational religion and, as such, isn’t at odds with science or philosophy. But it is at odds, indeed at war, with cults, false religions claiming they preach the truth but in fact peddling lies. Worshiping such cults is called idolatry, which word fits any ideology like a glove.

Ideologies appeared at the crest of the Enlightenment to fill the gap left by religious faith. Man was now perceived as merely a higher order of animal, but the ‘enlighteners’ knew he was the kind of animal who had an innate need to rise above his quotidian existence. Man has a compulsion to believe in something higher than himself.

That’s where ideology steps in. It gives people a chance to worship the superpersonal without rising to the supernatural. Yet upon closer examination, any ideology is found out sooner or later. It turns out to be not a philosopher’s stone but fool’s gold.

That’s why people susceptible to ideological temptation tend to float from one ideology to another. They look for a secular god, but because that god is false they can’t find it. At least they can’t find a single one, which is why they resort to secular polytheism.

And their rites grow more and more bizarre. Sexual equality turns into a ritual dance around a woman’s phallus, quest for peace turns into shamanistic shrieks for unilateral disarmament, social justice into rampant levelling, racial equality into a wholesale repudiation of Western history.

Like Greek gods who all lived on the same mountain, ideological idols also stay close together. They inhabit their own temple, that defined by hatred of Christendom. Yes, our civilisation has already been relegated to the status of distant memory, but iconoclasm tends to persevere long after the icons have been smashed.

All this is to say that for a church to feel the need for a highly paid “head of racial justice priority” is tantamount to worshiping idols at the expense of its mission to worship God. This comes close to my understanding of satanism and it’s useful to remember that, etymologically speaking, Lucifer means ‘enlightener’.

Ange Rayner, our deputy prime minister, knows how to ward off any accusations of misbehaviour. Wave the sabre of her class origin, and accusers flee like demons from the cross.

Photographed whirling drunk in a sleazy nightclub at 4 AM? “I’m working class.”

Accepted all-expenses-paid holiday with her intermittent lover at a billionaire’s penthouse? “I’m working class.”

Hired a personal photographer, on a £68,000 taxpayer-funded salary, to boost her online image? “I’m working class.”

Pushed an old woman under a bus? “I’m working class.” Sorry, I made this last one up. The idea is to probe the outer limits of that excuse, which seems to go far, although perhaps not quite as far as that yet.

Still, barristers routinely cite their clients’ humble origins as a mitigating circumstance. So perhaps my hypothetical excuse isn’t as fanciful as all that.

Actually, my problem today isn’t with Ange, that walking caricature of a Labour politician. It’s with the term ‘working class’, and I’ll be using her only as an illustration of its fatuity.

The term has two meanings, one English, the other Marxist. The English meaning is self-evident: ‘working class’ describes people who work. Those who don’t work aren’t working class, those who work are.

Now, anyone who has ever looked at the diaries of doctors, lawyers, farmers, teachers and dons will have to agree that they work extremely hard. So does that make them working class? In English, definitely. In Marxist, no.

According to Marx, only industrial labourers qualify as working class, aka the proletariat. But Ange doesn’t, not by that standard.

She has never worked at a factory and in fact has never done any meaningful work of any kind, apart from a short stint as social worker. She spent the rest of her career climbing the greasy pole of trade union politics all the way up to a safe Labour seat.

Specifically, Marx based his social taxonomy on a person’s relation to the ‘means of production’. Yet Ange has never produced anything other than an illegitimate child at age 16. Her means of production was her womb.

So how is she working class? I get it. Ange is a classical scholar who knows how to penetrate the etymology of words. The word ‘proletarian’ was coined in the 17^th century on the basis of the Latin root proles, meaning ‘offspring’. A proletarian was thus a person whose only useful function in life was to produce progeny.

If so, Ange’s illegitimate child indeed qualifies her as a proletarian, but somehow I doubt this is how she would explain it. Ange has a shaky mastery even of living languages, such as English, never mind dead ones. She is gobby without being eloquent.

Marx’s definition made little sense even when he concocted it, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. That was the time when industrialisation came to Britain, but it has since left. We now live in a post-industrial age, and no conveyor-belt definitions apply any longer, if they ever did.

Nor do any economic ones in general. Otherwise we’d have to argue that a train driver paid £80,000 a year for a four-day week is working class, and a teacher isn’t, even though he gets less than half that and still spends his weekends marking papers – and his evenings filling in endless forms on gender and racial equality.

I lived in the US for 15 years, and yet I never heard anyone describing himself as ‘working class’. I’m not saying that such Americans don’t exist, only that I never met any. My friends were mostly academics, my colleagues were admen, and neither group self-identified in class terms.

Suddenly, when I moved to London back in 1988, I met many advertising colleagues, all on princely salaries, describing themselves as working class. They saw that part of their identity as innate and immutable, like their height or the colour of their eyes.

That reinforced my belief that the definition of working class no longer has anything to do with economics. After all, I’ve met a few aristocrats with a lineage going back centuries who had less money than today’s train drivers. And in my professional capacity, I once even met Alan Sugar who despite all his billions still describes himself as working class .

If not economics, what then? I’d suggest a combination of culture and ideology as the defining discriminators of the working class. Sometimes culture is primary and ideology secondary, at other times it’s the other way around.

Here I use the term ‘culture’ broadly, to include not just education and aesthetic preferences, but also manners and conduct. All of these are given some bias by one’s birth and early upbringing, but they aren’t determined by such factors for life.

It’s possible for a girl with Ange’s social background to grow up with interests other than getting pissed at a night club and procreating behind a bike shed. I have among my close friends people whose start in life was no more auspicious than hers, but who as adults boast (figuratively speaking – such people never boast) broad erudition, refined tastes and impeccable manners.

By manners I mean so much more than knowing which utensil to use with which course at dinner or where brown shoes can or can’t be worn. The ultimate test of manners is intuitive knowledge of how to modify one’s speech and behaviour to take others into account. (A gentleman never offends unintentionally, as Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said.)

I’d suggest a supermarket-trolley test as a marker of class. When stopping at a shelf to decide which product to buy, some people try to place their trolley not to block access for others, and some don’t.

The former don’t make a conscious decision to be so accommodating – they intuitively adjust their behaviour to make other people’s life easier. The latter don’t decide to be boorish either, they just are. I’d describe them as proles, but I wouldn’t be talking about their wealth or living quarters at birth.

Neither education nor manners are innate, both can be acquired by conscious effort as one goes through life. Those whose beginnings are humble have to try harder, but that makes their achievement even more valuable and laudable.

But some people, and this is where ideology comes in, refuse to make that effort. They insist on screaming their proledom at the world, eternally staying in the gutter in any other than the practical sense. They may make billions or rise to the second highest position in government, while still flashing the tattoos and other cultural stigmata of their early life as some kind of badges of honour.

It’s not where people begin in life that matters, but where they end up. People can’t always choose to become rich, but they can always choose to become cultured and hence no longer prole. If they refuse so to choose, it’s often the pernicious Marxist ideology of class struggle that holds so many of them back.

Class (and also race, in any other than the purely chromatic sense) is as often as not a statement of ideological conviction. For some, such as Ange Rayner, it’s also a stepping stone on a career path. If she is expecting applause and compassionate understanding, she won’t find any at these quarters.

Do you live in an area where you or your child would be likely to run into a uniformed soldier? Or into a veteran of our recent wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan?

Statistically speaking, chances are you don’t. But if you do, I still think you don’t give such a possibility another thought – and you certainly don’t see a soldier as a factor of mortal danger to you or your brood.

If all that is true, I can use my sleuth-like deductive power to figure out one thing about you: you don’t live in Russia.

There, more and more soldiers go back home after completing their tour of duty in what’s officially called a ‘special military operation’, or, unofficially (and in Russia illegally) ‘the war against the Ukraine’.

War in general has a coarsening effect on fighting men, even in a well-behaved army observing every rule of civilised warfare. That, if you’ve been following the news at all, doesn’t describe the Russian army fighting in the Ukraine.

If you have been reading the papers, then you know that thousands of Russian soldiers torture and murder civilians, rape women, men and children, loot and steal. That sort of thing doesn’t do much to improve their moral health, but there also exists another problem.

Many Russian soldiers weren’t morally healthy to begin with. Thousands of them are imprisoned criminals promised a reprieve if they join up. Those who take Putin up on this kind offer go to the Ukraine and continue to ply their old trade, this time legally.

Moreover, the Russians are now offering the same option to criminals who haven’t even been tried yet. When they are arrested, say for rape or murder, they are given a choice between a prison camp and a boot camp, and you won’t win any prizes for guessing which way most of them go.

In any civilised country, this practice would raise the issue of deterrence. After all, courts and prisons largely exist to make a chap contemplating a crime think twice. But if a rapist casing a house knows he can always avoid punishment by joining up, he may still think twice, but the second, deterring thought will be much weaker.

Getting back to the issue in hand, we can detect a potential problem. Returning criminals, or even soldiers who are criminal novices, may eschew civilian careers in, say, social services and start roaming the streets with intent.

Actually, ‘may’ is the wrong word here. There have been hundreds of reported cases that involve demobbed or furloughed soldiers committing horrendous crimes of every description. The streets of Russian provincial towns increasingly begin to resemble a war zone.

Parents fear for their children’s safety, but they don’t need to be afraid, not in the Perm province at any rate. The authorities there have issued a leaflet instructing children how to protect themselves against men in uniform.

The text doesn’t really require any comments, but I’ll provide some parenthetical ones anyway – the temptation is too strong. So here it is:   

A Soldier Won’t Hurt a Child: simple rules for a child dealing with a soldier

These rules will help you communicate safely and easily with soldiers who defend Russia during the special military operation. Remember: your proper behaviour is a guarantee of your safety!

[This brings to mind notices, such as Beware of Dog on houses and Don’t feed the animals on zoo cages. The threatening tone is unmistakable.]

Boys: How you should look when running into a soldier

Desirable: natural hair colour, trousers, shirt, T-shirt in a neutral colour

Undesirable: dyed hair, jewellery or accessories, skimpy shorts, clothes in bright colours

Don’t forget! Your clothes mustn’t be showy. Choose a modest outfit covering your personal zones [?] and not too tight

[‘Personal zone’ makes no more sense in Russian than it does in English, but one can guess what it means. However, I shudder to think what will happen to a child wearing shorts and a tight shirt who runs into a returning hero. Kaleidoscopic images of baroque horrors flash through my mind, but I’ll keep them to myself.]

What you can talk to a soldier about

Desirable: your hobbies, the soldier’s hobbies, school, weather

Undesirable: military operations, politics

[“Mister, what do you like to do when you aren’t fighting our enemies? What, rape little boys and their mothers?”]

How you should behave

Give your defender a smile. But it’s worth remembering that you should smile or laugh only when appropriate

You shouldn’t shout or do anything unexpected. Remember! Such actions may provoke a soldier returning from the front into a sudden and negative reaction!

Act quietly. Try to listen attentively to our hero’s war stories. Important! Do not interrupt!

Here endeth the lesson, at least one taught to the children of Perm. Yet Western grownups who still harbour illusions about Russia’s war on the Ukraine should learn something too: about the war, the Russians’ fighting methods – and the country where such leaflets are necessary.  

James Carville, Bill Clinton’s strategist, got it wrong when he said: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

In today’s world, certainly its British part, ideology doesn’t just trump economics. It enslaves economics for its own nefarious purposes.

Allow me to explain this by boring you with a few economic truisms, facts so basic that any secondary school pupil should have them at his fingertips. Since our ministers, with the possible exception of Angela Rayner, possess such qualifications, nothing I’m going to say should be news even to them.

One such truism is that consumer confidence is a key factor in a consumer economy, which is what every Western country is supposed to enjoy. When consumers look towards the future with optimistic hope, they begin to, well, consume and invest more.

As a result, the economy grows in strength, the key indicators improve, consumers and investors become even more confident. Happiness all around.

Are you with me so far? Good. So what economic indicators are known to make consumers more confident?

First, inflation has to be low for otherwise people’s earnings will have less purchasing power. And here’s the good news: Britain’s inflation rate is down at a manageable 2.2 per cent.

Then there should be plenty of jobs around, so consumers won’t toss and turn at night fearing unemployment. More good news: unemployment is at its lowest level since 1974.

What else? Oh yes, the economy shouldn’t be stagnant. To be fair, our economic growth isn’t brilliant, but the British economy is still the fastest growing in the G7.

All in all, Britons should be serenely confident that our economic future looks bright, or at any rate brightish. And yet the Consumer Confidence Index is languishing at minus 20, meaning that consumers are running scared.

Such sentiments will have a knock-on effect on the economy: people will be spending and investing less, tax revenues will go down, the government will have to borrow more, inflation will go up as a result, employers will stop employing, unemployment will soar – well, you don’t need me to teach you the economic primer.

So why are British consumers lacking confidence? Simple. Within the first weeks of its tenure, the Labour government has already stated its wholehearted commitment to wrecking the economy by suffocating it with taxes.

Turn another page in that primer, and you’ll find another truism: high taxes make capital, and hence jobs, flee. A higher capital gains tax, inheritance tax, employment tax all have this predictable effect.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves will deliver her first budget on 30 October, but entrepreneurs are already fleeing en masse in anticipation. To repeat the old joke, I just hope the last one to leave will lock the door and turn off the lights.

When the budget is actually delivered, and people’s worst expectations are exceeded, the economy won’t take long to collapse or at least suffer the kind of damage that will take decades to repair.

Miss Reeves knows all that as well as you and I, possibly even better. After all, she holds a master’s degree in economics from the LSE, not just a secondary school diploma. And yet she is lying to the country by saying she’ll have “difficult decisions” to make on taxes, meaning she’ll raise them.

The lie isn’t that she’s going to raise taxes: she’s perfectly truthful about that. The lie is that the decision is difficult. It isn’t. It’s dead easy.

By the same token, if Fido could talk, he wouldn’t insist that his decision to chase Tabby around the block is difficult. That’s what his DNA is wired to do, and all socialist governments (meaning the governments of all Western countries) are just as programmed to raise taxes.

There’s no point arguing against that on economic grounds. Doing so can only spring from the failure to realise that the implicit purpose of modern taxation isn’t always, and never merely, fiscal.

Another omnipresent aim is to extend the power of the state by limiting the people’s ability to become independent of it. In that sense, taxation in the modern Western world – whatever else it might be – always has to be punitive and preventive.

The whole system is designed around this desideratum, and it will fight any interloper with the kind of resolution that would put the Spartans at Thermopylae to shame.

Another aim has more to do with PR. It’s to assuage the desire large swaths of the population have been brainwashed to feel for ressentiment and craving revenge against those more successful than they are. That’s why they’ll welcome, or at least won’t resist too strongly, the tax hikes whose sole effect will be reducing the state revenue by driving the wealthiest and most productive people, not to mention businesses, out of the country.

Labour politicians emetically shout about their concerns for the ‘working people’, especially – I dare say exclusively – those who belong to public-sector trade unions. Yet real working people and our government inhabit two different economic worlds.

People work their whole lives to live comfortably, raise and educate their children, provide for their own old age – such is their actual, tangible reality. The government, on the other hand, lives in the virtual reality, where ideology and powerlust reign supreme and nothing is tangible.

The two realities are irreconcilable; like Euclid’s parallels they never cross. That’s why we should prepare ourselves for another crisis, with the economy lying in ruins. And rising out of them, like a phoenix from the ashes, will be the state – stronger, bossier, increasingly tyrannical.

Sorry to be such a doomsayer. But hey, I’m a consumer too. That’s why my confidence is racing ahead of the Index on its way down.

Robert Jenrick, frontrunner in the Tory leadership race, realises that Reform UK schismatics threaten to perpetuate Labour rule.

Unless they are brought back into the fold, the Tories may for ever remain a rump party with little chance of reclaiming power. Hence the need for pushing the Conservatives far enough rightwards to make Reform UK redundant.

One way of doing so is to reassert the Tory claim to Englishness, thereby knocking the nationalist sabre, or perhaps pint, out of Nigel Farage’s hand. To that end Mr Jenrick set up his stall in an article saying that: “The attitudes and policies of our metropolitan establishment have weakened English identity. They have put the very idea of England at risk.”

Mr Jenrick gets top marks for his political acumen, but his thinking on national identity in general and English identity specifically sounds muddled. However, he can console himself with the thought that he isn’t the only one. This matter has baffled many thinkers, even some serious ones.

Jenrick talks about being equally proud of being British and English, lamenting that the second part is getting a rough treatment: “Whereas all of the most high-status people in Scotland and Wales are proud to be Scottish and Welsh, most of the English political and media elite are far from proud to be English.”

That’s doubtless true, but there is a ready explanation for this difference. While a great part of Scottish or Welsh identity consists in not being English, an Englishman can’t seek his own identity in not being Scottish or Welsh.

Anyway, though I wish the Tories well, neither their politics nor Mr Jenrick’s ambitions interest me very much. But the matter of national identity does, starting with the question of what constitutes a nation.

The question isn’t one of especially long standing. The issue of nationhood only moved to the forefront of people’s thought after the collapse of Christian universalism and its replacement with national, even ethnic, particularism.

This isn’t to say that national identity hadn’t existed until then, only that it played second fiddle to other identities, such as fickle dynastic allegiances and rather more constant folkloric differences, those of language and what’s broadly described as culture.

I always cite Thomas Aquinas as an illustration. He was born and raised in Italy, but his family had Germanic roots and was even related to the Holy Roman Emperor. As an adult, Thomas then spent most of his life in Paris. So was he Italian, German or French? I don’t know, and I’m sure neither did he.

The idea of blood-and-soil nationhood became popular in the 19^th century, the first in which victorious modernity ruled the roost. That notion received rather bad press following the Second World War, but it survives to this day.

For example, the American ‘paleoconservative’ (the term was coined by my friend Paul Gottfried but I don’t especially like it, though I like him) Sam Francis wrote: “Every real nation is a people of common blood and descended from the same ancestors”.

This idea is attractive but too one-dimensional for my taste, to the point of being nonsensical. It certainly doesn’t help the denizens of multi-national countries, such as Britain or Francis’s own US. By his criterion, the US isn’t a nation at all and has no hope of ever becoming one. Britain isn’t a nation either, and neither is just about any sizeable European country.

In general, Francis’s definition of a “real” nation makes me uncomfortable because it’s fundamentally anti-Christian. Christians are all brothers not because of any consanguinity but because they all have the same father who stands above ethnicity or nationhood.

It’s not by accident that most proponents of blood-and-soil nationalism have problems with Christianity, and that includes Francis. “Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it,” he once wrote, for example.

Which race was that? Hebrews? Caucasians? Americans? Christianity wasn’t created by or for any particular race or nationality, this is basic. My point is that nationalism of any kind, and especially the blood-and-soil variety, doesn’t sit comfortably with Christianity. Patriotism is something else again, but the etymology of the word points at one’s country, not at the composition of one’s blood.

A Breton and a Provençal aren’t “of common blood”, and neither do they “descend from the same ancestors”, unless it’s Adam and Eve. Yet both are French. The common blood of Englishmen may be less dubious, but it too has had many different inputs.

It all depends how far back we’re willing to go. Let’s just say that at first various Germanic and Celtic tribes contributed to the English bloodstream, then the Romans dropped a little in, and then Scandinavians and Frenchmen added some major tributaries – and we shan’t even talk about the minor ones.

Paradoxically, America, for all its mongrel make-up, is in some ways ahead of us in the blood-and-soil stakes because the previous inhabitants of the North American continent, those of the wigwams, tomahawks and white man speak with forked tongue fame, didn’t have countries in our sense of the word.

Britain, however, was formed by a union of four countries, each predating her. Mr Jenrick is clearly aware of the 1707 Acts of the Union, which is why he talks about identifying as both British and English.

That’s wonderful, but can one really claim allegiance to two nations at once? I’m in an ideal position to know that it’s possible to possess more than one passport, but belonging to more than one nation does create conceptual problems.

One detects some confusion there, and it’s common even to men who are older or more intellectually accomplished than Mr Jenrick. Even such achievers routinely talk about Britain being made up of four countries or four nations, which doesn’t solve my problem with definitions.

Let’s begin to sort it out by stating that the concept of a nation presupposes cultural, geographic and political commonality, and it may even include an ethnic element, but that is more debatable. This is reflected in terminology, though not everywhere.

Thus ‘French’ implies both citizenship in the French Republic and cultural commonality. ‘American’ is a term that’s also both political and cultural. But then one thinks of Jannik Sinner, the best Italian tennis player ever, whose first language is German even though he is Italian born and bred, and the cultural aspect of nationality begins to totter.

Now, it’s possible to date a multi-national Britain back to 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England and united the two crowns. But even if we go back only as far as 1707, that still makes Britain an older country than Germany, Italy or for that matter the US. Nevertheless, British nationhood needs, according to Mr Jenrick, to lean on the crutch of Englishness to stand on its own hind legs.

Everything I’ve said so far points at a problem. How do we solve it?

Let’s agree that ‘British’ implies mainly, though not exclusively, a political identity, whereas ‘English’ is mainly, though not exclusively, ethnic. That doesn’t solve the problem, but it does simplify it by eliminating conflicting allegiances. It’s thus possible to be both British and English at the same time.

Other than that, I can’t think of any objective criteria of nationhood, only subjective ones. If one identifies as English first, British second, that’s what one is. Such self-identification may be based on any number of factors: family roots, language, preference for warm beer rather than, say, cold vodka. Above all, I think, it’s based on what Otto Bauer (d. 1936) called the “commonality of fate”, and I thought I’d never quote any Socialist approvingly.

This has to do not only with one’s past but also with one’s commitment to the future, one’s – ideally unspoken – commitment to sharing one’s country’s fate, whatever that may be. Wearing St George’s Cross underpants is strictly optional.

Are you worried that your phone or some other communications device may blow up in your face? If you are, I’m on hand to propose a sure-fire method of protecting yourself:

Do not under any circumstances join a terrorist organisation, especially one whose stated mission in life is to wipe Israel off the map.

And if you can’t resist the temptation of becoming a member of Hezbollah, Hamas or some such, eschew newfangled devices, whether high-tech, such as I-Phones, or low-tech, such as pagers and walkie-talkies. Stick to smoke signals, carrier pigeons or, if you must, the odd payphone.

None of these is likely to explode into your face, hands or those parts of your anatomy that are close to trouser pockets. However, as thousands of Hezbollah thugs have discovered, anything more sophisticated just may blow up unexpectedly.

Blow up is different from ignite, which points at the sabotage technique used by the Israelis. Those devices couldn’t have been made to explode by using their integral parts, such as batteries.

An overheated battery may catch fire and burn down the house while the residents are otherwise engaged. But it won’t blow up with sufficient force to… well, I’ll spare you the lurid details of the physical damage those pagers, walkie-talkies and fingerprint-recognition devices inflicted on Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon. Let’s just say that the injuries were quite horrendous and, in some 20 cases, fatal.

One has to admire the ingenuity, skill and sheer guts of Mossad, or whatever Israeli agency was involved in planning and executing the operation. Their agents had to gain access to large consignments of devices travelling along the supply chain to their Hezbollah procurers. They then had to hide inside a small amount, perhaps only a gramme or two, of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (or a similarly powerful explosive) and a circuit acting as a remote long-range trigger.

No slapdash work was allowed. If even one of the charges had gone off before its time, the whole operation would have been exposed. The blasts had to be synchronised and so timed as to occur at a time when the devices were likely to be in use.

My admiration of Mossad’s brilliance isn’t universally shared. Thus Volker Türk, the current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, referred to the detonations as “shocking” and “their impact on civilians unacceptable”.

“The fear and terror unleashed is profound,” he added, displaying the customary knack of international functionaries for stating the blindingly obvious. Of course, the operation will spread fear and terror. That’s its whole point, apart from taking thousands of militants out of commission.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres added his own contribution by stating that “civilian objects should not be weaponised” and “that should be a rule that … governments should be able to implement”.

To begin with, no device used by terrorists to coordinate their murderous activities is ever truly civilian. Weapons include not only bombs, rockets and guns, but also communications systems. When a pager or a walkie-talkie is used in that fashion, it’s already weaponised. But never mind semantics; let’s talk about counterterrorism.

I don’t have the ear of either gentleman, which is a shame. I’d like to know which methods of fighting Arab terrorism they’d recommend to Israel as an alternative to weaponising civilian objects.

Would they prefer for the Israeli air force to level the Beirut buildings inhabited by Hezbollah terrorists and their families? Or perhaps, in order to curry favour with UN officials, the Israelis should drive tanks into the centre of Beirut and start laying about them with their tracks and high-calibre guns?

I can’t help thinking that any such foray would result in much higher collateral damage. In fact, this operation by, I assume, Mossad is a marvel of a precision strike. The devices involved were commissioned specifically for use by Hezbollah commanders of various ranks – not, judging by the number of the devices procured, for the rank and file.

The likelihood of a Lebanese civilian using a pager, walkie-talkie or a fingertip-recognition device would have been infinitesimally low. In fact, I can’t think of any other tactic, other than a sniper’s bullet, that would be as humanely selective in its targeting.

Perhaps Messrs Guterres and Türk are more knowledgeable than me, and there indeed exists some possible weaponry they’d rather recommend to Mossad and the IDF. But somehow I doubt that.

In fact, I’m sure that, if probed on their preferred methods of Israel’s anti-terrorist measures, they’d opt for ‘none of the above’ or rather ‘none’. To be sure, assorted Lefties will talk your ear off about the Israelis’ right to defend themselves. However, if we got down to the nitty-gritty, they’d explain that such defence shouldn’t involve killing or maiming those who wish Israel ill and do their best to kill Israelis.

Western Lefties, such as Messrs Türk and Guterres, are viscerally attracted to those who hate the West, and they use their offices to help them as best they can. They feel a Mowgli-like empathy for Third World terrorists, “We be of one blood, thou and I”. While decent Westerners root for Israel because it’s an oasis of Western civilisation in the Middle East, the Lefties hate it for the same reason.

In public, they’ll happily profess regret that Israelis have to live in constant anticipation of rockets raining on their heads or hordes of sadistic savages descending on their villages. But smouldering deep down is their inextinguishable affection for anti-Western actions, no matter how barbaric.

My congratulations to the Israelis on this brilliant operation, the likes of which I’ve never even heard about. I wish we had the same courage to fight for our liberties as that shown by the people of Israel and the Ukraine.

If we did, we’d be the ones wiping out terrorists and aggressors, even if we weren’t their immediate victims. Remember what John Donne wrote about men and islands?

I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. Yet speculation about the possible end to the war in the Ukraine isn’t exactly groundless.

After all, we don’t have to consider numerous possibilities. There are only three conceivable scenarios, with a few subplots here and there. I suggest we look at them and decide how the result of the US elections may make each more or less likely.

Scenario 1 (Doomsday). The US in particular and NATO in general continue to drip-feed supplies to the Ukraine, with the drip getting slower and slower.

The Ukrainian army gradually runs out of ordnance, armaments and soldiers, with Russia gaining the upper hand in the war of attrition (in fact, this tendency is already observable). Eventually the Russians break through, and the Ukrainian front collapses.

The Russians win a resounding victory and turn the Ukraine into their colony. Guerrilla war will continue to flare up in places, but the Russians will respond with murderous, and eventually successful, punitive raids.

Likelihood. Low. Whoever wins on 5 November will find this scenario unacceptable. NATO would have to confront an emboldened and ever-aggressive fascist state on its doorstep, requiring a huge military build-up across Europe to contain it. Another Russian aggression, this time against a NATO state, would happen nonetheless, it would only be a matter of time.

Barring the unlikely possibility of the next US president being a Russian agent, this scenario is unlikely, although I wouldn’t put anything past our leaders.

Scenario 2 (Ideal). The US in particular and NATO in general drastically revise their approach to the Russian aggression.

They review Zelensky’s vaunted ‘plan for victory’, find it realistic and decide to do all they can to facilitate it. Removing all stops, they inundate the Ukraine with a flood of state-of-the-art armaments, including long-range missiles, Patriot systems with plenty of rockets for each, warplanes, cannon shells, tanks, armoured cars, drones and so on.

All restrictions on the use of such weapons are removed, the Ukrainians go on the offensive and drive the invaders back to the 1991 borders or at least to the 2014 ones. The Ukraine then joins NATO and becomes a formidable bastion of the West against any further Russian aggression.

Likelihood. Low to nonexistent. Trump, ventriloquist speaking through his dummy Vance, is clearly not even considering such a possibility.  What he has in mind is something close to my Scenario 3.

The Left-wing cabal using Biden and, should she win, Harris as a figurehead president, has had plenty of opportunity to act on this scenario and has neglected to do so. It’s hard to imagine they’ll suddenly grow the appendage responsible for making bold decisions — or the brain capable of thinking beyond the next election.

Scenario 3 (Realistic). A ceasefire is agreed, with the line of demarcation frozen at the current frontline.

According to the subsequent treaty, the Ukraine cedes the 20 per cent of her territory currently occupied by Russia and promises never to try to join NATO in the future. In return, Russia undertakes not to make any further encroachments on the Ukraine’s sovereignty.

The US underwrites the treaty and uses some mechanism to safeguard it. That could be some kind of demilitarised zone fortified and policed by NATO troops, or simply a security guarantee.

The Russians declare victory and announce another annual state holiday to commemorate it. At the same time they continue their aggressive buildup, knowing that no DMZ in history has ever done what it was supposed to do.

As for security guarantees, the Russians will have no reason to believe NATO in general and the US in particular will honour them. The US and Britain didn’t honour the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, guaranteeing the Ukraine’s security in exchange for her relinquishing nuclear weapons – so why break the habit?

The history of Russia over the past several centuries shows that the country regards any peace treaty as merely a temporary expedient enabling her to rebuild, rearm and have another go. It takes psychotic credulity to believe that this treaty would produce a different outcome.

Give it a couple of years or a couple of decades, but the Russians will come again to claim the rump Ukraine and whatever else they can get their hands on, the Baltics and Poland the likeliest targets.

Likelihood. High. Trump has exactly this scenario in mind, and he’ll have enough clout with Russia and, more important, China to bring it to fruition. Trump, the self-proclaimed champion deal-maker, will threaten Russia with a version of Scenario 2 and China with crippling trade sanctions to get his way

Should he win on 5 November, Trump will thus push his plan through and blow his own trumpet at an eardrum-busting volume, declaring himself the kind of peacemaker Jesus had in mind in his Beatitudes. Moreover, he’ll be able to make sure that the toxic fallout from such surrender by another name happens after his stint at the White House.

Should Harris win, her wirepullers may still decide that Scenario 3 is the only way to avoid Scenario 1. They’ll then act according to Trump’s plan, with minor modifications, taking all the credit for the subsequent peace.

Scenario 3 is indeed the most realistic one, but the Ukraine’s refusal to play along will turn it into a chimera. The Ukrainians may choose to fight to the last bullet and the last man, and they have form in that sort of thing.

Ukrainian nationalists continued to fight the Soviets for several years after 1945, against desperate odds. They chose death over slavery, and whatever the realist in us may think about such self-sacrifice, the moral agent in us must applaud its nobility.

Unfortunately, either potential winner on 5 November, but especially Trump, will try to twist the Ukraine’s arm into compliance with Scenario 3. Making the threat to cut off the supplies altogether wouldn’t be beyond them.

Let’s hold our breath, wait and see what happens. Those of us who believe in miracles, should pray for one in this case. You never know your luck.

P.S. The amazing coup of exploding pagers raises more questions than I have the space or energy to ask. But the question foremost in my mind is what on earth that Iranian ambassador was doing with a Hezbollah pager.

Glancing at FB this morning, I came across a photo of an airliner with the initials TWA prominently displayed. “The paint job on Keir Starmer’s personal jet is almost finished,” said the caption.

I’m not sure this is an appropriate way of expressing political criticism, but it did make me laugh. It also made me think about Sir Keir’s latest achievement, and especially his subsequent comments.

Some 1,700 prisoners received an early release last week, and most of them weren’t gentlemanly tax evaders. That number included drug dealers, robbers, burglars and even the odd killer.

Then the government passed a hasty ad hoc ruling that thousands more would continue to be released in the coming weeks because Britain can’t afford to keep them inside. Our prisons are so grossly overcrowded that they’ve run out of room.

By way of an interim decision, the government announced that henceforth prisoners would only have to serve 40 per cent of their sentences, not the customary 50 per cent we’ve learned to know and, in my case, hate.

The system of tariffs makes a mockery of justice, devaluing sentences and emboldening criminals. When an evildoer knows he’ll be out in half the time he is supposed to serve, he may be encouraged to try something on he would have eschewed otherwise.

Half the term means half the justice, half the punishment and – to appeal to every woke heart – half the rehabilitation. And 40 per cent of the term… well, you can do the maths.

Morally corrupt as that system is, it’s not the worst of it. Last week we were treated to the sickening spectacle of released convicts celebrating outside prison gates in the style of Grand Prix drivers. Bottles of champagne were popped, and crowds of meeters and greeters were doused with pricey booze.

Sir Keir didn’t like the show any more than I did: “Being forced to release people who should be in prison makes me angry,” he said.

But what’s a mother to do? “The choice was pretty simple. We’d got to the point where prisons were so full we had the choice between releasing people in the way that we’ve done it, or not being able to arrest people and put them in prison.” 

And then: “No prime minister should be in that position.” There’s one thing our PM got right.

To be fair, Starmer then made some vague noises about how building more prisons would be the way out of that Hobson’s choice. Yet nothing concrete has been announced. All we’ve learned for sure is that Sir Keir is unhappy about the situation, and it’s all the Tories’ fault.

Some of it doubtless is. However, forgetting partisan squabbles for a second, the problem is more fundamental than the diminishing differences between the main parties. All such parties, along with the governments they form, have lost sight of what governments are for.

Last week, Mario Draghi issued a report calling for an increase of productivity across Europe, and any sensible person should welcome this entreaty. All God’s children like better productivity because… And there Mr Draghi inadvertently pointed at the fundamental problem I’ve alluded to.

Unless we become more productive, explained the former prime minister of Italy, Europe will have no chance of becoming “a beacon of climate responsibility” or of “financing its social model… This is an existential challenge.”

No, it isn’t. And thinking it is lies at the root of the problem.

I happen to regard ‘climate responsibility’ as nothing but a cynical, anti-scientific power-grab by our socialist governing elites, and I don’t have a good word to say for their ‘social model’ either. However, even assuming that governments should be concerned about warm weather and the millions sponging on the state, neither should be their first order of priority.

Such things are strictly secondary, not to say tertiary, to the reason why governments were first instituted among Men, to use the language of America’s clearly misogynist Founders. (They should have said “among Men, Women, Other”. Perhaps it’s time to get the old blue pencil out.) The primary responsibility of any state is to protect the people against those who threaten their liberty, safety and property.

That is to say against foreign enemies, domestic tyrants – and criminals. Everything else, even things immeasurably more important than “climate responsibility” and “social model”, should come into consideration only after the primary function of government has been taken care of.

Hence any responsible statesman in any civilised country has a simplified task of drawing budgets, and focusing one’s mind always simplifies intellectual conundrums.

He should look at the pot of money available or realistically projected and decide how much of it is required to provide for proper defence of the realm and effective law enforcement. That done, he can then decide how to allocate what’s left. But first things first.

I don’t know whether there are any civilised countries left in the world, but what I know for sure is that none of those with even a tenuous claim to that distinction is governed by responsible statesmen. That’s why they wilfully do things in reverse.

They start with allocations for things they hope will keep them in power a while longer, such as “social models”, “climate responsibilities”, education that indoctrinates without educating, subsidies for their sponsors and likely voters, foreign aid for assorted despots and so on.

Only then do they look at what’s left and plan how best to spend it. And if as a result our streets become inundated with released murderers, and our country is no longer capable of defending herself, so be it. There isn’t enough money for such incidentals. We’re skint.

Considering the problem in hand, the government should build as many prisons as it takes to keep all convicted criminals locked up for the duration of their sentence. Letting them out because we can’t afford to keep them in is in itself criminal, as is the refusal to arrest criminals because of prison overcrowding. Starmer is right: such a choice should never arise.

Alas, our ‘leaders’ can’t think along such lines. Instead they blame the previous government, Tory if it’s Labour laying the blame, the other way around when Tories are in power. Yet in this respect, the difference between them is marginal, if any. All of them have lost track of the main role governments should play, busying themselves with walk-ons instead.

That’s why I hope Messrs Cameron, Sunak et al. will join Sir Keir onboard his private jet. Once the paint job has been finished.

Ever since Heraclitus observed that you can’t step into the same river twice, mankind has known that everything develops, irreversibly so. Even natural selection held no secrets for our civilisational ancestors.

Already in the first century BC Lucretius observed that it was by their superior cunning and strength that all existing species were different from those that had become extinct. Plutarch made a similar observation when he wrote about wolves devouring the slower horses and thus contributing to the survival of the faster ones.

It would have indeed taken a blind man to overlook the dynamic essence of nature. All species develop, some thrive, others don’t, and most die out. We now know that some 99 per cent of the species that have ever inhabited the world no longer do.

And even a single biological organism, such as a tree, goes through predetermined biological cycles: birth, childhood, youth, maturity, decline, death. A human being develops over the same cycle, which indisputable observation has led some thinkers, Toynbee and Spengler spring to mind, to come up with the naturalist view of history, perhaps the most anti-Western theory I can think of.

But the really damaging theory of history first appeared in the 18^th century and acquired a sacramental status in the 19^th. That was the idea that each new phase wasn’t only a development of an old one, but also an improvement on it.

Life wasn’t just in flux, with things changing over time. According to progress junkies, things didn’t merely change; they became steadily and ineluctably better. They developed as if with a specific purpose in mind: from primitive to complex, from small to big, from chaos to order, from bad to good, from scatterbrained to rational, from wicked to moral.

The last two forms of development applied to man only, but the tendency was common for all nature. And why not? When later in the 19^th century Nietzsche explained that God was dead, he meant that educated people no longer believed. That was simply an observation, and an accurate one at that.

Therefore, man was no longer perceived as the unique creature made in the image and likeness of God. He was just another order of nature, a beast of a special kind – cleverer than any other animal but an animal nonetheless. Hence man too obeyed ubiquitous natural laws, by then helpfully formulated by Darwin. For evolution, read history.

Darwin explained, being rather economical with the proof, that Homo sapiens started life long ago (millions of years ago? billions? – never mind, as many as it took to make the theory plausible) as a single-cell organism. The single cell kept growing and becoming more complex until it became Charles Darwin via many intermediate stages.

Since Charles Darwin undoubtedly represented progress over an amoeba, the point seemed irrefutable. Progress, which is to say inexorable meliorative development, was now seen as an ontological property of biological life and hence of man, its more advanced element.

In the century preceding Darwin, man was paid a blanket compliment of getting better, not just older. Man had finally begun to acquire reason, having until then flown by the seat of his pants. Progress was under way, and man was growing from his natal senselessness to rationality, and hence from immorality to morality, showing signs that eventually the Rational Millennium was bound to arrive.

Soon Darwin was on hand to explain this tendency in biological terms, and preachers of progress experienced the joy of a safe cracker who hears the final satisfying click. Darwin’s hypotheses fell far below the level of evidential proof required of other sciences, but they were happily accepted as the ultimate truth.

History turned out to be a science after all, and a natural science at that. So what’s a few missing links here and there among progressivist friends? An irrelevant footnote at worst.

In any case, philosophers of progress were happy to leave the biological details for natural scientists to sort out. What mattered to them was the historical truth of meliorative evolution as it applied to human life.

Just look at social and economic formations, the way Darwin’s contemporary Marx looked at them. Can’t you see the steady progress from primitive and crude to complex and refined?

Primordial caveman, hunter and gatherer, developed a barter economy; his descendants progressed to slave ownership and then to feudalism; that was replaced by capitalism; capitalism became imperialism and hence moribund; socialism took over, with ensuing communism set to adumbrate the very millennium of Reason and hence Virtue that those 18^th century philosophes had prophesied.

Not every thinker accepted Marx’s take on progress, but few of them raised any objections to the notion of progress as such. It was patently obvious to all sensible people that life was getting steadily better, however ‘better’ was defined.

Life in the 19^th century was better than in the 18^th; that was better than life in the 16^th century, and there wasn’t even any point talking about earlier times. They were enfolded in darkness out of which man was gradually alighting, guided by the beacon of Reason.

Yet whenever we say that A is better than B, we’re implying the existence of objective valuation criteria enabling us to pass comparative judgement. But in this case such criteria don’t exist.

The criteria a historian uses are based on his own thoughts, experience, sensations. And these are largely affected by his own time. That’s roughly what Benedetto Croce meant when he said: “All history is modern history.”

Our own time is dominated by science and resultant technology, which are constantly getting more intricate and sophisticated. However, it’s slipshod thinking to insist on that basis that life is getting better. There’s no doubt that an Apple Mac represents a technological advance over the quill pen, yet more great books were written with the latter than the former.

History is a progression but not necessarily progress. It’s a chronological development of man’s thought and the acts inspired by thought, but only someone in the grip of wishful thinking would discern invariable melioration in the chronology.

One would have to be blindly committed to the fallacy of progress to insist that Beethoven was better than Bach, Brahms better than Beethoven and Pierre Boulez better than all of them. Or, that Aristotle was a better philosopher than Plato, Kant a better one than either of them, while Foucault and Derrida top the lot by a head.

A modern man may like his way of life, but it’s foolhardy of him to aver that the way of life in, say, Elizabethan England was nowhere near as good. Show me a nuclear reactor, a car and the Internet, and I’ll show you Donne, Marlowe and Shakespeare. They didn’t have modern technology, but then we don’t have any equivalents of them.

Looking at, say, the Middle Ages, modern man sees nothing but ignorance, cruelty and superstition. However, had a student of Albertus Magnus at Paris University in the 13^th century been endowed with the gift of prospective vision, he’d probably look at our times and see nothing but barbarism along with intellectual and moral degeneration.

Neither of such hypothetical individuals would probably want to swap his own way of life for the other one. Their tastes would differ too much.

Yet modern people are conditioned to believe that any change is for the better. They’ve bought the lazy and ill-conceived theory of progress, and they have neither the desire nor the intellectual wherewithal to bring it to task.

This is a very serious matter indeed since, using this theory as a starting point, modern man blithely initiates damaging changes to his way of life because he’s constitutionally unable to regard any change as damaging. Progression always means progress to him, he has no doubts on this score.

However, I’d argue that nothing stunts progress as much as presumption of progress. Man isn’t necessarily getting better because he has more expensive toys to play with. It may be easier to argue he is getting worse.

And he’ll continue to get worse until he is able to assess himself, his past and his present accurately, dispassionately – and with no presumption of progress anywhere in sight.