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The other day I quoted Paul Valéry (d. 1945) who said that lessons of history are never heeded. He probably meant times olden, but in our own time history is compressed and accelerated.

Never mind learning the lessons of centuries ago – we today are so advanced that we can successfully ignore the didactic value of the economic crisis that supposedly ended in 2008-2009.

Oh we know exactly what caused it: a bubble of public and personal indebtedness, burgeoning money supply taking reality out of currency, irresponsible banks flogging unsecured mortgages and piling layers of derivatives sometimes amounting to 10-15 times the underlying market value of the collateral. In 2008 the combined value of outstanding derivatives equalled three times the GDP of the whole world.

But learning the aetiology of a disease isn’t tantamount to treating it, or preventing a relapse. It’s in this sense that the lessons of 2008 have never been learned.

Personal indebtedness in Britain is growing at the same pace as in the run-up to that calamity. So is our national debt: it has grown from about 80 per cent of GDP then to over 90 per cent now (so much for austerity).

Banks are dangling unsecured low-interest loans before people’s eyes, which predictably light up with acquisitive zeal. New cars, exotic holidays, expensive consumer goods are all being bought on credit with nary a thought for tomorrow. This isn’t just us: in the 10 years preceding the 2008 crisis, personal expenditure in the US had run at three times personal income.

In Britain households are borrowing over £1 billion each month. In total, household debt stands at almost £200 billion, excluding mortgages. Actually, most people don’t take mortgages into consideration, seeing them as sound investment because house values always go up. This ignores Isaac Newton, with his sound observation of things that go up only to come down in due course.

The economic problem is so obvious that even economists, whose crystal ball tends to be murky, are talking about a new bubble swelling and a new crisis looming. Yet the way they put it shows that they don’t understand the situation well enough to offer a practical solution.

For, just like its predecessor, the looming crisis is neither new nor economic. In the sense that it’s woven into the very fabric of modern society, it isn’t new. In the sense that its causes are moral and existential, it isn’t economic.

Because economics is really a study of human behaviour, it’s closer to the humanities than to natural science or maths. It’s human nature, when it’s unfettered by moral restraints, that causes crises, not any immutable economic laws or government policies.

Somewhere along the way we’ve lost eschatology, the realisation that life has an ultimate meaning that extends beyond our earthly existence. Hence it’s the process of life that illogically has got to be seen as its meaning.

Rather than preparing ourselves for eternity, we try to cram as much comfort and pleasure into every waking moment. America’s Founders called this process ‘the pursuit of happiness’, while today we more accurately refer to it as seeking instant gratification.

Just as our progenitors pursued their ultimate goal, so are we pursuing ours, sweeping all obstacles aside. One such obstacle is the lamentably gaping chasm between our incomes and our appetites, and all modern economies are designed to bridge this gap.

That’s why most Western governments manage their finances on the same pyramid-scheme principles that a few years ago landed Bernie Madoff in prison for a surreal term. That’s why they run up national debts that can never be repaid (servicing our debt already costs more than we spend on defence). That’s why individual Westerners pile up debts driving them into bankruptcy and insolvency. That’s why bankers lend irresponsibly, trying to drive their bonuses up.

As always, economists try to explain the world in the terms of their own profession. But the world can’t be squeezed into such narrow confines. It stubbornly refutes theories and rejects remedies. It keeps reminding us that the economy is merely an aspect of human behaviour, and not the most important aspect at that.

With apologies for self-quoting, this is how I put it in my 2011 book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis:

“We have replaced religion with (at best) religionism, freedom with liberty, wisdom with cleverness, sentiment with sentimentality, justice with legalism, art with pickled animals, music with amplified noise, statecraft with politicking, love with sex, communication with sound bytes, self-confidence with effrontery, equality before God with levelling, respect for others with political correctness, dignity with amour propre – in short, everything real with virtual caricatures. We now live in a virtual world – so is it at all surprising that we live on virtual money?”

We already know that the economic crisis is systemic, not symptomatic, and its next act is just round the corner. We don’t know how calamitous it’ll be, but such crises tend to outdo their predecessors. Meanwhile, back to the really important news of Leonard DiCaprio finally winning an Oscar.

As any true Russian worthy of the name will tell you, Russia towers over the materialist West in every respect that matters. And the respects in which it doesn’t tower over the West don’t matter.

Unlike Westerners who only care about scented loo paper, the Russians are animated by their mysterious souls, and hence are positively bristling with spirituality. This is just as well, because in every down-to-earth respect the country finds herself in the lower reaches of the Third World.

Russia’s characteristic disdain for physical life, much vaunted by her great writers, inspires the Russians to take literally the biblical advice “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul.”

Hence Russia comfortably leads Europe in bodies killed. According to UN data, 70 per cent of all murders on Europe’s territory are committed in Russia, home to only 19 per cent of Europeans. The country’s murder rate is 20 times higher than in Norway, which makes one wonder if perhaps soulless materialism isn’t without its advantages.

Russia comes in at 51 out of 56 countries rated for quality of life, behind Pakistan and Egypt, but then true Russians, living as they do off the legacy of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, don’t care about such quotidian nonsense (until they come to the West, that is, where they are seduced into soulless materialism while still clearing passport control).

Alas, however, the country doesn’t do much better in the more spiritually elevated categories either.

For example in the freedom of the press rating compiled by Freedom House, Russia stands at 181 out of the world’s 199 countries, below Sudan, the Congo, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Burundi and Chad.

At 195 out of 198 countries in the Verisk Maplecroft corruption rating, Russia also finds herself in a similar neighbourhood, next to Sudan and Burma.

The country’s democracy rating of 129 puts her below that famous bastion of political pluralism Saudi Arabia (!), but – and here one must doff one’s hat – just a whisker above Somalia.

I won’t bore you with any more statistics, but just take my word for it: every survey one cares to look up shows that Russia’s domestic life comfortably fits the cliché of hell on earth.

Her international behaviour doesn’t evoke many serene images of paradise either. During Putin’s tenure Russia has launched unprovoked attacks on Chechnya in 2000, Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014.

Currently Putin’s army is busily vaporising Syrian schools and hospitals. The kind of collateral damage that for Nato members can only result from unfortunate accidents, for Russia represents deliberate policy aimed at terrorising the country into submission to Assad, who’s rapidly turning into a Russian puppet.

Russia’s aggressive forays into Turkey and non-stop violations of other Nato members’ air space are pushing the world towards the devastation of another world war. Hardly a day goes by that either Putin or his mouthpieces don’t threaten the world with nuclear extinction, a threat that’s getting more credible by the day.

And still Col. Putin’s kleptofascist regime produced by a fusion of the KGB and organised crime finds its champions in the West, across the whole political spectrum.

Fascists, swelling the membership rolls of France’s National Front, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, Italy’s Forza Italia, Austria’s Freedom Party have for Putin that warm feeling politicians reserve for those who bankroll their movements – which a newly pious Putin does with nothing short of Christian generosity.

Conservatives, especially those of a slightly authoritarian inclination, praise Putin for being a strong leader who takes no nonsense from liberals and won’t allow homosexual marriages in his own backyard. We should have such a leader, bleat the Hitchenses and Bookers of our press.

(Presumably they’d also be happy to accept as an inevitable corollary routine political assassinations, arbitrary justice dictated by the state, money laundering as the principal economic activity and suppression of the very press in which they make a living. One can only applaud such selfless devotion to public good.)

Businessmen hail Putin’s disdain for environmental red tape, his dispensing with casuistic legality and treating the taxation system as merely a statement of intent.

Lefties adore Putin’s anti-Americanism, along with his constant diatribes against the West’s decadence and materialism. Being lefties, they aren’t bright enough to weigh the fascist alternative in the balance, for Putin offers no other.

In fact the unreconstructed KGB colonel enjoys as much benefit of the doubt today as Hitler did in the 1930s. The ghoulish führer too was admired by fascists like Mosley, assorted anti-Semites, leftie liberals like Lloyd George, businessmen like Henry Ford, conservatives like Lady Astor’s Cliveden set, some of the more prominent royals and, between 23 August, 1939, and 22 June, 1941, while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in effect, even the communists.

This climate of benign toleration mixed with adulation created by way of precipitation a demob, appeasement mentality across Europe, which in turn had well-publicised consequences, expressible in millions of corpses.

History is never short of such useful, often life-saving lessons. But then, as the French poet and essayist Paul Valéry correctly observed, we never learn them.

The Nazi poison infecting most of Europe in the 1940s had a longer half-life than we like to claim. It left a legacy of all sorts of sinister ideas and practices.

For example, the current idea of a European federation revolving on a Franco-German (or, to be precise, Germano-French) axis goes back to the fruitful cooperation between Nazi, Vichy and other European bureaucracies during the war.

Still in its embryonic state, the notion of a single pan-European state was pithily expressed by Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who during the war served as Reichskommissar for the Netherlands: “The new Europe of solidarity and co-operation among all its people will find rapidly increasing prosperity once national economic boundaries are removed.” My friends Angie and Jean-Claude would readily sign their names to this heartfelt statement.

A Nuremberg noose prevented Seyss-Inquart from seeing his dream come true in the new guise of the European Union. But the political philosophy he so ably brought to life in the Low Countries left more than one poisonous legacy.

The Nazis firmly believed that individual lives had nothing but utilitarian value. The extent of their usefulness to the state was determined by, well, the state. If the value was perceived as negative, the state felt it had the right to take the useless life away the better to maintain the spiritual health of society.

Gypsies and especially Jews had to be expelled, exterminated or otherwise removed from the Aryan body brimming with spiritual health – that much was instantly obvious not only to Nazi leaders but, at the time, to most Germans.

But Jews and Gypsies weren’t the only offensive groups. Also blocking the way to achieving the Nazi muscular ideal of mankind were homosexuals, cripples and the mentally ill. By virtue of their deformities they forfeited their right to life, which point was driven home by the cyanide-loaded syringes wielded by German doctors.

That medical procedure was called ‘euthanasia’, which means ‘good death’ in Greek. Indeed, what could possibly be better than killing a few thousand for the noble goal of producing a GM race of unbounded mental and physical health?

The underlying belief that it’s neither God nor the person but the state that has the ultimate sovereignty over human life is common to every brand of socialism, national, international or ‘democratic’ (‘democratic socialism’ is the oxymoron to end all oxymorons). The wording will differ, as will the scale on which this principle is implemented. But the principle will remain the same.

Hence in 2002 Seyss-Inquart’s former bailiwick became the first European country to legalise euthanasia, albeit only for terminally ill patients expressing a “voluntary and well-considered request” to be done in.

Without going into the philosophical and – God forbid – theological aspects of that cannibalistic law, suffice it say that many so-called terminal cases are marginal. Even when all the doctors involved agree that the patient is on his last legs, miraculous recovery may still happen. (Much as I hate using myself as an example, doctors thought my Stage 4 cancer was terminal. Since then you’ve been exposed to 10 years’ worth of my vituperative prose.)

The issue of “voluntary and well-considered request” becomes even murkier when the patient suffers from a mental, rather than physical, illness. By definition, his competence to issue such a request has to be doubted – as should be the ability of psychiatrists to agree on an unequivocal diagnosis in this notoriously obscure branch of medicine.

Yet nothing would hold back the irrepressible Dutch. Between 2011 and 2014 the Dutch state put to death 110 mental patients, of whom some were only diagnosed with autism. (Altogether 5,036 patients were put to ‘good’ death there in 2014 alone.)

Analysing 66 of those 110 cases, psychiatrists from the National Institute of Health concluded that in many instances consulting physicians disagreed on how precisely the legal criteria had been met. Moreover, doctors proceeded with euthanasia in the 37 cases where patients had refused potentially effective treatments.

No one was bothered by the logical inconsistency of it all. If the patients were so mad that they had to be put down for their own good, and ultimately for the good of the state, how could they be deemed sufficiently compos mentis to decide on accepting or rejecting treatment?

This is the thin end of the wedge being driven into the very heart of our civilisation. If there is one founding principle that can be regarded as its cornerstone, it’s the certainty that every human life is sacred – and only God can decide when it ends.

Remove this understanding, and the ostensible differences among all those socialisms, state, national, democratic, international or Soviet pale into rhetorical triviality. They are distinctions, not differences.

The primacy of the state over the individual underpins all modern states – whatever modifiers they attach to their names. We have Holland to thank for continuously reminding us of this fact.

May I suggest that, if at times you act eccentrically, as many Englishmen do, you watch yourself very closely when visiting Holland, especially if you’re of a certain age. By getting off the plane at Schiphol, you may implicitly forfeit personal sovereignty over your life.

My friends will probably find it hard to accept me as a champion of temperance, and in fact I’m slightly hung-over even as I write this.

Having thus established my residence in a glass house, I’d nevertheless like to throw a stone or two – though not at drinking as such, and not even occasional heavy boozing. Few of us are without that particular sin, and this has been thus ever since Eve left some fruit juice out in the sun, for Adam to taste it a few days later and find the effect unexpectedly pleasant.

Not even Jesus held a dim view of drinking in an appropriate context. If he had, he would have turned that water into Ribena, not wine, much to the chagrin of the Cana newlyweds and their guests.

It’s only when endemic drinking stops being a problem in se and becomes instead a symptom of a catastrophic social and cultural malaise that it provides a fit subject for serious contemplation. Such, I’m afraid, is the situation in Britain now.

The story making the rounds at the moment is of a middle-aged female QC, regarded as a top legal mind, caught in flagrante delicto with a 51-year-old solicitor. The pair had had a boozy lunch and decided to consummate the resulting affection against the wall of Waterloo station at the height of the evening rush hour.

The top legal mind had her knickers around her ankles and the solicitor was similarly exposed when the lawyers were arrested for outraging public decency. They were held overnight and issued a caution, which both accepted.

However, six weeks later the top legal mind applied to have her conviction quashed, claiming she had been a victim of sexual assault. This status, unlike that of a willing participant in hanky-panky, entitles her to lifelong anonymity, and the top legal mind must have cottoned on that having her name splashed all over the papers might hinder her assent to damehood. The example of Graeme Stening, her partner cum would-be assailant, is vivid enough.

This sordid incident wouldn’t be worth talking about if it weren’t so depressingly symptomatic of the cultural catastrophe under way in Britain.

I can’t for the life of me imagine a top Queen’s Counsel, say, in the 1970s allowing herself to behave so swinishly no matter how much she drank. Nor do I recall seeing even in the 1980s scores of middleclass professionals throwing up along the whole 2.5-mile length of King’s Road (one of the city’s most upmarket streets, for the out-of-towners among you) every Saturday night.

Neither did many restaurants on the continent exhibit ‘No British groups’ signs in the their windows, as they nowadays do in, for example, Prague. The practical Czechs must have figured out that the profits they might realise from British stag or hen parties won’t cover the inevitable cost of a clean-up possibly followed by refurbishment and fumigation.

The footage of British proles turning places like Ibiza into hell on earth is depressing enough, but booze-fuelled anomie evidently transcends class divides – as anyone can testify who has seen photos of our young royals staggering out of nightclubs in the wee hours. They too talk about ‘going clubbing’, and there I was thinking it was a transitive verb demanding the question ‘Whom?’.

The English are a drinking race, and always have been. But in the past they didn’t drink with the aggressive purpose of smashing to bits the civilisation that makes them English. For civilisations are mainly defined by the inhibitions they impose on human behaviour.

When those inhibitions go out of the window, so does the civilisation. When a middle-aged woman fast-tracked for a damehood gets so blotto that she’s arrested for copulating in a crowded public place, she isn’t just breaking the law. She’s avidly breaking her civilisation.

I remember those office parties (I retired from that nonsense 11 years ago) when we had to send girls from good families home in taxis and tell the drivers where to go because the girls themselves couldn’t remember where they lived. The drivers were also pre-paid for cleaning out the likely vomit.

These weren’t unfortunate accidents. The girls (and of course the boys) actually planned to drink themselves unconscious in front of their colleagues; this was the effect they were after. Before they passed out, some sex play often ensued, as if a drunken stupor was a precondition for passion.

It saddens me to have to chart a route bypassing pubs whenever driving home on a weekend night. When central London throws more drunks under car wheels than central Moscow does nowadays, it’s not drinking as such that’s the problem any longer. So please join me in a mournful glass to commemorate a great civilisation fallen victim to modernity.