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This is one the funniest cartoons I’ve seen lately. But its implications are far from funny.

If the Incarnation and the Resurrection are the two most staggering miracles of Christianity, then the cartoon illustrates the third one: its survival.

It reminds us, in a humorous form, of the precarious balance at the very heart of Christian doctrine, with half a step to either side potentially able to turn it into nothing more than an antiquarian artefact.

The clash between the two terms, homoousios and homoiusios, defined the first ecumenical council at Nicaea in 325 AD. The two words differed in only one letter, ‘i’, ‘iota’ in Greek, which gave rise to the expression “one iota of difference”.

Yet that one letter spelled the difference between survival and demise, universal truth and subversive heresy. At issue was the divinity of Christ and the nature of the Trinity.

Homoousious (‘of one substance’ in Greek) was the doctrine stating that God the Son is of the same essence as the Father and thus is equal and co-eternal with him. Homoiusios referred to the heresy stating that the essence wasn’t the same, but only similar.

That made Jesus a sort of adopted son of the Father, and certainly not his equal. Proponents of that doctrine insisted on a pecking order in which Jesus was a divine being but not God. He occupied a place above any human or even any angel, but below the Father.

The principal champion of that doctrine, probably the deadliest in the history of Christianity, was Arius, a Cyrenaic presbyter. One of his most impassioned opponents was St Nicholas, a Greek bishop from Asia Minor.

A later legend turned him into a nice, cuddly Santa Claus who stuffs children’s stockings with presents. St Nicholas owes his Christmassy reputation to the numerous miracles attributed to him, but perhaps his greatest miracle was defeating Arianism at Nicaea.

Apparently the arguments got so heated that St Nicholas even punched Arius in the face, but then Arius could try the patience of even a saint. Anyway, if you love our civilisation, you should join me in celebrating the TKO victory St Nicholas and his friends won over Arianism at Nicaea.

For, if the difference between the two terms was only one letter, there was a universe of difference between the two doctrines. If a Christian is someone worshipping Jesus as God, then there would have been no more Christians ever had Arius picked himself up from the floor and gone on to win.

Nor, and this point should also be important to non-Christians, would there be any Christian civilisation, no Christian culture. No Giotto, no Dante, no Bach – even no Voltaire or Tolstoy, two apostates from Christianity and yet two products of it.

Arianism was among the first deadly heresies endangering the survival of Christianity, but far from the last one. Throughout its existence Christianity was a ship having to steer a course among both rocks and mines, each threatening its survival.

Here is the list I can think of offhand, and I am sure it isn’t complete:

Gnosticism – Manichean dualism of darkness and light, accompanied by rejection of the body as evil and a claim to special knowledge that will lead to salvation.

Docetism: Christ’s body was not human but only a phantasm, and therefore his sufferings were only apparent.

Chiliasm – the kingdom of God will eventually arrive without God’s help.

Pelagianism – man is unaffected by the Fall and can keep all the divine laws.

Socinianism – denial of the Trinity. Jesus is a deified but not divine man.

Catharism – the physical world is definitely meaningless and possibly evil.

Eckartism (Free Spirit heresy) – it’s possible to reach perfection on earth through merely a life of austerity and spirituality.

Orthodoxy triumphed against all these foes, but it suffered its greatest damage from internecine strife. “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand,” as recorded by St Mark.

The East-West Schism of 1054 split Christianity asunder, and, like the clash between St Nicholas and Arius, it too was largely caused by divergence in the understanding of the Trinity. Atheist commentators would later mock the argument as petty, the way they also mocked “religious wars fought over one letter”.

The issue was that of filioque, a disagreement that seems to be recondite, obscurely theological and, to a non-Christian outsider, trivial.

The West, as represented by Rome, had declared unilaterally that the Holy Spirit proceeds equally from the Father and the Son. The Roman bishopric inserted words to that effect into the Latin text of the Nicaean Creed, though not into the Greek version.

In turn the East, as represented by Constantinople, insisted that the procession was not double but single, from the Father through the Son. And in either event, the East maintained that the West had had no business deciding such matters on its own, without convening an ecumenical council.

The clash wasn’t just academic but violent, coming to the fore both in the 1182 massacre of the Latins (Western Christians) by the Greeks (Eastern Christians) and the 1204 slaughter of the Greeks by the Latins during the Fourth Crusade.

What to us may seem like a squabble over technicalities was a matter of life or death to our ancestors. And they were right.

Without going too deep into matters theological, the issue of filioque had far-reaching secular ramifications as well. The Western doctrine is symbolically represented by an equilateral triangle, with the Holy Spirit proceeding equally from the Father and the Son. By contrast, the Eastern version is more like a vertical line leading from the Father through the Son.

Could that be why political pluralism found a more natural home in the West, and political tyranny in the East? Let’s not forget that for at least a millennium and a half Christianity was a dominant factor in every walk of life, and the briefest of looks at even today’s cultural and political institutions will serve a useful reminder of that fact.

The balance of Christian orthodoxy has survived in the East, perhaps the only doctrinal shift that didn’t bring the house down. But the structure was badly shaken, becoming less sturdy on both sides as a result. Christianity became more vulnerable to its enemies, less animated by its erstwhile pugnacity.

St Nicholas, once he has wound down his parcel delivery business for another year, must be looking on with sadness in his eyes. He fought, he won, but those who came after him have frittered his victory away. But not completely! exclaims the old saint and sits up. And the look in his eyes once again becomes a ho-ho-whole lot steelier.

Yesterday I vented some of my bile (don’t worry, I have plenty left) on the subversive slogan of modernity one sees on every public building in France.

But that’s not all one sees everywhere one goes, not during this season. For laid out in front of the church in every village is a beautiful Nativity scene.

Some of the crêches are simple, some quite elaborate. For example, the Nativity scene in one village near us occupies an area the size of a tennis court, with all the people and animals live-size or even bigger.

Christmas lights are everywhere, for all the government warnings about the need to save electricity. Such warnings are largely ignored. The people of a country constitutionally committed to secularism since 1905 won’t let the state prevent them from celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ with all the proper pomp and circumstance.

Churches all around us were bursting with worshippers last night – this though not every church had an ordained priest in attendance. All over Europe professions devoted to selfless, poorly paid service are losing staff, not just the clergy but also nurses, carers, charity workers.

In rural France, one priest often has to cover several churches, sometimes as many as 40 of them. Anyone sticking to the old-fashioned notion that Mass ought to be celebrated by an ordained clergyman has to make sure in advance that the service he plans to attend will be so blessed.

Ours was, and it was deeply moving. The regular curé was present but, at 95 or so, he was too frail to celebrate the Mass by himself. Most of the work was done by another priest, but the old man served the host and later said a few words, bidding a cheerful good-bye to the congregation.

The moving solemnity of the occasion was in contrast to this morning’s Sky News broadcast, featuring an interview with a seaman serving overseas. The seaman was actually a seawoman, which these days is par for the course.

Her interview served a useful reminder that Yuletide is conducive not only to joyous revelries and solemn contemplations but also to bone-crushing banality.

“Do you miss your family at Christmas?” “Yes.” “Tell us how your family celebrates Christmas.” At that point my ears perked up. Obviously, I thought, the interviewer knows that the reply will be whacky and imaginative.

It wasn’t: “We put on funny jumpers and paper hats, Mum makes a big meal, and we play a lot of Christmas music.” Well, I never. Some people will go out of their way to be original.

Yet this is the day when one doesn’t really crave originality. One longs for tradition instead, unifying not separating, same for all. So even that pointless interview didn’t jar this morning as it would have done on any other day.

Happy Christmas to all of you, my readers! May the simple joy of this day stay with you all year, unsullied by sadness and tragedy. If you can spare a thought for Him whose birthday we celebrate today, so much the better. But rest assured that, even if you can’t, He will be thinking of you, and His thoughts will be full of love.

P.S. If you plan to operate a car today, please take special care. Because men often drink a lot on Christmas Day, they ask their wives to drive.

These words, without the quotation marks, appear on every public building here in France, which makes them hard to avoid. These are the founding words of modernity, and not just in France.

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t drive past our village council, where I see that slogan proudly emblazoned on the façade. And each time, I rejoice – one should always celebrate, if only inwardly, any reminder of the truth.

That’s what the slogan of the French Republic does: it reminds me of the truth. But it does so not by affirmation but by negation. By telling me not what the truth is but what it isn’t.

I hope that one day that triad will be submitted as Exhibit A at the trial of modernity. The charge will be grand larceny.

The slogan first gained currency during the French Revolution, an impassioned attempt to destroy the edifice that Christendom had built over 18 centuries. Yet when the mob got going in earnest, the revolutionaries found the building too sturdy to be razed to the ground.

So they settled for the next best thing. They kept the house standing, but evicted its rightful owners, those who had built it in the first place, added numerous extensions, decorated the house inside and out, lovingly maintained it for centuries.

New owners moved in, took stock of the verbal furniture and decided to keep some of it, to dupe the masses into thinking that a change of ownership didn’t just mean unrestrained vandalism. The vocabulary they found especially useful highlighted freedom, equality and brotherhood, three pillars of Christianity.

That added perfidy to vandalism and vulgarity to beauty. The new owners didn’t break the old furniture into sticks; they reupholstered it in ugly, lurid floral patterns. They didn’t yank the icons off the walls and toss them onto a bonfire; they disfigured them by using crayons and charcoal to add obscene details.

Freedom was one such icon, God’s gift to man. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” recorded St John. Perhaps “even freer” would have been more accurate, if less sonorous. For the first gift of freedom had been given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

It was the gift of free will, the ability to make uncoerced choices between right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust, good and bad. Such is the ultimate freedom, the only kind that emphasises the chasm separating man from beasts.

Ostensibly, wild beasts are free to do anything they want: run in any direction, sleep whenever or wherever they want, pounce on whatever they choose. But in fact, they aren’t free; they are enslaved. They are slaves to their biological makeups, and their behaviour is predetermined for ever.

Man, on the other hand, can use his free will to raise himself high above his physical nature, so high that it would be barely visible. That would be the right choice, but man is equally free to make a wrong one. Adam and Eve chose wrong and stigmatised mankind with the mark of original sin. Man was no longer perfect, but he was still free. That is to say he was still human – freedom was to remain his immanent property for ever.

Yet that’s not what liberté meant to the vandalising vulgarians, and it’s no accident that the distinction between freedom and liberty doesn’t exist in French. Their liberty came to them not from God but from the guillotine. Liberty was delivered to them on a platter containing piles of severed heads.

No wonder that their vulgar prophets talked about social contracts: their liberty was a transactional deal enforced by violence. Contracts replaced covenants; vulgarity replaced beauty; falsehood replaced truth.

Equality was another Christian property suffering the same gruesome fate. To the previous owners of the house, all people were equal before an authority infinitely higher than earthly kings or magistrates.

Everyone was regarded as an autonomous human being, to be cherished not because of any towering achievement or superior character but simply because he was indeed human. In fact, people short of achievement or incapable of it, like frail boys routinely drowned by the Spartans or unwanted baby girls left to die in the woods by the Romans, began to be seen as God’s creatures to be loved before all others.

Though some people may have been wicked, some weak and some moribund, none was useless. They all had redeeming qualities because they had all been redeemed. They were equal in a way that trumped the mundane inequality of birth, wealth or status.

The vulgarising vandals replaced that sublime equality with crude levelling. That was a lie even on its own puny terms: if anything, worldly, material inequalities multiplied.

But at a higher, spiritual level, humanism proved its inhumanity. If both prince and pauper used to be equally sustained by the hope of salvation and life everlasting, modernity gave the pauper the false promise of becoming a prince, and it gave the prince the false hope of keeping the pauper at arm’s length.

What followed was a series of increasingly destructive wars, the likes of which the world had never seen. Hundreds of millions of corpses later, the only equality on offer was proved to be equality of the grave.

Brotherhood was another item of furniture vulgarised by the vandals. The old owners knew they were all brothers for the simple reason that they all had the same father. Even if at times they, like Cain and Abel, didn’t behave in a brotherly fashion, they always knew that their kinship would survive even if one of the brothers didn’t.

The new owners knocked the stuffing out of that furniture and upholstered the hard wood with a thin layer of gaudy, kitschy fabric. The chair became uncomfortable and eventually impossible to sit on – one hears today’s leaders address their flock as fellow citizens but never as their brothers. And fellow citizenship is a much flimsier bond than ultimate kinship.

Tomorrow, we’ll celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, which fact everyone knows, but most people would rather forget. What most people don’t even know or might have forgotten is that we’ll also be celebrating real freedom, real equality, real brotherhood.

Let the vulgarians celebrate their fake triad. Christians will acclaim the real Trinity.  

Let’s set the scene first.

Dame Esther Rantzen, some kind of TV personality (sorry, but my ignorance of the genre doesn’t allow me to be more specific), has been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer.

She now wants to go to the suicide clinic in Switzerland to end her life. Her relations wish to travel with her to provide moral support, which creates all sorts of problems.

Eight years ago Parliament voted against legalising assisted suicide. That makes aiding and abetting it a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Since sending her nearest and dearest down isn’t the legacy Dame Esther wishes to leave behind, she made an impassioned plea to Parliament, begging it to put the issue to another vote.

As an aside, this fits in with the modern democratic pattern. Any new law catering to fashionable sensibilities gets chiselled in eternally durable stone. Yet a law going against such sensibilities is written on sand, which can be blown away by a gust of emotive righteousness.

Now, if you or I made that plea, we’d at best receive a reply from our local MP, more likely from his secretary, to the effect that he is deeply sympathetic and all that, but there is little he can do about it. With that he’d remain faithfully ours.

But since Dame Esther is a TV personality, she can’t be fobbed off quite so easily. Hence a lively debate ensued, underpinned with words like ‘dying with dignity’, ‘agony’, ‘unbearable pain’, ‘anguish of the whole family’ and so forth.

However, some public figures, including an MP or two, are arguing against another vote on the issue because they object to assisted suicide for any number of reasons.

Lord Sumption thinks that: “the real issue here is not about the merits or demerits of assisted suicide – it’s a question of the power of the state. Does the state have the moral right to intervene in such an intensely personal and agonising issue?”

On balance, he thinks the state has that right, which is why he’d vote for such a law. I’d vote against it, but not for the reason cited by Lord Sumption.

I’m as opposed as the next man to expanding the power of the state, but the issue here is precisely about “the merits and demerits”. If assisted suicide has the demerit of an unlawful taking of a human life, then it falls into the legitimate remit of any state, no matter how hands-off and libertarian.

Other commentators talk about slippery slopes and the thin ends of wedges. Relying on empirical evidence, they sensibly cite the examples of Holland and Belgium, the first countries that legalised euthanasia.

And let me tell you, when it comes to promoting modern perversions, those countries are indeed the lowest of the low. Once euthanasia became legal, Netherlandish doctors began to kill people at an ever-increasing rate.

They bump off demented patients, even though the law says the euthanasia candidate has to be of sound mind. They kill mentally disturbed teenagers and young girls with anorexia. They put to death women grieving for their dead husbands.

All in all, euthanasia accounts for one in every 20 deaths in Holland, and the proportion is steadily going up. It’s hard to avoid the impression that, if euthanasia becomes legal, sooner or later it’ll become compulsory.

Other countries follow suit. For example, in Canada patients are offered death over treatment as a way of cutting medical costs. That show of fiscal prudence, otherwise commendable, here seems ever so slightly inappropriate, but I’m no expert on pecuniary matters.

I’m better at catching the whiffs of modern deviancy, and one of them is a thinly disguised lament that we have too many old people for our own good. More and more people have the audacity to live so long that they deplete state coffers without adding anything to them.

Putting the wrinklies down can thus be seen as a public service, while clinging on to life against all statistical odds begins to look like obtuse, bloody-minded selfishness. That makes assisted suicide a public-spirited act akin to heroic martyrdom. And if some old codger is too slow to appreciate the morality involved, he may be helped to see the light, or rather darkness.

Getting back to Dame Esther, I have personal reasons for sympathising with her plight, if not with her plea. Some 20 years ago, I too was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer considered incurable.

In fact, I still remember a Scottish consultant with a whole alphabet after his name declaring: “Your prognersis is puer”. I mentally translated that diagnosis into English as saying that my prognosis was poor and rendered my soul to God.

Yet here I am, 20 years later, alternately regaling and disgusting you with my vituperative comments on modernity – including the aspect of it that deals with assisted dying. Call it a miracle, call it good luck but, whatever you call it, it happens.

The possibility, however remote, of recovery from cancer and other deadly conditions is an argument against assisted suicide, but it’s not a very strong argument statistically. All other arguments mentioned above are stronger, and I’d add to them the possibility of a misdiagnosis.

Yet what surprises me is that not a single objection to assisted suicide I’ve read in the past few days refers even obliquely to the fact that for many centuries our civilisation regarded suicide as a sin worse than murder. Since that view was based on the formative civilisational premise, one would expect it to get an airing, even if it’s then emphatically dismissed.

In fact, most commentators hasten to establish their atheist credentials first, lest they may be accused of objecting to that practice for uncool reasons. One would think that days before the world will celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, that name should at least come up in the historical context if no other.

Yet for centuries suicides were denied Christian burial, and they couldn’t be interred on consecrated grounds, a privilege not denied to murderers. One reason for that was that a murderer could repent his sin, but a suicide obviously couldn’t.

But there was a philosophical reason too, every bit as valid as the ecclesiastical one. A murderer takes one human life or several, but he doesn’t defy life as such. That’s exactly what a suicide does.

He doesn’t just take a human life, he destroys the very notion of human life. He also commits the worst cardinal sin of pride by claiming total sovereignty over his own life, denying God even minority co-ownership.

A suicide is different not only from a murderer, but also from a martyr. A martyr sacrifices his life for a cause he considers greater than himself. He thereby asserts the proper hierarchy by acknowledging that such causes exist. His is an act of love.

A suicide says by his very act that no cause is greater than himself. He hates all of them; he detests life. His is an act of hate. As the be all, he feels entitled to become the end all – Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden for a lesser display of hubris.

I’m not, God forbid, suggesting that my archaic view of the world should still hold sway over modern sensibilities. I’m just surprised that, so close to Christmas, no debater has made even a passing reference to the Christian implications of assisted suicide.

After all, just seven months ago our king was anointed in the name of Our Lord, promising to uphold his religion. I’d wonder how King Charles feels about assisted suicide, but I’d rather not commit an act of lèse-majesté. I’ll pray for Dame Esther Rantzen instead.

The English lexicon of abuse isn’t a patch on its Russian equivalent, but it’s certainly fit for most purposes as it is, without crying out for expansion.

It also varies from country to country, although our globalised media are pushing English, including this aspect of it, towards uniformity. Still, an irate Briton is less likely than an American to imply an oedipal relationship between a man and his mother. Then an American typically invokes a certain part of the female anatomy only metonymically, to denigrate a woman; while a Briton is more likely to use it metaphorically, to denigrate a man.

Yet both nations have seen fit to augment their arsenal of swearing with the blunderbuss of perhaps the most stigmatising term of all: ‘far-Right extremist’. This is used indiscriminately to demonise anyone who deviates one iota from the ‘liberal’ agenda of today.

The agenda is set by the ‘liberal’ media, which misnomer describes most newspapers and almost all TV channels. The goalposts are moveable: for example, a generation ago a putative far-Right extremist denied that the world would freeze to death; today, he denies that the world will fry to death.

Now, we all of us abhor discrimination in the widespread, strictly pejorative, sense of the word. Yet the word has its inoffensive side: simply denoting recognition of the difference between one thing and another.

In that capacity, discrimination is an indispensable asset, enabling people to tell good from bad, beautiful from ugly, sinful from virtuous and – germane to my today’s subject – precise from imprecise. Such categories are vital to language because it thrives on precision and withers by vagueness.

Unless words are used in their strict meaning, the same for all, any communication between two speakers may turn into a game of Chinese whispers. This is especially true of the political vocabulary, where words don’t just denote things or concepts. They also communicate prejudices, emotions and ideologies.

Those foreign implants have proved so virile that political terms nowadays communicate only prejudices, emotions and ideologies. Since these differ from one man to another, most communication turns into miscommunication. ‘Far-Right’ is a case in point.

It can mean so much that it ends up meaning nothing. For example, I’ve seen this term used to describe both Adolph Hitler and Margaret Thatcher, which implies commonality where there was none. And I do mean none: there existed not a single policy advocated by both.

This is the lexical confusion that Stephen Glover commendably set out to put straight in today’s article. He rebuked, correctly and deservedly, irresponsible hacks who attach that stigmatising tag to anyone whose view of life or any of its aspects isn’t identical to that of the BBC and The Guardian.

However, sensing that his assault would be defanged in the absence of his own, correct, definition, Mr Glover dug a hole for himself. He tried to make the term more precise, only succeeding in making it less precise. This is what he wrote:

“Let’s define what the expression means. There’s a large overlap with fascism. Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were of the far-Right. They were undemocratic, totalitarian and oppressive. They outlawed free speech and a free Press. In almost all respects, their policies were identical to those of far-Left tyrants such as Stalin.”

If I understand Mr Glover correctly, the far-Right is, “in almost all respects”, the same as the far-Left. That invalidates both terms so much that they can be safely deleted from the dictionary. Rather than clarifying the issue, Mr Glover obscured it.

Also, he left the economic aspect out of it, an omission I usually welcome because I think the economy as the prime mover of society is these days overrated by the Right, Left and Centre alike. That’s what I call ‘totalitarian economism’, which intellectual trend is too simplistic to be valid.

However, recognition that the economy isn’t everything doesn’t mean it’s nothing. While economic freedom doesn’t always produce political liberty, political liberty always produces economic freedom. That alone should make the economy worth considering even before we look at the history of social discontent caused by economic ills.

Socialism in its different guises ultimately boils down to a triumph of centralism over localism, and of the state over the individual. In that sense, the economies of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the Soviet Union were similar, though not identical.

They were all socialist, which has to mean Left-wing. Yet I wouldn’t lump them together – it’s that discrimination business again, let’s not push it aside.

Of the three economies, Stalin’s was the most radical. Although some artisans and small cooperatives were allowed to operate, the Soviet economy conformed to Marx’s idea of the state owning “the means of production”.

Hitler’s economy, on the other hand, was corporatist, not unvarnished Marxist. There was no wholesale, Soviet-style nationalisation. Messrs Krupp, Thyssen and Porsche retained the ownership of their concerns, but de facto those owners were turned into managers.

The state told them what products to manufacture and in what quantities, how much to charge for them and how much to pay the workers. The state controlled, but it didn’t own, which was the corporatist version of socialism.

Mussolini practised yet another version. Unlike Hitler, he had been an ideological socialist before he became a fascist dictator. In both capacities, he advocated state control, which made him closer to Stalin and Hitler than, say, to Margaret Thatcher.

Yet Mussolini’s view of the economy was formed not only by the Marxist Georges Sorel, but also by the libertarian Alberto di Stefani. His attempt to split the difference is generally known as syndicalism, which was more Sorel than di Stefani, but not really like Stalin.

While the Bolsheviks talked about workers’ control without meaning it, Mussolini tried to practise the idea by transferring some real power to the labour unions. In that sense, he wasn’t a million miles away from our Labour politicians from the 1950s.

Yet Stalin’s radicalism, Hitler’s corporatism and Mussolini’s syndicalism were all aspects of socialism, which is many awful things, but being far-Right certainly isn’t one of them.

Franco, on the other hand, wasn’t a fascist at all, although he aligned himself with the fascist, Mussolini-like Falange to win the Civil War. Nor was Franco a totalitarian, although he was indeed oppressive and undemocratic. However, lumping him together with Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin betokens either lazy thinking or shabby education.

It took Franco some 10-20 years to heal the bleeding wounds of the internecine Civil War, during which period he did rule with a heavy hand. But his economics steadily moved from the macro to the micro end. That tendency culminated in the 1959 Stabilisation and Liberalisation Plan, ushering in free-market reforms.

In parallel, Spain moved closer to Western liberties, and towards the end of Franco’s rule she wasn’t substantially different from other European nations. He was never Left-wing in the sense in which the other three rulers were. At his most oppressive Franco most resembled the traditional Western autocratic ruler. One tell-tale sign of that affiliation is that Franco was a pious Catholic working hand in hand with the Church, not a militant atheist like the other three.

In short, Mr Glover failed to straighten out the taxonomic mess he so correctly identified. Yet the fault lies not with him but with the inadequacy of modern taxonomy, going back, like so many modern perversions, to France circa 1789.

The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ first appeared when members of the country’s National Assembly divided into supporters of l’ancien régime to the president’s right and supporters of the revolution to his left. Since then, the two terms have been inflated like helium balloons to a point where they burst, leaving a terminological mess behind them.

In my book How the West Was Lost I proposed a different taxonomy, based on the subject’s relationship to Western civilisation, otherwise known as Christendom. The two broad categories I suggested were Westman and Modman, each with sub-categories.

Without going into lengthy detail, of the three rulers Mr Glover described as far-Right, Hitler and Mussolini (along with Stalin) would in my system be described as ‘nihilist Modmen’, whereas Messrs Sunak, Biden and Macron are ‘philistine Modmen’. Franco, on the other hand, would be ‘authoritarian Westman’.

This taxonomy is far from perfect, but then in this life we are seldom blessed with perfection. Yet I think it describes political realities more accurately than the current distinction between Right and Left.

It also knocks the verbal weapon of ‘far-Right extremist’ out of the hands of people who aren’t fit to bear lexical arms. That’s worth having.

No, young Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 didn’t put this sanguinary desideratum in quite so many words. Yet in a recent Harvard-Harris poll, 51 per cent of them said they believed the long-term answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.”

Even young (an adjective I use interchangeably with ‘silly’) people must realise what would happen to the Israeli Jews as a result. If they don’t, the events of 7 October should give them an accurate idea.

Currently, there are over seven million Jews in Israel. Assuming that a million or so would be able to get out in the nick of time, some six million would be slaughtered. Does the numeral sound familiar?

Actually, I shouldn’t accuse those youngsters of an inability to anticipate obvious consequences. Over 58 per cent of them agreed that “Hamas would like to commit genocide against the Jews in Israel.” That understanding, however, proved no hindrance to their response.

An additional 32 per cent believed in a two-state solution, which means arriving at the same outcome slightly more slowly. Or do they think that, if Hamas turned into, say, Hamasia or Hamastan, it would become better-disposed towards Jews?

Considering that only four per cent of Americans aged 65 and over felt Israel should be ended, my argument in favour of raising the voting age at least to 25, better still 30, got a tremendous boost. Anyone who casts a ballot assumes a political responsibility, and I’d think it axiomatic that responsibilities should only ever be given to responsible people. Yet all 2,034 respondents were registered voters.

Also, 60 per cent of the youngsters said Hamas’s terrorist raid was “justified by the grievance of Palestinians”, a view shared by 27 per cent of Americans overall. Quite. A craving for a two-state solution and a grievance against those who oppose it justify raping and murdering Israeli girls, not always in that order.

Commenting on the poll, Sen. Roger Marshall said: “Ideological rot among young Americans, driven by woke values and victim culture, has gotten so bad they’ve convinced themselves to sympathize with actual terrorists who hate America.”

Well, yes, sure, those terrorists hate America, but it’s a long-distance hatred, more or less abstract. The target of their concrete, immediate hatred is Israel in particular and Jews in general. I’m sure those young Americans didn’t ponder Hamas’s anti-Americanism too deeply. No, they cast their murderous vote because they too hate Israel and Jews.

Before I let older Americans off the hook, 37 per cent of them said it was Israel that was committing genocide, which means over a third of all Americans don’t even know what the word means. Sixty per cent of the youngsters agreed, and 53 per cent added that therefore no one should be punished for supporting the “genocide of Jews”.

This is what’s called ‘liberalism’ in America and elsewhere. A liberal is these days someone who thinks people should be punished for using a wrong personal pronoun but not for advocating the murder of millions of people, provided they are Jews.

I’ve never had any first-hand experience of the American educational system, and even my second-hand involvement with it is several decades out of date. Yet this poll is sufficient to suggest it’s failing. Oh, I’m sure enough young Americans emerge into the outside world armed to the teeth with an ability to programme a computer, calculate compounded interest, and manipulate share prices.

It’s in the area of the humanities that American education seems wanting. For it’s the humanities that should inculcate into youngsters the moral and philosophical fundamentals of our civilisation. As a minimum, they ought to learn – with apologies to Kipling – that liberalism is liberalism, fascism is fascism, and never the twain should meet.

In fact, while today’s fascism isn’t becoming any more liberal, today’s liberalism is becoming more and more fascistic. This isn’t a case of the opposites attracting, which cliché defies both common sense and empirical observation.

If the opposites attract, they aren’t really opposites. However dissimilar they may be on the outside, their cores overlap on some fundamental premises or – in the case of today’s liberalism and fascism – common genealogy.

What we are observing is Enlightenment chickens coming home to roost, except that on closer examination those fluffy creatures turn out to be birds of prey tearing to shreds the spiritual flesh of the West. This season is a good time to remind ourselves of some home truths, one of which is that, without Christianity, the West is a rudderless ship cast adrift. Sooner or later it’ll crash against the rocks, and there will be no survivors.

If you don’t believe any of these melancholy musings, take another look at the poll under examination. Over half of all young voters in the leading nation of the West see nothing wrong with a Holocaust Mark II. Moreover, they don’t think that agitating for it should in any way be curtailed.

Not that I suggest for one second that a similar poll would yield different results in Britain, France or Holland. The problem isn’t national but civilisational – and also, I believe, physiological.

It’s not for nothing that throughout recorded history, societies have had councils of elders, but not councils of youngsters. It’s only various hues of fascism, red, brown or these days ‘liberal’, that take their lead from barely post-pubescent boys and girls. (Have you listened to Greta Thunberg lately?)

Trotsky, the guru of the European Left, knew where the constituency for his brand of fascism could be found. “The youth,” he said, “is the barometer of a nation”. Nowadays, it’s not only the barometer but also the navigator, unerringly charting a route to perdition.

Paedocracy, I often repeat, is much more damaging than its more popular cognate. This poll shows just how damaging it can be. It also shows other things, wider, deeper and scarier. But with carols playing and Christmas trees lit-up, now isn’t the right time to think of them.

Dear brother in Christ,

I am Paul and I am appalled.

For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers. But verily I say unto thee, methinks my prayers for thee are not always answered.

As thou knowest, I keep a watchful eye on God’s creation, and methinks its affairs are not as serene as my surroundings up here. So what is it I hear about thou now letting priests bless “homosexual and other ‘irregular’ couples”?

“God welcomes everyone”, thou sayest, and, I have it on good authority, that is God’s own truth. Yea, God welcomes everyone. But He does not welcome everything. One thing He does not welcome is sin. Verily I say unto you, He hates it. ‘Tis the sinner He loves, not the sin.

People receiving a blessing, thou sayest, “should not be required to have prior moral perfection.” So yea, by all means, bless sinners singly, as Christians. But bless not two of them together for the sin they commit together.

He who lyeth with mankind or she who lyeth with womankind is welcome to be blessed in the house of God. But the sin shall be condemned.

And I have told thee three times if I have told thee once that mankind lying with mankind or womankind with womankind is a sin. It is unseemly, I wrote to Romans. Such people shall not inherit the kingdom of God, I explained to Corinthians. Same-sex lying, I taught Timothy, is contrary to sound doctrine.

Leviticus had said the same thing before me: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”

I say unto you that sex is in no wise righteous betwixt two men, and two women also. That is to say it is a sin. And thy remit is not blessing sin, doest thou not agree? I spoke to my friend Peter, whose chair thou occupieth, and he sayeth the same thing: condemn sin or get off my chair.

Thou sayest “same-sex and ‘irregular’ couples” shall be blessed. What irregular couples doest thou mean? Art thou referring to sex betwixt brother and sister or father and daughter? Or betwixt mankind and fowl of the air or beasts of the field? Thy namesake did bless fowl and beasts, but not for lying with mankind or womankind.

Change thy ways, brother, for tomorrow thou may well die.

Thy Cardinal Fernández sayeth thou art “firm on the traditional doctrine of the Church.” Methinks I am no longer part of it, and neither is the Old Testament. Didst thou decide to expel us on thine own?

Thou hast the “pastoral vision” of “broadening” the appeal of our church, thou sayest. I am with thee on this vision. Verily I say unto you, I had the same vision and was persecuted for it, going to heaven before my time. But I broadened the appeal of Christ Jesus by damning sin, not blessing it.

Francis, verily I say unto you, thou art in danger of hell fire. Take thought for the morrow for the morrow is nigh.

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with thee, but look out. And my love be with you in Christ Jesus, but thou triest my patience. Amen.

It has come back as the columnist Peter Hitchens, a man of modest intellect but immodest egotism. Hence every article he writes includes phrases like “no one has listened to me”, “will you now listen to me?”, “as I have been saying all along” and some such.

The impression of oracular powers is hard to avoid. But who is the intended target audience? It can’t be just the readers of The Mail on Sunday. Even assuming they hang on to every word Hitchens vouchsafes them from his lofty height, there is precious little they can do to take any corrective actions.

So Hitchens’s ‘you’ is aimed at the powers that be, Western governments, which could avoid silly mistakes by listening to him. Presumably, every one of them should include a department whose sole function would be to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest Hitchens’s prophesies.

Logically following from there is the idea that political sagacity should be quantified and measured in specific units, hitchenses. Governments could then be rated on a five-star system, from five hitchenses to none.

Seriously now, that kind of earth-shattering tastelessness would make one reject every word Hitchens has ever uttered, even those that would be acceptable if coming from a different source. Rejecting his mendacious drivel on the subject of Putin’s Russia, on the other hand, would be easy even if Hitchens were otherwise a sensible, well-informed, self-effacing man.

I do listen to him because I see it as my duty to counter enemy propaganda, which is what Hitchens’s writings on that topic are. Whether he does a Lord Haw Haw wittingly or unwittingly is a matter for his priest or perhaps the Crown Prosecution Office. What is important to me is that, to paraphrase what Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman, every word he writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.

Yesterday, for example, Hitchens took aim at “many people [who] reacted to [the Russian aggression] by developing a strange admiration for Ukraine. But it is in fact a corrupt, troubled, ill-governed and increasingly unfree country, not all that different from Russia in many ways.”

That’s a lie. Compared to Russia, the Ukraine is an impeccable Western democracy, an oasis of liberty. Unlike Russia, the Ukraine holds real, as opposed to bogus, elections. Her elected leaders are accountable to the people who are informed by the uncensored media. The Ukrainian president isn’t a dictator like Putin – his power is no greater than that of a French or American president.

The Ukraine may be more corrupt than, say, Britain, but infinitely less so than Russia that’s ruled by an eerie blend of secret police and organised crime. Ukrainian special forces don’t murder political opponents, and those few who ever go to prison are demonstrable agents of Putin’s Russia.

As to her being “unfree”, the government’s conduct of the war is openly criticised in the Ukrainian press – at wartime, when even countries like the US and Britain have been known to suspend some civil liberties. And what do you know, the editors of those papers aren’t even arrested, never mind defenestrated, shot out of hand, poisoned or, if they are lucky, imprisoned, as they are in Russia. There prison terms of up to 10 years or longer have been meted out for the slightest hint of criticism, even for referring to the war as such, not as the mandated ‘special military operation’.

The admiration that all decent people feel for the Ukraine isn’t “strange”. It’s richly merited by the people heroically resisting brutal invaders who are committing the kind of savage, large-scale atrocities that neither the Ukraine nor indeed Europe has experienced since the big war.

Then comes the story of the stalled Ukrainian counteroffensive, which Hitchens knew was going to fail, yet “I kept my mouth shut because apparently impossible things can sometimes happen, but it seemed to me to be more likely that the attack would stall. It has duly done so.”

Mouth shut? Excuse me? Practically every week Hitchens has been agitating for the Ukraine’s surrender, which he calls peaceful negotiations. And before the full-scale invasion, hardly a week went by that he didn’t extol Putin as the “conservative and Christian” leader he wished Britain could have. As to Putin’s stated ambition to rebuild the Soviet empire to its past glory, Hitchens always treated it with barely concealed sympathy.

It’s only when the evidence of the mass tortures, rapes, murders and looting of civilians began to emerge from the occupied areas that Hitchens moderated his almost erotic admiration of the muscled man in the Kremlin.

The counteroffensive hasn’t succeeded in driving the invaders out largely because of the massive propaganda effort launched by Putin’s trolls, moles, agents of influence and useful idiots (you decide which category Hitchens falls into).

They’ve been screaming for years that the Ukraine is a Nazi state (Hitchens always refers to the 2014 revolution as a “putsch”), corrupt, historically a part of Russia, that Putin is legitimately concerned with Nato’s eastward expansion and hence the invasion is Nato’s fault, that supporting the Ukraine will impoverish Western tax-payers for no good cause – well, I don’t want to paraphrase everything Hitchens has been writing for at least 10 years and possibly longer.

When the totality of such spirit-sapping propaganda reached a critical mass, Western leaders, emphatically including Biden, got an excuse for keeping down the level of assistance for the Ukraine, indulging thereby their own craven instincts.

Armaments have been drip-fed to the Ukraine, their quality, quantity and types sufficient for keeping her in the fight but not for her winning. Had the Ukrainian army got the tanks, warplanes and long-range missiles from the start, the war would have ended months ago, and the thousands of deaths that Hitchens sheds crocodile tears over wouldn’t have happened.

The logical conclusion would be for Western governments to realise the error of their ways and start supplying the Ukraine properly, without talking about “the danger of escalation” or “provoking Putin”. The conclusion of the Putin propagandist, aka Peter Hitchens, is that the Ukraine should sue for peace, which is another term for surrendering.

Anyone whose intelligence is one notch above imbecility knows that ceding the occupied territory to Putin wouldn’t bring peace. It would bring a lull of a couple of years, or however many it would take for Russia to regroup, restock, rearm and then go again, that time rolling not only over the Ukraine but also over much of Eastern Europe, including some Nato members.

Then came that claim of oracular powers and unique knowledge: “This has all been entirely predictable, and it has been very painful for people such as me, who actually know something about the area and the issues.”

Saying that Hitchens knows very little about “the area” would be true, but it would be paying him a compliment. The suggestion would be that he writes his subversive bilge out of ignorance, not for some nefarious reasons. What those reasons are I don’t know, but I hope we’ll learn one day.

Meanwhile, he concludes by asking a question doubtless meant to be rhetorical: “And what have we gained by these deaths, exactly?”

Who is “we” there? Certainly not the Ukraine, because even a child will know what “exactly” she has gained: preserving her freedom and sovereignty in the face of a fascist predator. Certainly not Eastern Europe, which the heroic Ukrainians have shielded with their bodies from that fascist predator whose plans self-admittedly included their countries as well.

If by “we’”, Hitchens means Britain, then helping the Ukraine defeat the fascist aggressor in question is by far the least costly way of preventing a major war in Europe, possibly the world. It’s also the least costly way of preempting another emergence of a dominant fascist power in Europe, with the dire consequences that one doesn’t have to be an oracle to predict.

Will anyone ever shut up this present-day Lord Haw Haw? (And no, I’m not suggesting he should be shut up by the same method.)

Anyone who gets the pun in the title is way too old. And anyone who thinks that economists can solve our economic problems is way too naïve. In fact, the title is a hint of what will happen if we follow their prescriptions.

Economics is a self-perpetuating science, and economists only found themselves in high demand when governments began playing fast and loose with the natural workings of the market. Yet central control of the economy is impossible because an economy is made up of people, whose behaviour is often irrational and always unpredictable.

That’s where economists step in. They earn their keep by claiming the clairvoyant ability to predict economic trends, to which end they act like gnostic dervishes who get a following by muttering abracadabra.

‘Paradigm’ is one of the arrows in their quiver of recondite terms, jagged graphs, incomprehensible models and impenetrable statistics. They’ll rain those arrows on anyone who dares suggest that they should get out of people’s hair and just let them get on with what they already know how to do: make a living.

People don’t need pedigreed help in that area. The help they do need is to be found in churches, museums, concert halls and libraries. At least that’s where they should look, even at the risk of a let-down. What they do in the marketplace is strictly derivative.

Yet somehow the Marxist idea of the primacy of economics has taken hold, and it unites the seemingly incompatible political extremes, as personified by Marx and Hayek or Keynes and Friedman. They may all be saying different things, but they share a common premise.

Nationalise the means of production, claim the socialists, and everything else will follow. Socialism good, capitalism bad. Privatise the means of production, object the libertarians, and everything else will follow. Capitalism good, socialism bad. Like Orwell’s animals, both species reduce everything to a single issue. They just can’t agree on the number of legs.

Yet economic activity reflects merely a small part of an individual’s essence, and it would be far-fetched to believe that it’s divorced from all other parts. Of course it isn’t, but that shouldn’t be understood simplistically.

When performing on the economic stage most people will behave differently from the way they act at home or with their friends. However, if we know a person well, we’ll have no difficulty in finding a link between the two behavioural modes.

The link is the person himself, his character, culture, ideas, aspirations, religion if any, temperament – even at times appearance and other physical characteristics. And if we consider the totality of what makes a human being human, then we may well reach the conclusion that his economic performance is the easiest part to understand.

That makes economics the simplest of all the sciences devoted to the study of human behaviour. Just consider this. Neuropsychologists, neurophysiologists and other behavioural scientists have spent billions in whatever currency you care to name on trying to understand the human mind. Yet, after all those Decades of the Brain and Genome Projects, they still don’t even know what the mind is, how it works, what produces and constitutes a thought, or whether consciousness will ever be describable in any physical or biological terms.

But the results aren’t all negative. At least all those neurosciences, though largely failing in their declared mission, have succeeded in proving that they are indeed sciences.

They have passed the critical test of going beyond common sense. According to Lewis Wolpert, a serious scientist but a dreary populariser of atheism, real, especially modern, science always does that. In fact, it may well be an essential part of its definition.

If we look at photons getting to us from faraway stars by unerringly and, on the face of it, rationally choosing the shortest path of least resistance for millions of years; if we even begin, to the best of our limited ability, to consider the implications of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity (and how the two may be at odds); if we ponder universal constants or modern genetics with its undecipherable codes; we’ll see that common sense will help us grasp none of these. It will mislead, not lead.

Economics is different. It not only doesn’t go beyond common sense but invariably and miserably fails when trying to do so.

Whenever a professional economist starts using terms and concepts that go beyond the understanding of someone with a decent secondary (or better still, primary) education, then we know that the wool is being pulled over our eyes. The chap isn’t trying to elucidate the issue. He is trying to obscure it, and probably for nefarious reasons.

The founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, never had to do this. His books rely on plain common sense to explain a very basic problem: how markets can help people to make a living (spoiler alert: by not letting governments get in the people’s way). But for modern economists, economics is too simple to understand.

One can draw two conclusions from this: First, if our definition of a science includes as a necessary constituent its going beyond common sense, and if economics not only does not but indeed must not do so, then economics isn’t a science. Second, economics has an off-chance of becoming a science if it’s treated as a study of merely a single aspect of life that’s closely intertwined with others, and is only ever pursued in conjunction with them.

That’s why, if we wish to get to the bottom of economic hardships, economics can be but a small part of things to consider. Therefore, we either abandon the project before we have even started or we must delve deeper.

I can’t do in a short article what I once did in a book (The Crisis Behind Our Crisis). All I can do here is single out one aspect highlighted in Max Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Weber’s brilliant, if debatable, analysis hinged on the causative link between the Reformation and capitalism, both its rise and spread. Yet capitalism, narrowly defined as the use of one’s own or borrowed capital to achieve economic ends, had been spreading steadily throughout the Middle Ages – in spite of the variously vigorous resistance on the part of the church. Granted, there is no denying that capitalism benefited from the Reformation. But was it caused by it?

The answer is probably no, and Weber tacitly acknowledged as much. But neither is this a case of a simple coincidence in time.

Witness the fact that even today Protestant countries boast a per capita GDP 1.5 times higher than in Catholic countries, three times higher than in Orthodox ones, and five times higher than in Muslim lands – this despite an ocean of petrodollars sloshing underfoot in the largest Orthodox country and quite a few Muslim ones.

This hints at an indisputable causative chain. What people believe affects what they think, and what they think affects what they do. This chain demonstrates the primacy of faith over economics; of thought over action; of mind over body.

That’s why, contrary to the popular misapprehension, theology and philosophy are real sciences because they uncover the first causes of human behaviour. Economics, on the other hand, is a dubious science because, even at its best, it merely records what people have always known.

And at its worst – which nowadays means at its usual – it’s not a science at all.

Extrapolating from an indisputable fact is called induction, which was Aristotle’s stock in trade. Taking my cue from the great man, I’ll try to make some general comments on the basis of what I saw the other day.

It was a video of a young Russian jazz singer singing Dream a Little Dream of Me at a Moscow concert some 12 years ago. She introduced the song by rapping with the audience, which is now practically de rigueur even at classical concerts, to say nothing of any other.

The introduction was effusively emotive, something to be expected from any Russian artist. The girl said she had first heard the song in Paris a couple of years earlier, and “it went right through my heart and soul.”

Now, I happen to like that song myself, although my first exposure to it predates that singer’s by perhaps 50 years. But even in my younger days, I would have been physically incapable of expressing myself in such kitsch terms. So the introduction served another reminder of why Russia and I were incompatible and always heading for divorce.

I first heard Dream a Little Dream sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, and it’s really unfair to compare any other performer, including that Russian girl, to those two. But on her own terms she was actually a good singer, with a real voice and musical sense.

But when introducing the song, she described its lyrics as very enigmatic, which put me to shame. I had never detected any gnostic quality in that song, which suggested that a Russian girl in her late 20s could find things in an American song that had escaped me.

She explained what it was. One line, she said (obviously in Russian), went “say Ninety-nine and kiss me”. That must have communicated, she opined, a deep numerological meaning, or else it was simply some obscure idiom.

She then sang the song in the original English including that gnostic phrase. Now, it must have been some 40 years ago that I last heard an English idiom I didn’t know. This one, however, went right by me. What if it really had some hidden numerological subtext?

That was a possibility. Another possibility was that the girl got something wrong, transcribing the lyrics of a song sung in a language she didn’t know well.

Back to my trusted YouTube and that great duo of Ella and Satchmo. And there was Ella Fitzgerald, enunciating with her customary clarity: “Say Nightie-night and kiss me.” Nightie-night. Not Ninety-Nine. No hidden meaning. No Gnosticism. No numerology. Just a bloody good love song.

Now for extrapolation. The first one deals with Russians not being particularly good at doing homework (to that extent, I suppose, I am a Russian myself). Even 10 years ago, computers were widely available in Moscow. All the singer had to do was Google “Lyrics to Dream a Little Dream of Me”, and Boris would have been her uncle. She would have seen that the first line of the second verse simply talked about a good-night kiss.

The second extrapolation is more general, going beyond a Russian singer with her poor command of English. Hand-me-down cultures are like hand-me-down clothes. They seldom fit and usually look outdated.

The two qualifiers in that last sentence are useful because cultural interchange is a time-proven manner of augmenting one’s own cultural capital. The interest on it, accrued over many decades, may well acquire an organic, indigenous quality, enriching the culture in ways it might not have been able to enrich itself if left to its own devices.

But this can only work over a long time, with the borrower exhibiting endless patience, exquisite taste and proper respect for both the lending and borrowing cultures. If you write those three nouns side by side – patience, taste, respect – you’ll probably agree that they designate commodities seldom found in today’s world.

Thus one sees and hears snippets of borrowed cultures that are as jarring as the sound of two pieces of glass rubbed together. Last summer, for example, we were having lunch at an outdoor café in Clamecy, a sleepy Burgundian town whose claim to fame is that it’s the birthplace of Romain Rolland, a third-rate communist writer.

Had his comrades won their victory, the Gothic church in the middle of Clamecy would probably have been pulled down. As it was, it was lending its steps to a dozen youngsters rocking to the sound of a ghetto blaster blaring French rap. We couldn’t make out the words, but the hermaphroditic cultural hybrid destroyed our appetite.

That vocal art has nothing to do with either vocalism or art, and it sounds revolting even in its native habitat. But when ‘sung’ by people named Jean-François, Jean-Paul or Jean-Pierre it’s even worse, much worse.

In a different genre, one sees quite a few large American saloon cars on British and French roads. Those vehicles are designed for wide, straight and empty American highways, where they provide an alternative to trains and planes for long-distance travel. On narrow, twisting European roads, such cars are unwieldy and often dangerous.

Yet Europeans buy those automotive boats not because they like their handling and ease of parking, but because they too want to get their kicks on Route 66 (which is incidentally single-lane for much of its length). It’s an exercise of cultural appropriation that really is misappropriation.

The romance of popular American culture has a strong effect on the lower classes all over Europe. Frenchmen and, after many years of resistance, even Italians queue up at McDonald’s not because they prefer that fare to, respectively, steak frites or pasta al ragù, but because America is cool (the French even borrowed that word for the sake of verisimilitude).

On a higher cultural plateau, my French friends once humbled me by mentioning a great modern American writer whose name I had never heard, James Salter. Since in my youth I used to teach American literature, albeit on a truncated Soviet curriculum, I felt as if my face had been slapped.

I immediately got two novels by James Salter and found them vacuous and pretentious, although composed in well-crafted sentences. It’s not surprising that I had never heard of him in the US or Britain. But he is a household name for every well-read Frenchman I’ve met, and all my French friends are well-read and have good taste.

They simply aren’t sufficiently plugged into the Anglophone culture to detect the false notes instantly audible to, say, Penelope or me. Similarly, I must have missed the finer points of Michel Houellebecque, whose work reads like jumped-up pornography to me. Getting culture second-hand is a time-proven technique, but care must be taken and allowances must be made.

Anyway, if it’s getting late where you are, ninety-nine to all of you. Sleep tight.