Blog

When it comes to defining their war objectives, the Russians not so much move the goal posts as throw them out of the stadium.

When Putin’s hordes flooded into the Ukraine on 24 February, 2022, the objective was defined as de-Nazifying and demilitarising the country. Wiping the Ukraine out as a sovereign state in other words: that was the only way to achieve such worthy goals.

When several crushing defeats turned that objective into a pie in the sky, Vlad lost the thread. Having missed the original target, he began both to lower his sights and to raise them – sometimes in the course of a single day.

Aiming low, he’d announce ad urbi et orbi that all he wanted was to make sure Russian-speaking Ukrainians wouldn’t be abused by bloodthirsty Judaeo-Nazi Ukies. In the next breath, he’d go global. His redefined aim was in fact defending (or else creating – it could be either) a Pax Russica, made up of all Russian speakers around the world.

That gave me a few sleepless nights, pursued as I was by the nightmares of Russian tanks rolling down Piccadilly to protect my right to speak Russian, which I don’t want to speak anyway. I was also tempted to alert the residents of Brooklyn’s largely Russian-speaking Brighton Beach to the imminent airborne landing of Spetsnaz paras.

Jesting aside, unclear strategic objectives compromise tactical operations, and someone must have put a quiet word to that effect into Putin’s shell-like. To his credit, he understood and acted on that understanding.

Earlier this week Vlad convened his Security Council and delivered a speech meant to eliminate any strategic obfuscation once and for all. The Council members applauded, and so did much of the rest of the country. Now they knew.

“In the Ukraine,” said Vlad, “Russia is waging war on the USA to create a Palestinian state. The absence of such a state is the principal injustice of today’s world, which the USA is guilty of, and which Russia must correct by fighting in the Ukraine.”

Clarity at last, happiness all around. Noticing the unbridled enthusiasm written on the faces of everyone present, Vlad went on to explain that the West was the “root of evil” in the world.

“Behind the tragedy of the Palestinians, the massacre in the Middle East, the conflict in Ukraine, many other conflicts in the world, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and so on, are the ruling elites of the United States and their satellites,” continued Vlad, like a thief screaming “Stop thief!” as he runs ahead of his pursuers.

“It would be good for those who worry so deeply about citizens of Israel to investigate what their special services are up to in Ukraine, and that they are trying to provoke pogroms in Russia,” added Putin. “Pure scum, there is no other word for it.”

He was referring to the pogrom at Makhachkala’s airport the other day, when a mob screaming “Allahu akbar!” rushed onto the runway hoping to massacre Israeli passengers on the flight arriving from Tel Aviv.

In the process they looted the airport shops, proving that the terminal has come up in the world since I myself landed there. My friend Tony Daniels and I went to Makhachkala in 1995, when the FCO asked us to have a look at the refugee camps on the Dagestan-Chechnya border. At that time, there were no shops to loot at the airport – but on the plus side, there was plenty of naked concrete.

The horror stories of Russian atrocities we heard at the camp were the worst I had ever heard, and people dying in front of our very eyes proved the stories were true. If further validation was necessary, the Russians have now provided it by their inhuman massacres of civilians in the Ukraine, every bit as horrific as in the two Chechen wars.

Rallying Dagestani Muslims to storm that airport, while also launching an anti-Semitic riot in Khasavyurt (the site of that camp in 1995), seems like a task beyond even the combined efforts of CIA and Mossad, but well within the capabilities of the FSB. It has form in that sort of thing: Russian and Soviet security services have always whipped up anti-Semitism to channel resentment into that proven conduit and away from the government.

Putin then accused the dastardly Yankees of using their Israeli proxies to murder “hundreds of thousands” of Gaza civilians, including the mandatory “women and children”. Since Hamas sources themselves had only claimed 8,000 such victims, Vlad was out by two orders of magnitude at least. But that, as the Russians say, is only half the trouble.

If the Guinness Book of World Records had an entry for the most deranged speeches, it would have to be updated every time Putin opened his mouth in public. Accusing others of atrocities against civilians when the Russians are indeed killing hundreds of thousands of them in the Ukraine takes more than just mendacious cynicism.

Putin seems to have lost all touch with reality, but the scary thing is that the Russians don’t mind. Their social networks are bursting at the seams with messages of enthusiastic support and calls for immediate nuclear strikes on all major Western cities.

All this should eliminate all doubts, if any still exist, as to who really is the root of evil in the world. Putin’s speech is nothing short of a declaration of war on the West, specifically the US.

He is issuing a war cry: by murdering Ukrainian civilians, Russia is fighting the US to create a Palestinian state. This sounds deranged, and at the level of semantics it is. But the semiotic signal comes across loud and clear: Russia considers herself at war with the US and the West in general. I do hope we are listening and making notes.

P.S. Speaking of evil, the other day the Israeli authorities showed an audience of foreign reporters a 43-minute film cut together from footage shot by the bodycams of Hamas terrorists.

Those reporters have been around a block or two, and they’ve seen horrors worse than those Tony and I witnessed in 1995. Yet the bloodbath shown in the film shocked even that blasé audience.

Many hyperventilated and ran out, others threw up, some others had hysterical fits. Those experienced people had seen many massacres, but scenes of people dismembered with hoes and babies roasted in the oven were too much even for them.

In 1945 the victorious Allies forced many Germans to watch documentaries of Auschwitz and Treblinka. It would be nice to do the same thing by forcing all those pro-Hamas demonstrators to watch that horror film. Greta Thunberg should get a free ticket.

“Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life,” writes Max Weber in his canonical work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904-1905.

To any sixteenth-century humanist or Protestant this line of thought would have sounded not just wrong but downright daft. Yet Weber’s readers nodded their collective understanding. For them, that observation went without saying.

A shift must have occurred in the intervening four centuries, and it did. It’s called Protestantism.

Luther was an Augustinian monk, and he was strongly influenced by the founder of his order. Yet in the time-proven manner of a politicised exegete, Luther focused on those teachings that supported his own thoughts and ignored those that didn’t (such as unquestioning obedience to the church, which Augustine demanded, and the vital importance of sacraments, which Augustine extolled as “the visible form of an invisible grace.”).

One such aspect stands out: the doctrine of predestination, closely linked to original sin.

The Fall, according to Augustine, stigmatised man for ever. Original sin was so grave that it couldn’t be redeemed by anything an individual could do in his lifetime. Only God could determine who would be saved. No one but God could either know a person’s final destination or affect it in any way.

The greatest philosophical problem arising from predestination is its seeming contradiction with free will. After all, if choices we make using our free will are irrelevant to our salvation, what makes our will free in the first place? And why do we need it at all? Free will can only remain man’s most valuable possession if we stand to gain from a correct choice or suffer the consequences of a wrong one.

God’s is the absolute freedom, but if we are truly created in his image, ours has to be at least a relative one. Only God can be totally free, but that doesn’t mean man has to be totally enslaved.

Luther also declared that every man was his own priest, thereby extending humanism to religion. In one fell swoop this made apostolic succession, along with the church hierarchy, redundant and therefore useless.

But it couldn’t have been made completely useless for as long as the church hierarchy was considered essential to the task of preserving Christian tradition. Showing laudable consistency, Luther chopped through that Gordian knot with Alexander’s élan: if it takes a useless church hierarchy to preserve tradition, then tradition is useless too. Who needs it anyway if the Scripture contains the whole truth of Christianity?

This explains why 300 years later John Henry Newman felt justified to write that: “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant”. For Luther’s denial of equal rights to tradition ignores both the history and the nature of Christianity.

To begin with, the first Gospel wasn’t written until decades after Jesus. Yet the church had survived and spread in the intervening period by subsisting on tradition, mostly oral. Also, since Christianity is a living religion, revelation can be given gradually, not once and for all.

Unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity isn’t a religion wholly contained in a written document, and nor can it ever be regarded as such this side of heresy. The Scripture may be the first, second and tenth most important parts of doctrine. But it isn’t the only part.

Calvin developed Luther by pushing the idea of predestination to an absurd extreme. He acted in the manner of a heretic who attaches undue significance to one single aspect of faith, however correct it may be.

We are predestined for salvation or damnation, pronounced Calvin, and, since we live in “total depravity”, we can do nothing to affect the outcome. The idea of good works as restitution for sin is Catholic nonsense, a way of keeping the masses in check. Some will be saved and others damned, regardless of their works (apart from faith, which is a work too).

When asked to put a number on the lucky winners of that divine lottery, Calvin tended to change his mind. The range varied from a miserly one in 100 to a generous one in five. In any case we were talking about a small minority, but out of curiosity, how could we know which of us had drawn the lucky ticket?

It’s Calvin’s answer to this question that led Weber to regard capitalism as a predominantly Protestant phenomenon. God, explained Calvin, gave those to be saved a sign of his benevolence by making them rich.

No, God wouldn’t just rain gold on the elect. Rather he’d guide them to a way of life that would deliver wealth as a reward. Hard work would be an important part of it, but piety and frugality also had a role to play, if only as a way of thanking God for the lucre he had allowed the righteous to make. Virtuous conduct was thus an equivalent of a thank-you note to God.

This was nothing short of a revolution, a crucible of class war. For the first time since Christ, a major religious figure upgraded wealth from an object of bare toleration to a sign of divine benevolence. Grace became quantifiable in pieces of gold.

In common with most successful revolutionaries, Calvin sensed the mood of his flock and told them exactly what they craved to hear. Secretly Genevans had always known that God rewarded righteousness with money, just as he did in the Old Testament; now they no longer had to be secretive about it.

Austerity was in their nature too. The burghers eschewed opulence both out of inner conviction, but also to emphasise the difference between themselves and the idle, degenerate aristocracy on the one hand and lazy, impoverished layabouts on the other.

By allowing the bourgeoisie to strike out against both, Calvin provided a much needed tool of social control. He married remunerative work and religion, thus making indolence a sin, only matched by the sin of pleasure-seeking. Now if hoi-polloi were to rebel against the rich, they would be rebelling against God – not something they were prepared to do. Not yet anyway.

For all his (and Luther’s) anti-Semitism, Calvin pushed Christianity even further towards its Judaic antecedents than Luther did. For one thing, material reward for virtue had until then been a feature of the Old Testament only.

Followers of Christ were supposed to leave their possessions behind, not try to multiply them. Unlike Abraham whose faith was rewarded by riches, theirs was rewarded by a lifetime of penury. St Francis, shedding his clothes and walking out of his father’s house naked, was closer to Christ than a successful merchant could ever be.

Those who according to Calvin were predestined for salvation had to show their gratitude by pursuing puritanical self-denial not just during some festivals, such as Lent, but every minute of their lives. Though he attacked Catholic monasticism, Calvin effectively took his own version out of the monastery, extending denial of the world to the world at large.

In theory, there is something attractive about the ideal of pursuing virtue one’s whole life, not just a hundred or so days a year. And it’s easy to poke fun at a hypothetical Catholic who divides his week between debauchery and double-dealing only to go to confession on Sunday and be forgiven. In practice, however, there is a serious obstacle to turning such an ideal into reality. It’s called human nature.

Perfect life can only be achieved by perfect people, and few fit this description. The rest welcome any excuse to practise what they don’t preach.

As a result, many Protestants used their religious freedom to steer clear of the more taxing demands on their lives. In heeding Calvin’s simple explanations, they slit their own religious throats with Occam’s razor. Gradually many of them, along with much of what used to be called Christendom, moved away from the religion itself.

This isn’t what Calvin envisaged, and it is something both he and Luther would have abhorred. They themselves believed in God with sincere passion. What they didn’t seem to believe in was unintended consequences, a failing they share with secular revolutionaries.

It’s otherwise known as Reformation Day, but I believe in calling a spade a spade, as long as I don’t get done for commiting a hate crime.

On 31 October, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg.

Thereby Europe stepped into the antechamber of secularism, for the Reformation pushed the countdown button for it. I may go into the doctrinal and theological reasons for that tomorrow, but today I’ll just ask a simple question:

Why did the Reformation become so successful at that particular time, early in the century when even translating the Bible into vernacular was a capital offence?

After all, that wasn’t the only attempt at church reform. The Englishman John Wycliff and the Czech John Hus before Luther, along with the Fleming Cornelius Jansen (or rather his followers) immediately after him, also tried to correct the iniquities that so excited the sixteenth-century Protestants.

Yet their efforts neither destroyed the traditional church nor created a new one. Whatever their original intent, those reformers achieved just that: some reform, not much.

Conversely, first Luther and then Calvin succeeded in breaking away from the Catholic church altogether, starting worldwide confessions of their own. In many areas of dogma, liturgy, everyday practices and the whole tenor of religion, these confessions veered as far away from orthodox Christianity as was possible while still remaining Christian.

Yet, though the original animus of the Protestants was directed at dogma, liturgy and clerical abuses, their success had little to do with correcting any of those. At the risk of sounding materialist, one has to conclude that the contributing factors were almost all secular.

The Holy Roman Empire was a feudal network of principalities, mostly though not exclusively Germanic, acting as vassalages to the supreme feudal lord, the Emperor. Some of the potentates were desperate to assert their independence from the papacy, sensing correctly that the Emperor’s power would diminish if denied its ecclesiastical underpinnings.

The most effective way of breaking away from the Pope would have been to break away from Catholicism altogether. However, by that time the only alternative to it, the Eastern confession, had become no alternative at all.

Thus, when Luther came up with his sweeping reforms, his audience was primed, and the seeds of his dissent fell on fertile soil already softened up by Renaissance humanism.

The feudal aristocrats of the Holy Roman Empire didn’t take long to realise that what was under way was the birth of a new religion, not just a reform of the old one. A new religion meant a new political arrangement, this much they knew.

And, following two centuries of humanist scepticism, that was probably all they needed to know. Their secular aspirations came first. Fine points of theology and liturgy were strictly secondary.

However, the power of the feudal aristocracy was being curbed not only by the Pope but also by the emergence of the bourgeoisie, a new, mostly urban, class.

The economic, and consequently political, power of that class derived neither from inheritance nor from arable land. Mostly the bourgeois relied on labour, their own or hired, to get ahead. Their economic success was measured not in acres but in money – the more of it, the better. This put them on a collision course with the Catholic church.

First, though the church’s opposition to usury had by then weakened, it had by no means disappeared. Even if some secular authorities had made the charging of interest legal, the general attitude of the church was that of half-hearted toleration, barely masking the tacit disapproval underneath.

Yet credit was the bloodline of the urban middle classes, since without it they couldn’t take advantage of the business opportunities arising in the rapidly growing towns. Hence the bourgeoisie of the Holy Roman Empire felt uncomfortable with the Catholic church.

Nor were they happy with the Jewish domination of financial services that would inevitably ensue if Christians were banned, or at best discouraged, from lending money at interest.

Whatever latent anti-Semitism the bourgeois possessed to begin with became more virulent because they felt that their own church was pushing them into the hands of the Jewish money lenders. That resentment was described in English literature, both approvingly (by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice) and disapprovingly (by Scott in Ivanhoe).

It wasn’t only the growing middle classes but also many of the aristocrats who were often indebted to the Jews, and those gentlemen were conditioned to solve financial problems by violence. After all, their original fortunes had been made that way.

This was the nature of many anti-Jewish massacres, including the 1190 pogrom in York (the last such event to take place in England), where the mob led by local noblemen first broke into the Minster to destroy the promissory notes kept there, and only then went after the Jews. That bile could also partly account for the anti-Semitism of both Luther and Calvin who were aware of its appeal to their flock.

The difficulty of obtaining credit wasn’t the sole problem the urban middle classes had with the church. Their wealth depended on hard work – not only around the clock but also around the calendar. Yet both the clock and the calendar were affected by the traditional practices of the church: it wasn’t just the Sabbath day that was supposed to be kept holy.

The ‘days of obligation’ set aside for religious worship numbered at least 100 in many dioceses, which meant that almost a third of the year was to be taken out of wealth-generating toil. This paled by comparison to the 200 such days demanded by the Eastern church at its most orthodox, but that was little consolation for the aspiring Germans.

Upwardly mobile classes are innately opposed to any traditional hierarchies, and this held true for the Germanic bourgeois of the sixteenth century. That’s not to say they were intuitively egalitarian, far from it. It’s just that, for their aspirations to be pursued unimpeded, they needed to replace the old hierarchy of status derived from birth with the new hierarchy of status derived from money.

To that end, throughout the Middle Ages the emerging class of urban bourgeoisie had been fighting for political independence from the aristocracy. Municipal government and other local institutions had been wrenching bits of sovereignty away from feudal noblemen, including ecclesiastical ones.

The wealthier the bourgeoisie became, the more political power it could wield – and the more prepared it would be to break away from the church. Yet, pious as most of the townsmen were, they weren’t quite ready to part ways with their faith even if they had problems with their church. And in those days they tended to use the words ‘faith’ and ‘church’ almost interchangeably.

When the reformers came along, the bourgeois heaved a sigh of relief. They no longer had to be good Catholics in order to be good Christians: “Every man is his own priest,” declared Luther. Thus it stands to reason that they welcomed with open arms the original reformer, Luther, and especially Calvin who reformed the Reformation by pushing it even closer to the middle class.

Luther stayed within the confines of the German principalities, and his survival was largely owed to his appeal to the secular aspirations of the German princes, however carefully they tried to mask such aspirations with pious verbiage. That’s why, 19 years before Tyndale was immolated for merely translating the Bible, those princes shielded Luther from papal wrath.

I realise to my shame that I’ve been waxing materialist throughout this short sketch. The fault isn’t so much mine as my subject’s, but I still must atone for it. So, barring a nuclear attack in the next 24 hours, I’ll try to decorticate Protestant theology tomorrow – showing, with luck, that it too pushed Europe closer to secularism.

Looking at history, one has to conclude that war isn’t so much an aberration as the norm. Some people always fight some wars somewhere, killing one another with gusto.

That observation is as true today as it was in the 13^th century BC, when Moses was vouchsafed God’s commandments, one of which said “Thou shalt not kill”.

The Israelites must have been perplexed, as they had every right to be. Neither history nor scripture records their ensuing question, but I’m sure it had to be asked. “Then how are we going to reclaim the Promised Land if we aren’t allowed to kill those barbaric squatters? They aren’t going to roll over, you know.”

There was only one possible, if unrecorded, answer to that, and I’m sure Moses had to give it: “Fighting a just war doesn’t violate that commandment.”

That had to be the gist of what he said, but it’s St Augustine who is credited with coining the term ‘just war’  (jus ad bello, as he put it in The City of God). War is a sin, taught Augustine, but it becomes justified if fought to prevent a greater sin. Such was a belated Christian answer to the next likely question doubtless put to Moses: “But what makes a war just?”

The doctrine was further developed by St Thomas Aquinas in his Summa. A war is just, he wrote, if it promotes the advancement of good and the avoidance of evil. He also stressed that it’s not only jus ad bello, but also jus in bello that matters: even a just war must be conducted by just means.

Such has been the general framework of thought on this subject throughout subsequent Western history. Later humanist thinkers, such as Hugo Grotius, added a pragmatic twist to the moral tale: for a war to be just, it also has to be started with a clear and achievable end in mind.

The problem with humanism is that it ignores human nature. Because it lacks the anthropological insights of St Thomas, it becomes impractical specifically when trying to be practical.

One would have expected Aquinas, ever the realist, to add that pragmatic consideration to his criteria for just war. If the moral aspect of a realistic end to a war was obvious to Grotius, it must have been as obvious to Aquinas – and yet he sagely ignored it.

He must have realised that, whatever desired outcome rulers put forth as justification for war, once the shooting starts the number of imponderable permutations becomes so vast that no man’s reason will be able to sort them out. To quote a renowned modern philosopher, Mike Tyson, “Everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the nose.”

No decent person would deny that Israel’s response passes the Christian test with flying colours. The oasis of Western decency in the region was attacked by savages, and its cause is just. And should a present-day Grotius insist that a moral and achievable end to the war were identified with utmost clarity, Israel could do so with one word: survival.

However, in yesterday’s article Philip Collins cited Grotius to suggest Israel’s cause isn’t necessarily just: “Yet this is where we friends of Israel need to invoke Grotius… not on the grounds that [her war] is wrong in intent but that it cannot hope to succeed. Prudence on this point is not just a problem after the fact. It is part of the moral case for the intervention itself. If an action has no feasible hope of success, the moral case for war is damaged.”

So what would be the solution, according to Messrs Grotius and Collins? “Terrorism,” writes the latter, “cannot be defeated by military means.” That may be true, although it isn’t immediately clear by what other means it can be defeated.

Negotiations, for example, are off the table when one side refuses to recognise the other side’s right to exist. “You cannot negotiate peace with somebody who has come to kill you,” as Golda Meir once put it.

What else? UN resolutions? Paying a king’s ransom in perpetuity? Surrender, the method chosen by Tony Blair when dealing with IRA terrorism? What would Grotius suggest as a way of keeping the moral case for Israel’s war undamaged? Such questions must have occurred to Mr Collins, which is why he changed tack:

“Israel can, and must, choose to maintain the supply of water and electricity to Gaza and continue to issue warnings about forthcoming bombardment.” That’s backtracking three centuries from Grotius to Aquinas’s jus in bello.

So would keeping Gaza in water and electricity somehow clarify the ways of defeating terrorism? Would that satisfy Grotius’s practical criterium of just war? I am confused.

The problem is that, though Collins calls himself a friend of Israel, he is a left-wing friend. That breed is characterised by muddled thinking in general and on the subject of Israel in particular. Israel is like a bull in the ring for them, an animal allowed to fight but usually not allowed to win.

Hence even Israel’s few allies always gang up on her whenever she tries to solve the problem of pan-Arab terrorism by unrestrained violence, which is the only way it can be solved. The current situation is no different.

Jus ad bello in this case means that jus in bello includes every means at Israel’s disposal. If that involves bombing Gaza flat, then so be it. There are no civilians there, only terrorists with blood-dripping machetes and those who dance in the streets every time Israelis are butchered – implacable enemies all.

Invoking Grotius, or else Tolstoy and Gandhi, in today’s context betokens a woeful misreading of Augustine and Aquinas. Good must stop evil, otherwise it itself becomes a sin.

There have been few wars in modern history where the moral lines were drawn with indisputable clarity. Even in the Second World War, the West had to side with red fascism to defeat the brown variety, which might have pleased Grotius but possibly not Aquinas.

We are fortunate in that the two on-going wars, with two of our allies desperately fighting for survival against evil, are an exception. In both wars, qualified good is fighting unqualified evil, which ought to preclude any moral dilemmas.

They only appear when people like Collins muddy the waters, looking for moral problems where none exists. Israel’s war is just, and neither Aquinas nor Grotius would disagree.

Congratulations to Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair’s consigliere, who has finally made an honest man of his boyfriend after 27 years together.

It’s good to see that true romance can still express itself in such a traditional way… I’d better stop myself now before I say something funny that could be classed as a hate crime. In any case, I’m reminded of an old Russian story.

A girl visiting the Tchaikovsky museum asks the guide whether it’s true that the composer was homosexual. “It is,” replies the guide. “But that’s not the only thing we love him for.”

Similarly, I love Lord Mandelson for one rare moment of honesty he permitted himself a few years ago. The Blair government, he explained, flung the doors open for Muslim immigration as a way of combatting what his boss called “the forces of conservatism”.

The policy proved effective: Britain’s political landscape has been repainted an even brighter red. Mr Mandelson (as he then was) was a smart enough political operator to know that Muslim communities tend to vote as a bloc, and usually against the aforementioned vile forces.

This explains, inter alia, why London has since 2016 been stuck with Sadiq Khan, a manifestly inept mayor who, in addition to his minority status, boasts impeccable woke credentials and none other.

I don’t know a single Londoner who doesn’t swear each time Khan’s name comes up in conversation. But then I don’t move in his kind of circles, nor live in his kind of neighbourhood.

His kind of neighbourhood is situated either in heavily Muslim or predominantly left-wing areas, and both vote for the leftmost candidate as a matter of course. This is especially true of London’s Muslims who, courtesy of Blair, Mandelson et al., make up 15 per cent of the  city’s population.

One doesn’t have to be a political mechanic of Mandelson’s attainment to realise that a Tory candidate would have to possess armour-piercing charisma to stand any chance of overturning a guaranteed electorate bloc of 15 per cent. Boris Johnson did manage, but then he does have that sort of megaton appeal.

This is an illustration of how the mechanism identified by Mandelson works. Moreover, swarms of Muslims inundating Europe are exerting an ever-greater influence not only on the countries’ domestic policy but also on their foreign affairs.

Yesterday, for example, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. I’d call it a Grin-and-Bear-It resolution, which is what Israel is expected to do in response to the savage attack on her citizens.

Effectively, the resolution denies Israel the right to retaliate and secure herself against subsequent attacks. This is consonant with the view widely held all over the world by the kind of people who think London is better off with Sadiq Khan as its mayor.

The resolution makes no mention of Hamas at all, which would give a tourist from Mars the impression that the bloodthirsty, unprovoked Israelis are indulging their innate murderous hatred of Arabs. When Canada meekly put forth an amendment condemning Hamas terrorism, it was voted down.

Seven EU members voted for the resolution, which is in effect a statement of support for Hamas: France, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Slovenia and Montenegro. Now something tells me that most people in those countries hate Islamic terrorism more than they dislike Jews, in or out of Israel.

Speaking from personal experience, in my 22 years of part-time French residency, I haven’t met a single person who had a kind word to say about Muslim terrorists or, truth to tell, Muslims in general. But – and here we get back to my main point – the people I know don’t matter to France’s politicians.

What matters to them is winning the next election, and to do so they have to mollify Muslims who make up 10 per cent of the population. Any sensible party would find it hard to overcome such a solid voting bloc, especially under proportionate representation.

Add to it the usual haters of our civilisation happy to elect Trotskyists, Maoists or Stalinists but ready to vote strategically for the wokest candidates, and you’ll see why French politicians have to play footsies with the Muslims in public, while bemoaning their presence in private.

To take the most striking example, it was impossible for the Montenegro ambassador to the UN to vote against the pro-Hamas resolution. Over 20 per cent of the country’s population are Muslim, and voting against their wishes would have been tantamount to political suicide.

All the EU countries that voted for the resolution, except Luxembourg, have sizeable Muslim minorities, and even Luxembourg has a not negligible two per cent. This isn’t the whole reason for their vote, but I’m sure it is a reason.

This whole situation should give the lie to the usual bien pensant leftie waffle about equality, inclusivity, multi-culturalism, diversity and all such nonsense. They oppose anti-immigration policies, especially those directed against Muslims, not out of their love of the Third World but out of their hatred of the First one.

Mr Mandelson (as he then was) made that abundantly clear, and it takes a strong man to break a lifelong habit of dissembling. Incidentally, in case you’re wondering, my wedding invitation must have been lost in the post.

On 7 October, 2023, Hamas launched a well-orchestrated, well-equipped and well-executed attack on Israel. I’m deliberately describing it in such unemotive terms to draw your attention to the planning involved, not the savagery displayed.

Experts in such matters agree that such an operation couldn’t have been improvised. Veteran commanders of special forces from around the world insist it had to be planned for at least a year in advance.

Keep this in mind when reading reports of Hamas and Iran officials visiting Moscow. Taking a stab in the dark, I’d venture a guess that Abu Marzook of Hamas and Ali Bagheri, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, aren’t there to admire the Italian architecture of the Kremlin. They must have some serious terrorist business to discuss.

That the three evil regimes are launching a coordinated assault on Western interests, indeed civilisation, is beyond doubt. Everyone knows that Russia has been arming Iran, with the latter now reciprocating by supplying Russia with suicide drones. As to the links between Russia and both Hamas and Hezbollah, no one, including the parties involved, denies them.

Russia has been funding, training, arming and inspiring Muslim terrorist organisations since the time she was still the Soviet Union and they were neonatal. But so much for general knowledge. What about the 7 October raid specifically? Was Russia involved and if yes, how?

There is plenty of circumstantial evidence of such involvement, starting with the old cui bono principle. The conflict unleashed by Hamas’s savagery benefits Russia by diverting the West’s resources and – more important – attention from Russia’s own brutality in the Ukraine.

The pronouncements of Russian leaders and spokesmen leave little doubt as to which side Russia supports. And the very fact that the Kremlin has seen fit to entertain Hamas and Iranian officials at this time does little to contradict that impression.

None of this, however, proves Russia’s direct complicity in the massacre. You could say that Hamas bandits wouldn’t have had their own knowhow to set up such a clockwork raid, and you’d be right. But take this evidence to court and see how far you’ll get.

It’s all conjecture for now, which doesn’t mean it can’t condemn. Provided circumstantial evidence has reached a certain critical mass, it may be sufficient to convict. In this case, we need one last piece to complete the evidential jigsaw – so here it is.

Remember that the Hamas operation would have taken a year to plan and prepare. Well, it so happens that exactly a year ago, in September, 2022, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh visited Moscow for discussions with Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Lavrov.

Again, I doubt they spent the time discussing the relative merits of vodka and fermented mare’s milk. Some serious business was on the table, which for Hamas means nothing but terrorism.

Was it then that the 7 October raid was requested by Hamas and authorised by Russia? Was it then that the planning began? It seems likely, and the dates add up.

Meanwhile, Russia’s own banditry is proceeding apace. As wave after wave of badly trained and ill-equipped Russian soldiers are being mown down at Avdeyevka, reports say the Russians are routinely executing their own retreating soldiers and threatening to kill whole units if they display insufficient valour.

To that end, so called blocking units have been formed, with their machine guns placed behind crowds of soldiers going on what the Russians call ‘meat attacks’. It has to be said that both human-wave assaults and blocking units lack novelty appeal.

The former has always been a time-dishonoured tactic of Russian commanders. Back in the 18^th century, Alexander Suvorov, worshipped in Russia as history’s greatest general, formulated the strategic doctrine that’s still doing good service: “The bullet is stupid, the bayonet is clever.”

Of course, for a bayonet charge to show its cleverness, the attackers first have to go through a murderous barrage unleashed by the entrenched defenders. Hence the inordinate casualties Russia has suffered in all her wars, far in excess of those she inflicted on even vanquished adversaries. Hence also the high numbers of soldiers who get cold feet.

To treat those frozen extremities, the Russians have always regarded their surrendering soldiers as deserters. Thus, when the 16^th century Polish king Stefan Batory released 2,300 Russian prisoners of war, they were all summarily slaughtered on return.

This fine tradition survived until modern times when Stalin declared, “There are no Soviet POWs, only traitors.” He practised what he preached: most of the returning POWs during the Russo-Finnish and Russo-German wars were shot, imprisoned or exiled (my father was fortunate to have fallen into the last category).

And the practice of executing retreating soldiers started in 1941, immediately after the German attack on the Soviet Union. That noble effort was formalised in July 1942, when Stalin issued his infamous ‘Not a step back’ order. Both the blocking units and military tribunals went into high gear and started killing Soviet soldiers with alacrity.

The output of the tribunals is known: 157,593 Soviet soldiers were sentenced to death and executed during the war. As far as the number of those machinegunned by the blocking units, it’s estimated at twice as high, though such calculations are never precise in Russia.

One way or the other, the Soviets inflicted more casualties on their own troops than the US armed forces suffered altogether – and possibly even more than the overall British losses. By contrast, the Nazis executed only about 8,000 of their own soldiers.

Evil comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but today’s shapes all seem to have a Russian imprint on them. Yet evil can seldom conquer on its own. Outsiders must display at least acquiescence, ideally tacit support, to help it along.

In that spirit, Hungary and Slovakia have blocked a £43.6 billion EU aid package for the Ukraine. Hungarian PM Orban, a Putin admirer of long standing, explained the rationale: “Everybody knows but they do not dare to say it out loud, that this strategy has failed. The Ukrainians will not win on the front line.”

Quite. So let’s do what we can to make sure they lose. Actually, the Ukrainians have already won on the front line, by preventing Russia from achieving her war objectives. These were stated at the outset as “de-Nazifying and demilitarising” the Ukraine, which is to say expunging her as an independent state.

While mildly critical of the Russian prong of evil in the Ukraine, our own dear BBC still refuses to brand the Hamas raid as terrorism. Doing so, Beeb claims, would undermine its reputation for objectivity.

That admirable quality was displayed by Rami Ruhayem, BBC Middle East correspondent, who emailed Director General Tim Davie earlier this week to formulate the broadcaster’s strategy in reporting on the conflict.

“Words like ‘massacre’, ‘slaughter’ and ‘atrocities’ are being used – prominently – in reference to actions by Hamas, but hardly, if at all, in reference to actions by Israel,” he wrote.

“The power of emotive coverage and repetition is well understood. The selective application of emotive repetition is sure to have an impact on audiences, and it is exactly the kind of impact Israeli propagandists are aiming for as they dehumanise Palestinians and set the stage for the mass murder they have pledged – and begun – to carry out.”

So much for objectivity. And so much for promoting evil – by both omission and commission.

If you’ll forgive a crude colloquialism, Google’s training programme is crap, and I’m not being judgemental here. By its own proud announcement, Google has succeeded at turning every company lavatory into a classroom.

This constitutes the exact reversal of the situation familiar to anyone who has gone to a comprehensive school, but I’ll keep the dismal state of our public education for another time.

What interests me here is the lavatorial aspect of learning pioneered by Google some years ago. Since then their educational series Learning on the Loo has been a constant presence in every Google company around the world.

Lavatory stalls there come equipped not only with customary rolls but also with educational flyers enlightening Google employees on a variety of subjects. I’ll give you a clue: neither Thomistic philosophy nor quantum mechanics is among them.

The academic subjects favoured by the company are more practical, including such topics as Better Incident Management, 6 Tips for Writing a Better Email, and Avoiding Bias (also evidently hyphens) in Decision Making.

One bias that Google would like its people to avoid is the anti-Jewish one, and by the looks of it the company is facing an uphill struggle. Many employees have been posting comments ranging from anti-Israeli to virulently anti-Semitic.

Leading the way was the company’s Head of Diversity Strategy who must have misread his remit. He accused Jews of having an “insatiable appetite for war,” forgetting to mention that such a belligerent craving only ever evinces itself when Israeli babies are decapitated, and sometimes not even then.

Google has declared war on such attitudes, choosing its loo stalls as the training ground. Its Jewish Allyship flyers teach misguided employees that not all their Jewish co-workers are equally bad, and some of them aren’t to blame for the atrocities being committed by Israeli Jews in the Middle East.

I’m only paraphrasing here, not exaggerating. The verbatim lessons teach Googlers that “every Jew is different,” adding that employees should “avoid assuming a Jewish colleague represents the Israeli government”.

According to Alan Bloom, education is supposed to disabuse pupils of wrong notions and replace them with correct ones. On the evidence of these flyers, many Google employees think all Jews are the same, and each one of them is responsible for everything done by the Israeli government.

Contextually, this means the Israeli government is evil, though not necessarily every Jew in the world is. Why, some of them could even become Googlers’ best friends, especially if they disavow Israel’s right to defend itself or indeed to exist.

There goes that educational effort, right down the sewers. “Continuous learning is a big part of Google’s culture,” announces the company’s website. In this case, what Google’s employees are learning continuously is that some kinds of anti-Semitism are better than others.

Now imagine a flyer saying that not all Muslims are the same, and some not only aren’t terrorists themselves but may even disapprove of terrorism. Or that every Irishman is different, and it’s wrong to blame all of them for IRA bombing campaigns. Or that some blacks, including those working for Google, don’t peddle drugs and run prostitution rings.

Can you hear the hue and cry raised in every medium? Can you see screaming headlines on The Guardian’s front page? Can you picture an avalanche of complaints followed by another one of lawsuits and, probably, criminal indictments?

Since the monstrous HAMAS attack on Israel, anti-Semitic attacks in Britain have gone up 600 per cent. Jews no longer feel safe walking the streets in their neighbourhoods or sending their children to school (you know, it’s real schools I’m talking about, not public loos). As to anti-Israeli sentiments, even reputable media are either unable or unwilling to keep them under wraps.

It’s hard not to conclude that latent anti-Semitism always bubbles away just underneath the surface, only waiting for a pretext to burst out. And there comes Google, teaching its employees that, murderous and aggressive though Israel is, some Jews aren’t quite like that.

I don’t know what shining educational ideal the company’s managers see in their mind’s eye, but if it’s ridding their employees of anti-Jewish bias, their effort will fall far short. Like all those megalomaniac campaigns declared by various states, the likely result will be exactly the opposite of the one declared.

A war on poverty makes more people poor. A war on drugs produces more addicts. An attempt to redistribute wealth destroys it. An overhaul of education promotes ignorance. An all-out effort to end all wars leads to more, and bloodier, wars.

And Google’s attempt to indoctrinate its employees against anti-Jewish bias is guaranteed to make them more anti-Semitic, not less.

I wonder what Sergei Brin, Google’s co-founder and himself Jewish, thinks about this. Probably nothing: he is too busy bankrolling Democratic causes to worry about such incidentals.

For the outlanders among you, I’m talking about the biggest of the Channel Islands, not the state-sized suburb of Manhattan.

We’ve spent the past few days there, with Penelope regaling the local concertgoers with her music, and me acting in my customary capacity of groupie, roadie, driver, caterer, performance coach and shrink.

When not busy performing these functions, I used the local material to weave another tissue of vituperation against modernity. My targets ranged from vulgarity to something even more sinister, and it’s in that order that I’ll mention them.

First, as we drove through St Helier, the island’s capital, we saw several houses exhibiting I’M TAKEN signs. At first, I thought the women living there were thus telling potential suitors not to bother – they were happy with their current husbands and/or lovers.

But the locals kindly explained that the sign was a cute way of saying SOLD. ‘Cute’ is one word, ‘vulgar’ is another, and it’s more accurate. I’ve heard of anthropomorphism, but this is ridiculous. Endowing houses with an ability to talk is pushing the usual estate agents’ inanity too far. Obviously, that profession lacks normal defence mechanisms triggering an alarm whenever vulgarity threatens.

And speaking of vulgarity, we took a long walk on a long pier jutting out in the direction of France, 11 miles away but looking closer due to an optical illusion. There were several benches along the way, each donated by the family of a deceased person. The little plaques showed the dear beloved’s name and dates, along with commemorative messages.

One of them said: “You are gone but continue living in our hearts, just a step behind.” Another found an interesting metaphor for dying, “Gone fishing”, probably alluding to the poor man’s hobby. That reminded me of American gangster films where dead Mafiosi were supposed to be “sleeping with the fishes”.

I have no opinion of the Mafia idiom, other than doubting its verisimilitude. But those we saw are vulgarity at its soppiest. Grieving for someone close is an unfailing test of taste: it’s at a moment of emotional turmoil that people show their dignity – or lack thereof.

A friend of mine who lives in Shropshire actually collects vulgar and tasteless epitaphs at the local cemeteries. I’ve seen the list, and the Jersey samples I espied are mild by comparison to some of the entries. But they are still bad enough. Today’s lot confuse sentiment with sentimentality, which is a vulgar category error.

Now for the sinister part. A local amateur pianist died last year, and his widow wanted to sell the concert grand he left behind. Having found no potential buyers on the island, she asked the Steinway office in London to do the honours.

They happily accepted the commission, but with one proviso. Since the law prohibits importing ivory into the UK, the instrument’s ivory keys had to be ripped up and replaced with plastic ones.

Now that piano was made 100 years ago, at a time when public morality still fell short of today’s dizzying ascendancy. One can safely assume that the animal that kindly provided its tusks for the keys is now dead and has no further need for its megalomaniac teeth.

In any case, one can see no immediately obvious way of returning the pieces of bone to their original owner. So what exactly is the problem?

None exists, not in the realm of reason. But modernity, adumbrated by the so-called Age of Reason, has abandoned that realm for another one, that of signalling what it considers virtue and what is in fact its cloyingly sentimental idiocy.

The official reason for the ban on ivory is that vile poachers are threatening to make elephants extinct. One would think that those swearing by Darwinism would accept such a calamity as proof of natural selection. People are fitter for survival than elephants, which is why they can make powerful rifles and shoot the animals. Moreover, some 99 per cent of the species that have ever inhabited ‘our planet’ are now extinct. So what makes elephants so special?

Instead of banning ivory we should ban poaching. Otherwise, we might as well burn every painting in every museum just because some of them are sometimes forged. Same logic.

However, rather than staging such a bonfire of pictorial vanities, authorities routinely burn piles of tusks, even though their original owners don’t need them any longer. Actually, I’m reasonably sure that not all dead elephants are killed by poachers. If biology is to be trusted, some must die a natural death.

Why not use their tusks to make the kind of piano keys that, unlike plastic ones, don’t make the pianist’s fingers slide off? No rational reason suggests itself, unless we think that ivory is a malum in se.

Also, apparently our animal worshippers have found another ingenious way to save elephants from poachers. They saw their (elephants’, that is, not poachers’) tusks off, thus making poaching commercially useless.

Now, God (or was it Darwin?) gave elephants those huge tusks not only for us to make piano keys but also for them to survive. The animals use them to gather food, strip bark from trees to eat, dig, lift objects and defend themselves from predators. The tusks also protect the trunk, without which the animals would be unable to eat, drink and indeed breathe.

In other words, sawing tusks off a live elephant is almost guaranteed to make it a dead one. But on the plus side, the animal won’t be shot. In any case, why burn the sawn-off tusks? Why not sell them to Steinway?

Sentimentality, which is annoying in the case of epitaphs, here becomes sinister. It’s a symptom of the worst kind of paganism, smoothly progressing from animal worship to human sacrifice and everything in between. Such thunderously proclaimed love of all living things disguises contempt of man, for whom all living things were created. Or, if not of man in general, certainly Western Man and his whole civilisation.

The last item is linked with Jersey only tangentially. It’s a Daily Express headline I saw on a newsstand there: “Bishop quits job and apologises after ‘all-male orgy in rectory goes wrong’.”

I can only commiserate with His Grace and offer a prayer that his next all-male orgy goes right. I don’t dare think what that might be.

President Biden’s speech of unwavering support for the Ukraine and Israel has caused great enthusiasm in both countries and among their supporters.

Within America, however, the cheering was less universal. Large swathes of the population don’t think America has a dog in either fight.

Hence they don’t understand why American taxpayers have to dump billions into other people’s wars. They also justifiably fear that, should push come to nuclear shove, America’s activism may make her the principal target.

Though expressed in an up-to-date context, this current resistance to US internationalism is par for the historical course, as is its opposite. Isolationism is one of the two principal trends of American exceptionalism; proselytism is the other.

Both are rooted in the doctrine of manifest destiny cogently enunciated when the first batch of English settlers created the Massachusetts Bay colony. In 1630 their leader, John Winthrop, delivered an oration in which he alluded to Matthew 5: 14 by describing the new community as a “city upon a hill”.

He didn’t have to complete the quotation. His Puritan listeners knew the rest by heart. Hence they grasped the implication: “Ye are the light of this world.”

Both the isolationists and the proselytisers share this messianic vision of America. The difference is that, while the former believe America should shine her lantern mainly on herself, leading the world by example, the proselytisers also think she should be more hands-on in helping the outside world see the light.

Isolationism is more apparent within the ranks of the Republican Party, proselytism among the Democrats, although the overlap is significant. Thus it’s no historical accident that it was under Democratic administrations that America entered both world wars.

Here I must remark that people and governments tend to feel about wars differently. Most people don’t like them, but most governments do. This isn’t hard to understand: war is the ultimate expression of the innate statism of modern states, the sustenance on which they build up their muscle mass.

Like babies, all modern states were born covered in blood. No modern state, whenever it came to life, was delivered without the midwifery of a formative war.

In the USA, it was the Civil War – more so even than the Revolutionary War. In Russia, ditto. In Spain, ditto. In France, the post-revolutionary Napoleonic wars. In Germany, the Franco-Prussian War. In Italy, the war of liberation from Austria.

And collectively, modern statism vanquished finally and irreversibly as a result of what was perhaps the greatest, and definitely stupidest, crime in modern history: the First World War. In all instances, people died so that the modern state might be born and then grow, weaned on the congealing red liquor.

Yet the old adage says there is an opportunity in every crisis. Two democratic presidents a generation apart saw in the two world wars an opportunity for America to fulfil her messianic mission,

Woodrow Wilson knew America wouldn’t become the world’s dominant empire after the war unless she flexed her muscles during it. But he also knew that he could never get a declaration of war through Congress, however pliant, without risking a backlash from the largely isolationist electorate.

Wilson’s better bet was to provoke Germany into precipitous action, so that the people would feel they were the wronged party. That purpose was achieved by encouraging the House of Morgan to float war loans for Britain and by sending a steady flow of supplies across the Atlantic, which left the Kaiser’s Germany no choice but to launch unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson got what he wanted.

After the war America was rewarded with the intoxication of the Roaring Twenties at home and the status of a burgeoning global power abroad. But then came the hangover of the Great Depression treated with the poisoned tonic of the New Deal.

After Roosevelt’s hasty and ill-advised statist measures had run out of steam, trouble came back in force. By 1938 unemployment was again nearing 20 percent, recession returned, and suddenly even the intellectually challenged realised that the depression had not really gone away. It had merely been camouflaged, and confirmation of this came from unexpected quarters.

Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary and one of the principal architects of the New Deal, admitted before the House Ways and Means Committee that the New Deal had failed: “We have tried spending money,” he commiserated.

“We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!”

With the precedent set by Wilson to learn from, Roosevelt knew exactly how to manage a similar situation. The country needed to enter the on-going world war. And if the people and their representatives were likely to prefer peace to war, they had to be left with no choice.

To that end Roosevelt desperately hoped that either Germany or Japan would launch a pre-emptive strike, the sooner the better. Yet Germany wouldn’t come out and play. However, Japan, being starved of essential raw materials by the American blockade, would.

In one fell swoop all America’s problems were solved. Massive production of armaments put paid to unemployment, GDP went up 72 per cent between 1940 and 1945. Perhaps most important, by default the dollar became the world’s reserve currency, which enabled the Federal Reserve to play fast and loose with money supply without suffering unduly painful consequences.

Above all, the US became the unchallenged leader of the Free World, supplanting the British Empire. So were isolationists proved wrong?

Yes and – possibly – no. The two big wars gave America a shortcut to greatness, defined in the crudest terms. She became a superpower able to extend her will to much of the world. She also emerged with the world’s largest and most robust economy, having soared Phoenix-like out of the ashes of the depression. Such was the country’s ascending road charted by two Democratic presidents.

However, that ascendancy was bought at the cost of inordinate centralism, a move towards practically unchecked growth in the power of the central government. Another word for this process is socialism, and America’s body got a large dose of that poison.

Had she stayed out of the two world wars, as so many Americans wanted, she could conceivably have emerged better – if not necessarily greater, as that dread term is understood these days. Here we are entering the valid but speculative area of the ‘What if…”  school of history, which is a journey without an obvious end.

So let’s get back to today’s situation and remark that, for better or for worse, American isolationists have lost the debate. The country can no longer concentrate on her own virtues while looking at the outside world with detached avuncular condescension.

The choices made yesterday determined the choices available today. A great power doesn’t have the luxury of deciding to swap some of its greatness for peace and quiet. Trying to do so would make America part with her superpower status, a craving for which entered the country’s DNA back in the 17^th century, when she wasn’t even a country yet.

Looking on the bright side, those Americans who begrudge the Ukraine and Israel a few billion here and there should brush up on both their history and their economics. They would only have a point if aid were provided in cash. But it isn’t.

Most of it comes as war materiel produced in the US, and the more of it is produced there, the higher America’s GDP, the greater the number of new jobs created, the more voracious the ensuing consumer demand.

Economically speaking, the US has much to gain and nothing to lose by throwing her full weight behind her two allies fighting for their lives against pure evil. She could also improve her moral standing in the world, which is another aspect of global power to keep in mind.

However, the risks involved can’t be gainsaid either. One of them is the possibility of another world war, this time offering few chances for any party to emerge better off. However, even though the history teacher has been made redundant, the lessons are still with us.

The most important one is that appeasement is more likely to cause a war than thwart it. This simple observation applies at all levels, from schoolyard bully to global aggressor. Still, the argument from world war is worth discussing.

Crying over a few spilled billions isn’t. That argument is so inane that one has to wonder if perhaps it’s just shorthand for something else. But we’ll leave this for another time.

Everyone is talking about the current existential danger to Western civilisation. Everyone is only partly right.

Our civilisation is indeed under threat, but this doesn’t come from any axis of evil, whichever countries are supposed to make it up. Great civilisations don’t succumb to physical threats from outsiders. They only ever collapse under the weight of their own metaphysical folly, with outsiders sometimes providing the last straw.

Metaphysics doesn’t have to spring from faith in any confessional sense. It does, however, have to be correct, for a faulty metaphysical premise invariably undermines practical outcomes. In fact, it’s practical results that can as often as not either vindicate the metaphysics or disprove it.

The proof of the metaphysical pudding is in the empirical eating. Conversely, if we look deeply enough, we’ll realise that the most spectacular practical errors mankind ever makes all come from a metaphysical blunder that then triggers off a chain reaction of folly. Our present situation is no exception.

In his Essay on Metaphysics R.G. Collingwood (d. 1943) ascribes the fall of the Roman Empire to this cause. A clash between an increasingly monotheistic philosophy and an obstinately polytheistic people deprived the Romans of their spiritual backbone. They began to question the certitudes on which their society was based, and before too long they were no longer sure what those certitudes were.

The Romans no longer understood their own society. They no longer knew what role they themselves had to play in their community, or what role their community played in the general scheme of things.

Mired in confusion, they resorted to decadence. Misguided in their overall direction, they got lost in a warren of blind alleys. They tried to probe every which way, but there was no way out – they were running in place.

Fatigue set in. Step by step, the stuffing went out of their previously taut muscles, and they fell prey to barbarian attacks. Such is the aetiology of the senility and erosion of will to which historians usually, and correctly, attribute the demise of Rome.

Collingwood concludes (in The Principles of Art): “Civilisations sometimes perish because they are forcibly broken up by the armed attack of enemies without or revolutionaries within; but never from this cause alone. Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself, the form of life which it tries to realise, is worth achieving. On the other hand, this doubt is quite capable of destroying a civilisation without any help whatever. If the people who share a civilisation are no longer on the whole convinced that the form of life which it tries to realise is worth realising, nothing can save it.”

Parallels with our own situation cry out to be made, and many writers have responded to that cry. Like Rome, we too are reaping the poisoned harvest of metaphysical folly. It is the grave error we made in having jettisoned the sound theocentric metaphysics on which Western civilisation was built in the first place.

In its stead we have put forth the anthropocentric metaphysics that began with Renaissance humanism, developed through the Reformation and Enlightenment, and culminated in the manic-depressive relativism of post-modernity. Moving man from the periphery of God’s world to the centre of his own, this hubristic elevation of self to a God-like status destroyed the precarious metaphysical balance on which the West rested – with likely consequences similar to those suffered by the Romans.

We too are no longer certain of our fundamental convictions. We too have replaced stern resolve with decadence. We too have lost the will to defend ourselves against even a theoretically weaker enemy.

The major difference so far is that we haven’t yet had this point hammered home by a barbarian onslaught. But few are the optimists who maintain that such a development is improbable. Even fewer are the realists who point out that the barbarians have already attacked and won. Except that in our case the vandals came from inside, not outside, our city walls.

Our culture has lost structure and therefore order. Entropy reigns, and any teleological sense of direction has fallen by the wayside. We have lost the ability to think in straight lines, which is to say we’ve lost the ability to think. A typical Westerner may well conclude that the shortest distance between two points is a hamster wheel.

Metaphysical decline has been long in the making, but its forward motion has had an accelerator built in. Thanks to the technological advances of which modernity is so proud, what used to take centuries may now take years or even months.

Like an old man who looks back on his life and can’t pinpoint the exact time when he did become old, we try to take stock of our ertswhile certitudes, only to find they are no longer there.

We notice, for example, that our democracy is no longer democratic, our supposedly free speech is no longer free, our culture is no longer cultured, our justice is no longer just, and we start pointing a finger at all sorts of culprits.

Blaming anyone other than ourselves comes easily to us, and our accusing finger first jerks eastwards to indict any melange of barbarians clad in camouflaged animal skins and armed with nuclear spears. The few oddballs capable of thinking critically may realise that our problems are really internal. But they don’t look far enough back, nor deeply enough inside.

Their bogeymen may be deemed to be lurking on the left or the right of politics, in schools or government offices, even in sports arenas (whatever use they are put to). But they are looking at the physical symptoms of a metaphysical malaise – and the like can only ever be treated with the like.

That’s where one can easily lose hope. The tired clichés, along the lines of toothpaste that can’t be squeezed back into the tube, begin to sound tangibly germane to our situation. One can legitimately fear that, barring a global catastrophe, our tattered metaphysical fibre can never be sewn back together.

And if the parenthetical phrase about a global catastrophe indeed points to the only possible solution, then we face an awful dilemma whose horns are ready to nail us to the wall.

On the one hand, we are desperate to regain our erstwhile metaphysical strength. Yet on the other hand, we find ourselves unable to wish for what we might have identified as the only possible restorative remedy: a universal cataclysm sweeping away millions or billions of lives.

And now, by all means do let’s talk about our voting intentions at the next elections. The box we tick will make all the difference, won’t it?