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“Repudiation of Europe,” the novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, “is, after all, America’s main excuse for being.”

This is one of my favourite aphorisms because it rings true and also lends itself to extrapolation. For if repudiation of anything is the main excuse for being, that means the repudiator is mostly driven by negative impulses.

This is true of every revolution, political, social, cultural or religious. They are all animated by the urge to cast tradition away or, for preference, to destroy it. Sometimes, as in the case of the American Revolution, a positive impulse is present too. But it’s never as strong as the negative one, nor as all-pervasive as the revolutionaries claim.

All revolutions are in essence what Ortega y Gasset used as the title of his best-known book, The Revolt of the Masses. However, the masses don’t rise in revolt until they have been sufficiently primed by educated elites possessed of the urge and energy to change things.

Such elites never plan a long way ahead. They don’t bother about the chain reactions triggered by the revolt they inspire and organise. Their claimed motive is some sort of progress, but all revolutionaries mainly use positive shibboleths as camouflage for negative urges – to enfeeble, destroy, abandon or, for that matter, repudiate.

Now, my hypothesis, one that I’ve explored in several books, is that every formative upheaval of modernity was caused by a revolt against Western civilisation and the religion on which it was based – regardless of the slogans the revolutionary banners displayed.

Some revolutions, such as the French and the Russian, also aimed their slings and arrows at Christian worship. But neither the English nor American revolutionaries sought to annihilate the faith. It was the apostolic Christian religion that they loathed, along with the civilisation the religion has spun out.

They shared that animus with all other revolutions, including the only properly religious one, the Reformation. All of them were populist, serving up different versions of the same slogan, “All power to the people”.

But power, unlike wealth, is a zero sum game. The more of it is in the hands of the people, the less is left for the traditional institutions and, more broadly, traditional civilisation.

Yet all populist revolutionary slogans are larcenous. It’s not the people who gain power, but an elite presuming to act in their name. Hence, in effect, as opposed to rhetoric, the ubiquitous slogan really ought to be “Down with the traditional institutions and the civilisation they embody”. That would be less catchy but more honest.

The groundwork for systematic subversion had been laid by Renaissance humanism, whose spread signalled the end of the Middle Ages. That was the onset of the shift so precisely described by Chesterton: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; rather, it has been found difficult and left untried”.

The Black Death (1346-1353), the cataclysm that wiped out up to half of Europe’s population, was a decisive factor. That delivered a blow to the Church, which couldn’t find a theodicy persuasive enough to explain a calamity of that magnitude.

Anti-clericalism, at the time mostly expressed as mockery, became the order of the day and so it has continued to this day. The personage of a corrupt, lustful, crooked monk, priest or nun densely populated European literature, from Rabelais and Boccaccio to Diderot and Voltaire. Even when the writers were themselves devout, as in the case of Boccaccio, the Zeitgeist made them put their pen to wicked use.

As the formulator and guardian of Christian doctrine, the Church was (and to a large extent still remains) for all practical purposes coextensive with Christianity, while the latter was coextensive with the civilisation called Christendom.

The three were like a tripod: sturdy only when all three legs are intact. But break one of the legs off, and the whole structure collapses. And the Church was the leg to which the subsequent Reformation took the sledgehammer.

Although the key figures of the Reformation thought they were better Christians, in fact they were out to destroy, not just to reform. Even though they identified their grievances against the Church as clerical corruption, graven images, indulgences and the rest, these were mere pretexts.

It was the very institution of the apostolic, hierarchical Church that they set out to annihilate, perhaps not realising they would thereby set the stage for the advent of mass atheism. Luther, Calvin and Zwingli aimed their blows at the Church, but the blows landed on Western civilisation, if by delayed action.

The typological secular equivalent of the apostolic, hierarchical Church was the aristocratic, hierarchical state. Since the two were interlinked, the state too was bound to become vulnerable. Luther et al. might not have realised that and, more critical, neither did the contemporaneous princes.

They were the ones who saved Luther’s life after he nailed his 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg. His action was blatant heresy, and under normal circumstances that would have been severely punished. But many princes shielded Luther from ecclesiastical wrath, and actually professed embracing his ideas. Their reasons were not fideistic but purely political.

By abandoning the Emperor’s confession, they could claim a legitimate reason for abandoning the Emperor. Hence Luther wasn’t their priest; he was their weapon.

The Western Church was put asunder, and it could no longer act as the ramparts protecting the civilisation against a barbarian assault. The walls had been breached, and they began to totter.

The Reformers were revolutionaries driven by the same populism that was later adopted and weaponised by their secular descendants. Luther and especially Calvin wished to remove the mediation of the Church from the discourse between God and man, effectively making each man his own priest, in Luther’s phrase.

De facto prayer leaders were going to replace priests who were no longer needed. After all, the Bible contained everything believers needed, and each of them was perfectly capable of interpreting Scripture as he saw fit.

Yet subsequent history showed that, when every man became his own priest, sooner or later he was going to become his own God. Thus Protestantism was bound to split up into the hundreds of dubiously Christian sects we see today, but that was the lesser evil.

Above all, men who approached the divine status in their own minds were bound to make God redundant sooner or later. Humility was being ousted by solipsism, liberally laced with hatred.

The Protestants were led to believe that they had lost the shackles of clerical oppression – and they were encouraged to abhor the institutions deemed responsible for their erstwhile plight.

The psychological mechanisms were exactly the same as those activated two centuries later, when the Americans and the French were tricked into believing they were tyrannised by the least despotic monarchs ever, George III and Louis XVI respectively.

We now know that a strong Church is the sine qua non of a strong religion, and a strong religion is the sine qua non of Western civilisation. Once the rot set in, atheism began to advance in parallel with the decline of a civilisation that could no longer ward off the blows raining on it from all directions.

Yet iconoclasm persists long after the icons have been smashed. The masses, encouraged to believe Western civilisation was evil and oppressive, are eager to erase its vestiges off the face of the earth.

To get the wrecking ball swinging, the Reformation and the Revolution combined to destroy some 80 per cent of all the Romanesque and Gothic buildings in France – an orgy that continued throughout the 19^th century. Yet it’s not only the physical monuments of Christendom that continue to excite barbarian hatred.

Every extant manifestation of Western civilisation, from music and poetry to language and manners, is a red rag to the modern bull. That situation didn’t just appear. It has taken centuries to develop, a period signposted by the Black Death, Renaissance humanism, the Reformation and all the secular revolutions adumbrating modernity.

The rot set in a long time ago, and it has infested our civilisation the same way termites infest the foundations of buildings. And with the same result.  

Listening to the commentators at the Australian Open is hard going for anyone who loves the English language as much as I do. Just two examples, off the top:

“She hits the ball hard in spite of her physicality.” The word you were looking for, dear, was ‘physique’. If it was the player’s physicality you wished to highlight, then the proper preceding phrase would have been ‘because’, not ‘in spite of’.

Or, “I referenced his backhand earlier.” ‘To reference’ means to cite the source of a claim. ‘To refer [to]’ means to mention, which would have been the right word there.

These mistakes aren’t as bad as their origin: the prole belief that adding syllables adds sophistication no matter what. Actually, it doesn’t, even when the words are used correctly. When they aren’t, the effect is as risible as it’s upsetting.

That gets me back to one of my pet themes: issuing licences to use words of more than two syllables. A simple test should establish eligibility, with questions like “Choose the right word: the performance was [masterful, masterly], every nuance came delicately shaped.”

Such a procedure wouldn’t just protect the curmudgeonly sensibilities of an old pedant like me. Above all, it would have an outside chance of saving the greatest language on earth from mangling vandalism.

Oh well, that will have to remain a cherished dream. However, one has to take issue with one axiomatic assumption of liberal ideology: the advisability, indeed virtue, of universal literacy.

Since any ideology ends up delivering results opposite to its proclaimed aims, a politically motivated commitment to make everyone literate is guaranteed to make most people illiterate.

This is borne out empirically. In Victorian England, before literacy was declared to be a social-engineering hoist lifting the downtrodden masses out of their misery, 97 per cent of the population were literate. Today, after liberal notions have indeed become axiomatic, that rate is 10 per cent lower.

Literacy in this statistic means being able to read simple texts, such as road signs, fluently and without moving one’s lips. Climbing up from that basic requirement, we’ll get to a higher plateau: the ability to use words in their true meaning and arranged according to the demands of proper grammar.

Now that height is beyond the reach of most of our comprehensively educated masses, as it always was even before education became comprehensive. But there is a difference: in the past, people unable to use English properly didn’t get to parade their ignorance in the public arena, especially in a professional journalistic capacity.

And I’m not talking about a very distant past either. Anyone who listened to the wireless in the ‘50s, watched TV in the ‘60s or read the papers in the ‘70s will confirm that my vituperative attacks on egalitarianism aren’t wholly groundless.

Alas, turning English into a heap of solecisms is part of the general vulgarisation of life. And the latter, in turn, proves a law of nature to which there are no known exceptions: everything that requires discernment will be destroyed if made available to the masses.

Modernity is mindlessly committed to the elevation of the common man, but this goal is unachievable in any other than the crudest material sense. Yet ideology prevents this demonstrable truth from ever being mentioned.

Today’s malcontents are out to destroy the hierarchical social structure. They don’t realise that, when that pyramid collapses, it will bury culture under the rubble.

For the masses won’t rise up to the level of cultural subtleties – they’ll force them to tumble down to their own level. Poetry will be reduced to doggerel, literature to potboilers, music to easy listening at best and anti-musical satanic chants at worst, politics to Rishi Sunak.

And English will plummet into the linguistic gutter inhabited by the masses, out of whose ranks sports journalists are being plucked.

Now I’d better shut up, just in case. I’m sure elitism will be criminalised before long, and there’s no guarantee that law won’t be made retroactive.

The C of E bishops have said no to the demand of Penny ‘Thunder Thighs’ Mordaunt, senior Tory minister, that the Church “conduct weddings for same-sex couples or, at a minimum, enable authorised blessings.”

According to Thunder Thighs, the Church fails “to recognise the pain and trauma that this continues to cause many LGBT+ people who are left feeling that they are treated as second-class citizens within our society.”

Specifically unrecognised are the pain and trauma plaguing her brother James, a homosexual airline steward and, by all accounts, a keen body builder. Actually, James would be well-advised to concentrate on developing his mind, rather than just building (and decorating) his body.

If he made that effort, he’d probably refrain from speaking arrant nonsense, such as: “If you are a member of the Conservative Party, a Conservative MP, part of this homophobic transphobic Government, you are complicit [in the hatred that’s conspicuously prevalent in England]”.

Clearly, James’s big sister wants to absolve herself of any such complicity. To that end she has contributed some arrant nonsense of her own.

Thunder Thighs doesn’t seem to realise that promoting secular egalitarianism isn’t what churches are for – even if they happen to be established. They have their own mission and their own rules, which are collectively called Christian doctrine.

That doctrine regards homosexuality as a mortal sin and homomarriage in church (which by the way was regrettably legalised by precisely the “homophobic transphobic” party that James finds complicit in fostering hatred) as a sheer impossibility.

Equally impossible is, or rather should be, offering “authorised blessings” to homomarriage, for churches are supposed to damn mortal sins, not bless them. Anyway, that would constitute cultural appropriation, for such endorsement is the exclusive domain of satanic sects.  

If Penny Mordaunt wishes to indulge in social taxonomy by dividing citizens in first and second classes, and then insisting they be merged into one, that’s her privilege. However, one wishes that a Minister of the Crown devoted her boundless energy to more productive activities.

For the time being the C of E bishops are holding firm. They have reiterated that, according to the Church’s teaching, Holy Matrimony is a union between one man and one woman. They’ve also refused to put the matter to a Synod vote.

However, the Church is under tremendous pressure to adapt its doctrine to the vicissitudes of secular fads.

Its ability to resist isn’t helped by its established status, especially since its Anglican equivalent in Scotland, the Scottish Episcopal Church, has chosen woke virtue over the Christian kind, at least on this issue.

(That Church is the ecclesiastical equivalent of the consistently subversive Scottish Independence Party, whose mission in life is to destroy the United Kingdom in the name of independence. It then hopes to commit Scotland to membership in the EU, which worthy goal doesn’t quite tally with any sensible idea of independence.)

My guess is that the C of E will succumb soon enough. That should remind those who take such issues seriously of how perilous it is for churches to submit to state control.

State policies change in line with its flexible, not to say these days nonexistent, principles and elastic morality. So much more important is it that Christian doctrine remain immutable and impervious to any secular pressures.

Doctrine should only ever change strictly as a result of an internal ecclesiastical decision, not of ministerial diktats. If any church becomes a weathercock turning in the wind of secular fashions, it thereby forfeits its mission.

Those Scottish prelates ought to remind themselves of the kingdom that is not of this world. In case they aren’t sure of the provenance of this phrase, it comes from John 18:36, which is a verse in the book that Christians used for guidance in the past.

When they veer from it in the direction of other publications, such as PinkNews or the Communist Manifesto, they are no longer Christian churches in anything but name.

As for our siblings, I have an idea they may wish to ponder. Brother and sister Mordaunt should campaign for incestuous nuptials as well, so that they could marry each other in church. Or, barring that, save from pain and trauma other blood-related couples, those who are willing and able to consummate such unions.

Just to think that Penny Mordaunt almost succeeded in becoming our prime minister. On the other hand, she probably would be no worse than the current incumbent or any other present candidate for the post.

When I was interviewed by an American streaming service yesterday, a thought crossed my mind and I blurted it out in what William F. Buckley used to call an “encephalophonic” fashion – from the mind straight to the mouth.

Have you noticed, I said, that Americans use the word ‘taxpayer’ more widely than the British do?

An American is likely to say ‘taxpayer’ where a Briton will probably say ‘citizen’ or, if he is more attuned to our constitution, ‘subject’. The word ‘taxpayer’ will usually appear in British speech only when taxation is the specific subject under discussion.

Since words often have cultural meanings that go beyond the purely semantic ones, this difference is worth pondering. For it suggests that Americans are more likely to define citizenship and government in purely economic terms.

I blame John Locke for that. He was one of those prophets who found honour in a country other than his own. For, though Locke was British, it was the Americans who took him more seriously.

Lockean notions flash through not just the American founding documents, but through the country’s entire history. In our context, Locke believed, wrongly, that representation was the only legitimising factor of taxation.

Hence one of the more thunderous slogans of the American revolt was “no taxation without representation”. That’s transparently nonsensical, for no state, democratic or any other, can survive without taxation. Thus that slogan is fully synonymous with “no state without representation”, which is demonstrably false.

The revolt was triggered by Britain trying to extract from the 13 colonies a tax in the overall amount of £78,000. To put this in perspective, it cost Britain more than £200,000 a year to maintain her troops in North America after the French and Indian wars.

In fact, at the time of their revolutionary afflatus, American colonists were paying lower taxes than residents of Britain proper, many of whom weren’t represented either. Bostonians even got their British tea at half the price Londoners paid – this in spite of the tea tax that inspired the 1773 Boston Tea Party.

As subsequent events have shown, the colonists also got another thing wrong: the relationship between representation and that other key theme of Lockean philosophy, property rights.

The word ‘rights’, natural, inalienable or otherwise, ranks right up with ‘liberty’ and its numerous cognates in offering an endless potential for abuse. In fact, one of the less pleasant aspects of modernity is trying to pass appetites, desires and aspirations as rights.  

While property rights are more valid than almost any others claimed by various demagogues, they aren’t without an offensive potential either. This potential is realised when they are raised to an absolute, as they tend to be wherever post-Enlightenment liberalism has triumphed, especially in the Anglophone world.

American post-Enlightenment thinkers have always accentuated property acquisition and protection as the cornerstone of liberty. Even these days, American political scientists emphasise protection of property more than do even conservatives in Europe who still, for old times’ sake, tend to regard it as only one of many prerequisites for civilised society.

Yet Locke only talked about preserving a man’s “life, liberty and estate against the injuries and attempts of other men” – the rule of law, in other words. But this wasn’t how it came out in the Declaration of Independence.

The Founding Fathers chose a less precise term ‘happiness’, preceded by ‘the pursuit of’, a combination they declared to be an ‘unalienable’ right. ‘Happiness’ was at the time a popular shibboleth of political discourse, but, as Alexander Hamilton explained later, the Founders used it in the narrow meaning of Locke’s ‘estate’.

However, the belief that representation would protect property rights was proved wrong. For universal franchise ineluctably promotes centralism at the expense of localism. I could explain why that is so, but anyone with eyes to see will know that it is so.

A central state thus empowered will always be tempted to increase its power by taking on more and more functions. That will require higher and higher taxes.

Thus immediately after the Revolution, taxes began to climb in America and have continued their steady ascent to this day. That may suggest that the two key mottos of the American Revolution, representation and property rights, just may be at odds.

Raising property rights to an absolute also provided the Confederacy with a valid argument in favour of slavery. The rebels had ironclad logic on their side: a slave in the South was chattel property whose legal standing was on a par with that of livestock, which is to say nonexistent.

Therefore any attempt to emancipate the slaves was a gross violation of Lockean property rights. On its own terms the South was thus as justified to secede from the Union as the Founders had been to declare their independence from England. Those terms, however, were invalid on a level deeper than that plumbed by the Enlightenment apostles of secular liberty.

The interesting dichotomy is that in a country constituted along Lockean and Enlightenment, which is to say atheist, principles, some 40 per cent of the population identify themselves as church-goers (as compared to about five per cent in Britain).

However, having discarded their faith, Britons have retained more political vestiges of Christendom, such as monarchy, aristocracy and an established church whose prelates sit in the House of Lords. And that’s why British conservative thinkers, unless they happen to be economists, don’t routinely talk about British subjects as taxpayers.

“What’s in a word?” asked Shakespeare. Well, a good chunk of political philosophy is one possible answer to that.

At mass yesterday, a visiting priest delivered a homily on peace and reconciliation, a time-honoured theme in both religious and secular discourse.

So time-honoured, in fact, that it’s hard to move the discussion forward by finding something new to say. However, reducing the subject to platitudes and fallacies is easy, and the good father managed to do so famously.

He stayed within his remit by telling us that we should love one another as Christ loved us, and that was an unassailable statement if I’ve ever heard one.

Universal love certainly beats universal hatred, and this is the kind of banality one doesn’t mind repeated in that setting. It never hurts to remind people of the basics.

But then the priest enlarged on the subject by equating love with absence of prejudice, and there he lost me for ever. For, ‘prejudice’, along with ‘discrimination’, is a good word that has been undeservedly maligned.

The Latin prae-judicium reached English via French to designate an a priori premise, a set of criteria acting as the starting point of any ratiocination. Subsequent thought and experience can put a prejudice to a test, showing it to be either true or false. But without pre-judgement no true judgement is possible.

If the father had given that matter a moment’s thought, he would have realised that his own job wouldn’t exist in the absence of some such presuppositions, starting with faith in God.

True, modern vandals have assigned to that perfectly good word nothing but bad meanings, such as visceral enmity to some groups seen by the vandals as requiring protection. But then any word, including ‘love’, can suffer from similar calumny.

How about “He loves beating his wife” because “she loves having drunken sex with multiple strangers”? It’s not only denotation but also connotation that confers a meaning on a word.

‘Prejudice’ (which, by the way, Burke regarded as an essential political virtue) has suffered more than any other word, however, since it has been deprived of any good meaning whatsoever. And not only because it has got to mean preconceived bias against some fashionable groups.

For modern vandals indeed insist on approaching any issue (except those dear to their hearts) with a mind open so wide that one’s brain is at risk of falling out. No axiomatic premise is allowed to exist, unless of course it tallies with modern fads.

That, I’m afraid, is something yesterday’s priest went on to prove in short order. Though he didn’t repeat the letter of Benjamin Franklin’s fallacy that “there was never a good war, or a bad peace”, he spoke in the same spirit.

Since Franklin was an atheist (fine, a deist – a distinction without a difference), he was unable to ponder such notions at sufficient depth. But a priest, especially one in the most philosophical Christian confession, should be capable of more nuanced thought.

No intelligent discussion of the issue, especially from the pulpit, is possible without a reference to Matthew 10:34: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”

Any pursuit of truth and virtue presupposes the possibility of having to defend them by violent means against those seeking evil ends. Therefore Matthew 10:34 leads ineluctably to the doctrine of just war laid down by St Augustine and later developed by St Thomas Aquinas.

Granted, a Sunday homily isn’t a philosophical treatise, and a priest can’t be expected to provide an exhaustive exegesis of a complicated issue in a few minutes. But he should at least hint at some cursory familiarity with it.

Instead yesterday’s priest showed blithe ignorance of that essential Christian concept by citing “the war between Russia and the Ukraine” as an example of a situation in which urgent peace is required on any terms. After all, the war has already produced “many victims, both in the Ukraine and Russia”.

Out of idle curiosity, what Russian victims would those be?

Ukrainian victims don’t require an elucidation: they are civilians of all ages murdered, looted and raped by evil invaders. They are soldiers dying heroically in defence of both their freedom and, at one remove, ours. They are the dozens of peaceful people blown up yesterday when a Russian missile hit a block of flats in a major Ukrainian city.

But who exactly are the Russian victims? The evil invaders? The soldiers who do the murdering, looting and raping or the officers who encourage them to commit those crimes? Those who target schools, hospitals and residential buildings for missile strikes?

That one sentence showed a lamentable lack of discrimination, another word unjustly maligned. The word comes from the Latin discriminationem, defined as “the making of distinctions.”

Discrimination, the making of distinctions, is as essential as prejudice to any rational thought and moral or aesthetic judgement. And there too the father showed a most regrettable deficit.

He spoke briefly about the drive-by shooting at a Catholic church in Euston the other day, when some criminals fired shotguns at a crowd of worshippers coming out of the church after a requiem mass for two parishioners. Many were wounded; two, both children, critically.

They were undoubtedly victims, but suppose for the sake of argument that the shooters had been killed driving their getaway Toyota too fast from the scene. Would they have been victims too? The logic of yesterday’s homily would point at the affirmative answer to this question.

But neither Augustine nor Aquinas nor, more important, Christ would agree. Unlike our visiting priest, they were capable of both prejudice and discrimination – and knowing their indispensable value to finding the truth.

Any commitment to truth in that situation, or indeed in the war mentioned, would demand that the perpetrators of evil be damned as such and, in due course, punished. That would in no way contradict loving them in the Christian sense, hoping that their souls will be saved.

But treating either Euston or Russian murderers as victims would show a lack of both prejudice and discrimination where they are badly needed.

That’s how many dogs inhabit our green and pleasant land. And there’s no denying that Surrey with its undulating hills is right up there, as far as green and pleasant go.

It was there, in that bucolic landscape, that eight dogs attacked their professional walker the other day and mauled her to death, tearing her apart limb from limb.

One of the dogs then pounced on another woman walking her own small dog on a lead. When she saw the red-fanged beast rushing at her, the woman picked up her pet, leaving herself vulnerable. The attacker jumped, bit through the woman’s overcoat and badly wounded her.

You might think the murderous animals were attack dogs, like rottweilers or pit bulls, those weaponised pets so popular on the more lugubrious council estates. But they weren’t.

One dog in the murderous pack was indeed a scary 11st (154lb to those unfamiliar with imperial measurements) leonburger. But the others were all cuddly little puppies, your dachshunds, collies and cockapoos, so popular with those who have to look for companionship beyond our own species.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, a compendium of authoritative opinions has been offered by ‘dog psychologists’ and ‘animal behavioural specialists’.

They all deliver mantras that are typologically similar to those often heard in our human courts: it’s all the fault of [society, poverty, poor educational system, insufficient social benefits] – of anyone other than the perpetrator himself.

“It’s sad that the dogs will get the blame for something that was a failure of human responsibility,” explains one such expert.

The poor doggies were suffering from stress. After all, they hadn’t been properly introduced to one another, and nor were they on intimate terms with the walker. In all likelihood they had been delivered to their pasture in a van, which had to make them even more anxious. Anyway, the walker shouldn’t have handled so many.

“What happens next,” continues the expert, “is an automatic response which sees the dogs looking for a way to lash out. This isn’t because they want to harm someone or something; it’s a way of communicating that they want the situation they are in to stop.”

Now dogs know how to communicate their displeasure without necessarily killing anybody. They can whine, growl, whimper, bark or even – as one dachshund I knew as a child did – sit up on their hind legs. Yet they can also pounce unexpectedly and, no matter how “socialised” they are, unpredictably.

I’ve written before about the lamentable exercise of anthropomorphism so widespread among pet owners. They assign human characteristics to dogs, forgetting their feral ancestry.

Yet these animals carry murderous DNA in their genetic makeup. That might have been suppressed by many generations of breeding and domesticating training. But it has never been expunged.

People pet and kiss their dogs, and their mawkish sentimentality is sometimes rewarded with a joyously wagging tail. But occasionally a dog would discourage such foreplay by biting the owner’s nose off. (Exactly that happened to the famous Russian actor Steklovidov back in the 1950s, which must have set his career back.)

Considering the ridiculous proliferation of dogs in Britain, the number of dog-related wounds is relatively small, some 8,000 a year. Though this serves a useful reminder of canine ancestry, it doesn’t really amount to a runaway social problem.

That may still be on the cards, considering how fast the dog population is growing. When dogs get to outnumber people, then we may be looking at a rapid spread of dog rights campaigners insisting that canine Britons should enjoy the same human rights as their owners.

Thus emboldened, socioeconomically underprivileged dogs may begin to see all people as legitimate targets, and they could put their numerical superiority to good use. But that’s hasn’t happened yet.

What, to me, is really lamentable, is the national obsession with dogs, which suggests a high degree of emotional retardation. I’m talking about dogs used as strictly pets, recipients of gushing soppiness that masks the owners’ deficient ability to relate to other people.

Functional animals, all those hunting hounds, police dogs, guide dogs and guard dogs, have a job to do, and they are usually treated by their owners without any effusive emotiveness.

But pet owners castrate their darling puppies to make sure they are less likely to act in character and then treat them as surrogate children. (Come to think of it, the drive to castrate human children is also afoot, but transsexuality is a separate subject.)

Sentiment and sentimentality may be etymological cognates, but in fact they are diametrically opposite. Sentimentality is ersatz sentiment, it’s like coffee made of oak acorns, tofu burgers, ‘genuine imitation leather’ and that ubiquitous oxymoron, ‘plastic silverware’.

Observing my own lifetime evolution from an uppity child with his head up his own rectum to a grown-up who gradually stopped seeing himself as the be all and end all of life, to a middle-aged and eventually old softie, I can see how my attitude to both people and dogs changed.

It has become the exact reverse of the popular adage of uncertain, probably French, attribution. In my case, it’s “the more I love people, the less I like dogs”.

I wouldn’t try to explain this intuitive feeling by delving into philosophy or theology. Nor will I draw the obvious parallel with paganism and animal worship. Suffice it to say that, even as I refuse, for all the ample provocation, to see people as animals, so do I refuse to see animals as people – even surrogate ones.

For me there exists only one justification for having 13 million dogs in Britain. They are a default source of protein that may come in handy as more traditional sources become unaffordable. What’s good enough for Koreans may become good enough for us.

P.S. On an unrelated subject, more and more people — even writers! — use the verb to refute in the meaning of to deny. This reinforces my conviction that the use of rarer words ought to be licensed. ‘To deny’ means you disagree. ‘To refute’ means putting together an irrefutable argument why you disagree. Big difference: everyone can do the former, very few the latter.

Paul Johnson, who died yesterday at 94, was one of the few contemporary writers I could cite as an influence. He is also one of the few who’ve taken me in.

Whenever Johnson was asked about the about-face in his views he performed at midlife, he liked to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

True, a man who dedicates his life to a search for truth is bound to find it in different places at different times. Show me a man who holds exactly the same views at 70 as he did at 20, and I’ll show you someone who made a point of stunting his intellectual growth.

However, there’s different and there’s different. Generally speaking, the intellectual pendulum can swing within a wide amplitude, but there are limits. These are imposed by one’s temperament, mentality, innate taste – one’s very personality. One’s views can change; one’s personality can’t.

For Johnson, no such limits existed, which is why he, or rather his works, played an unwitting prank on me. That started some 40 years ago, when I read his book Modern Times (American title).

At that time I had only lived in the West (Houston, Texas, to be exact) for some 10 years, a period mostly spent on trying to come to terms with, and survive in, a new world that didn’t seem to be designed for people like me. As a naturally conservative chap, I subsisted on a steady diet of National Review and Firing Line, both brainchildren of the Catholic writer William F. Buckley.

National Review writers, such as James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Buckley himself, showed me how to relate my innate conservative instincts to a system of thought.

Most of those writers were Catholic, either cradle or converted, and they gradually nudged me towards Catholic writers across the ocean: Newman, Chesterton, Belloc, Muggeridge, Waugh and so on, all the way down the list.

And then another English Catholic, Paul Johnson, published Modern Times, which I devoured practically in one sitting. It was a valuable book of history, though not, to me, of historiography. I hardly gleaned from its pages any facts I didn’t already know, and a few of those I knew well sounded inaccurate.

But that didn’t matter. For there was a brilliant writer who put into a coherent narrative many a scattered thought flashing through my mind. Johnson came up with an explanation and criticism of modernity, not just a diary of it. And, unlike some of his facts, his explanation rang true.

His was a conservative exegesis of a period that was veering further and further away from conservatism, a cri de coeur as analysis, analysis as a cri de coeur. There was no vacillation: every page exuded the certainty of a man who knows.

Normally, when a book impresses me as much as that, I’d re-read it after a year or two, sometimes more than once. But there is Modern Times, sitting in my bookcase unopened again since 1983.

For at the time I had to slake my thirst for more writings by that impressive man. So I rummaged through the piles towering at my local second-hand bookshop and was rewarded with A History of Christianity, published just a few years earlier.

The author was identified as Paul Johnson, but as I read it I thought the book-seller had pulled a fast one on me. Far from being a conservative synthesis, the book was clearly written by a rank Leftie, an unapologetic socialist.

Surely it wasn’t the same Paul Johnson? Today this question could have been answered within seconds, but in those pre-Google days it took time. So I did some research – and found to my amazement that sure enough, it was the same man whose Modern Times had impressed me so.

Considering that the two books were separated by merely five years, the turnaround was unfathomable. Yet one thing didn’t change: Johnson’s unwavering, authoritative certainty behind every sentence. There was a man who had the power of his rapidly changing convictions.

I felt cheated, which was silly. After all, Johnson wasn’t the only Catholic writer I knew who had changed horses in mid-gallop.

James Burnham, for example, was a leading Troskyist writer throughout the 1930s. Yet already in 1941 he published his seminal conservative work The Managerial Revolution. In the 1950s he became a regular contributor, and eventually co-editor, of National Review, whose columns I never missed.

Burnham’s turnaround was even more drastic than Johnson’s, but for me there was an important personal difference. I had never read Burnham’s Trotskyist writings and hence couldn’t juxtapose them with his conservative prose – as I could do with Johnson’s work.

That difference was trivial intellectually. But emotionally, that ignorance spared my sensibilities – and never diminished my pleasure in reading Burnham’s books. But the bond between writer (Johnson) and reader (me) was broken.

Since then I’ve read several of Johnson’s books and liked them. But that was akin to playing no-limit poker with strangers: one has to be on guard against the possibility of cheating. I could never again quite trust Johnson, though I could still admire him.

That admiration survives him, as do the reservations. But those apart, on balance I’m still grateful to Paul Johnson, as I am to all writers who influenced me in any way.

Paul Johnson, RIP.    

Was Brexit a success? My friend, a learned and intelligent man but, alas, an empiricist, thinks it was an abject failure.

That’s his privilege – we are all entitled to our unsound opinions. Yet the way he argues the case proves the inherent shortcomings of empiricism when it’s applied to fundamental issues, not just to calculations of compounded interest or advisability of prison reform.

In the good Cartesian tradition, before we try to answer the question above we ought to define success. I propose this working definition: achieving the result intended.

Yes, that seems to work. Thus a man who pops out for a pint of milk and accidentally finds a million pounds in a sack isn’t ipso facto successful. He is merely lucky – his good fortune didn’t come as the result he had set out to achieve when deciding to go to the Co-Op.

Conversely, a man who divorces his cheating wife isn’t a failure because as an immediate result his house becomes a shambles (in the unlikely event he has been able to hold on to it). Though neatness is desirable, he didn’t file for divorce to keep his house spick-and-span.

If you accept this definition, then you have to agree that Brexit was a qualified success, when measured against the intended effect.

It has to be said that, before Brexit became a fait accompli and when the debates about it still raged, both sides indulged in much crepuscular thinking. The problem was that empiricism, which I identify as my friend’s intellectual drawback, is almost a national characteristic of the British.

Unlike so many continentals, Britons like to dine on meaty facts, not pies in the sky. And meaty facts tend to have an empiricist, materialist flavour: physical pounds and pence are palpable, metaphysical convictions and beliefs are not.

This sort of thing is like aspirin: in small doses it can relieve your headache. But take too much of it, and your stomach will bleed.

The positive effect of their innate empiricism is that it often inoculates Britons against abstractions and toxic ideologies, especially those of megalomaniac proportions. It’s not for nothing that Edmund Burke identified prudence as the highest political virtue. And ideologies may be many things, but prudent is never one of them.

So far so sensible. But unfortunately sober British thinkers often throw the baby of principles and convictions out with the bathwater of ideologies. That often leads to category errors, such as the one my friend is committing.

He lists all our post-Brexit failures, displaying an enviable command of facts and figures. Going over his checklist of our woes, one has to put a tick next to each one.

Economy in the doldrums, tick. Incompetent and corrupt government, tick. Even worse, a socialist government, tick. Politicised and inept civil service, tick. Soaring crime rate, tick. Third-world healthcare, tick. Education that doesn’t educate, tick. Collapsing moral standards, tick. Noxious wokery everywhere, tick. And so on, all the way down the list – ticks all around.

At this point one may engage the argument on my friend’s terms by pointing out, for example, that few of those problems were caused by Brexit and fewer still could have been solved by our continuing membership in the EU. Therefore his reasoning is plagued by the well-known rhetorical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after it, therefore because of it).

But this debating strategy would be a mistake because it would lose sight of the fundamental category error underpinning my friend’s argument.

Yes, Brexit would be a resounding failure if its intended result was an instant improvement in the economy, education, medical care and law enforcement. But it wasn’t. The whole point of Brexit was to re-establish the sovereignty of the United Kingdom.

And sovereignty is a legal and, if you will, metaphysical concept. It can only be evaluated in the context of the centuries of British history, the nature of the country’s institutions, the specificity of the nation’s ethos and character, the profound meaning of Britain’s constitution.

All of these are transcendent constants unrelated to any transient, fly-by-night fluctuations in the country’s fortunes. The constants are the yardsticks by which the success or failure of Brexit ought to be measured.

I’ve described Brexit as only a qualified success because it hasn’t been fully achieved. Perhaps one could say about it the same thing G.K. Chesterton said about Christianity: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”

As I write this, 2,400 EU laws falling into over 300 policy areas are still valid in the UK. The previous Tory government had the right idea of tossing them all into a bonfire, but the idea was sabotaged by the political class within which Remainer attitudes predominate.

The point of those EU laws isn’t whether they are good, bad or indifferent. It’s that they were issued by a foreign body outside the realm of our ancient constitution. If some of those laws are indeed good, then by all means they should be reissued by our own parliament, the only legislative body that has jurisdiction over UK laws.

A great deal of the muddle still surrounding the issue is the shockingly poor level of debate in the runup to Brexit. Both sides displayed that malaise of empiricism in spades.

The Remainers were warning about the imminent economic Armageddon should Britain leave the EU. The Leavers were talking up the economic heaven to which Britain could ascend by negotiating independent trade deals with Nepal and Peru, or whatever.

I was writing at the time and can still repeat now that this isn’t an economic issue. Those who insist it is are making a category error, setting up the stage for future confusion.

Keeping the issue within its proper category makes it clear-cut. Membership in the EU already amounts to becoming a province in a single supranational state de facto, and within a few years will do so de jure.

Regardless of the economic aspects of that arrangement (and I for one don’t think for a second the EU is a factor of a long-term economic success), it’s tantamount to taking a fat blue pencil to the millennia of our history, crossing out the most ancient – and dare I say the most successful – constitution in Europe.

Even if there is an economic price to pay for such glorious sovereignty, it’s as worth paying as it was when Britain stood alone in 1940, resisting Germany’s previous attempt to unite Europe.

Once we’ve realised that, we’ve satisfied the demand for rhetorical rectitude. Now by all means let’s talk about the British economy going to the dogs, closely followed by her education, medical care and law enforcement.

But do let’s keep Brexit out of it – it belongs to a different category altogether.

I’m cross with Gen. Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russia’s Security Council and by some accounts second only to Putin in the government.

You see, realising that most of my readers are fed up with stories about Russia, I usually try to ration them in this space. Hence, since I pondered the fine aspects of Russian religiosity yesterday, I was going to write about something else today.

But Patrushev has made it impossible. The interview he gave yesterday to a Russian newspaper is so full of fascinating titbits that all other news has to recede into the background.

No turn was left unstoned: the Rothschilds, Soros, the West’s decadence – and especially the global corporations, Russia’s real adversary in the on-going war. These have total control not just of the Ukraine but of the West in general, including the US, that notorious colossus with feet of clay.

“Transnational corporations are nervous about the divergence in philosophies and ideas between Russia and the countries controlled by Western capital,” explained Gen. Patrushev, former director of the FSB. “These corporations only pursue wealth and a growing consumer society. Russia, on the other hand, stands for a sensible balance between spiritual and moral values, and socioeconomic development.”

The good general then directly blamed those dastardly concerns for committing aggression against Russia, using the Ukraine and Nato as their proxies or, to be more exact, puppets.

He didn’t bother to explain why and how those corporations’ pursuit of wealth would benefit from their vicarious war on Russia’s moral and spiritual values. That went without saying.

However, what does seem to require some commentary is the way those values manifest themselves in practice. An important disclaimer is in order: left outside the discussion must be the bombing of Ukrainian cities, along with the murdering, looting and raping of civilians en masse.

For Russia isn’t to blame for any of that, it’s those global corporations what done it. Otherwise one might think Russians hate Ukrainians, which can’t be the case.

After all, Patrushev invariably refers to them as “our fraternal people”. So it’s not really Ukrainians who are being murdered, looted and raped. It’s Soros, the Rothschilds and directors of transnational corporations.

I get it, the Russians and the Ukrainians are brothers. That, however, doesn’t mean the former can’t chastise the latter – the Bible says so, and that’s the book all Russians, including Gen. Patrushev, live by. And that book tells a few stories about some siblings being beastly to others. Cain and Able? Joseph and his brothers? So there’s no contradiction there.

But let’s look at a few international indices unrelated to warfare but related to things moral, spiritual and socioeconomic. Once we’ve done that, we’ll know how Russia strikes a perfect balance among them all.

So here are the most recent available data divided in several rubrics.

Abortion Rate is one unfailing indicator of Christian, and generally moral, virtue. And there Russia, at 53.7 per 1,000 women per annum, comfortably leads the world, leaving the nearest competitors Vietnam (35.2) and Kazakhstan (35.0) in her wake.

Russia’s Public Sector Corruption Index stands at 86, as opposed to 3 in Britain, 2 in Germany and 7 in France, all of them materialistic and decadent. That’s another proof of Gen. Patrushev’s assertions: Russia refuses to abide by the materialistic bourgeois rules fostered by global corporations.

Britain, with her runaway Crime Rate, has 131 prisoners per 100,000. Russia boasts 329, which proves her intolerance of illegal activities and the sterling standards of her law enforcement.

In Divorce Rate Russia narrowly misses the medals position – she comes in at Europe’s Number 4. However, she gets the bronze in Opiate Addiction Rate: third in the world, behind only Afghanistan and Iran.

So much for the spiritual and moral values. Alas, though it pains me to say so, one has to take issue with Gen. Patrushev’s claim on that score, if only on the basis of the data cited.

He is, however, on much safer ground in his second claim, one about Russia’s disdain for socioeconomic development, that obsession imposed by the transnational corporations on the world they’ve created in their image.

In Quality of Life Index, Russia comes in at Number 70 of the 79 countries listed, finding herself between Colombia and Pakistan. And in Health Index Score, measuring the efficacy of the healthcare system, Russia is second from the bottom, between Morocco and Tajikistan.

Now, juxtaposing Gen. Patrushev’s view of the world with the cold facts, one has to reach an unavoidable conclusion: Russia is a hellhole unfit for human habitation. But her people have been brainwashed by centuries of propaganda to believe in their own innate superiority.

That phenomenon, when exhibited by individuals, is amply described in psychiatric literature. When exhibited by a large country, especially one led by the likes of Gen. Patrushev, that psychosis creates a predator pouncing on everyone within reach and committing midnight horrors along the way.

Such individuals must be forced into a straitjacket and committed. And such countries must be stopped in their tracks before they blow up the world. Then and only then could we discuss the possible therapy and course of treatment.

For we don’t want Russia to impose her moral and spiritual values, along with her socioeconomic development, on us. Gen. Patrushev and his jolly friends must be made to practise their virtues within Russia’s own borders.

The Russians like to point out that theirs is the last Christian country in Europe, the envoy from heaven to a godless West.

A particular Mail columnist (I shan’t name him this time lest I be accused of having it in for that Putin fan) agrees. Russia, he confirms, is “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”, while Britain is neither.

It’s hard to argue with the second part of the statement, but the first one just doesn’t quite tally with what I know about Russia, which is quite a bit more than that nameless hack.

But how do you judge the religiosity of a nation? For example, a man who prays several times a day, observes all the feasts and refuses to work on Sunday won’t be caught in the statistical net if he hardly ever goes to church. Conversely, a regular church-goer who doesn’t believe in God but likes the companionship of a parish will swell the numbers of the believers.

However, while readily accepting the shortcomings of statistics, one still has to insist that there is one datum that gives a more or less accurate idea of a country’s religiosity: church attendance at Christmas and Easter.

These are the two most important Christian festivals, celebrated by both devout and nominal believers, and also by many atheists. For example, I remember my Moscow neighbours, each one a Party member and statutory atheist, painting eggs at Easter and baking kulich, the festive cake not unlike the Italian panettone.

Hence church attendance at Christmas and Easter is as reliable a statistic as one is likely to get. It certainly wouldn’t overestimate the proportion of devout believers. If anything, that statistic would be on the high side, boosted by the typological equivalents of my erstwhile Moscow neighbours.

And what do you know: this year, the same number of people, roughly 1.4 million, attended the Christmas services in Russia and in Britain. Considering that the population of Russia is more than twice that of Britain (although the gap is narrowing by the day), Russia is half as religious.

Putin, who after many wrong attempts finally had to learn that the Orthodox cross themselves from right to left, rather than the way people do it in Hollywood films, celebrated the Christmas mass on his lonesome (if you don’t count the photographer).

The setting was the Annunciation Cathedral, the smallest one of the three in the Kremlin. It was also the only one designed by Russian architects, the other two owing their existence to Italian masters. Perhaps for that reason, Russian tsars always used the Annunciation Cathedral as their private chapel. But they never celebrated major festivals in solitude.

That was because they were neither hypochondriac enough to fear infection nor cowardly enough to fear assassination. Putin is both, but then neither is he a tsar.

He is just a chap raised in the Petersburg gutter, the chieftain of a gang made up in equal measure of KGB officers and gangsters, so intermingled that it’s no longer possible to tell which is which.

Oh yes, he is also – if you wish to believe the aforementioned if unnamed hack – the president of the most Christian country in Europe. Humbug.

The most Christian country in Europe? Not by half, if you choose to believe the church attendance records instead.