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Over the past few days I’ve read it a thousand times if I’ve read it once: Liz Truss was knocked down and out by the invisible hand of market forces.

No human agency was involved, as it isn’t involved in hurricanes, earthquakes and tornados. It’s all that force majeure at work business. Nothing personal.

This approach to economics has always bothered me, and now more than ever. To begin with, exactly what were Truss’s sins that made that putative invisible hand lash out? What did she do that was so awful?

She didn’t want to raise the rate of corporate tax, which seems sensible, especially for a country that heavily depends on attracting foreign investment. In parallel, she sought to get rid of the 45p tax rate that didn’t exist even under Blair. That would have stopped her ‘Conservative’ party from sliding to the left of Labour, which doesn’t strike me as a felony.

Granted, Truss wanted to pay for the very marginal tax cuts with increased borrowing, without the necessary cut in public spending. But she saw that as strictly a temporary measure, made necessary by the combined effect of two blights: Covid and Putin. Once the nation caught its breath, Truss was going to take a chisel, if not a sledgehammer, to the social budget.

She promised as much, and there was no obvious reason to disbelieve her. After all, she was trying to put into effect exactly the policies she had campaigned on, those that the Tory rank and file had voted for when choosing Truss as their leader.

If that’s what made that invisible hand swing with so much deadly force, one is justified to doubt its sanity. But is it really invisible? Perhaps if we focus our eyes, we can actually see it in all its three-dimensional glory.

The expression was popularised by Adam Smith, even though he didn’t coin it and only used it three times in The Theory of Moral Sentiment and The Wealth of Nations. Since Smith treated his economics as a derivative of his primary discipline, moral philosophy, the concept of the invisible hand was supposed to merge the two.

Smith essentially attributed demiurge powers to the market, whose invisible hand unerringly guides private individuals to public virtue. He saw an economy as a giant cauldron into which individuals toss their private self-interests to produce a stew of collective goodness.

That was a sort of alchemy, with the gold of morality extracted from the base metal of amorality. Such unalloyed idealism can only work in ideal conditions or something close.

Edmund Burke, a deeper thinker than Smith, anticipated that such conditions would remain unattainable, and he knew why: “The moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted.”

At that time, in the 18^th century, government couldn’t “appear at market” as it saw fit. The simple expedient of a currency pegged to the gold standard acted as a natural restraining mechanism. (Opponents of the gold standard say, correctly, that it inhibits the state’s ability to react to economic emergencies with sufficient flexibility. What they leave out is that the gold standard also prevents the state from what Burke identified as “subverting the principles of the market”.)

Since then government has slipped such tethers by abandoning the gold standard and replacing it with the printing press. Instead of acting as merely a referee, the state has thus become both the star player and the coach, with all other players modelling themselves on its patterns of play.

Currency stopped being merely a way of denominating the amount of goods and services available, a means of their exchange. Instead it became a lever with which governments and government-like setups could control the workings of the market.

It then transpired that simply adding millions of private self-interests together didn’t produce public virtue (any more than pooling millions of individual votes delivers wise government). It produced instead a frantic traffic in buying and selling with no red lights, except those found in the district known for such fixtures, with the state combining the function of policeman and pimp.

This emphasised the fundamental difference between nature and market. The first is impersonal, the second is made up of people.

That was the case in the 18^th century too, but the people making up and driving the market were different then. In those days they were mainly, almost exclusively, those who produced goods and provided services. Today they are predominantly state officials and economists, either academic or hands-on, those working in financial companies.

State officials impose, with economists happily accepting and fostering, a whole raft of ideological constraints under which the market is supposed to operate. At some point, the machine inevitably becomes overloaded, sputters, slows down to a crawl or even crashes.

Faced with such downturns, those chaps heave a sigh, shrug their shoulders and, taking a leaf out of Adam Smith’s book, make some vague noises about inexorable market forces and the invisible hand. However, in this instance the metaphorical hand is very much visible: all they have to do is look at their own.

It’s not an invisible hand that has been steadily debauching Western currencies with inflation; it’s state officials and economists. It’s not an invisible hand that created a huge dependent underclass that consumes without producing; it’s state officials and economists. It’s not an invisible hand that is smashing to bits the energy driver of our economy; it’s state officials and economists. It’s not an invisible hand that has turned finance into a casino where blackjack is played with marked cards; it’s state officials and economists.

They have effectively turned democracy and free market into spivocracy, where Smith’s principles no longer apply, certainly not at any macro level.

Smith, along with his followers in Austria, Chicago and elsewhere drew up an ideal towards which all economies should strive. The closer they get to that ideal, the healthier they’ll be.

Yet those ideals, along with all others coughed up by modernity, have parted ways with reality. They survive only as empty phrases looted from their original owner and distorted beyond any recognition. ‘Invisible hand’ is one such purloined phrase; ‘market forces’, another.

Such forces do exist, but it’s not they that crushed Truss’s modest, bungling attempts to introduce a modicum of sanity to our economic behaviour. At play there were other forces, those of ideological tyranny imposed by the dogs of spivocracy that modernity has let slip.

Three days ago our papers devoted much space to the coverage of strikes and riots in France. From where I was sitting things looked cataclysmic.

Hundreds of thousands marched and demonstrated all over the country, protesting against whatever it is the French usually protest against. There was also a bit of rioting thrown in to enliven the proceedings.

The rioters didn’t have any specific grievances. They protested against capitalism in general, spraying graffiti, smashing bank windows and trashing a BMW dealership in Montparnasse. That last one I took personally, having been a BMW driver for the past 30 years (not the same car, I hope you realise).

Eleven people got arrested in Paris, and four police officers were injured, which sounds like a normal casualty ratio.

All this was accompanied by a strike of oil refinery workers, who are exploited and downtrodden. They make on average €60,000 year for a 32-hour week and can retire at 59. If that’s not oppression, I don’t know what is.

As a result, between a quarter and a third of petrol stations in France are running dry, with the problem being especially dire in the Paris region.

Just to keep oil refinery employees company, workers in the nuclear power sector are also on strike. That may make it difficult to restart reactors down for maintenance and safety checks. Considering the general situation with fuel in Europe, those chaps chose a perfect moment.

Judging by the reports I read in London newspapers, I thought we should cancel any plans we had for going to our house in Burgundy. My December speaking engagement in Paris also looked under threat.

I didn’t cherish the possibility of getting stuck with an empty fuel tank on a dark road. And the prospect of getting caught in the middle of a street riot appealed even less. Anyway, further research was in order.

I promptly went to the on-line version of Le Figaro, the closest the French have to a conservative paper, which isn’t very close at all. I was ready for front-page coverage complete with lurid pictures, why-oh-why laments and gloomy forecasts for the near future and, more generally, for France’s survival prospects in the long run.

I got none of that. In fact, I had to flick through several computer screens to find any mention of the riots and demonstrations. In a print version, the report I finally found would have taken about a column inch. The report did say dismissively that the scale of the disturbances hadn’t come up to the expectations of the hard Left.

Evidently it’s not only beauty that’s in the eye of the beholder. What to us across the Channel looks like a major event, similar to what France had to endure in 1968, appears like a minor nuisance to the French, barely to register on the nation’s consciousness.

It could be that demos, strikes and riots are more commonplace in France than in Britain. Thus they lack both novelty appeal and the wow factor.

If a large tattooed chap bare to the waist punched me in the face, once I came to I’d consider that outrage a pivotal point in my life this year. However, a boxer to whom that sort of thing happens a hundred times during one fight may regard it at as trivial.

Perhaps this analogy goes some way towards explaining the nonchalant Gallic shrug at Le Figaro. Another possibility is that the editors didn’t want to sow more panic than was unavoidable.

In any case, that made me think about news coverage. If it can be as subjective as that, how trustworthy is it? And yet most people form their view of the world almost entirely on the basis of what they read in the papers or, more common these days, watch on TV.

Both Americans and Russians used to have correct ideas about this. The Russians have a saying “no one lies like an eyewitness”. And an American writer of the past, probably Mark Twain but I don’t remember exactly, said, “The worst thing you can say about an American is that he believes everything he reads in the papers.”

I’m out of touch with both Russia and America, but it’s instructive to see how differently the same news is covered in the two countries I live in now, Britain and France. Add to this the widely divergent stories in media outlets within each country, and one’s head begins to spin.

I suppose no one can be completely objective on anything. Hard as we try, our thoughts, feelings and personalities colour our version of events. Even in natural sciences two researchers may get different results from exactly the same experiment using exactly the same equipment. Their personalities skew the findings.

A proposal if I may. Sometimes we know what bias a media outlet has, but sometimes we don’t. What about a rating system similar to that used in films?

It could even be colour coding above the masthead: indigo for conservative, pale blue for conservative wet, pink for Leftist, red for rank communist, brown for populist, black for fascist, that sort of thing. This wouldn’t eliminate bias, but it would make it manifest.

That way a viewer turning on, say, BBC News would know what to expect: woke, pro-Labour, eco-loony, anti-Brexit propaganda. And anyone opening The Times would expect… well, about the same I suppose.

Perhaps that isn’t such a good idea after all.

Yesterday marked a new first in our parliamentary history, and these are piling up fast.

The Mother of All Parliaments featured a fracas that almost came to fisticuffs, a scene more readily associated with legislatures in, shall we say, more temperamental nations. The occasion was the debate on Labour’s bill to ban fracking.

The combined pugilistic powers of Deputy PM Thérèse Coffey (heavyweight) and Secretary of State for Business Rees-Mogg (welterweight) won the day. They managed to force enough Tory MPs to vote against the bill to make sure it didn’t pass.

This added much redundant passion to the already febrile debates about the collapse of Liz Truss’s tenure today. These are debates I’m not going to join, averse as I am to all perversions, emphatically including necrophilia. Let’s just say that defeating that bill was the last, possibly only, favour she did her country.

I am more interested in the nature of the widespread hysterical opposition to hydraulic fracturing in a broad historical, psychological and anthropological context. Taking our cue from Aristotle, let’s arrive at that lofty plateau from the low ground of indisputable facts.

Such as: neither our industry nor our economy nor, consequently, our prosperity can survive without a reliable supply of affordable energy. We can get that energy either by producing it ourselves or buying it elsewhere or by combining the two.

Every sensible person realises that, though energy production methods popular before the Industrial Revolution (such as windmills by another name) may help, they aren’t going to solve the problem.

I’m skipping some intermediary steps for the sake of brevity, but everything I’ve read on the subject shows that, while it may be possible to heat a house with solar panels or even a town with wind farms, none of such virtuous contraptions can fuel modern industry.

This leaves only three realistic (as opposed to idealistic) sources of energy: hydrocarbons, coal with its derivatives, and nuclear.

Of these, coal is the clear loser, ideally to be relied on in emergencies only. It kills miners with black lung, and using it as a primary source of energy kills people with pulmonary disorders. The famous London fog, so beloved of Claude Monet, was in fact toxic fumes produced by burning coal in factories and homes. Once that practice disappeared, so did the smog, with cases of emphysema taking a plunge.

This gets us to hydrocarbons and nuclear. Let’s start from the latter.

Nuclear energy has an exemplary safety record. Not a single fatal nuclear accident has so far occurred in the West (including, for these purposes, Japan). That’s more than can be said for oil with its capsizing marine platforms and coal with its silicosis and collapsing pits.

Nuclear power has a practically inexhaustible supply of fuel, especially for us. The world’s three major suppliers of the global uranium are Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia, and at least two of these countries can be counted on as Britain’s friends (I’ll let you guess which ones).

Building new reactors is expensive, but it should be seen as long-term investment, not expenditure. More affordable is keeping the existing reactors going, resisting the urge to shut them down, about which later.

Supplies of oil and gas may run out eventually, but nowhere near as soon as the doomsayers are claiming. New deposits are being discovered all the time, although not so much in countries that are our friends for life.

This gets us to the vital aspect of energy supply: it must be domestic as much as humanly possible. This point has always been self-evident but never as much as now, when an evil regime is using energy as a blackmail weapon.

Having much of our energy produced domestically is an economic and strategic necessity. It’s economic because dependence on foreign suppliers puts us in a poor bargaining position, making energy prohibitively expensive. It’s strategic because many foreign energy producers are our adversaries, who can become our mortal enemies at the drop of a hat, or a bomb if you’d rather.

We, along with Norway, do have North Sea oil, but somewhere between 50 and 75 per cent of its reserves has been extracted already. Given our current emergency, we could and should step up production, but that would accelerate depletion.

However, the reserves of shale gas throughout the world, including Britain, can be confidently expected to last until the Second Coming, give or take. It thus ticks all the boxes: it’s plentiful, domestic and guaranteed to make us self-sufficient in energy.

Shale gas is produced by hydraulic fracturing, commonly called fracking – injecting a high-pressure water-based liquid into subterranean rock to release the gas inside. This produces some mild seismic activity, roughly equal in strength to the tremors caused by street traffic.

The resulting political activity, on the other hand, puts major earthquakes to shame – and here, by this circuitous route, we arrive at yesterday’s pushing and shoving in Parliament. For it’s neither science nor responsible environmentalism but politics that puts shale gas and nuclear energy in the same bracket.

Nuclear energy, for one, has no adverse effect on the environment. Radiation levels outside nuclear power stations are lower than outside coalmines, and, as I mentioned earlier, their safety record is unmatched by any other form of energy, of those that can realistically keep us going.

While science and empirical evidence can’t defeat nuclear energy and fracking, politics steps in, of the most pernicious kind. And here I am mainly interested in homemade subversives, not our foreign adversaries with a vested interest in continuing our dependence on foreign energy.

Just as the Soviet Union funded Western anti-nuke campaigns (including our own dear CND), today’s Russia funds the anti-fracking movement. There’s no need to ponder why: the country has self-evident economic and strategic reasons for preventing Britain from becoming self-sufficient.

But the Russians (and to some extent also Arabs) don’t create suicidal impulses in the West. They merely tap into the existing rancour, exploiting the boundless reservoir of resentment bubbling close to the surface.

They didn’t create the reservoir. They merely inject new impetus into it to bring the desired product to the surface, a process not dissimilar to fracking.

Political opposition to technological innovations goes back to the Luddite movement in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The Luddites destroyed machinery in textile mills because they thought it threatened their jobs.

That was on the surface. Underneath it there were many people who detested the Industrial Revolution because they felt it threatened not only their jobs but also their status in life.

The Revolution reshuffled the pack of social cards, dismissing the King and Queen and replacing them with an up and coming meritocratic elite. Entitlement of birth was being replaced by entitlement of achievement.

For those outside that neonatal elite this was a hard pill to swallow. Before, they could just dismiss their lowly status as an accident of birth. With that off the table, if they still remained outside they had to ascribe that to their own failure, which is never an easy thing to do. Blaming ‘the system’ is so much easier.

This created that reservoir of envy and resentment, the troubled waters in which assorted subversives could profitably fish using utopian pies in the sky as bait. Socialism, the evil corrupting the resentful, was born and has since grown to maturity.

Hatred of the West has been lovingly inculcated and cultivated. Millions of today’s Westerners grow up believing that history’s greatest civilisation has no merit, nor has ever had any.

That’s why they clutch at any straws helpfully proffered by wicked propagandists. They are ready to believe any nonsense as long as it confirms their visceral bias.

Hating the West means also hating its material achievements, fuelled by coal, hydrocarbons and, more recently, uranium. This hatred doesn’t extend to rejecting the products of those achievements, far from it. But it certainly takes over tittle-tattle in pubs and salons, along with academic discourse at universities and coverage in mass media.

Hence, the masses so inclined happily gobble up any lie portraying our economic success, and the energy that has made it possible, as inherently evil. How this evil is supposed to manifest itself is irrelevant.

It may be the danger of a mushroom cloud spreading over the countryside after an explosion at a nuclear power station. Never mind that it’s impossible even theoretically for the low grade of the uranium used there to produce such an effect. It’s also impossible for a chap to become a sex god simply by switching to a new deodorant, but he still goes out and buys the brand advertised on TV.

Anti-nuke propaganda has already caused many countries to scale down, and some discontinue, their nuclear energy programmes. Putin is helpfully demonstrating this suicidal folly for what it is, but no one is capable of listening any longer.

Such is the nature of the wide acceptance of the totally unscientific theory of anthropogenic global warming. After all, if the West has built its prosperity on raping the domestic and foreign underprivileged, it’s credible that it should now be raping ‘our planet’ to the same end.

Fracking is an even easier target for being relatively new. Tell the people it causes earthquakes, start a massive campaign to that effect, illustrate it with pictures of gruesome hypothetical devastation, and Greta is your aunt.

Liz Truss tried to fight rearguard action against the onslaught of subversive madness going by the name of modernity, and modernity crushed her. She contributed to her own downfall by being chaotic, politically inept, impetuous and, on balance, perhaps not excessively bright.

Therefore she did untold harm to her cause, if she indeed had one. That, however, is partly redeemed by the stay of execution she managed to secure for fracking, our major hope for survival. For that she deserves our thanks – on the last day of her tenure.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman has dramatically resigned, doubtless to the loud cheers of every progressive, forward-looking person out there.

Mrs Braverman’s views disqualify her from any government post, especially that in one of the great offices of state. And they certainly disqualify her from admission to any cocktail party held by progressive, forward-looking people.

Judge for yourself and be ready: some readers may find everything Mrs Braverman stands for to be deeply upsetting.

When she took over the job a little over a month ago, Mrs Braverman told the police to concentrate on fighting real crimes, not those that are only perceived as such by progressive, forward-looking people.

How dare she! As if some trivial burglary or mugging come anywhere near using a wrong pronoun or insisting on keeping the number of known sexes down to two. Doesn’t she realise that a burglary only hurts one victim, whereas a wrong pronoun attacks every progressive, forward-looking person in Britain? No, apparently she doesn’t.

Mrs Braverman’s response to our roads and bridges being blocked by eco-fanatics would have been to order the police to get rid of the nuisances. But she was prevented from committing that outrage by those same progressive, forward-looking people who control our mass media and therefore the consciences of most Tory MPs.

So did she understand the error of her ways and shut up? Did she hell. During the ensuing Commons debate on the Public Order Bill, Mrs Braverman had the gall to say: “I’m afraid it’s the Labour Party, it’s the LibDems, it’s the coalition of chaos, it’s the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati – dare I say, the anti-growth coalition – that we have to thank for the disruption we are seeing on our roads today.”

You see what I see? She is an enemy of progressive, forward-looking people everywhere. Why, she may even be a Tory! Clearly, the parliamentary Conservative Party is no place for airing such seditious views. This regardless of whether or not she is right.

Not only that, but Mrs Braverman has also shown herself to be an enemy of progress in any number of other ways as well. For example, she objected to the 45p rate of income tax.

Surely, any progressive, forward-looking person knows that high taxes bespeak high virtue (unless he is the one who has to pay them). She doesn’t, so she isn’t.

Then, unlike such persons, Mrs Braverman seems to take Brexit seriously. How gauche can one get? Just because hoi polloi voted for it in the greatest numbers they’ve ever voted for anything, that doesn’t mean progressive, forward-looking people who self-evidently know better must abide by vox populi.

Why, she even wanted Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights! My inference is that Mrs Braverman thinks Britain has nothing to learn about human rights from Germany, which refined the concept no end as far back as 80 years ago.

Xenophobia or what? Of course it is. And also doubtless global warming denial, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny (although this one requires further research) – and racism, that awful crime than which nothing fouler has ever existed.

For it was racism boosted by little-England chauvinism that made Mrs Braverman campaign against relaxing the rules on visas for Indian nationals. She must hate Indians and all other off-white races so dear to the hearts of all progressive, forward-looking people.

What, she herself is a daughter of Indian immigrants? Well, let me paraphrase that great orator Joe Biden: If she disagrees with progressive, forward-looking people, she ain’t Indian.

I hope you’ll agree with me that we don’t need ministers like Mrs Braverman. Nor do we really need a multi-party system either. De facto, we already have a single party, that of progressive, forward-looking people.

It’s time we stopped being coy about it and turned de facto into de jure. May I suggest Jeremy Corbyn as leader and Peter Mandelson as his deputy?

That may be jumping the gun a bit. But ridding our government of the likes of Mrs Braverman is a good step in that direction. Fancy a real Tory in the Tory cabinet!

‘Ideology’ and ‘idea’ are etymologically close. But in every other respect they are as far apart as two concepts can ever be.

An idea comes from reason and appeals to reason. An ideology, on the other hand, uses reason for tactical purposes only, if at all. Both its origin and the target of its appeal are emotional and visceral.

Every ideology I’ve observed in action relies on negative emotions at both send and receive: hatred, resentment, injured pride, desire for revenge. Ideologies seem to compete with one another as to which deadly sin they not just expiate but raise to moral virtue.

This distinction seems to be lost everywhere, including within the ranks of the Tory Party. Smelling the decaying flesh of their parliamentary majority, MPs genuflect, banging their heads on the floor and screaming repudiation of economic ideologies.

In fact, hoping to imbibe the elixir of political life, they are spewing ideological death on every shoot of a sound idea planted before their eyes. Kwarteng and Truss used ideas to spit against the ideological zeitgeist, only to have their ideas blown back into their faces.

Yes, Kwarteng deserved to be sacked, just as Truss deserves having become a lame duck soon to waddle into political oblivion. But they proceeded from ideas, not ideologies. And their ideas were doomed even had they been better thought through, or executed with more subtlety.

The ideas are familiar to every sensible family: don’t spend more than you earn, manage your budget, prioritise, be thrifty in your expenditure and prudent in your investments.

Adam Smith put it in a nutshell: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

However, such ideas are too simple for modern economists to understand. Thus, for example, Samuel Brittan, the FT’s late economics guru: “Since my undergraduate days, I have been pointing out that a government budget is not the same as that of an individual…” Exactly. That’s precisely the trouble.

Smith’s statement was an idea. Brittan’s retort was an expression of the prevailing ideology.

The ideology comes from the innate megalomania of the modern, which is to say post-Enlightenment, political state. From birth it has pretended to spread political power wide, with every eligible person seemingly having a share. And criteria of eligibility have been falling off by one, until the ever-lowering age remains the only one left standing.

However, by breaking up power into millions of fragments, the modern state makes each fragment meaningless. It’s like a chap buying one share of a giant corporation and hoping to have a say in how it’s run. He won’t. The board will take care of that.

A corporate board is essentially what runs the modern corporatist state, and most modern states are corporatist. It’s this board that drafts and enforces the corporate charter, called the rule of law in the political context.

This political elite owes its existence to the Enlightenment, which had innately more to do with ideologies than ideas. That DNA is reinforced by the state’s will to self-perpetuate at all costs, and the combination seems invincible.

The ideology of equality and liberty, comprised as it is of mutually exclusive components, would be oxymoronic if it had any real substance to it. But it doesn’t. It’s all smoke and mirrors, especially the equality part, but increasingly liberty as well.

Or else it’s a massive advertising campaign building up momentum over three centuries. The product it sells is a giant paternalistic state doing so much for the people that it feels justified to do much to them.

That advertising campaign has taken so long to sell its product because it runs against the grain of a great civilisation created over the previous centuries.

Yet the corrupting ideology regenerates as the public degenerates. Hence the board holding the controlling interest manages to seduce the poor sods, each clutching a single puny share, into accepting zeitgeist as the wind of progress.

The zeitgeist blows in the direction of endless expansion of the state and its ability to turn more and more citizens into dependents. Every modern state has become a welfare state not because it cares for the people, but because it needs to create a growing class of people who depend on it for their livelihood.

In practice, this means runaway government spending funded by promiscuous borrowing and punitive taxation, with inflation its de facto subset. It also means more and more people putting their survival into the hands of the state – and hence compelled to kiss the hand that feeds them.

In France, for example, only 25 million people work for a living, out of a population of 67 million. In the UK, the corresponding number is 33 million out of the same population – a marginally better proportion, but just as ruinous.

The natal affliction of political modernity has over time turned into a pandemic, with germs coming together to form that invincible ideological zeitgeist I mentioned earlier. And this is the ideology that Truss and Kwarteng tried to fight with ideas, pitting Adam Smith against Samuel Brittan. Smith didn’t have a chance.

Like Smith, they proceeded from commonsensical ideas, not ideologies. Not being blessed with Smith’s intellect, nor indeed with the skills involved in operating political mechanisms, they made a mess of it. This compromised the ideas, which is unfortunate.

The idea of cutting taxes across the board was sound, but not accompanying it with concomitant cuts in public spending was sheer folly. Now the mock-Tories elected to Parliament by out-Labouring Labour scream bloody murder, or rather bloody ideology.

However, had Truss and Kwarteng done everything right by not only cutting taxes, but also kicking huge dents in the welfare state, the reaction would have been even more violent than it is now. And it would have been an ideology killing ideas – not the way they are put into practice.

I strain my weakening eyesight trying to discern a flicker of hope for conservative, which is to say sound, ideas. But I can’t – things have gone too far, the baby of ideas has been splashed out. The dirty bathwater of ideology continues to run freely, a flow that can only be stemmed by other ideologies, not ideas.

The list of ideologies to choose from is small, with entries from Russia, 1917, Italy, 1922, and Germany, 1933, leaving little room for others. Oh yes, there’s also Russia, 2022, which some of our true-blue Tories find oh-so appealing.

Yuri Kerpatenko, chief conductor of the Kherson Music and Drama Theatre, dropped out of sight in September. His friends feared the worst – with good reason.

Kherson is one of only two major Ukrainian cities the Russians have managed to seize during their bandit raid launched eight months ago (Mariupol is the other). There and everywhere else they showed the world how to win the hearts and minds of the locals.

Wanton murders, rapes, mass torture, looting, destruction of property – really, a lesson in community relations seems to be in order. Kherson is no exception.

Quite apart from the usual murderous rampage perpetrated on hoi polloi en masse, the Russians have also kidnapped 457 prominent Khersonians, including mayors, government officials and priests.

So much more important it is for them to quieten things down by communicating to the terrified population that normal life will soon return. To that end, a month ago the Russians announced a gala concert to be held on 1 October, which happens to be International Music Day.

Maestro Kerpatenko was invited to conduct his orchestra, and Putin’s bandits didn’t expect a problem. They should have known better.

For Kerpatenko was made of stern stuff. Thus he refused to get out of the city while the getting was good – and now he refused to act as a performing seal to Russian fascists. Having been flatly turned down, the Russian officers left, promising to come back for Kerpatenko.

This is the only kind of promise those ghouls can be counted on to keep. And they have. Shortly thereafter Kerpatenko disappeared, and now reports have come out that the Russians shot him dead in his home.

His heroism stands in stark contrast to the behaviour of many of his Russian colleagues. Gergiev, Matsuev, Bashment, Spivakov, Berezovsky et al., not only happily play at Kremlin concerts, but some of them also make hateful blood-thirsty pronouncements on Russian TV.

Coming to mind is the spineless, sycophantic behaviour of the great Dutch conductor Joseph Mengelberg. When the Germans occupied his country in 1940, Mengelberg gave an interview to the Nazi newspaper Völkische Beobachter.

The conductor spoke glowingly about the cultural bond between Germany and Holland, adding that he had cracked a bottle of champagne to toast the Nazi victory. He then continued to conduct throughout the war all over Germany and the occupied countries, posing for snapshots with Seyss-Inquart (later hanged at Nuremberg) and other Nazi dignitaries.

Meanwhile celebrated German conductors, such as Furtwängler, Strauss and Karajan, happily filled the vacancies left by other celebrated German conductors, such as Walter and Klemperer, who had to flee the country for obvious reasons.

Furtwängler and Strauss also wrote, or rather signed, articles pondering the seminal differences between Aryan and Jewish music, but Karajan went much further. Unlike his pragmatic colleagues, he was a fervent Nazi who joined the Nazi Party twice, first in his native Austria and then in Germany.

When the Führer graced the royal box at the Berlin Philharmonic with his presence, Karajan arranged the audience in the shape of the swastika. That doubtless put a smile under that famous moustache.

Soviet musicians, including geniuses like Prokofiev and Shostakovich, kowtowed to Stalin, but there was a major difference there. The Nazis didn’t kill artists who refused to cooperate with them, but the Soviets did.

Furtwängler and Strauss risked only a hiatus in their careers. Prokofiev and Shostakovich risked a bullet in the Lubyanka cellar or, even worse, slower, torturous death in an Arctic labour camp.

The murder of Yuri Kerpatenko shows where Putin falls in the ranking of murderous European despots, at least in their treatment of artists: as hard as Stalin, harder than Hitler.

When the Russian hordes are driven out of Kherson, which is bound to happen later this year, I hope there will be a statue to Kerpatenko erected opposite his theatre. He wasn’t a musical titan like Mengelberg or Furtwängler, but he towered over them as a moral giant.

As for the moral pygmies among his Russian colleagues, I hope they’ll never be allowed to befoul any civilised country with their presence. In a famous 1772 ruling on slavery, Lord Mansfield stated: “The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe in”. And for fascist collaborators.

Too bad we have no laws to apply to our domestic shills for Putin. Otherwise it would be nice to see them deported to the country run by the strong leader they wish we had.

P.S. Yesterday Lieut-Col. Lapin, in charge of training Russian recruits at Belgorod, shared with his trainees his frank, which is to say derogatory, opinion of Allah. Three Tajik soldiers took exception to that theological position and opened up with their AKs, killing Lapin and any number of their comrades. Official Russian sources have owned up to 11 killed and 15 wounded, but the eyewitnesses cite numbers three times as large. Perhaps the Ukrainians should just sit back and wait for the snake to devour its own tail.

P.P.S. Army recruitment centres have so far been set ablaze in 67 Russian towns. The locals must be using the fireworks to celebrate their unreserved support for Putin and his war.

In common with other sexual perversions, exhibitionism is taking on every characteristic of an ideological crusade. And in common with everything rotten about modernity, the crusade has an accelerator built in.  

Things have got much worse than they were four years ago, when I wrote this:

“First a disclaimer: I love naked women’s bodies. Some of the happiest moments of my life have been spent in their presence, and I cherish every one, especially those I can remember.

“Moreover, at the risk of enraging my more devout friends, I even enjoy female nudity vicariously, by looking without touching.

“Photographs of naked women don’t upset me, quite the opposite. And I even like explicit sex scenes in films, provided they’re gratuitous and pursue no artistic ends whatsoever.

“Having thus established my dissipated, tasteless and probably misogynistic credentials in three paragraphs of self-lacerating disclaimers, I now feel it’s safe to say what it is I dislike, nay despise.

“That’s nudity practised for a cause and thus pretending to be something it isn’t (virtue), while concealing what it actually is: exhibitionism covering itself with an ideological fig leaf.

“What the cause is doesn’t really matter: no good one can be promoted by parading flesh in the buff. And even if the cause starts out as good, it’ll be compromised by the striptease.

“Actually, the original Calendar Girls dropped their kit in 1999 allegedly to support a worthy cause, Leukaemia Research. Yet, even though a film was made about them, with Helen Mirren starring, they only succeeded in trivialising that deadly disease.

“Miss Mirren, incidentally, has struggled to keep her clothes on throughout her distinguished career. Even now, in her dotage, she likes to parade her superannuated flesh at every opportunity, making one suspect that such exposure is an aim in itself.

“Anyway, the idea caught on, and exhibitionism for commercial or ideological causes became a standard technique. Actually, Pirelli tyres have always been promoted that way, which is tasteless but otherwise unobjectionable.

“Famous actresses stripping for the anti-fur campaign, on the other hand, was not only tasteless but also actively revolting.

“Various naked celebrities would drag their fur coats behind them, each leaving trails of blood. ‘I’d rather go naked than wear fur,’ was the line.

“Ladies, this side of puerile, onanistic fantasies, there’s usually something worn between one’s skin and an overcoat. Hence the choice didn’t have to be as stark as that, as it were. It’s possible to shed a fur coat and still sport, say, a jumper and a skirt for decorum’s sake.

“Yet the ‘celebs’ jumped at the chance to parade what the Americans call T & A. Exhibitionism is as much of a compulsion as is drug addiction.”

However, as the recent Mori poll confirms, exhibitionism doesn’t just have to function in support of various ideological causes. It can act as an ideological cause all on its own.

The poll shows that almost half of young adults in the UK now identify as naturists. Some merely like skinny-dipping and nude sunbathing, others frequent nudist beaches, clubs and resorts.

Talking to The Guardian, Dr Mark Bass, President of British Naturism, said: “It turns out there’s a huge, hidden enthusiasm for nude recreation. Attitudes to nudity are changing with the taboos and stigma being eroded.

“Modern society is weighed down by a body confidence crisis and more and more people are discovering the benefits that nudity brings to mental, emotional and physical health by allowing us to reclaim ownership of our identities.”

This shows what a tiny step separates starkers from barkers. For, rather than being healthy, the desire to parade one’s nudity in public is well-documented in medical books on sexual pathology.

The stigma and taboos that Dr Bass finds objectionable go back rather a long time, as documented in a formerly popular book: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”

Since Adam and Eve rebelled against God, people who belong to the civilisation based in part on that story cover their bodies to keep them away from prying eyes.

Conversely, people who belong to other civilisations, especially those enjoying sunnier climes, ignore such conventions. They happily pose nude for National Geographic, while wisely refraining from talking to The Guardian.

Those unsophisticated tribesmen are sufficiently secure in their identity not to feel they have to assert it by parading their genitalia. They go naked simply because that’s how they are. Actually, I doubt they bother about identity politics at all.

Not so Dr Bass, along with Guardian readers and writers. But I am confused.

Surely, by exposing their primary sex characteristics, people reinforce binary identification, thereby upholding those same taboos and stigmas that Dr Bass finds oh-so-yesterday. If nudity is tantamount to “reclaiming ownership of our identities”, we have a conflict.

Normal, civilised people don’t have a problem that can be solved by dropping their underwear. Modern Western savages may have such problems, but then they also pray at the altar of 70-odd sexes, which they eccentrically call genders.

Yet every time I’ve seen naked people, they displayed the characteristics of only one of two sexes, or genders if you’d rather. Wouldn’t the cause of modernity be better served then by them preserving what for millennia has been regarded as decency? Just to keep us guessing?

I rejoice every time I see a clash of modern pieties. Yet this time my triumphant joy is marred by sadness and fear. If nearly half of young Britons are eager to “erode” the “stigmas and taboos” of our civilisation and revert to times prehistoric, where will they stop?

Incest? Human sacrifice? Culling every first-born male child? More important, why would they ever stop at anything, if they get their marching orders from the likes of Dr Bass?

As a life-long student of languages, I’m fascinated by, to use Eric Partridge’s phrase, both usages and abusages.

And this isn’t merely an academic interest. For a study of language is a study of people.

After all, language is a reliable indicator of a person’s class, education, culture, even character. And comparing two languages gives a clue to the differences between two nations.

The current political turmoil in Britain provides a couple of helpful examples of the former benefit, and we have Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng to thank for it.

Yesterday Liz sacked Kwasi in the last-ditch hope of saving her own job. No such luck, prophesied Mr Kwarteng in his good-bye letter.

By stabbing him in the back, Liz only bought herself “a few weeks”, he wrote, because “the wagons are circling” her premiership.

Mrs Malaprop would be happy to discover a kindred spirit. For Kwasi – an Old Etonian and Cambridge PhD! – misused the expression badly.

Contrary to what he evidently thinks, “to circle the wagons” doesn’t mean getting ready to pounce. In fact, it means exactly the opposite: people defending themselves by pooling their resources.

The expression dates back to the American westward expansion, when settlers travelled in horse-drawn wagons. Their caravans were constantly harassed by Indians, wielding bows, tomahawks and scalping knives.

Hence, when they stopped for the night, settlers would form a defensive perimeter by arranging their wagons in a circle around their tents. That’s a far cry from what Mr Kwarteng was trying to say.

What he had in mind should have been conveyed by the idiom of “the vultures are circling”. Those birds of prey scavenge on carrion, the decaying flesh of dead animals. Sometimes they get ahead of themselves and begin to circle a moribund animal in its last throes.

Hence “the vultures are circling” would have been a proper metaphor for both the state of Miss Truss’s premiership and the Tory MPs who can’t wait to tear her to shreds. Unless Mr Kwarteng can provide historical evidence of scavenging wagons, or at least those deployed in an offensive formation, he must own up to an annoying malapropism.

His knife-wielding boss herself is no slouch in that department. When Liz Truss won the Tory leadership contest, she promised that, as PM, she would “hit the ground”. Splat! Ow! Ouch!

Any criticism of that usage has to be qualified by allowances made for the possibility that Miss Truss meant exactly what she said. An outside chance exists that she actually planned to shatter her tenure by falling on the flinty political ground from a great height.

Barring that unlikely possibility, she probably meant to promise to “hit the ground running”, to take a fast start on the road to becoming a statesman of Periclean proportions. Alas, her wrong usage has proved to be factually true, while the correct idiom would have delivered a promise Miss Truss was ill-qualified to keep.

At least, unlike the Eton-educated Kwasi, little Lizzie went to a comprehensive school, if not of the bog-standard variety. While we’re in the business of clichés, that enables her to hit two birds (vultures? wagons?) with one stone.

First, she can score political points by claiming to be as prole as the next woman. And then she can use her educationally disadvantaged background to absolve herself of any personal responsibility for not speaking English proper like. Tories, after all, are no longer in the personal responsibility business.

Getting out of personalities (and politics, come to think of it), comparative linguistics is a good tool of comparative anthropology. For example, one can learn much by comparing English and Russian sayings.

Just compare these two: “Let bygones be bygones” and “Gouge the eye out of anyone who mentions the past”. The first is English, the second, conveying the same idea, is a translation from the Russian.

Far be it from me to suggest that this juxtaposition explains exhaustively the carpet bombing of the Ukraine’s residential areas, but we are beginning to get a tiny hint of a clue.

Or how about this pair: “Too many cooks spoil the broth” and “A child with seven nannies will lose an eye”. Are you beginning to detect a tendency?     

Not yet? Then look at this duo: “No use crying over spilt milk” and “Having lost your head, don’t cry over your lost hair”. Still no traction? Then consider this: “At a loose end” and “Like a turd in an ice-hole”.

Even violent English sayings are more violent in Russian. To wit: “Curiosity killed the cat” and “Curious Barbara had her nose ripped out at the market”.

On and on in the same vein. “Still waters run deep” and “Devils live in still waters”. “A bad workman always blames his tools” and “A bad dancer is always hampered by his balls.” “Make a note” and “Make a notch on your nose.” “The cold hard truth” and “Truth will prick your eye”.

Some Russian proverbs don’t have obvious English equivalents, which in itself provides valuable insights into various aspects of Russia. Such as relations between the sexes:

“A chicken isn’t a bird, a wench isn’t a human being.” And its companion: “A wench falls off the cart, the horse’s life is easier”. Or, “If he beats a woman, he loves her”, a proverb I don’t recommend for the defence counsel in a domestic violence case.

If you wonder how a country with the world’s richest natural resources can remain so dirt-poor, look at the Russian proverbs dealing with related subjects: “You can’t earn all the money in the world”, “Work isn’t a wolf, it won’t run away into the forest”, “Work likes fools”, “You won’t build a stone house by honest work”, “You don’t steal, you won’t survive”.

Aren’t languages wonderful? I can never understand why anyone ever bothers to study anything else.

Belgium and Holland lead the way in euthanasia, but many other countries, including our own, are in hot pursuit.

To stay out in front, Benelux has to keep setting new records, and it fell on Belgium to answer the clarion call of modernity.

In that spirit, a physically healthy 23-year-old woman was euthanised in May as a way of treating her depression.

In 2016 Shanti De Corte witnessed a murderous Islamic attack at Brussels Airport. As a result, she developed PTSD and depression, which she has since been unable to overcome.

Those Muslim terrorists didn’t kill her, but Belgian doctors did. It was all perfectly legal, for Belgian law allows euthanasia in cases of “unbearable physical or mental pain that cannot be alleviated”.

The law has ruled, so there’s nothing anyone can say against it. Roman Law is in force in Belgium, and didn’t Roman jurists say dura lex, sed lex (“the law is harsh, but it is the law”)? So that’s it then.

Not quite. For, harsh or soft, a law must above all be just. And one has to acknowledge with sadness that not all laws satisfy this requirement.

Doctors in Nazi Germany, for example, functioned according to elaborate laws drafted by celebrated medico-legal experts. However, Nuremberg Tribunals judged that their compliance with those laws had led them to break other laws, which ought to have taken precedence.

Among other things, Nazi laws encouraged doctors to euthanise mental patients, some similar to Miss De Corte. And the medics set about that task with alacrity. About 300,000 psychiatric patients were killed by lethal injection, gas, sedative overdose or forced starvation.

You might say that the implied parallel with today’s Belgian doctors is spurious. After all, the euthanasia they performed on Miss De Corte was voluntary, while their Nazi precursors neither asked their patients’ permission nor waited for their requests.

Yet this argument is weak even on its own terms. One could object that the wishes of a schizophrenic or, in this case, a severely depressed young woman ought to be taken with a bag, not just a grain, of salt.

In any number of legal situations, the testimony of such a patient would be regarded as inadmissible. Yet when the same patient says she wants to die, the law holds that wish to be unimpeachable.

However, the issues at stake are larger than legislative inconsistencies and lapses in logic. For they bring into focus the role of the medical profession in general and individual doctors in particular.

What kind of doctor would happily kill a patient? One corrupted into institutional hubris, is the answer to that.

In fact, one of the few valid arguments against the death penalty is its corrupting effect on the executioner. This though most executioners could claim a legal justification for their actions.

Hence the argument against judicial killing: it’s not a function of the law to produce monsters for whom killing is all in a day’s work. If it does, there must be something wrong with the law.

I don’t necessarily agree with this argument. But I nonetheless consider it valid, and some of the personalities involved support it well.

For example, Charles-Henri Sanson (d. 1806), who pioneered the use of the guillotine, executed a total of 2,918 people, including the royal family and many of his own friends. However, he was a babe in the woods compared to the chief NKVD executioner Vasily Blokhin (d. 1955).

Gen. Blokhin personally shot tens of thousands, including 7,000 Poles at Katyn in less than a month. Vasily, he of the leather apron fame, took his job seriously. Thus he carried to Katyn his personal stash of German Walther pistols, dismissing the home-made TT for two reasons.

First, the TT overheated when used on that scale. More important, German rounds found in those Polish crania enabled the Soviets to lie for the next 50 years that the Nazis had been responsible for the killings.

Whatever you may think of such executioners and the laws empowering them, at least judicial killing was their job description. A doctor’s job is different, and he takes an oath to that effect.

Having consulted the text of the Hippocratic Oath, I found no mention of the God-like power of life and death it confers on doctors. But then its original texts go back to the times when God-like powers were reserved for, well, God.

Faith in the immortality of the soul put the mediator of God’s will, the priest, at the centre of the moral, and therefore legal, ethos. It stands to reason that, when the ethos changed, the priest was marginalised.

The soul was repudiated as nonexistent, and the emergent materialistic man elevated his body to the now vacant perch. His body became his religion, with the doctor its priest.

Or even more than that. Unlike a priest, a doctor isn’t just a mediator between man and a higher authority. When it comes to life and death, the doctor himself is that higher authority for none higher exists.

This isn’t to say that, until modernity got really toxic, doctors couldn’t decide who lived and who died. It’s part of their remit to make a therapeutic decision to withdraw treatment they know would be futile, and it’s hard to argue against this on any moral grounds.

Moreover, when a dying patient is in agonising pain requiring sedation with opiates, the line between an effective dose and a lethal one is often smudged. Thus doctors have always administered doses that they knew could potentially kill the patient.

But a moral chasm separates ‘could potentially’ and ‘would definitely’. A doctor putting a risky amount of drug into a writhing patient’s IV is a million moral miles away from one whose sole intention is to kill the patient.

There is no need to legislate for euthanasia to cover the cases of doctors withdrawing treatment or administering a borderline dose of opiates. Moreover, there is a need not to: such laws would make it harder for doctors to do their jobs.

Conversely, euthanasia laws turn doctors into executioners at their patients’ beck and call. This is a relationship similar to that Sanson had with Robespierre, Blokhin with Beria or, closer to my subject, Drs Brandt and Mengele with Hitler.

Granted, there still exists a vast distance separating the Belgian doctors who killed Shanti De Corte from the German doctors who killed hundreds of thousands of mental patients. But if history teaches anything, such distances can be covered fast.

Just look at the evolution of abortion laws, which started out as treating it as an operation only performed in exceptional cases and ended up as a fulfilment of a basic human right. The slippery slope theory doesn’t always work, but it does usually.

If euthanasia is made legal, sooner or later it’ll be made mandatory – it’s impossible to draft the law in such a way that the slippery slope would be off limits. Euthanasia on demand will join abortion on demand in the medical repertoire.

One is tempted to believe that our ancestors were on to something. Human life was sacrosanct to them, and not just man’s exclusive property to dispose of as he saw fit. But that was before progress really got going.

I can’t because I’m not a zoologist. Nor can I define a house because I’m not an architect. And don’t even ask me to define a bottle – I’m neither a silicate chemist nor even a glassblower.

Now, if I were to say any of these things without my tongue securely planted in my cheek, you’d be justified to question my honesty or intelligence or even sanity. Feel free to do so: since I’m not a black woman, such doubts are legitimate.

But if I could indeed boast such fortunate sex and race, your doubts would brand you as the distillation of everything evil in life: racism, sexism, misogyny, even – are you ready for this? – conservatism. And then transphobia would be just round the corner.

This brings me to the US Supreme Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose confirmation hearings were held earlier this year. Now, she does possess the qualifications I so lamentably lack: she is indeed a black woman, one of only a handful of females in the history of the Supreme Court, and the only off-white one.

She thus satisfied the sine qua non criteria pre-set by Joe Biden with a commendable lack of equivocation. “It’s time we had a black woman on the Supreme Court,” he said.

Biden got what he wished for, to thunderous hosannas coming from progressive quarters. But hold on a moment. Celebrations of a black woman reaching the acme of the legal professions might have been premature.

That Miss Jackson is black is undeniable, or at least no one has so far denied it, if only because the matter never came up. But is she a woman? This question is impossible to answer in the absence of a cogent definition of the Homo sapiens female.

Miss Jackson certainly couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, answer it during her confirmation hearings. When Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn asked her whether she could define a woman, Miss Jackson replied: “No, I can’t. I’m not a biologist.”

She thus took advantage of the loophole carelessly left by Sen. Blackburn, who probably thought she was setting a trap. The ease with which Miss Jackson evaded it shows that the trap was far too obvious.

She could have been snared inescapably with a different wording: “Can a woman have, or be born with, a penis?” Only three replies would have been possible: “yes”, “no” or “shut up, you reactionary scum”. The trap would have snapped shut in any case.

This way Miss Jackson could have it both ways. On the one hand she could rejoice in being a highly successful woman, while on the other hand claiming ignorance of what a woman is.

Reading up on Jordan Peterson the other day, I came across his comments about the sheer stupidity and immorality of selecting officials on any basis other than their ability to do the job. I agree wholeheartedly – so much so that I shan’t try to tread the same ground.

Instead I’ll comment on a problem that’s both broader and deeper than simply introducing irrelevant selection criteria for any job, and especially one that’s crucial constitutionally. The key to it isn’t Miss Jackson’s reply, but the comment on it in The Washington Post:   

“It was clear what kind of answer Blackburn wanted: Something chromosomal. Something to do with uteri or double X’s or estrogen – never mind the millions of women (postmenopausal, post-hysterectomied, infertile or living with Turner syndrome) who would not fit those definitions. Or maybe what Blackburn wanted was exactly what she got: Jackson declining to answer so that conservative groups could use that as political fodder.”

The author is doubtless correct about Sen. Blackburn’s intent. But her previous sentence highlights a civilisational catastrophe, while, more immediately, vindicating my lifelong belief that all left-wingers are either fools or knaves or both.

Surely the author can’t be so imbecilic as to think she was debunking any chromosomal or oestrogenic definition of a woman by mentioning postmenopausal or post-hysterectomised females. That’s like saying that a double amputee isn’t human because human beings have legs.

No, nobody is as stupid as that. That leaves dishonesty as the clear winner or rather, much worse, dishonesty motivated by an ideology. The circle is vicious, for mandated universal stupidity is the key demand imposed by the ideology in question.

In a widely misquoted passage, Dostoyevsky’s Dmitry Karamazov asks what his creator called accursed questions: “And without God and without life everlasting? That means then that everything is permitted, that one can do anything?”

That’s debatable. But one can certainly say anything – and insist on one’s right not only to an opinion but also to an audience.

I don’t know if atheists will be punished in the next life, but in this life a predominantly atheist society suffers dire cultural, social and intellectual consequences. For religion doesn’t just create a system of worship and morality. It creates a civilisation, whose vital constituent is intellectual.

A religion, in our case Christianity, imbues its adherents with a highly disciplined cognitive methodology, a way of thinking about life and everything in it. When the flesh of a civilisation grows on the skeleton of this methodology, it pervades every walk of life, going far beyond religion as such.

Natural science, for example, flourished specifically in the Western world because scientists growing up in Christendom thought like Christians, even if they weren’t in any confessional sense.

They knew – were trained to know – that the world was rationally knowable because it was created by a rational God. They also knew that matter functioned according to absolute, universal laws because it was created by an absolute, universal God. Scientists were thus intellectually equipped to uncover those laws because they knew the laws were there, waiting to be uncovered.

Westerners were also trained to direct their search towards a specific end because Christian thinking is teleological. Knowing that life continues in perpetuity until it has reached the ultimate end, Christians used the same knowledge to ponder more mundane issues as well.

When Aquinas brought Aristotle into Christianity, he equipped Westerners with an inductive methodology essential to any understanding of reality. This, according to Chesterton, “simply meant that the study of the humblest fact will lead to the study of the highest truth”.

Hence, no understanding of reality is possible unless it’s initiated and anchored by facts, humble or otherwise, that are accepted as such. Facts can be not only physical. Once the very existence of material facts is accepted as a given, we are ready to extend the same courtesy to intellectual facts as well.

Indeed, the Western perception of reality was woven out of material facts and the metaphysical premises enabling people to understand and interpret the facts (R.G. Collingwood called these premises “absolute presuppositions”).

Once checked against the premises, the facts themselves became absolute and universal, accepted as such by anyone who bothered to consider them. Logically, this cognitive process is impossible without an intellectual discipline based on the notions of the absolute and the universal.

This discipline is what we lost when God was relegated to the status of a quaint personal idiosyncrasy. The loss was incremental.

First we lost Collingwood’s absolute predispositions, premises accepted as intellectual facts. Then, with the certainty of night following day, we lost – or rather blithely tossed away – the very understanding that absolute facts exist or even can exist.

From there it was but a small step towards discrediting the very concept of an objective fact. No absolutes exist. Everything is open to subjective interpretation, with all subjects and all interpretations accepted as equal.

Such is the theory. The practice is that women can have penises with which they can impregnate men who have wombs. The practice is that a member of the highest judicial authority in the US can’t take issue with this lunacy on pain of ostracism and professional oblivion.

And a writer for one of the top US newspapers can get away with saying, albeit in a convoluted way, that objective reality doesn’t exist. And there I was, thinking that modernity swears by science.

It doesn’t. The only thing modernity swears by is itself, with its own puny relativities, superstitions and resentments. When science encroaches on them with its ridiculous chromosomes and oestrogens, it’s shoved aside with contempt. When modernity speaks, facts flee.