Month: September 2024

Send out for the men in white coats. The government – and I promise I’m not putting you on – wants 70 per cent of school leavers to go into higher education.

I admire Starmer’s self-restraint. I’m sure his egalitarian loins ached for 100 per cent, but he manfully decided to postpone that objective until his second term. But even his present aim is guaranteed to destroy what John Henry Newman called “the idea of a university” in his eponymous book.

To be fair to Sir Keir, it was Tony Blair who laid the groundwork for this madness when he set his sights on 50 per cent. Now his Labour heirs proudly announce that the shining ideal has been realised. But they are lying.

Half of school leavers don’t go to universities. They go to jumped-up trade schools, most of them former polytechnics, that were misnamed for nefarious, which is to say egalitarian, purposes.

The government is quite open about this: it shines the light of its vision on all and sundry, with no bushel to hide under anywhere in sight. The idea, as proudly declared, is to boost the number of students from poorer backgrounds from 30 to 50 per cent by 2035.

The words “regardless of aptitude” weren’t mentioned, but they can be confidently assumed. Basing university admission on individual attainments would go against the socialist vision of class struggle.

People mean nothing as individuals; it’s only as members of warring classes that they have any value. And our socialist government is prepared to debauch the very idea of higher education even further to give the poorer classes a leg up in their struggle against… what exactly?

If you have to ask, you aren’t a socialist. Your ears aren’t attuned to the UHF vibes of Marxist echoes reverberating somewhere in the firmament.

Let me spell it out so that even socialists can understand: if 70 per cent of all school leavers go to university, zero percent of school leavers will do so. Universities qua universities won’t exist. We might as well refer to elementary schools as universities, which would get us close to 100 per cent.

Champions of this madcap bloating to bursting insist that, without the benefit of higher education, it’s hard to make a living in our capitalist rough-and-tumble. That’s nonsense even on its own puny terms – unless our £80,000-a-year train drivers all have advanced university degrees.

Conversely, I’d like to see statistics on the number of those who do hold such degrees and yet are flipping burgers for a living. There’s truth to the old joke: “What do you say to a PhD in classic philosophy? I’ll have fries with that.”

But even assuming that our socialist utilitarians have a point and degree holders do learn some marketable skills, that’s not what universities are for. I’d suggest we listen to Newman whose 1852 book spells it out beautifully.

Newman despised academic utilitarianism. Universities were to him places where thinkers come together to pursue intellectual and no other ends. Universities, he argued, should teach students “to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse”.

As a result, students will acquire a “perfection of the intellect … the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things”. As I recall, Newman didn’t attach any number to the percentage of school leavers who had the requisite abilities to indulge in such pursuits.

Seventy per cent? Fifty? You can hear Cardinal Newman laughing in his Oxford grave.

I can’t estimate that proportion with any hope of accuracy. Suffice it to say that in 1950 only 3.4 per cent of young Britons were in higher education.

As a lifelong champion of progress, I’m generously prepared to accept, against every bit of available evidence, that since then we’ve got three times as intelligent and academically gifted. So let’s say that 10 per cent would be a realistic assessment of school leavers intellectually equipped to go into higher education. But that’s 10 – not 70 and not even 50.

You might say that Newman’s ideas were fine for his time (1801-1890), but they are out of sync with the cultural and economic realities of the 21^st century. These days youngsters can’t eschew the utilitarian aspect of education; they can’t afford the luxury of wasting several years on studying subjects of no practical value.

I disagree. I think the ability “to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse” can then be profitably applied to any field that catches a graduate’s fancy. Moreover, this realisation didn’t become extinct 100 years ago.

Until very recently, a widespread path to riches was for a youngster to go to university and study subjects known since time immemorial to develop the faculties Newman highlighted. Arts, philosophy, theology, history, classics, that sort of thing.

The graduate would then get a ground-level position with a City firm, learn on the job and start getting seven-digit bonuses within a few years. His “clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things” would be not only useful in his work, but indeed essential to it.

At this point, I have to return to my recurrent theme I’ve stated a thousand times if I’ve done so once. Our governing socialists understand all I’ve written so far as well as I do – possibly even better because some of them went to British universities with which I’m familiar only tangentially.

Hence they are aware that, by putting quantity before quality, they’ll destroy what little is left of our real universities – and they won’t even improve the lives of the poorer classes in any appreciable way. However, if you tried to argue with them along such lines, they’d look at you with a blank expression of ennui.

You’d be missing the point, like someone who advocates a vegan diet speaking to a cannibal. The inner imperative of socialism isn’t to improve any institutions or people’s lives. It’s to destroy whatever little is left of Western tradition.

The oldest British university, Oxford, was founded in 1096, the second-oldest, Cambridge, in 1209. Western academic tradition doesn’t get much older than that, which is a sufficient reason for socialists to loathe it. And anything they loathe, they try to destroy.

This is the only realistic way of assessing all Labour policies, including educational ones. Oh well, if you believe Joseph de Maistre, the British people got the government they deserve.

I have a confession to make, and please don’t judge me too harshly. Much as I flap my wings every time a conservative writer is cancelled, I myself have embarked on a one-man cancelling mission.

I’m about to banish from my reading list the American academic Steven Pinker, or rather his book Enlightenment Now. Unlike woke cancellers, however, I first made an effort to find out and judge dispassionately the nature of the argument he puts forth.

To that end I read the first 100 pages or so, and only concerns for my own mental health and blood pressure prevented me from reading the book to the end. I have, however, scanned it to the end, which was enough to grasp Prof. Pinker’s gist. It was also sufficient to reinforce my cherished belief expressed in the title above.

Prof. Pinker is a passionate advocate of the Enlightenment that, according to him, replaced superstition with Reason (always implicitly capitalised), thereby making us all better-off. Yet his own reasoning is proof of the damage the Enlightenment has inflicted on that very faculty.

He devotes hundreds of pages to scientific-looking illustrations complete with charts and graphs proving that over the past couple of centuries people have become healthier, wealthier, more comfortable and longer-lived.

That, argues Prof. Pinker, is enough to discredit any “negativist” and “declinist” who points out the rapid degeneration of the West. And of course we have the Enlightenment to thank for our well-being. But for Messrs Hume, Voltaire and Diderot, we’d be eating slops, drinking swills, using snake oil salesmen instead of doctors and consequently dying at 40.

That line of reasoning is a classic rhetorical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc – averring that if something happened after an event, it happened because of it. For Prof. Pinker’s argument to make any sense at all, he’d have to resort to the Subjunctive Mood.

That’s generally a thankless task, and in this case a hopeless one. For he’d have to argue that, but for Messrs Hume, Voltaire and Diderot, science, and hence technology, would have frozen at their 18^th century level. Thus today we wouldn’t have painless dentistry, modern drugs, rapid transportation, computers and all those things that, according to Prof. Pinker, define progress.

I see no sensible justification for that view. To begin with, the scientific revolution of the 17^th century, which adumbrated scientific and technological progress, happened without any contributions from Messrs Hume, Voltaire and Diderot. Moreover, the men largely responsible for that revolution, such as Newton and Leibnitz, weren’t atheists, which conviction Prof. Pinker sees as a sine qua non of any progress.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that science would have stopped developing at that point. There’s every reason to believe that it would have continued to do so in pretty much the same way and at pretty much the same pace. This subjunctive argument sounds more convincing than its opposite.

Natural sciences developed not in spite of Christianity but because of it. Only after Christian thinkers corrected what R.G. Collingwood calls the metaphysical error of the Hellenic world did science truly get off the ground. Scientists began to believe in the existence of universal and rational laws governing the world of matter, which equipped them to direct their inquiry into the right conduits.

If we were at trial, with Prof. Pinker representing the progress junkies and me the ‘declinists’, I’d spare him the trouble of drawing up all those graphs. I’d simply stipulate that, in purely material terms, our lives are indeed better than they were 300 years ago.

Prof. Pinker partly defines progress in purely materialist terms because, he explains, material well-being is all that matters to most people. Again, so stipulated. Uninteresting if correct.

But since when is truth subject to a show of hands? This is yet another rhetorical fallacy, argumentum ad populum: because many people hold a certain view, it must be true. Really, for someone who worships at the altar of Reason, Prof. Pinker is rather lacking in intellectual rigour.

Progress in the toys man surrounds himself with isn’t tantamount to progress in man himself. And looking at the development of Western man since the Enlightenment, it’s hard not to notice that he has degenerated in every faculty, except those required to keep himself fed, clothed, treated and entertained. In fact, ever since the destruction of Christendom, Western man’s material acumen has been growing in inverse proportion to his ability to maintain his culture and civilisation.

To be fair, Prof. Pinker doesn’t reduce his arguments merely to trinkets. He also insists that, as a direct result of Enlightenment atheism, man acquired a hitherto absent ability to feel sympathy, empathy, sensitivity and all such markers of morality. As Tocqueville showed, post-Enlightenment documents replaced sentiment with sentimentality, morality with moralising, and righteousness with self-righteousness.

Prof. Pinker’s supposition has to languish at the level of superstition, being too weak to qualify even for an honest belief.

The Enlightenment declared war on Christendom, with its every tradition, practice and thought. That war was fought for the sake of empty slogans but, alas, it wasn’t fought just with slogans.

The Enlighteners announced their victory by perpetrating a wholesale massacre of whole classes that were trying to shield their eyes from the dazzling light of pseudo-Reason. And the Enlighteners started as they meant to go on.

More people died violent deaths in the 20^th century, the first atheist one from beginning to end, than in all the prior centuries of recorded history combined. Many were killed with the products of technological progress so dear to Prof. Pinker’s heart, but most were dispatched by expedients long in the public domain: executions, artificial famines, torture, neglect.

Even honest atheists acknowledge the restraining power of Christianity to keep human bestiality down to a manageable level. Not down to zero, of course: because people are sinful they have always had the propensity to kill one another. Contrary to Prof. Pinker’s unfounded insistence, war is an integral part of the human condition.

But the way societies functioned in Christendom, that propensity to kill was limited by any number of factors. One such was that kings and princes had difficulty recruiting large numbers. Because young men were needed to till the land, monarchs had to beg their vassals to spare some of their subjects to go into battle.

The Enlightenment removed such restraints in one fell swoop by introducing the concept of all-encompassing citizenship and, eventually and inevitably, democracy. Universal citizenship presupposes universal conscription, and towards the end of the Enlightenment 18^th century, the French army, to name just one, grew ten-fold overnight.

Wars got to be fought not between armies but between populations, which turned civilians into military targets. That at a stroke added many zeroes to casualty statistics.

Also, pre-Enlightenment wars were typically fought for territory and dynastic interests. But post-Enlightenment wars have pitted against one another various ideologies, a word and concept invented in the late 18^th century.

The most prominent of them were socialism and nationalism, both owing their birth to Prof. Pinker’s favourite period. These ideologies have amply realised their cannibalistic potential. They caused more deaths by several orders of magnitude in just one century than all those religious wars, Inquisitions and other Christian burrs under Prof. Pinker’s blanket managed in almost two millennia.

Contrary to what he seems to believe, man’s essence can’t be reduced to his material products and surroundings. An animal man may be, but he isn’t just an animal and certainly a unique one. Alone in the world’s fauna he is endowed with a soul, mind, spirit, which you are welcome to treat as separate faculties or one and the same.

It’s impossible even to begin talking about progress without being able to show a positive development in such faculties. This neither Prof. Pinker nor anyone else is able to do.

Quite the opposite, when outward and inner developments are vectored in opposite directions, a catastrophe beckons. Physicists invent weapons capable of wiping out life on earth, doctors stage diabolical experiments on people, computers are used to empower the state over the individual, planes transport bombs rather than passengers.

Also, post-Enlightenment modernity has effectively replaced culture with cults. These words may be cognates, but they denote incompatible phenomena.

Western culture was created by men of genius as a medium for communicating with God and glorifying Him. Western music, arts, architecture all trace their roots to ecclesiastical beginnings. And all of them have largely lost their cultural value, turning instead into illustrations to variously pernicious ideologies. The Enlightenment pushed the button for culture breaking up into cults.

Looking just at music for brevity’s sake, it’s hard not to notice the purely cultish appeal of pop din to immature minds and underdeveloped souls. Prof. Alan Bloom was the first to observe 40 years ago that worship of various pop groups had become the principal self-identifier of his students.

Yet even in classical music the worship of cultish performers has replaced any true appreciation of music and those who reveal its divine mysteries. This tendency started in the 19^th century with the appearance of the first cultish performers, Liszt and Paganini. Yet they were great musicians too, a requirement that has since fallen by the wayside.

I invite Prof. Pinker to listen to the performance of the same piece first by, say, Gieseking, Gilels or Gould, then by Yuja Wang, Lang Lang or even Trifonov – and then continue to shill for progress on that comparative basis.

He’d also be called upon to make the same claim by comparing St Bartholomew’s church with the Lloyd’s building, J.M.W. Turner’s work with Tracy Emin’s, Elizabethan poetry with today’s – and I’m stacking the odds in his favour by using British examples only.

Offered his book as Exhibit 1 in my imaginary trial, any sensible jury would find for the ‘declinist’ prosecution. If that’s the level of thought the Age of Reason produces, can we please go back to the Age of Faith?

And yes, we’d still be able to keep all those things Prof. Pinker holds so dear. They too owe their existence to Christendom – not to the vandals who destroyed it.

Unlike Kamala Harris, I don’t often use the word ‘holistic’. Like Kamala Harris, I believe that, as often as not, different parts of a complex whole are interconnected, which may justify the use of that word, much as I dislike it.

Now, holistically speaking, I’m convinced that the way a person talks is a reliable indication of the thought process involved.

Someone who speaks in perfectly parsed, logically connected sentences with clear antecedents and with each word used in its precise meaning may not be a profound thinker. But at least he is a lucid one, a quality Somerset Maugham rated above all else.

Conversely, when someone forces a listener to ask what on earth he’s trying to say, or makes a reader go over the same sentence several times attempting to disentangle the convoluted verbal mess, that person isn’t a thinker at all. His only excuse may be that he is a German philosopher but, as Schopenhauer showed, it’s possible to overcome even that congenital defect and still produce lucid prose.

Looking at the two presidential candidates from that angle, I can say that Trump may make me sad, but Harris makes me desperate.

Trump’s crude, semi-literate speech betokens a primitive, undisciplined mind. Even his body English is ungrammatical and full of solecisms. But at least he is always concise and to the point, leaving the audience in no doubt about his message.

The other day he even showed that he may eventually learn how to speak diplomatically, which is a useful skill for someone in charge of a country’s foreign policy. On meeting PM Starmer, Trump said that the latter is a “nice man” who “did very well. It’s very early but he is popular.”

I don’t know how closely Trump follows British politics, or indeed how well he understands it. However, I’m sure his advisers must have told him that Starmer’s popularity is dropping faster than Princess Di’s knickers in her heyday.

In fact, Starmer has to represent everything Trump loathes in establishment politicians. Sir Keir is a high-spending, high-taxing woke socialist with strong globalist inclinations and an unquenchable thirst for punishing (and banishing) the rich.

Trump’s pronouncements, crude though they are, and also his actions when in the White House suggest that it took a big effort for him to say something polite about Starmer. Yet he did make that effort, which indicates some bow towards proper politics.

Moreover, Prime Minister Starmer was accompanied at that meeting by Foreign Secretary Lammy, whom one can safely describe as not one of Trump’s most ardent admirers. In fact, Lammy campaigned for cancelling the president’s 2018 visit to the UK. Donald Trump, according to David Lammy, was a “dangerous clown” and a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath.”

This sort of thing says more about Lammy than Trump, but that’s a comparatively minor matter. For everything I know about Trump suggests that he doesn’t suffer personal insults with equanimity. If there is one adjective that always crops up in connection with Trump, it’s ‘narcissistic’, and narcissists tend to lash out at the slightest manifestation of opprobrium.

However, he didn’t call Lammy any pejorative names, racist or otherwise, and by all accounts behaved in a civilised, some will even say presidential, manner. That’s a move in the right direction, although I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when Trump talked to his retinue after the meeting.

By contrast to Mr Trump, Miss Harris doesn’t say many crude things, doesn’t make savage remarks about the opposite sex and doesn’t often swear at her political opponents. Yet one almost wishes she did.

For things she does say, on the rare occasions when she isn’t flanked by aids whispering in her ear, shouldn’t qualify her to be elected even the proverbial dog catcher.

I don’t know much about her specific plans for foreign and domestic policy (does anyone?), because she restricts herself to generalities and platitudes. One can surmise, on little hard evidence, that her politics are as close to Starmer’s as possible in the context of US politics.

Yet what she says, however little that may be, is nowhere as important as how she says it. It’s that holistic aspect of her speech, to use Kamala’s favourite adjective, that proves her incompetence. No one capable of uttering the two passages below can be trusted to run the nation that Trump wants to make great again.

In reverse order, the first one comes from Kamala’s rare solo TV interview the other day, while the second pearl popped out of its shell earlier this month:

“For example, some of the work is going to be through what we do in terms of giving benefits and assistance to state and local governments around transit dollars, and looking holistically at the connection between that and housing, and looking holistically at the incentives we in the federal government can create for local and state governments to actually engage in planning in a holistic manner that includes prioritising affordable housing for working people.”

And,

“The trauma that exists in communities around the violence of losing their children, losing a brother, losing a father, an uncle – all of that must be addressed, and we have to have a holistic response to it. It’s about understanding what we need to do to, again, understand that, to your point, we have to have a holistic response to this issue and prioritise it, instead of reacting to the tragedy that, sadly, they are too predictable.”

Someone else could accuse Kamala of misogyny: the only losses, other than “their children”, she mentioned were those of male relations. What happened to losing a sister, a mother or an aunt? Is losing a female person less tragic? You see, like Donald Trump, I too am learning alien ways, in this case trying to use the debating logic of our woke modernity.

But relying on my more natural way of thinking, I can state with absolute certainty that a politician capable of delivering the two passages above has no business being a politician – of any kind, never mind a US president.

Kamala got hold of a key word, ‘holistic’, and used it as the axis around which her thought revolved. It’s the sort of thing third-rate barristers do: basing their defence in a mass murder case on the abuse suffered by the defendant as a child, they’ll stick ‘abused’ into every sentence.

America – and what’s left of the free world – can’t afford a third-rate thinker in the White House any more than a defendant can afford a third-rate lawyer. Kamala has had her stint as the latter, and I hope American voters are wise enough not to let her have a shot at the former.

You might have gathered that none of this is a ringing endorsement of Donald Trump. It is, however, a ringing endorsement of the lesser evil. That’s the best we can hope for these days.

The Russian government, enthusiastically supported by its KGB church, is planning to rid school curricula of Darwin’s theory because it “contradicts religion”.

I don’t see how. Since we can’t know God’s ways, we have to assume he could in his omnipotence create things not just fast but also slowly.

Nor do I believe Darwin’s theory, slapdash though it is, should be excluded from curricula. It may be bad science, but no good science can compete with it for sheer influence. The same, incidentally, goes for Marxism: bad economics, worse philosophy, yet extremely influential and hence to be studied.

I’d definitely teach Darwinism, if only to train pupils how to think critically. They should be taken by the hand and gradually led to the realisation that the theory doesn’t hold water, certainly not as an all-encompassing explanation of life. It takes someone as philosophically ignorant as Dawkins to say that Darwinism “explains everything”.

I’d start by offering pupils this quotation: “Not one change of species into another is on record… we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.” Who wrote this? Some fundamentalist preacher? No, it was Darwin himself, in My Life And Letters.

And, considering in his Origin the complexity of the human eye, he went even further: “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

Unlike their idol, today’s Darwinists don’t even try to see how his assertions tally with the most elementary scientific data, such as the dearth of any intermediate forms of living creatures in the fossil records. In fact, Darwinism, along with any other materialist explanations of the world, has been refuted not only by logic but also by every natural science we may wish to consider:

Cosmology has reached the conclusion that our material world has not existed for ever: conclusive evidence shows it appeared more or less instantaneously at the beginning of time.

The physics of elementary particles has reached the level where some forms of matter (particles and field) can’t always be differentiated. Their material characteristics are now often seen as secondary to their metaphysical properties describable in terms of information only.

Palaeontologists have found and studied millions of fossilised remains of ancient organisms, and yet discovered practically no transitional forms in the development of species. If millions of fossils collected over 180 years have shown no such evidence, one can safely assume it doesn’t exist.

Genetics has demonstrated that mutations can only be degenerative in nature. Also, the amount of information in a single DNA molecule is so vast that it couldn’t have been gradually created even in the time exceeding by trillions of years the most optimistic assessments of the age of our universe.

Biochemistry accepts irreducible complexity as fact: each molecule of living matter contains a multitude of intricate systems that in a simpler form wouldn’t have existed at all. That means they didn’t evolve but were created as they are at present. 

Geology is another example. How is it that specimens of new species always appear in fossil records instantly and in huge numbers, fully formed and lacking any obvious predecessors? How is it that many species appearing in the earlier layers are in no way more primitive than the later ones?

Microbiology has shown that even single-celled organisms believed to be the simplest living beings are in fact incredibly complex systems of interacting functional elements. Even greater complexity is revealed at the genetic level, accompanied by much confusion in deciding what is primitive and what is advanced.

Indeed, if we look at the number of their chromosomes, man, with 46, is more complex than the mouse (40), mink (30), fly (12) and gnat (6). Yet using this criterion, man is much more primitive than the sheep (54), silkworm (56), donkey (62), chicken (78) and duck (80). And the prawn, with its 254 chromosomes, leads the field by a wide margin.

So is man perhaps the missing link between the gnat and the prawn? Actually, even some plants are more complex than we are. Black pepper, plum and potato each boast 48 chromosomes, and the lime tree a whopping 82.

Much has been written about the universe obeying rational and universal laws, which presupposes the existence of a rational and universal law-giver. But rationality apart, look at the geometric perfection of physical bodies.

Particularly telling here is the golden section, which is obtained by dividing a length into two unequal portions, of which the shorter one relates to the longer one as the latter relates to the overall length. Any length can be divided into an infinite number of portions, but only one division will produce this geometrically perfect ratio.

Modern scientists discover the proportion of golden section in the morphological makeup of birds and man, plants and animals, in the structure of the eye (which so baffled Darwin), in the location of heavenly bodies, in brain biorhythms and cardiograms.

Scientists are united in their conclusion: because this phenomenon goes across all levels of material organisation, it conveys a deep ontological meaning. But science is unable to explain it, and honest researchers have to admit their inability to account for the aesthetic aspect of the world.

After all, aesthetically perfect shapes add nothing to the organism’s survivability and may often endanger it. Why, for example, do cereal plants need stalks with joints arranged according to the golden section? Such an arrangement does nothing to make the stalk stronger. Why do the bodies of dragonflies relate to the length of their separate parts according to the principles of the golden section?

The aesthetic arrangement of nature points at a metaphysical, rather than physical, purpose that’s not of this world. And this is revealed in so much more than just the golden section. Just listen to birdsong, to name another beautiful example, or look at the peacock’s tail that jeopardises the bird’s survival by revealing its location to predators and making it slower in trying to get away.

Examples of this kind, and every branch of science can provide thousands, would have been sufficient to put paid to any other scientific theory a long time ago (and even evolutionary fanatics never claim that Darwinism is anything more than that). Generally, if a theory doesn’t become fact within one generation, or at most two, it’s relegated to the status of a museum exhibit. Yet today’s world was prepared to throw its whole weight behind Darwinism because it needed it even more than Marxism.

The two theories dovetailed neatly and, if anything, Darwinism went even further. Not only did it attack religion more effectively than Marxism did, but it also rivalled Marxism for wide-reaching social and economic implications.

One no longer had to leave the realm of seemingly objective biology to explain both socialism, with its class struggle, and capitalism, with its dog-eat-dog competition for survival. Even more fundamental is Darwinism’s demotic insistence on the purely animal nature of man.

No, I definitely wouldn’t excise Darwin’s theory from school curricula. Instead, I’d use it as an introduction to natural science, philosophy, rhetoric and religious studies.

But then I believe in debunking false theories by rational arguments, not cancelling them or their exponents. That’s because I’m not a fascist of any hue: brown, black, red, green – or Putin’s.

The salaries of employees reflect their relative value to the employer. Hence, if someone receives double the salary of someone else, the former is deemed to be twice as valuable.

Starting from this unassailable observation, we can then assess properly the current Wanted advertisement run by the Church of England, London diocese. The job advertised is that of a “head of racial justice priority”. (Is it possible to be a head of priority? You tell me.)

The salary on offer is £66,646 a year, which happens to be more than twice the stipend received by parish priests. The inescapable conclusion is that to our established church a chap capable of mouthing woke twaddle is twice as valuable as someone who preaches the word of God. Vox DEI speaks louder than vox dei.

The ad says that the successful candidate will “foster a culture… built on love, fairness, equity, justice, collaboration and integrity”, enlightening people on “the injustice and impact of racism”. He will “break down mental, cultural and institutional barriers… to engender true race equality,” thereby helping “address the historical legacy of slavery and challenge systemic racism”. 

I’m sorry, am I missing something? I thought equality before God is an integral part of any Christian message to the multitudes, and it’s the job of a priest to deliver this message from the pulpit. On the other hand, the sermon of secular DEI in relation to race or anything else is properly delivered by social workers, left-wing dons and Labour politicians.

A Christian minister and a Labour minister are jobs not just different but diametrically opposite, although DEI propaganda compromises both. But at least a politician indulges it in a secular context.

God knows it’s wicked enough even there, but in our democracy run riot securing 20 per cent of the electorate is supposed to give politicians a mandate to do as they please. Hence we may huff and we may puff, but we can’t argue that a woke politician is corrupting his mission.

He is, but this isn’t an argument we can ever win. However, when our established church misappropriates its finances to fund DEI propaganda, the church isn’t just going beyond its mission. It makes a mockery of it.

This isn’t to say that the church should never comment on worldly affairs. Not at all. It should sit in judgement and cry foul whenever a government acts in ways inconsistent with Christian morality. But it should steer clear of any faddish ideology specifically because it’s a) faddish and b) an ideology.

Fads come and go, but a church should overlook the transient in favour of the transcendent. Governments these days act as weathervanes, turning this way or that depending on the way the wind blows. But because the church’s mission is eternal, it should be impervious to political vicissitudes.

When it comes to committing itself to an ideology, the church should remind itself what all ideologies are. The term first appeared in France at the very end of the 18^th century, and new words are coined when they are needed to denote new concepts.

The need for this particular concept sprang from the very nature of the Enlightenment, which, when stripped of its sloganeering cant, was a mass revolt against Christendom – not just its founding religion but the civilisation it had produced. When troops go into battle, they need to inscribe something on their banners, and ideology is what provides the text.

An ideology was to the philosophes a system of rational convictions designed to supplant irrational superstitions, which is how they saw Christianity. However, it was understood even then that such rational convictions may be held for reasons other than purely epistemic, that is based on evidential reasoning. Irrational was the new rational.

In other words, an ideology isn’t a philosophy but a secular creed perceived to be in competition with religious faith, which it sees as its mortal enemy.

Now, Christianity is a rational religion and, as such, isn’t at odds with science or philosophy. But it is at odds, indeed at war, with cults, false religions claiming they preach the truth but in fact peddling lies. Worshiping such cults is called idolatry, which word fits any ideology like a glove.

Ideologies appeared at the crest of the Enlightenment to fill the gap left by religious faith. Man was now perceived as merely a higher order of animal, but the ‘enlighteners’ knew he was the kind of animal who had an innate need to rise above his quotidian existence. Man has a compulsion to believe in something higher than himself.

That’s where ideology steps in. It gives people a chance to worship the superpersonal without rising to the supernatural. Yet upon closer examination, any ideology is found out sooner or later. It turns out to be not a philosopher’s stone but fool’s gold.

That’s why people susceptible to ideological temptation tend to float from one ideology to another. They look for a secular god, but because that god is false they can’t find it. At least they can’t find a single one, which is why they resort to secular polytheism.

And their rites grow more and more bizarre. Sexual equality turns into a ritual dance around a woman’s phallus, quest for peace turns into shamanistic shrieks for unilateral disarmament, social justice into rampant levelling, racial equality into a wholesale repudiation of Western history.

Like Greek gods who all lived on the same mountain, ideological idols also stay close together. They inhabit their own temple, that defined by hatred of Christendom. Yes, our civilisation has already been relegated to the status of distant memory, but iconoclasm tends to persevere long after the icons have been smashed.

All this is to say that for a church to feel the need for a highly paid “head of racial justice priority” is tantamount to worshiping idols at the expense of its mission to worship God. This comes close to my understanding of satanism and it’s useful to remember that, etymologically speaking, Lucifer means ‘enlightener’.

Ange Rayner, our deputy prime minister, knows how to ward off any accusations of misbehaviour. Wave the sabre of her class origin, and accusers flee like demons from the cross.

Photographed whirling drunk in a sleazy nightclub at 4 AM? “I’m working class.”

Accepted all-expenses-paid holiday with her intermittent lover at a billionaire’s penthouse? “I’m working class.”

Hired a personal photographer, on a £68,000 taxpayer-funded salary, to boost her online image? “I’m working class.”

Pushed an old woman under a bus? “I’m working class.” Sorry, I made this last one up. The idea is to probe the outer limits of that excuse, which seems to go far, although perhaps not quite as far as that yet.

Still, barristers routinely cite their clients’ humble origins as a mitigating circumstance. So perhaps my hypothetical excuse isn’t as fanciful as all that.

Actually, my problem today isn’t with Ange, that walking caricature of a Labour politician. It’s with the term ‘working class’, and I’ll be using her only as an illustration of its fatuity.

The term has two meanings, one English, the other Marxist. The English meaning is self-evident: ‘working class’ describes people who work. Those who don’t work aren’t working class, those who work are.

Now, anyone who has ever looked at the diaries of doctors, lawyers, farmers, teachers and dons will have to agree that they work extremely hard. So does that make them working class? In English, definitely. In Marxist, no.

According to Marx, only industrial labourers qualify as working class, aka the proletariat. But Ange doesn’t, not by that standard.

She has never worked at a factory and in fact has never done any meaningful work of any kind, apart from a short stint as social worker. She spent the rest of her career climbing the greasy pole of trade union politics all the way up to a safe Labour seat.

Specifically, Marx based his social taxonomy on a person’s relation to the ‘means of production’. Yet Ange has never produced anything other than an illegitimate child at age 16. Her means of production was her womb.

So how is she working class? I get it. Ange is a classical scholar who knows how to penetrate the etymology of words. The word ‘proletarian’ was coined in the 17^th century on the basis of the Latin root proles, meaning ‘offspring’. A proletarian was thus a person whose only useful function in life was to produce progeny.

If so, Ange’s illegitimate child indeed qualifies her as a proletarian, but somehow I doubt this is how she would explain it. Ange has a shaky mastery even of living languages, such as English, never mind dead ones. She is gobby without being eloquent.

Marx’s definition made little sense even when he concocted it, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. That was the time when industrialisation came to Britain, but it has since left. We now live in a post-industrial age, and no conveyor-belt definitions apply any longer, if they ever did.

Nor do any economic ones in general. Otherwise we’d have to argue that a train driver paid £80,000 a year for a four-day week is working class, and a teacher isn’t, even though he gets less than half that and still spends his weekends marking papers – and his evenings filling in endless forms on gender and racial equality.

I lived in the US for 15 years, and yet I never heard anyone describing himself as ‘working class’. I’m not saying that such Americans don’t exist, only that I never met any. My friends were mostly academics, my colleagues were admen, and neither group self-identified in class terms.

Suddenly, when I moved to London back in 1988, I met many advertising colleagues, all on princely salaries, describing themselves as working class. They saw that part of their identity as innate and immutable, like their height or the colour of their eyes.

That reinforced my belief that the definition of working class no longer has anything to do with economics. After all, I’ve met a few aristocrats with a lineage going back centuries who had less money than today’s train drivers. And in my professional capacity, I once even met Alan Sugar who despite all his billions still describes himself as working class .

If not economics, what then? I’d suggest a combination of culture and ideology as the defining discriminators of the working class. Sometimes culture is primary and ideology secondary, at other times it’s the other way around.

Here I use the term ‘culture’ broadly, to include not just education and aesthetic preferences, but also manners and conduct. All of these are given some bias by one’s birth and early upbringing, but they aren’t determined by such factors for life.

It’s possible for a girl with Ange’s social background to grow up with interests other than getting pissed at a night club and procreating behind a bike shed. I have among my close friends people whose start in life was no more auspicious than hers, but who as adults boast (figuratively speaking – such people never boast) broad erudition, refined tastes and impeccable manners.

By manners I mean so much more than knowing which utensil to use with which course at dinner or where brown shoes can or can’t be worn. The ultimate test of manners is intuitive knowledge of how to modify one’s speech and behaviour to take others into account. (A gentleman never offends unintentionally, as Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said.)

I’d suggest a supermarket-trolley test as a marker of class. When stopping at a shelf to decide which product to buy, some people try to place their trolley not to block access for others, and some don’t.

The former don’t make a conscious decision to be so accommodating – they intuitively adjust their behaviour to make other people’s life easier. The latter don’t decide to be boorish either, they just are. I’d describe them as proles, but I wouldn’t be talking about their wealth or living quarters at birth.

Neither education nor manners are innate, both can be acquired by conscious effort as one goes through life. Those whose beginnings are humble have to try harder, but that makes their achievement even more valuable and laudable.

But some people, and this is where ideology comes in, refuse to make that effort. They insist on screaming their proledom at the world, eternally staying in the gutter in any other than the practical sense. They may make billions or rise to the second highest position in government, while still flashing the tattoos and other cultural stigmata of their early life as some kind of badges of honour.

It’s not where people begin in life that matters, but where they end up. People can’t always choose to become rich, but they can always choose to become cultured and hence no longer prole. If they refuse so to choose, it’s often the pernicious Marxist ideology of class struggle that holds so many of them back.

Class (and also race, in any other than the purely chromatic sense) is as often as not a statement of ideological conviction. For some, such as Ange Rayner, it’s also a stepping stone on a career path. If she is expecting applause and compassionate understanding, she won’t find any at these quarters.

Do you live in an area where you or your child would be likely to run into a uniformed soldier? Or into a veteran of our recent wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan?

Statistically speaking, chances are you don’t. But if you do, I still think you don’t give such a possibility another thought – and you certainly don’t see a soldier as a factor of mortal danger to you or your brood.

If all that is true, I can use my sleuth-like deductive power to figure out one thing about you: you don’t live in Russia.

There, more and more soldiers go back home after completing their tour of duty in what’s officially called a ‘special military operation’, or, unofficially (and in Russia illegally) ‘the war against the Ukraine’.

War in general has a coarsening effect on fighting men, even in a well-behaved army observing every rule of civilised warfare. That, if you’ve been following the news at all, doesn’t describe the Russian army fighting in the Ukraine.

If you have been reading the papers, then you know that thousands of Russian soldiers torture and murder civilians, rape women, men and children, loot and steal. That sort of thing doesn’t do much to improve their moral health, but there also exists another problem.

Many Russian soldiers weren’t morally healthy to begin with. Thousands of them are imprisoned criminals promised a reprieve if they join up. Those who take Putin up on this kind offer go to the Ukraine and continue to ply their old trade, this time legally.

Moreover, the Russians are now offering the same option to criminals who haven’t even been tried yet. When they are arrested, say for rape or murder, they are given a choice between a prison camp and a boot camp, and you won’t win any prizes for guessing which way most of them go.

In any civilised country, this practice would raise the issue of deterrence. After all, courts and prisons largely exist to make a chap contemplating a crime think twice. But if a rapist casing a house knows he can always avoid punishment by joining up, he may still think twice, but the second, deterring thought will be much weaker.

Getting back to the issue in hand, we can detect a potential problem. Returning criminals, or even soldiers who are criminal novices, may eschew civilian careers in, say, social services and start roaming the streets with intent.

Actually, ‘may’ is the wrong word here. There have been hundreds of reported cases that involve demobbed or furloughed soldiers committing horrendous crimes of every description. The streets of Russian provincial towns increasingly begin to resemble a war zone.

Parents fear for their children’s safety, but they don’t need to be afraid, not in the Perm province at any rate. The authorities there have issued a leaflet instructing children how to protect themselves against men in uniform.

The text doesn’t really require any comments, but I’ll provide some parenthetical ones anyway – the temptation is too strong. So here it is:   

A Soldier Won’t Hurt a Child: simple rules for a child dealing with a soldier

These rules will help you communicate safely and easily with soldiers who defend Russia during the special military operation. Remember: your proper behaviour is a guarantee of your safety!

[This brings to mind notices, such as Beware of Dog on houses and Don’t feed the animals on zoo cages. The threatening tone is unmistakable.]

Boys: How you should look when running into a soldier

Desirable: natural hair colour, trousers, shirt, T-shirt in a neutral colour

Undesirable: dyed hair, jewellery or accessories, skimpy shorts, clothes in bright colours

Don’t forget! Your clothes mustn’t be showy. Choose a modest outfit covering your personal zones [?] and not too tight

[‘Personal zone’ makes no more sense in Russian than it does in English, but one can guess what it means. However, I shudder to think what will happen to a child wearing shorts and a tight shirt who runs into a returning hero. Kaleidoscopic images of baroque horrors flash through my mind, but I’ll keep them to myself.]

What you can talk to a soldier about

Desirable: your hobbies, the soldier’s hobbies, school, weather

Undesirable: military operations, politics

[“Mister, what do you like to do when you aren’t fighting our enemies? What, rape little boys and their mothers?”]

How you should behave

Give your defender a smile. But it’s worth remembering that you should smile or laugh only when appropriate

You shouldn’t shout or do anything unexpected. Remember! Such actions may provoke a soldier returning from the front into a sudden and negative reaction!

Act quietly. Try to listen attentively to our hero’s war stories. Important! Do not interrupt!

Here endeth the lesson, at least one taught to the children of Perm. Yet Western grownups who still harbour illusions about Russia’s war on the Ukraine should learn something too: about the war, the Russians’ fighting methods – and the country where such leaflets are necessary.  

James Carville, Bill Clinton’s strategist, got it wrong when he said: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

In today’s world, certainly its British part, ideology doesn’t just trump economics. It enslaves economics for its own nefarious purposes.

Allow me to explain this by boring you with a few economic truisms, facts so basic that any secondary school pupil should have them at his fingertips. Since our ministers, with the possible exception of Angela Rayner, possess such qualifications, nothing I’m going to say should be news even to them.

One such truism is that consumer confidence is a key factor in a consumer economy, which is what every Western country is supposed to enjoy. When consumers look towards the future with optimistic hope, they begin to, well, consume and invest more.

As a result, the economy grows in strength, the key indicators improve, consumers and investors become even more confident. Happiness all around.

Are you with me so far? Good. So what economic indicators are known to make consumers more confident?

First, inflation has to be low for otherwise people’s earnings will have less purchasing power. And here’s the good news: Britain’s inflation rate is down at a manageable 2.2 per cent.

Then there should be plenty of jobs around, so consumers won’t toss and turn at night fearing unemployment. More good news: unemployment is at its lowest level since 1974.

What else? Oh yes, the economy shouldn’t be stagnant. To be fair, our economic growth isn’t brilliant, but the British economy is still the fastest growing in the G7.

All in all, Britons should be serenely confident that our economic future looks bright, or at any rate brightish. And yet the Consumer Confidence Index is languishing at minus 20, meaning that consumers are running scared.

Such sentiments will have a knock-on effect on the economy: people will be spending and investing less, tax revenues will go down, the government will have to borrow more, inflation will go up as a result, employers will stop employing, unemployment will soar – well, you don’t need me to teach you the economic primer.

So why are British consumers lacking confidence? Simple. Within the first weeks of its tenure, the Labour government has already stated its wholehearted commitment to wrecking the economy by suffocating it with taxes.

Turn another page in that primer, and you’ll find another truism: high taxes make capital, and hence jobs, flee. A higher capital gains tax, inheritance tax, employment tax all have this predictable effect.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves will deliver her first budget on 30 October, but entrepreneurs are already fleeing en masse in anticipation. To repeat the old joke, I just hope the last one to leave will lock the door and turn off the lights.

When the budget is actually delivered, and people’s worst expectations are exceeded, the economy won’t take long to collapse or at least suffer the kind of damage that will take decades to repair.

Miss Reeves knows all that as well as you and I, possibly even better. After all, she holds a master’s degree in economics from the LSE, not just a secondary school diploma. And yet she is lying to the country by saying she’ll have “difficult decisions” to make on taxes, meaning she’ll raise them.

The lie isn’t that she’s going to raise taxes: she’s perfectly truthful about that. The lie is that the decision is difficult. It isn’t. It’s dead easy.

By the same token, if Fido could talk, he wouldn’t insist that his decision to chase Tabby around the block is difficult. That’s what his DNA is wired to do, and all socialist governments (meaning the governments of all Western countries) are just as programmed to raise taxes.

There’s no point arguing against that on economic grounds. Doing so can only spring from the failure to realise that the implicit purpose of modern taxation isn’t always, and never merely, fiscal.

Another omnipresent aim is to extend the power of the state by limiting the people’s ability to become independent of it. In that sense, taxation in the modern Western world – whatever else it might be – always has to be punitive and preventive.

The whole system is designed around this desideratum, and it will fight any interloper with the kind of resolution that would put the Spartans at Thermopylae to shame.

Another aim has more to do with PR. It’s to assuage the desire large swaths of the population have been brainwashed to feel for ressentiment and craving revenge against those more successful than they are. That’s why they’ll welcome, or at least won’t resist too strongly, the tax hikes whose sole effect will be reducing the state revenue by driving the wealthiest and most productive people, not to mention businesses, out of the country.

Labour politicians emetically shout about their concerns for the ‘working people’, especially – I dare say exclusively – those who belong to public-sector trade unions. Yet real working people and our government inhabit two different economic worlds.

People work their whole lives to live comfortably, raise and educate their children, provide for their own old age – such is their actual, tangible reality. The government, on the other hand, lives in the virtual reality, where ideology and powerlust reign supreme and nothing is tangible.

The two realities are irreconcilable; like Euclid’s parallels they never cross. That’s why we should prepare ourselves for another crisis, with the economy lying in ruins. And rising out of them, like a phoenix from the ashes, will be the state – stronger, bossier, increasingly tyrannical.

Sorry to be such a doomsayer. But hey, I’m a consumer too. That’s why my confidence is racing ahead of the Index on its way down.

Robert Jenrick, frontrunner in the Tory leadership race, realises that Reform UK schismatics threaten to perpetuate Labour rule.

Unless they are brought back into the fold, the Tories may for ever remain a rump party with little chance of reclaiming power. Hence the need for pushing the Conservatives far enough rightwards to make Reform UK redundant.

One way of doing so is to reassert the Tory claim to Englishness, thereby knocking the nationalist sabre, or perhaps pint, out of Nigel Farage’s hand. To that end Mr Jenrick set up his stall in an article saying that: “The attitudes and policies of our metropolitan establishment have weakened English identity. They have put the very idea of England at risk.”

Mr Jenrick gets top marks for his political acumen, but his thinking on national identity in general and English identity specifically sounds muddled. However, he can console himself with the thought that he isn’t the only one. This matter has baffled many thinkers, even some serious ones.

Jenrick talks about being equally proud of being British and English, lamenting that the second part is getting a rough treatment: “Whereas all of the most high-status people in Scotland and Wales are proud to be Scottish and Welsh, most of the English political and media elite are far from proud to be English.”

That’s doubtless true, but there is a ready explanation for this difference. While a great part of Scottish or Welsh identity consists in not being English, an Englishman can’t seek his own identity in not being Scottish or Welsh.

Anyway, though I wish the Tories well, neither their politics nor Mr Jenrick’s ambitions interest me very much. But the matter of national identity does, starting with the question of what constitutes a nation.

The question isn’t one of especially long standing. The issue of nationhood only moved to the forefront of people’s thought after the collapse of Christian universalism and its replacement with national, even ethnic, particularism.

This isn’t to say that national identity hadn’t existed until then, only that it played second fiddle to other identities, such as fickle dynastic allegiances and rather more constant folkloric differences, those of language and what’s broadly described as culture.

I always cite Thomas Aquinas as an illustration. He was born and raised in Italy, but his family had Germanic roots and was even related to the Holy Roman Emperor. As an adult, Thomas then spent most of his life in Paris. So was he Italian, German or French? I don’t know, and I’m sure neither did he.

The idea of blood-and-soil nationhood became popular in the 19^th century, the first in which victorious modernity ruled the roost. That notion received rather bad press following the Second World War, but it survives to this day.

For example, the American ‘paleoconservative’ (the term was coined by my friend Paul Gottfried but I don’t especially like it, though I like him) Sam Francis wrote: “Every real nation is a people of common blood and descended from the same ancestors”.

This idea is attractive but too one-dimensional for my taste, to the point of being nonsensical. It certainly doesn’t help the denizens of multi-national countries, such as Britain or Francis’s own US. By his criterion, the US isn’t a nation at all and has no hope of ever becoming one. Britain isn’t a nation either, and neither is just about any sizeable European country.

In general, Francis’s definition of a “real” nation makes me uncomfortable because it’s fundamentally anti-Christian. Christians are all brothers not because of any consanguinity but because they all have the same father who stands above ethnicity or nationhood.

It’s not by accident that most proponents of blood-and-soil nationalism have problems with Christianity, and that includes Francis. “Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it,” he once wrote, for example.

Which race was that? Hebrews? Caucasians? Americans? Christianity wasn’t created by or for any particular race or nationality, this is basic. My point is that nationalism of any kind, and especially the blood-and-soil variety, doesn’t sit comfortably with Christianity. Patriotism is something else again, but the etymology of the word points at one’s country, not at the composition of one’s blood.

A Breton and a Provençal aren’t “of common blood”, and neither do they “descend from the same ancestors”, unless it’s Adam and Eve. Yet both are French. The common blood of Englishmen may be less dubious, but it too has had many different inputs.

It all depends how far back we’re willing to go. Let’s just say that at first various Germanic and Celtic tribes contributed to the English bloodstream, then the Romans dropped a little in, and then Scandinavians and Frenchmen added some major tributaries – and we shan’t even talk about the minor ones.

Paradoxically, America, for all its mongrel make-up, is in some ways ahead of us in the blood-and-soil stakes because the previous inhabitants of the North American continent, those of the wigwams, tomahawks and white man speak with forked tongue fame, didn’t have countries in our sense of the word.

Britain, however, was formed by a union of four countries, each predating her. Mr Jenrick is clearly aware of the 1707 Acts of the Union, which is why he talks about identifying as both British and English.

That’s wonderful, but can one really claim allegiance to two nations at once? I’m in an ideal position to know that it’s possible to possess more than one passport, but belonging to more than one nation does create conceptual problems.

One detects some confusion there, and it’s common even to men who are older or more intellectually accomplished than Mr Jenrick. Even such achievers routinely talk about Britain being made up of four countries or four nations, which doesn’t solve my problem with definitions.

Let’s begin to sort it out by stating that the concept of a nation presupposes cultural, geographic and political commonality, and it may even include an ethnic element, but that is more debatable. This is reflected in terminology, though not everywhere.

Thus ‘French’ implies both citizenship in the French Republic and cultural commonality. ‘American’ is a term that’s also both political and cultural. But then one thinks of Jannik Sinner, the best Italian tennis player ever, whose first language is German even though he is Italian born and bred, and the cultural aspect of nationality begins to totter.

Now, it’s possible to date a multi-national Britain back to 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England and united the two crowns. But even if we go back only as far as 1707, that still makes Britain an older country than Germany, Italy or for that matter the US. Nevertheless, British nationhood needs, according to Mr Jenrick, to lean on the crutch of Englishness to stand on its own hind legs.

Everything I’ve said so far points at a problem. How do we solve it?

Let’s agree that ‘British’ implies mainly, though not exclusively, a political identity, whereas ‘English’ is mainly, though not exclusively, ethnic. That doesn’t solve the problem, but it does simplify it by eliminating conflicting allegiances. It’s thus possible to be both British and English at the same time.

Other than that, I can’t think of any objective criteria of nationhood, only subjective ones. If one identifies as English first, British second, that’s what one is. Such self-identification may be based on any number of factors: family roots, language, preference for warm beer rather than, say, cold vodka. Above all, I think, it’s based on what Otto Bauer (d. 1936) called the “commonality of fate”, and I thought I’d never quote any Socialist approvingly.

This has to do not only with one’s past but also with one’s commitment to the future, one’s – ideally unspoken – commitment to sharing one’s country’s fate, whatever that may be. Wearing St George’s Cross underpants is strictly optional.

Are you worried that your phone or some other communications device may blow up in your face? If you are, I’m on hand to propose a sure-fire method of protecting yourself:

Do not under any circumstances join a terrorist organisation, especially one whose stated mission in life is to wipe Israel off the map.

And if you can’t resist the temptation of becoming a member of Hezbollah, Hamas or some such, eschew newfangled devices, whether high-tech, such as I-Phones, or low-tech, such as pagers and walkie-talkies. Stick to smoke signals, carrier pigeons or, if you must, the odd payphone.

None of these is likely to explode into your face, hands or those parts of your anatomy that are close to trouser pockets. However, as thousands of Hezbollah thugs have discovered, anything more sophisticated just may blow up unexpectedly.

Blow up is different from ignite, which points at the sabotage technique used by the Israelis. Those devices couldn’t have been made to explode by using their integral parts, such as batteries.

An overheated battery may catch fire and burn down the house while the residents are otherwise engaged. But it won’t blow up with sufficient force to… well, I’ll spare you the lurid details of the physical damage those pagers, walkie-talkies and fingerprint-recognition devices inflicted on Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon. Let’s just say that the injuries were quite horrendous and, in some 20 cases, fatal.

One has to admire the ingenuity, skill and sheer guts of Mossad, or whatever Israeli agency was involved in planning and executing the operation. Their agents had to gain access to large consignments of devices travelling along the supply chain to their Hezbollah procurers. They then had to hide inside a small amount, perhaps only a gramme or two, of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (or a similarly powerful explosive) and a circuit acting as a remote long-range trigger.

No slapdash work was allowed. If even one of the charges had gone off before its time, the whole operation would have been exposed. The blasts had to be synchronised and so timed as to occur at a time when the devices were likely to be in use.

My admiration of Mossad’s brilliance isn’t universally shared. Thus Volker Türk, the current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, referred to the detonations as “shocking” and “their impact on civilians unacceptable”.

“The fear and terror unleashed is profound,” he added, displaying the customary knack of international functionaries for stating the blindingly obvious. Of course, the operation will spread fear and terror. That’s its whole point, apart from taking thousands of militants out of commission.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres added his own contribution by stating that “civilian objects should not be weaponised” and “that should be a rule that … governments should be able to implement”.

To begin with, no device used by terrorists to coordinate their murderous activities is ever truly civilian. Weapons include not only bombs, rockets and guns, but also communications systems. When a pager or a walkie-talkie is used in that fashion, it’s already weaponised. But never mind semantics; let’s talk about counterterrorism.

I don’t have the ear of either gentleman, which is a shame. I’d like to know which methods of fighting Arab terrorism they’d recommend to Israel as an alternative to weaponising civilian objects.

Would they prefer for the Israeli air force to level the Beirut buildings inhabited by Hezbollah terrorists and their families? Or perhaps, in order to curry favour with UN officials, the Israelis should drive tanks into the centre of Beirut and start laying about them with their tracks and high-calibre guns?

I can’t help thinking that any such foray would result in much higher collateral damage. In fact, this operation by, I assume, Mossad is a marvel of a precision strike. The devices involved were commissioned specifically for use by Hezbollah commanders of various ranks – not, judging by the number of the devices procured, for the rank and file.

The likelihood of a Lebanese civilian using a pager, walkie-talkie or a fingertip-recognition device would have been infinitesimally low. In fact, I can’t think of any other tactic, other than a sniper’s bullet, that would be as humanely selective in its targeting.

Perhaps Messrs Guterres and Türk are more knowledgeable than me, and there indeed exists some possible weaponry they’d rather recommend to Mossad and the IDF. But somehow I doubt that.

In fact, I’m sure that, if probed on their preferred methods of Israel’s anti-terrorist measures, they’d opt for ‘none of the above’ or rather ‘none’. To be sure, assorted Lefties will talk your ear off about the Israelis’ right to defend themselves. However, if we got down to the nitty-gritty, they’d explain that such defence shouldn’t involve killing or maiming those who wish Israel ill and do their best to kill Israelis.

Western Lefties, such as Messrs Türk and Guterres, are viscerally attracted to those who hate the West, and they use their offices to help them as best they can. They feel a Mowgli-like empathy for Third World terrorists, “We be of one blood, thou and I”. While decent Westerners root for Israel because it’s an oasis of Western civilisation in the Middle East, the Lefties hate it for the same reason.

In public, they’ll happily profess regret that Israelis have to live in constant anticipation of rockets raining on their heads or hordes of sadistic savages descending on their villages. But smouldering deep down is their inextinguishable affection for anti-Western actions, no matter how barbaric.

My congratulations to the Israelis on this brilliant operation, the likes of which I’ve never even heard about. I wish we had the same courage to fight for our liberties as that shown by the people of Israel and the Ukraine.

If we did, we’d be the ones wiping out terrorists and aggressors, even if we weren’t their immediate victims. Remember what John Donne wrote about men and islands?