Month: April 2025

“Remember that you will die,” that’s how the Roman Stoics rendered the recurrent theme of philosophy.

Before the Romans that idea had been articulated by the Greeks, from Democritus to Plato. The latter even insisted that proper philosophy was “about nothing else but dying and being dead”. A couple of millennia later Martin Heidegger added that “the resolute confrontation of death is essential to authentic living”.

In between, every religion worthy of the name contemplated death from every conceivable angle, reaching different conclusions but never failing to assign due importance to the end of physical life.

Roughly at the same time Heidegger spelled out his criterion for authentic living, Mikhail Bulgakov wrote his iconic novel The Master and Margarita about Satan appearing incognito in pre-war Moscow. In the opening scene, the Devil, named Woland in the novel, engages a Soviet editor in a dialogue on that very subject.

His point is that man can’t possibly run his own life because he doesn’t even know what will happen to him in the next few minutes. The editor acknowledges that man is mortal, but Woland cuts him short:

“Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he is sometimes instantly mortal – there’s the trick!”

These scattered snippets of thought and memory came to my mind yesterday, at the very beginning of a doubles match at my tennis club. When our opponents prepared to serve the opening game, my partner collapsed.

My first reaction was that he had slipped, but then he began to convulse and utter hissing sounds. We all rushed to him, but by the time we got there, he wasn’t breathing.

Mercifully, there were two doctors playing on an adjacent court, such is the advantage of living in a decent neighbourhood. A few years ago, I too found out that a high number of restaurants and a low crime rate aren’t the only benefits of such areas.

Penelope and I were walking through local streets when I collapsed and was out cold. I shan’t bother you with the medical reasons for such fallibility, but the point is that there were two doctors among the passers-by. They kept me alive until the ambulance arrived, and the paramedics took me to hospital – but not before wastefully cutting my favourite coat in half.

My tennis partner was similarly lucky. The two doctors pumped his chest and did mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Also, all tennis clubs in Britain are equipped with defibrillators, and the coaches are trained in using them. Ours started to apply electric shocks to my fallen partner, and he began to breathe, after a fashion.

The play stopped on all ten courts, and everyone was shaken. As is my wont, I tried to relieve pressure, mostly my own, with a silly joke: “I suppose we’d better play a let”. Another chap laughed in a somewhat strained fashion and asked if I remembered what the score was. No one else as much as cracked a smile.

The ambulance came, the paramedics diagnosed a heart attack and took the poor chap away. After some time, play resumed on most courts, but no one felt like hitting fuzzy yellow balls very much. I suppose our confronting death wasn’t as resolute as Heidegger prescribed.

Actually, as I write this, I still don’t know whether my tennis partner has survived. I hope so, but any brush with death, one’s own or someone else’s, fills one’s head with all sorts of macabre thoughts that are hard to chase away.

Every Sunday I recite the Creed that ends with the words “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come” (or rather, if you wish to be technical, Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi). This is a core belief of Christianity: just as there is death in life, there is also life in death.

Yet faith in immortality is one thing and subcutaneous dread of death is another. In some lucky people, the core belief absorbs the visceral feeling and they become one and the same. Such people have no fear of death, and I’ve read about many such saintly individuals. But I’m not sure I’ve ever met one.

They say that, when two people part at a railway station, the one who gets on the train bears only a fourth of the parting grief. The one left behind suffers the remaining three-fourths.

This rings true in reference to the more permanent departure as well: because it’s possible to love another person more than oneself, the death of such a person is a greater tragedy than one’s own. Still, both of you are going to die at some point and the only unknown is the order of your going.

Also the manner of it, one must add. It’s possible to keel over and go out like a light like my tennis partner (who I hope will live to tell the tale), or else to succumb to a long, sometimes painful, illness, dying a little every day.

A few years ago, a good friend of mine, Ken Minogue, the token conservative professor at the LSE, died on a plane flying home from a conference in Latin America. He was talking to someone and stopped, for ever, in mid-sentence.

Most people who heard the story said they envied him: one moment you’re alive, the next you’re dead, but you don’t even know about it. In a way, one can say that any death is like that: you may know you’re dying, but you’re still alive until that last heartbeat – and then you don’t know you no longer are. In that sense, death doesn’t exist, not in our consciousness anyway.

Yet that, to me, sounds like treating death without the respect it deserves. Plato would certainly disapprove: if death is the essence of all philosophy, then surely one must prepare for it with appropriately solemn and thoughtful contemplation.

Christian rituals acknowledge the same necessity, mutatis mutandis. Preparing for death is serious business, requiring reflection, confession, absolution and whatever else brings spiritual comfort and sets one up for the encounter with one’s Maker.

Whether you think such a slow passage is worth the concomitant physical suffering is a matter of taste. I suppose most people would rather go Ken’s way, but then not everyone is most people.

Sorry about inflicting such gloomy thoughts on you, but I suppose yesterday I was shaken more than I let on. Tennis matches are sometimes a matter of life or death, but only figuratively so. One doesn’t expect crude literal reality to barge in.

One way or another, I doubt the poor chap will be up to playing in the foreseeable future. I suppose I need another doubles partner, such is the conclusion of this melancholy story.

Nationalist demagogues of every hue are screaming bloody murder, or rather judiciary activism. Everyone is talking about the political implications of the verdict banning Marine Le Pen from French politics for five years, the assumption being that the law had nothing to do with it.

Yet from what I can surmise, the legal argument for her conviction was solid. Miss Le Pen was found guilty of embezzling millions in EU funds, and serious jurists in France don’t think she has good grounds for appeal.

Messrs Trump, Orban and Wilders may regard the judgement as yet another example of the pernicious deep state at work, but then they would, wouldn’t they? This ignores the fact that France has form in convicting politicians of corruption, including more illustrious establishment figures than Miss Le Pen.

Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, both former presidents, also found themselves on the receiving end of guilty verdicts, and no one saw them as courageous anti-establishment figures. If the deep state existed, they’d be among those running it.

Without delving into the legal niceties, the strongest, if indirect, argument in favour of the verdict came from Moscow. According to the Kremlin it was a “violation of democratic norms”, and fair enough: Putin and Le Pen interpret said norms in a similar vein, the former blatantly, the latter surreptitiously.

The Russians have been known to bankroll Le Pen’s campaigns, and accepting such funding should have been treated as sufficient corpus delicti by itself. After all, Putin wasn’t indulging his charitable impulses by financing Le Pen’s National Rally. He evidently saw the subversive potential of NR’s fascisoid demagoguery, and for once I agree with his judgement.

The papers are writing about Miss Le Pen’s efforts to detoxify the party founded by her father, Jean-Marie. A great admirer of Marshal Pétain, old Jean-Marie insisted that, regrettably, the Holocaust had never happened but it still might if he was elected president. And that was the softer end of his rhetoric.

A party weaned on such venom can’t really be detoxified; it can only be dressed up for PR purposes. That’s what Marine has done, successfully pretending that the leopard has changed its fascisoid spots. This beast may indeed have undergone a cosmetic makeover, but its DNA still betrays a predator red in tooth and claw.

As a linguist, I often tend to ascribe political confusion to misused language. Thus politicians I usually call nationalist or fascisoid demagogues are often described as right-wing populists.

Now, under universal franchise, all politicians are populists by etymological definition. If they have no popular appeal, they won’t be in politics, it’s as simple as that. Hence, to merit the sobriquet of ‘populist’, a politician has to be all about such appeal, and never mind anything else.

Such a politician will identify the broadest swath of voters and tell them whatever they want to hear. Any relationship to reality will be purely coincidental.

Perhaps, ‘tell’ is a misnomer – such politicians tend to scream at the top of their voices. Since it’s impossible to strain one’s vocal chords for too long without getting hoarse, they tend to reduce their messages to sloganeering soundbites. Because the slogans are aimed at the broadest and therefore the stupidest strata of the population, they have to be punchy in form and primitive in content.

Marine Le Pen is good at that sort of thing, but this ability doesn’t appear high on my list of political virtues. As to the ‘right-wing’ part of it, this is laughable. If you look at her economic agenda, you won’t discern many differences from the ideas flogged by the Trotskyist Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Le Pen is both a nationalist and a socialist. Put those two words together, and you’ll know why she isn’t my favourite political flavour.

That, of course, doesn’t mean that she should fall innocent victim to politically biased lawfare. But beyond all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in certain like-minded quarters, one doesn’t hear any legal arguments against the conviction. For the ‘populist’ crowd, one of their own kind is innocent even after being found guilty.

This sort of malaise is reaching pandemic proportions. It seems as if the nationalist demagogues of the world have taken a leaf out of the communists’ book and formed a sort of International of their own.

Thus Elon Musk and a few other MAGA chaps have whipped up a campaign in defence of our own dear Tommy Robinson, whom they depict as a courageous fighter for free speech. Now, not to mince words, Tommy is scum. But to that lot he is their scum.

Robinson has a list of crimes as long as my arm, or rather longer because my arms are quite short. His previous (what Americans call ‘sheet’) includes convictions for physical assault, financial and immigration frauds, cocaine possession with intent to supply, public order offences, and I’m sure I’ve left a few out. Tommy started out as a football hooligan and then graduated to political hooliganism.

He is currently serving a prison term for violating a court order to shut up on the subject of some young Muslim Tommy falsely accused of being a violent thug. As far as Elon Musk is concerned, that makes him a martyred freedom fighter.

Marine Le Pen will also doubtless be hailed as a martyr – this regardless of the legal merits of her case. The noble cause of nationalist demagoguery can never be championed by convicted criminals, only by martyrs.

I’m sure Donald Trump will have something to say about this case too: after all, he sees himself (with somewhat greater justification) as a victim of a legal witch-hunt too. Now, one would think that, an aptitude for nationalist demagoguery apart, Le Pen and Trump have nothing in common.

Say what you will about the Donald, but a socialist he ain’t, as he’d put it. Neither is Geert Wilders, who responded to the verdict by declaring that Marine is “100 per cent innocent”, and never mind the circumstances of the case. Yet all such politicians seem to feel a kinship that runs deeper than any political differences.

And that kinship is more seminal to them than anything else, including the rule of law and such trivia as telling the truth or behaving in a civilised manner. That’s tribalism at its most harebrained and hence dangerous – this kind of mentality has more to do with Mafia gang wars than with Western politics.

My fear is that these ‘populists’ will queer the pitch for better people who oppose some of the same things. Marine Le Pen’s principal appeal is to those Frenchmen who are appalled at the sight of their country being turned into a kasbah by immigration, legal or otherwise.

This is a legitimate fear, but stoking it up by demagogic means isn’t. This issue must be seen in a broader context, and the case against it should be made by conservatives, not loudmouthed ‘populists’. Rallying the populace mainly behind this issue may become successful politically, but it will be disastrous civilisationally.

The upshot is that Marine Le Pen broke the law and has been justly punished. By all means, if the verdict is overturned on appeal, we should all celebrate the blow struck for the rule of law.

But spare me the talk of her political martyrdom: I wouldn’t want to live in a France run by the likes of her.