Author: Alexander Boot

Beheading is an effective treatment for a headache, but some sufferers may find it a tad too radical.

This profound thought flashed through my mind when I read about a few Anglophone Westerners, including 17 Scotsmen, emigrating to Russia to swap ‘neoliberalism’ for ‘traditional values’. Considering that over a million Russians have moved the other way since 2022, the score is still in our favour, but still.

I know exactly how those emigrants feel. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t bemoan, orally or in writing, the West going to the dogs. However, I’ll take neoliberalism any day if the only alternative to it is paleofascism.

Yet some people seem to disagree with me, as they are entitled to. Their decision has to consist of two parts, the first one understandable, the second ill-advised: dissatisfaction with their homeland and a realistic hope that Russia will be better.

Major-General Irina Volk of the Russian Interior Ministry accentuated the first part: “The desire to move to Russia for permanent residence arose against the background of the abolition of traditional moral and family values in American society, as well as the low level of education.”

One thing I can say for Gen. Volk is that our own major-generals don’t look like her. I’m sure she has reached such a high rank at such a young age by assiduously practising traditional values. Volk means ‘wolf’ in Russian, and I do hope it’s her surname and not nickname. In any case, the song she is howling is familiar to anyone ever exposed to Kremlin propaganda.

All the recent migrants to Russia sing from the same lupine hymn sheet, highlighting “destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes” in the West. They all claim to “share traditional Russian spiritual and moral values”.

One fertile Canadian couple blessed with eight children explained what neoliberalism means: “There’s a lot of left-wing ideology, LGBTQ, trans, just a lot of things that we don’t agree with they teach there now. We wanted to get away from that for our children.”

Any Westerner who is fed up with ideological wokery has my sympathy. Any Westerner who criticises it has my support. Yet I can respond with nothing but scorn to any Westerner who falls for the Russian propaganda of ‘traditional values’.

That said, they may have a point because traditions differ. The Russian variety, for example, includes the compulsion to pounce on the country’s neighbours. Looking at the 1991 map of the moribund Soviet Union, née the Russian Empire, I can’t see a single bordering country that hadn’t fallen victim to Russian aggression at some point.

Another Russian tradition is government by fiat, the decree imposed by a single omnipotent ruler. Such governments have always oscillated within a narrow range between authoritarian and totalitarian, the latter finely poised these days between fascist and Nazi.

Suppression of free speech is another traditional value there. At the time of Elizabeth I’s reign in England, the mildest critics of the Russian tsar were flayed alive, fried in giant frying pans or, if the tsar felt merciful, only drawn and quartered.

Fast-forwarding to the reign of Charles III, double-digit prison terms are being routinely given to Russians who find anything wrong with the criminal war on the Ukraine – indeed even to those who simply refer to it as just that, a war, rather than the prescribed term of a ‘special military operation’.

It’s true that what the Russians call ‘non-traditional orientation’ is discouraged at all levels short of the upper reaches of government. There, however, it’s rife, and some of Putin’s closest lieutenants aren’t immune to same-sex attractions.

And – here I must lower my voice to make sure we aren’t overheard – if you believe reports from his numerous ex-colleagues in the KGB, even the man himself isn’t quite as macho as his PR will have you believe. Rumour has it that Putin ordered the murder of Alexander Litvinenko on finding out that the latter was writing a book on why Vlad’s career in the KGB had been so sluggish.

But fair enough: the children of that despairing Canadian couple won’t be asked at their Russian school which of the 100-plus sexes they’d rather be, they won’t be taught advanced condom studies at a barely postpubescent age, and I doubt the critical race theory will figure prominently on their curriculum.

But what will their Russian curriculum feature instead? Independent journalists have found out that the current school year will be mostly devoted to ‘patriotic’ subjects and extracurricular activities – at the expense of traditional, as it were, disciplines.

One such subject, introduced after the full-scale invasion of the Ukraine in 2022, is called “Talks of Important Matters”. Such talks mainly focus on vindicating Russian aggression and portraying the Ukrainians as sub-human in frankly Nazi terms.

Military training will also take much of the schooltime this year. The course is called “The Essentials of Security and Defence of the Motherland”. The pupils will be taught “basic elements of military training” and “safety requirements in handling firearms”, that goes without saying.

Yet Russian traditional values on the syllabus will also include “basic concepts of today’s warfare… including the methods of using combat drones”. Especially privileged will be 523 schools where pupils will be taught not only how to use combat drones, but also how to design and manufacture them.

And of course “Family Building” will be another compulsory course, inculcating “a system of family values traditional for our Motherland”, to teach pupils such “conceptual-value guidelines as marriage, having many children and chastity.”

Knowing Russia fairly well, I anticipate problems in finding instructors qualified to teach chastity. Perhaps some of the monks from the Candlemas Monastery in central Moscow could be thrown into the breach…

On second thoughts, perhaps not. A few years ago, it turned out that the holy fathers used their quarters to run a brothel, charging a modest $35 a pop. An interesting touch was added by the personalities involved. The vicar of the monastery at the time was Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), Putin’s confessor, while Patriarch Kirill is the monastery’s superior.

I wonder if these migrating dupes of the Russians had done due diligence before taking this step. How much do they know about the country? They know exactly what they are leaving, but do they realise where they are going?

I doubt if they even know how to say ‘traditional values’ in Russian, but that presents no immediate problem. Putin has magnanimously agreed to waive the language-test requirement for immigrants, doubtless because he plans to turn them into a propaganda coup.

Generally speaking, I refrain from prophesying, but I’ll make an exception in this case. I’ll tell you exactly what will happen to those useful idiots – and how soon they’ll outlive their usefulness.

They’ll be feted to begin with, and every TV channel will be vying for their appearance. They’ll all be given decent lodgings and sinecures in whatever field they fancy. Their children will be sent to showcase schools, where they’ll have their brains scrubbed clean of any Western memories.

Then, a few months later, the novelty appeal will start wearing thin before it disappears altogether. Like the Cambridge spies of yesteryear, they’ll try to live the life of Russian citizens, only to find they aren’t made for it. Before long they’ll realise they live in a fascist country, where the liberties they used to take for granted are unheard of and where any passing cop can torture them with impunity.

They’ll start missing Scotland, America, Canada, wherever they are from. Unlike their children, they’ll find Russian an impossible language to learn and the local mores impossible to understand.

A gulf between them and their thoroughly brainwashed children will appear, and they’ll be looking with horror at the fascist nonsense the little ones spout after a day at school. Moreover, they’ll realise that, when they grow up, the children may well be asked to die for ‘traditional values’ in the Ukraine or elsewhere.

Eventually they’ll do a Shamima Begum and beg to go back. And there I hope they’ll suffer the same fate. You see, the Russians declare every minute of every day that they are at war not with the Ukraine but with NATO. That means that citizens of NATO countries don’t emigrate to a hostile power – they defect, become turncoats.

Hence they must be deprived of their citizenship and banned from ever returning, just like Shamima was. And as for Gen. Volk, well, she can teach me traditional values any time.

The Russian for grammatical tense is the same word as the one for time. I find that overlap convenient when thinking about history.

So let’s try to consider that discipline in the terms of grammatical categories. All Indo-European languages have the three basic tenses, Past, Present and Future. Some, such as English, also have other tenses linking the three temporal planes.

So which tense applies to history? The answer isn’t at all obvious, and we can find many celebrated historians and philosophers of history who put forth different arguments.

Some, such as scholars influenced by positivism, have insisted that history is strictly unconnected events strewn about the past. Some, mostly idealist thinkers, have seen history as a continuum where the past clarifies the present and makes it possible to predict the future. Still others have insisted that history ends at present and offers no insights into the future whatsoever.

Let’s just say that the first, positivist, view reduces the study of history to the hobby of collecting relics of the past. History stops being a science and becomes a variously enjoyable pastime catering to one’s curiosity about ancient artefacts and hunger for retrospective gossip.

Our Past becomes very Indefinite indeed, in fact meaningless. Monty Python satirised that view by asking “What have the Romans ever done for us?” The implication is that Romans are ancient history, and their toing and froing have no bearing on our life today. A budding historian may well think that studying Rome is like watching a period TV drama: a painless but pointless way of idling away an hour or two.

Relying on Past Indefinite to make future more definite is a parlous business, although not so much so as Bertie Russell suggested. That the sun rose today, he said, doesn’t mean it will rise tomorrow. Thus the Future tense of history is so murky that we may as well assume it doesn’t exist at all.

Yet the past is the only reliable predictor of the future. It’s not a sure bet, but it does offer good odds. The study of history thus becomes an expedient for which there is no sensible substitute if we wish to prepare for things to come – and especially if we want to shape them to our liking.

That said, history only offers a speculative view of the future, which is its side benefit but not its purpose. It doesn’t turn Future Indefinite into Future Definite, even though some determinist historians may believe it does.

Confucius, while shunning determinist certainty, did encourage caution: “A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do you know that his future will not be equal to our present?”

Perhaps to clarify the grammar of history we have to leave the realm of philology for that of anthropology interlaced with philosophy. Unalloyed anthropology, which studies man as any other animal, won’t help us understand history. Essential to that understanding is the realisation that man is so much more than just an animal.

Unlike all other species, man thinks, analyses, synthesises and in general engages his cerebral faculties in unique ways. Man always thinks before acting, with the prior thought sometimes taking a lifetime, sometimes a split second and usually a span falling between the two extremes. But the thought is always present as a stimulus to action. If so, then history becomes a study not only of man’s acts but also of man’s thoughts.

A combination of thoughts and acts adds up to man’s experience, just as it sums up the experience of a single individual. If you, I or anyone we know were to write an autobiographical sketch, we’d be able to trace back our thoughts, decorticate our acts and find how the former preceded the latter.

That way we’d come close to understanding how we’ve developed over time, realising that everything in our life has been interconnected, although not always in an obvious way. As a corollary to that exercise, we’d have debunked the positivist view of history.

If historical facts are unconnected, they offer no idea of how our race has developed over time. Denying historical causality is tantamount to believing that human thought (and hence experience) is static, the same for all ages. A positivist thinker denies man what he grants himself: capacity for development.

Contrary to what Enlightenment philosophers thought, this doesn’t presuppose mankind’s evolution from irrationality to the ultimate rational, and hence moral, millennium. Neither does an individual always become cleverer and better as he matures. But he does become something, and becoming is a process, not a fait accompli.

Some thinkers believe that history is nothing but a compendium of dark facts we try to elucidate in the light of our present understanding. It’s the present that makes the past, in other words, and this view again devalues history to a trivial pursuit.

It’s true that some historians glorified the past, while others demonised it, with both proceeding from their own thoughts tainted by ideology. Rousseau, for example, believed in the primordial goodness of man subsequently perverted by civilisation, especially Christendom. Enlightenment philosophers, on the other hand, saw man’s past, especially but not only Christendom, in exclusively dark tones only to be lightened up by the arrival of Reason (always implicitly capitalised).

Whatever we may make of such opposite views, neither has anything to do with the study of history as a sum of man’s experience. History is neither Past Indefinite nor Present Indefinite nor Future Indefinite. It’s Present Perfect, something that started in the past but is still acting at present.

Just as a man is largely shaped by his individual experience, so has mankind become what it is by its collective experience. And ‘has become’ is Present Perfect, not any other tense.

Dispassionate analysis of facts meticulously collected is a study of human experience and hence a study of human nature. This makes history not only a fascinating science but an indispensable one, more so perhaps than such worthy disciplines as psychology and neurophysiology.

It’s a most unfortunate fallout of the Enlightenment that thought got to be associated strictly with science, meaning natural science. Neither philosophy nor history was regarded as a science at all. Both and their combination have got to be treated as pure speculation, a mental exercise akin to word puzzles.

Historiography, a mere recording of facts, is still seen as helpful in establishing the context in which real progress, that of science of technology, has occurred. The thought that history is a science of human nature, possibly the most important such science, is treated as sheer heresy or, typically, dismissed as so unsound as not to warrant serious discussion.

That’s a grammatical error. For history is Present Perfect, not Past Indefinite. It’s our experience, a record of our on-going attempts to make something worthwhile of our nature. It’s the past shaping the present, not the present shaping the past. If we don’t study history as it should be studied, we’ll never understand how we’ve become what we are.

That means we’ll stay as we are, which doesn’t bode well for our survival. The future becomes not only indefinite but frightening.

The government has announced gleefully that the remaining 92 hereditary peers will be kicked out of the Lords within 18 months.

The reasons cited for this act of constitutional vandalism fall into two categories: real, which are vicious; and those offered to the public, which are illiterate. The real reasons all have to do with the hatred Labour feel for every last vestige of our civilisation, emphatically including its constitutional arrangement.

In his article, Charles Moore appealed to tradition: the institution of hereditary peers in the House of Lords goes back 700 years. Of course, he wrote, if we were to start the upper chamber from scratch, we wouldn’t even consider such an anachronism. But since we aren’t starting from scratch, do let’s have some respect for the patina of venerable age.

Now Lord Moore knows perfectly well, but is reluctant to say, that the tradition attached to the House of Lords is precisely the reason Labour vandals hate it. Another argument put forth by Lord Moore, that hereditary peers aren’t susceptible to party-political pressures, cuts even less ice.

The whole idea is for (ideally dictatorial) power to be concentrated in the hands of the central (ideally socialist) government. Any institution capable of applying clamps to such tyranny is ipso facto anathema.

Members of the Commons are all professional politicians, which these days more or less means spivs. As such, they can be bribed, bought, coerced or pressured into toeing the line – after all, they depend on the government for their careers, indeed livelihood.

A hereditary peer neither owes nor needs any political favours, and he depends on nothing but his birth for his post. Hence he may vote strictly on the basis of his reason and conscience, which may make him a menace to spivocracy.

The upshot of it is that a hereditary Lords adds an essential check to the balance of power, and that’s precisely why socialists detest it. They don’t want any checks and balances. They want dictatorship, or any possible approximation to it.

Then again, 45 of the 92 remaining hereditary peers are Conservatives, and practically none are Labour. That goes to prove Labour’s point: those walking cadavers are guaranteed to stick spokes into the wheels of progress, as it’s understood by socialist spivs. Out with them.

And it’s not just that: all those despicable 92 are white men. Where’s diversity there? Where’s inclusivity? Where’s equity? That’s what happens when you let nature take its course. Why, the very presence of those pale-faced crypto-misogynists is a slap in the face of progress.

So much for the real reasons behind one of the worst acts of constitutional vandalism in British history. Now let’s mention the arguments in favour of it offered for public consumption.

One such argument was put forth by Nick Thomas-Symonds, minister for the constitution, whose post would be more properly described as minister for constitutional sabotage.

“The hereditary principle in law-making has lasted for too long and is out of step with modern Britain,” he said. “The second chamber plays a vital role in our constitution and people should not be voting on our laws in parliament by an ­accident of birth.”

An alien could be forgiven for believing that ‘accident of birth’ has been expunged from British politics altogether – or at least will be, once the proposed legislation has gone into effect. Well, not quite. There’s that other burr under Labour’s blanket: the monarchy.

That’s your accident of birth at its most outlandish: people get to head our state simply because they are born in the purple. Don’t they know that red or at a pinch brown are the only acceptable colours of modern politics?

If you think for a second that our governing vandals wouldn’t get rid of the monarchy in a second if they thought they could get away with it, you are mistaken. It’s the next item on their agenda, and they are just waiting for the propitious moment to strike.

That, to me, is self-evident. But another example of accident of birth at work in politics is even more self-evident, and I don’t think that even our socialist spivs see it in their crosshairs. Not yet, anyway.

Britain is supposed to be a democracy, meaning that those entitled to vote elect their government. But where does this entitlement come from if not from an accident of birth? Upon reaching majority, anyone born in Britain is allowed to take an active part in politics by voting for Labour or – if they wish to be sticks-in-the-mud – some other parties.

According to that despicable colonialist Cecil Rhodes, “To be born English is to win first prize in the lottery of life”. But winning anything in any lottery is random luck or, in this particular lottery, an accident of birth, isn’t it?

I don’t know if this iniquity bothers our rulers as much as hereditary peers do but, if it does, I can propose an effective solution: disfranchising all native-born Britons. That will hammer the last nail into the coffin of power based on an accident of birth. Moreover, it’ll satisfy another argument, that from meritocracy.

When some 25 years ago Tony Blair, arguably the most subversive PM in British history and definitely the most disgusting one, delivered the first blow to our constitution, he explained that any right to affect legislation should be based on achievement, not birth.

There we go then. A Briton born and bred votes from an accident of birth and no required achievement. A chap who braves the storms to paddle across the Channel, on the other hand, has definitely achieved something.

Tony’s own achievement qualified him in spades. After all, he was a fire-eating activist in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a transparent Soviet front. What he was out to achieve was Britain losing her nuclear deterrent and also her energy independence, in which nuclear power played a vital role.

Though young Tony didn’t quite achieve the entirety of his goals, he came close enough by weakening the country as much as was feasible at the time. Is that the kind of achievement he had in mind?

Perhaps Angie Rayner, our deputy prime minister, is an even higher achiever. Not every girl manages to get pregnant before her 16^th birthday, leave school never to resume any appreciable education, and then embark on a steeply ascending political path by activism in trade unions and other such setups.

I’d suggest that centuries of good breeding, sound education and gradual training in exercising political power responsibly constitute better preparation for government than such ‘achievements’. That’s what hereditary peers used to have, and some still do.

One wonders how Britain managed to become the greatest empire in history when it was governed almost exclusively by white men of such objectionable backgrounds. I detect a causal relationship there, but that’s only me.

“It’s not racist if it’s against the French,” quipped a British comedian once, eliciting a sympathetic laugh from his audience. He was referring to the perennial English game of scoring points off the French.

The game has been played for some 1,000 years, but the levels of intensity have varied. During the Hundred Years’ War that ended in 1453, it was rather passionate. In the end, having won every significant battle, the English lost that war, which didn’t do much to promote Gallophilia on these shores.

The last time the English and the French found themselves on the opposite sides in an armed conflict was during the Napoleonic Wars, when the French acquired a distinctly diabolical character in British folklore.

“You must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil,” said Horatio Nelson to his sailors, adding mystical touches to the traditional rivalry. Since then, though, French-baiting has become mostly jocular, with jokes targeting the French compulsion to eat cheese, have kinky sex and lose wars.

However, though the desire to aim our slings and arrows across the Channel may have abated, it hasn’t disappeared. Sometimes it springs to the surface, as it did in the Times article France’s Rape Case: The Week That Put a Nation on Trial by Peter Conradi.

Although Mr Conradi entered the game with gusto, he ended up heavily outscored. It’s France that has emerged the clear victor.

The trial in question is that of Dominique Pélicot, 71, who got his kicks in a way that even the most passionate Gallophobes would agree is rather atypical even of that naughty nation. It all began in September 2020, when Dominique was caught ‘upskirting’ women at a local supermarket near Avignon.

Personally, I don’t see the point of surreptitiously photographing women’s knickers (assuming of course they wear them – one never knows in France, as any true Englishman will tell you), but we all get our jollies as we can.

In any case, it’s good to see a fellow septuagenarian who is so much more au courant with modern technology than I am. Apparently, if you know how to use your phone camera (which I don’t), you don’t have to lie supine on the floor, aiming your Nikon upwards to get the requisite angle.

Anyway, having nabbed Mr Pélicot, the police then looked at his camera first and his computer second only to see a horror story unfolding before their Gallic eyes. Over a decade, Pélicot had been drugging his wife of 50 years and inviting strangers to come and rape her while she lay unconscious.

All in all, about 80 men enjoyed Mme Pélicot’s unwitting favours, some of them more than once, and 50 of them are sharing the dock with her hubby-wubby. He recruited them all through a sleazy website, but then I told you he was technologically literate.

Pélicot is clearly degenerate to the point of being deranged, while his accomplices are as wicked as he is. I sincerely hope the court rules that they should be locked up, with the key hopelessly lost in eternity.

However, they are the ones to be held responsible for this crime, not France in general. It’s Pélicot and his accomplices who are on trial, not, as Conradi’s title will have us believe, their country.

To insist on wider implications, it should be argued persuasively that such crimes are both typical and widely condoned in France. Otherwise, the Pélicot case is as symptomatic of marital relations in France, as Fred and Rosemary West are of British parenting or Dr Shipman of British care for the elderly.

Now I have quite a few French friends and, to the best of my knowledge, none of them invites platoons of strangers to copulate with their drugged wives. Moreover, I’ve never heard any of them telling stories about such a pastime involving anyone else, and some of them are lawyers.

I doubt Mr Conradi is any better informed than I am, and yet he sees fit to nail the whole country to the cross of his opprobrium. He extrapolates France’s perversity from “the treatment of the case by France’s leading newspapers, which have largely tucked away the grim proceedings on their inside pages”.

“If such a case were taking place in Britain,” he adds, “it would dominate the front pages and lead the television news”. Conradi makes it sound as if such obsession with lurid sex crimes were a good thing: “It’s also a matter of media culture: leading national newspapers, such as the left-leaning Le Monde or right-wing Le Figaro, do not stoop to putting [such stories] on their front pages.”

Good for them, I dare say. But note how Le Monde, the French counterpart of The Guardian, is only “left-leaning”, whereas Le Figaro doesn’t just lean to the right – it’s already irredeemably “right-wing”. It’s clear enough to what side Mr Conradi himself leans.

True enough, our broadsheets are these days barely distinguishable from tabloids. At a time when a major war is raging in Europe, another one is brewing in the Middle East, either of them can lead to a cataclysmic conflagration, and Britain herself has fallen into the hands of those evidently committed to doing her harm, they’d doubtless put on their front pages the story of some degenerates having their wicked way with an elderly grandmother.

Their voyeuristic audience would rejoice: it’s so much more fun to read about the STDs Mme Pélicot contracted during her ordeal than about Ukrainian children blown up in Mariupol or tortured in Bucha. Our editors know how to give due prominence to things that really matter. That’s why they are already allocating more column inches to the Pélicot case than it’s receiving in France.

However, I can see Conradi’s point. The Russians are only murdering hundreds of thousands, whereas the Pélicot case can be used to promote the MeToo ideology so dear to the heart of our formerly conservative paper. And Conradi does his bit with relish.

He quotes approvingly the gibberish mouthed by a French social worker who doesn’t sound in any way superior to our own homegrown variety: “I think it’s symptomatic of our society, which is still patriarchal and doesn’t take the measure of the revolution that’s unfolding before their eyes,” she said.

Revolution, nothing less. Sans-culottes are on the march, and Mme Pélicot, whose own culottes were so heinously removed on so many occasions, is their standard bearer.

Meanwhile the French legal system has neglected even to come up with a definition of rape that Conradi would countenance. All their code says is that rape is  “sexual penetration, committed against another person by violence, constraint, threat or surprise”. That sounds exhaustive enough to me, but not to Conradi. This definition is deficient because it “does not explicitly include the question of consent”.

That’s it, I must have a serious talk with the French jurists among my friends. How dare French jurisprudence describe nonconsensual sex while omitting the buzz word of woke ideology? Anyone may misunderstand and decide that raping a woman at gunpoint may be construed as consensual hanky-panky.

The French have already picked up quite a few rotten things from Britain: tattooed, facially metalled proledom, education that doesn’t educate, law enforcement that doesn’t enforce law, healthcare that doesn’t care for health. Please let them stay for a little while longer in the state of blissful ignorance about our woke imperatives.

It’s not France that’s on trial, Mr Conradi. It’s Pélicot and his accomplices. Leave France to her vices and devices, will you? And for God’s sake spare us the woke idiocy that’s convulsing Britain. Before long, it’s the French who’ll put us on trial.

Some years ago, I wrote the book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, inspired by the financial disaster of 2008.

The main point was that our financial problems were a symptom of an underlying civilisational malaise caused first by the Reformation and then by the contagion inexplicably called ‘the Enlightenment’.

The former was a rebellion against apostolic Christianity; the latter, one against Christendom as such, not only its religion but also much of the civilisation that the religion had produced.

That included a specifically Christian take on economics, summed up in the past by “not by bread alone”. However, “not by bread alone” didn’t mean not by bread at all.

It’s just that Christianity established a pecking order in which money and everything it bought occupied a low rung on the ladder of values. Such things might have been important, but some other things were more so.

It was as if Jesus had told compulsive money makers, “By all means, go on if you must. But never lose sight of what comes first.”

The Reformation, especially its Calvinist offshoot, perverted that pecking order by treating riches as God’s gift, His reward for virtue. For the first time in history, acquisitiveness received a divine blessing. (Such is the origin of what Weber described as “the Protestant work ethic”.)

Following what Ortega y Gasset called the ‘revolt of the masses’, the Christian pecking order collapsed altogether and was replaced with naked rationalist materialism. The pursuit of material possessions, otherwise known as happiness, was elevated to a secular moral height it had never scaled before.

This eventually led to rapacious, impatient consumption with no holds barred. Happiness, which is to say material possessions, was treated as an inalienable human right, and millions of people tried to defend it by taking promiscuous risks. In due course, the sum of all risks became too heavy for the financial system to bear, and it collapsed.

Such is the schematic representation of a rather involved argument touching on aspects of history, theology, philosophy, politics and economics. Obviously, since I was writing about a civilisational shift from A to B, I had to devote quite a few pages to A, which is to say Christendom.

Anyway, after the book was published I gave a copy to a well-known journalist, at that time my friend and editor. My friend was – still is, God bless him – a highly intelligent man, touching on the upper limit available to an atheist. Hence I was sure he was going to review my Crisis in a high-circulation paper.

No review appeared for a month or so, and finally I asked him if he had had the chance to read the book. “Oh you mean the one about God…” he said dismissively, and I realised my Crisis would remain unread and unreviewed, at least by him.

The book wasn’t “about God”. It was about economics considered historically and philosophically. But mea culpa: words like ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ did figure prominently in the first half of the book – they had to be there as essential parts of the argument.

Yet such words have become optical taboos: as far as the modern mind is concerned, they don’t belong in a serious discussion. A modern editor casts a quick eye over the text, espies a profusion of the offensive words, and his eyes glass over. The book is ‘uncool’. It’s not worth reading.

Now, I’ve described my friend as highly intelligent, but he won’t be offended if I suggest he isn’t one of history’s greatest minds. Yet several Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries who could have a valid claim to that distinction suffered from the same myopia.

The word ‘God’ burned their lips with the same singeing intensity, and I for one am amused by the dexterity of the mental acrobatics they displayed when trying to zigzag around it. The ‘G’ word was unutterable to them – even when they clearly had it in mind.

They talked about ‘defence mechanisms’, while refusing to mention the existence of a mechanic able to design such protective devices. They discussed the ‘laws of nature’, skipping the need for a legislator who could have laid such laws down. They talked about nature as something endowed with a mind, which wasn’t especially clever.

Thus, in no particular order, Herder insisted that the world is a natural organism designed to produce higher organisms within itself. Designed by whom exactly? Well, nature itself, if you insist. Quite.

But that endows nature with a rationality for surely it takes reason to design anything. I’m unable to discuss the matter with old Johann Gottfried, but had that discussion taken place, he would have doubtless explained that he was speaking metaphorically. If so, the metaphor didn’t quite work.

To Kant, nature had a rational plan, and human nature was the matter through which that plan was to be carried out. The plan was teleological: eventually, at some time in the future, a rational millennium would be achieved, but not quite yet.

Again, unable to utter the word ‘God’, one of history’s greatest thinkers resorts to a lame metaphor that simply doesn’t work. While implicitly agreeing with Herder that nature is predetermined to evolve from low to high, Kant reverts to primitive pantheism by assigning to nature an ability to draw long-term plans.

Kant’s able disciple Schelling treated history and nature as two great realms manifesting the Absolute from the beginning of time. Yes, but what exactly is that Absolute, Herr Professor? And how did time begin?

The Absolute, explained Hegel, is man’s thought expressed through actions. History is nothing but the dialectical development of this Absolute Spirit, or Absolute Thought, if you’d rather.

If I understand correctly, which with Hegel can never be taken for granted, the world is graced with the presence of some collective intellect, of which we all partake. Like any individual mind, this collective intellect develops with age, growing from primitive to intricate, which is to say from a cave dweller to Hegel.

But what is it? Where does it come from? Why didn’t he just admit that he was talking about God? Hegel couldn’t make that admission. Neither could Kant, Herder, Shelling or Fichte. Neither could their French counterparts, such as Montesquieu and Voltaire.

None of them could admit what all of them knew: only God makes man, history – and, for that matter, nature – intelligible. Even the greatest thinkers, which all of them were, couldn’t credibly dispense with that essential starting point. That’s why they had to concoct variously convoluted crypto-theological metaphors to get around the offensive ‘G’ word, hoping their readers wouldn’t be able to decipher their codes.

One thing for sure: my editor friend is in good company, and one of long standing. Not quite as long-standing as mine, but one that’s much more up-to-date. This seems to be the ironclad requirement of modernity: everything has to be up-to-date, progressive and forward-looking.

Never mind intellectual rigour and honesty. Such virtues have gradually faded away over the past couple of centuries.

Had you asked me yesterday what a bus shelter is, I would have said: “A bus stop that has a roof, three walls and one open side”.

In doing so, I would have tried to suppress the disdainful condescension Londoners tend to feel about ignorant out-of-towners. Fancy not knowing what a bus shelter is! I’d be amazed if that country bumpkin has ever even seen a double-decker, I would have thought with the snobbery characteristic of a capital city dweller.

Thus I recall once overhearing an American ask a bus driver whether he was going to Holborn, which word came across as Hall-born. “It’s Hoebn, mate,” said the driver, and the contempt in his London voice had more layers than one would expect to find in a millefeuille at a French patisserie.

Anyway, in my hypothetical case, it’s I who would have been ignorant. For I would have missed a whole new meaning Mayor Sadiq Khan has added to the concept in question. In his capable hands, a bus shelter now means offering protection not only for people waiting for a bus, but also for those riding in it.

The good mayor has introduced a direct bus route in North London, running from Stamford Hill to Golders Green. That development sounds unremarkable in itself. However, what makes it astonishing isn’t that it was introduced but why.

Both neighbourhoods are home to large communities of Orthodox Jews, who often shuttle from one place to the other. But until the new route came on stream, they had had to change buses at Finsbury Park, an area predominantly inhabited by gentiles, many of them of the Muslim persuasion.

Jews waiting for the next bus to arrive were routinely subjected to abuse, both verbal and physical. Hence the new route was opened not so much for their convenience as for their safety.

“For 16 years now the Jewish communities in Stamford Hill and Golders Green have been lobbying for a direct link between those two communities, said Mr Khan. “They were frightened because of a massive increase of antisemitism since October 7 last year.”

That is, since a murderous Hamas attack on Israel, which, according to some London denizens, wasn’t murderous enough.

‘Massive’ is the right word for the rise in anti-Semitism. The Met Police recorded 2,065 anti-Semitic crimes between October and July, a 278.9 per cent increase on the same period in the previous year. Hundreds of anti-Semitic attacks occurred even in Westminster, the central area not known for a large Hebraic presence.

“I don’t want any Londoner to be scared to leave their home because they’re worried about public transport,” added the mayor. “I think we’ve got to recognise the fear that Londoners feel who are Jewish, we’ve got to recognise the tremors of hate that are felt by Jewish people across the country.”

Reports say the Jewish community is “delighted” with the new route, but I would have been happier with another word: enraged. The whole thing is so sinister as to make me wonder in what place and period I live.

If London, circa 2024, even remotely begins to resemble Berlin, circa 1934, the problem has degenerated beyond a point where a new bus route could provide a solution. A local or national government that can’t keep any group safe is in default of its raison d’être, and palliatives just won’t do.

Far be it from me to advocate rough homespun justice, but it’s better than no justice at all. Perhaps London Jews should take their cue from the events in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20^th century.

Between 1903 and 1905 a wave of pogroms swept over Kishinev, one of the centres of the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Dozens of people were killed, hundreds were wounded, hundreds of women were raped, thousands of homes were robbed and trashed.

The government did little to stop the violence and in fact tacitly encouraged it. Therefore the Jews of Odessa, another centre of the Pale, realised their turn would come next. Knowing they couldn’t rely on the government for protection, Odessa Jews decided to protect themselves.

They created self-defence units and, when the marauding mob barged into their neighbourhood, the thugs were greeted with pistol shots. Having left a few bodies behind, the rioters retreated, tail between their legs.

Now, unlike the Russian Empire, Britain is ruled by law. Hence there’s no place here for responding to violence with extralegal violence – provided the law does its job. Yet I’d maintain that responding to such sinister attacks by opening a new bus route isn’t a case of the law doing its job.

It’s the Met reneging on its remit of protecting Londoners from villains, and Mayor Khan being too cowardly (or reluctant) to solve the problem, not just mitigate it. And you don’t solve the problem of mob violence by playing with buses.

You do so by putting more cops on the streets of North London, where most Jews live, empowering the police to do what it takes to stamp out anti-Semitic attacks – and the courts to pass stiff sentences.

After all, England, unlike Russia, has no history of pogroms, not recent history at any rate. The last – or shall we say the latest – such riot happened in York, in 1190. It won’t stay the last one for long, however, if the government acquiesces in anti-Semitic attacks by refusing to deal with them as severely as they demand.

If Jews are forced to do in London what they did in Odessa in 1905, London won’t be London, England won’t be England, and – on the plus side – Sadiq Khan won’t be the mayor. Not much of a silver lining, but still.

Inadvertently, I hasten to add. Deputy PM Angela Rayner would be unable to make any good points deliberately – such an ability isn’t in her intellectual make-up.

The point I have in mind was made after videos of Angie dancing at 4 AM in Ibiza had caused quite a stir.

Some spoilsport reactionaries questioned whether an Ibiza rave is a proper environment for a Secretary of State to display her dancing skills. Words like ‘dignity of office’ crossed a few lips, but Angie brushed them aside.

“Yes I’m working class,” she explained proudly. “I like a dance, I like dance music.”

This calls for at least two comments. The first one is less serious: Angie seems to believe that only working-class people like to dance.

Anyone who has ever attended, seen or read about an aristocratic ball will know that this is simply untrue. Choreographic displays aren’t the privilege of any particular group, far from it. It’s just that some people may dance gavottes and mazurkas, others choose tangos and foxtrots, and Angie prefers mimicking various approximations to coital gyrations.

Some social divides are indeed observable there. Or are these divides really social?

This brings us to the good point Raver Rayner made, albeit inadvertently. She always describes herself as working class, but what does the term mean?

Marx, the shining light of Angie’s world view, defined classes in economic terms (their relation to “the means of production”), dividing people into oppressive haves and oppressed have-nots, and identifying struggle between them as the principal social dynamic.

(Let’s remark parenthetically that Marx didn’t really originate that view. It had been wafting in the air since the early days of the Enlightenment, and Giambattista Vico, to name one thinker, had enunciated it 200 years before Marx.)

On that criterion, Angie isn’t working class. Even assuming she doesn’t fiddle her expenses, her government salary alone puts her firmly into the middle class. Since she nevertheless identifies (dread word) as working class, she clearly isn’t talking about money.

What then? It’s true that Angie’s background isn’t normally associated with the upper reaches of society. She grew up on a council estate, left school at 16 after getting pregnant and has never acquired any educational qualifications other than some training in social care.

But surely what matters isn’t where one begins but where one ends up? I know some erudite and refined people whose beginnings, minus a teenage pregnancy, were as humble as Angie’s. Yet, as they moved through life, they acquired the trappings of the cultured elite, rather than, like Angie, a collage of tattoos specifying their party affiliation.

The closer we look at the issue Raver Rayner touched upon, the more we realise that the only definition of class making sense these days must be based not on economics but on culture. This points at a paradox that brings into question many traditional notions of political taxonomies, specifically the difference between the conservative right and socialist left.

Conservatives are supposed to renounce change and devote tireless efforts to preserving ossified social and economic structures. Socialists, on the other hand, are inveterate progressives. Along with Marx and Darwin they believe in steady meliorative change: things continuously evolving from primitive to complex, from small to big, from bad to good.

However, when it comes to the touchy issue of class, it’s conservatives who believe in upward mobility, social, economic and cultural. Socialists like Angie, on the other hand, insist that one stays for ever in the class of one’s birth. It’s as if class were coded into one’s DNA, along with sex, height and the colour of eyes.

It’s obvious to anyone that, for all the clamps socialists love to apply to the economy, it’s possible for an originally poor person to become rich through industry and enterprise. If that’s the case, then, for a person to get permanently frozen into the same class, it’s culture that has to be held as immutable.

It’s tasteless to be either ashamed or proud of one’s roots, just as it’s silly to be ashamed or proud of one’s hazel eyes. Where or to whom we are born is beyond our control. But living over four decades (Angie is 44) without elevating herself beyond the culture of tattooed raves is indeed something to be ashamed of — and it’s definitely not something to be proud of.

When one finishes in the same place where one started, one has remained immobile. Culturally, one has been running in place, if at all. I’d define such a life as misspent, but Raver Rayner must have different ideas. She likes her cultural savagery and has assiduously cultivated it over a lifetime.

This isn’t just a personal idiosyncrasy. Such is the zeitgeist that Angie has inhaled deeply and filled her lungs with. And every gust must have told her that in matters cultural it’s not upward but downward mobility that’s laudable.

If you compare her to our former chancellor, George Osborne, his social background is the opposite of Raver Rayner’s. A scion of a wallpaper magnate, he had every privilege England can offer: prep schools, St Paul’s, Oxford, the lot. And yet, when asked about his musical tastes, George instantly cited… no, you’re wrong, not Palestrina and Bach. His professed musical preference was a sub-proletarian rap group.

He might have said it just to come across as prolier than thou, but that’s an even stronger indication of where the zeitgeist is blowing. Its squalls send people plummeting to the flinty cultural ground, rather than soaring to the heights of Palestrina or Bach.

“I take my job really seriously and what I do… you’ve got to have downtime as well. Everybody has to have downtime,” says Raver Rayner.

Fair enough. But the kind of downtime she chooses bodes badly for the job she does, however seriously she takes it.

It used to be taken for granted that leaders of Western countries had to be part of Western culture. That requirement has evidently fallen by the wayside, and the consequences are there for all to see.

Commenting on Labour’s decision to cut arms sales to Israel, Boris Johnson asked: “Do they want Hamas to win?”

No, they don’t, is the answer to that one. They don’t want Hamas to win. They just want Israel to lose, and they don’t really care to whom.

It could be Hamas, but it doesn’t have to be. Hezbollah will do just as well. Or Iran. Or Syria. Or Egypt. Or Burkina Faso, if she felt like taking Israel on.

It’s useless pointing out to the likes of Prime Minister Starmer or Foreign Secretary Lammy that Israel is an oasis of Western civility in a desert of barbarism. They know this. And they want Israel to lose not in spite of it but because of it.

Lammy can talk all he wants about “international humanitarian law” that supposedly demands that Israel be disarmed, or as near as damn. Engaging him on this battleground is like trying to explain to Fido that chasing cats around the block isn’t a good idea.

Fido doesn’t do so because he thinks it’s a good idea, but because hostility to cats is wired into his DNA. If the dog could talk, he’d doubtless come up with a seemingly valid explanation, possibly one based on the urgent need to protect the rights of mice and rats. But any sensible person would know the real reason.

Modernity was ushered onto the historical stage by a collectively felt urge to repudiate Christendom, as the West was then called. That was the foundation of the modernity edifice, with everything else, such as the talk of liberty and equality, merely window dressing.

Then, whole classes deemed incurably infected with the emanations of Christendom had to be exterminated en masse. That massacre was portrayed as an unfortunate necessity, a means to glorious ends. But it wasn’t. The only reason for mass murder is always the urge to murder masses. The destruction of Western heritage, be that people or physical plant, wasn’t the means. It was the desired end.

The animating impetus of modernity was negative – it was hate, not love. But in due course modernity bifurcated into philistine and nihilist strains.

The desire to expurgate every vestige of Christendom remained strong in both, as was the craving for physical comfort. The difference was – as it so often is – in the relative emphasis placed on these desiderata.

If the philistine put comfort first and revenge second, the nihilist reversed that order. Push come to shove, the philistine could even forgo revenge if it began to threaten his comfort. Similarly, the nihilist was more prepared to sacrifice his comfort if it got in the way of hatred.

Today’s Left live off that nihilist legacy, which has been lovingly passed on from one generation to the next. They too loathe the West, even though it can no longer be legitimately described as Christendom. Never mind: some earthly fragments of the old order are still extant, and there’s no shortage of secondary targets to aim at.

It’s vital to keep in mind – and I don’t mind repeating myself – that the animus of this lot remains negative. In this case, they don’t love Hamas because it’s a terrorist organisation. In fact, they may not love it at all. They support it because of the shared hostility to the West, personified in that region by Israel.

That’s one problem with Israel the Left identify either viscerally or consciously, doesn’t really matter which. The other is her being Jewish.

The Jew is a traditional bogeyman of the Left, ever since Marx erased the distinction between Jew and capitalist. That gave his followers a semblance of a philosophical justification for anti-Semitism, which was so much more attractive than simple zoological hatred – or rather could be sold to the outside world as being more attractive.

Some Lefties, such as Jeremy Corbyn, use Marxist dogma as camouflage for their primordial anti-Semitism, others may not be intuitive anti-Semites at all. They just feel duty-bound to hate Israel because such is the cost of admission to their ideological club. However, if they happen to be politicians, they have a full set of shibboleths at their fingertips to explain why they regretfully have to do all they can to make sure Israel will lose.

They aren’t going to divulge the real reasons, such as hatred of the West in general and Israel in particular. Professing affection for “international humanitarian law” plays so much better on Evening News. This stands to reason, and they can’t be faulted for it – a professional politician isn’t going to commit professional political suicide.

But it’s not only football but also politics that’s a game of two halves. One half is nonentities like Starmer and Lammy coming up with manifestly false explanations designed to conceal their real feelings. The other half is their opponents’ inability, possibly reluctance, to bring Leftie dissemblers to account.

This too reflects subterranean tectonic shifts of long standing. Just as the Duke of Orléans had to become Philippe Égalité to earn the right to speak (though, as it turned out, not to keep his head when all about him were losing theirs), so do today’s ‘conservatives’ have to play the game by the rules drawn by the dominant Left.

It’s not only the Creation that the Word was in the beginning of. Political power also starts with the Word, the ability to dominate and impose the language of public discourse. I refer to this tendency as ‘glossocracy’, the government of the word, by the word and for the word.

Glossocracy is a rigged game, in that it’s both played and refereed by the same people. The other side is allowed to play the game but, because the glossocrats lay down the rules, there’s never any victory in sight.

In this instance, someone like Boris Johnson may have a go at Lammy, but only on the latter’s terms. Even someone considerably more principled than Johnson (which doesn’t narrow the field down too much) would impose self-censorship on any desire to take the Left to task at a fundamental level.

Any politician or, for that matter, establishment pundit daring even to hint at the ideas I’ve touched upon would be instantly drummed out of the guild for violating its ironclad charter. For example, no one could get away with saying to Messrs Starmer and Lammy that, after Maidanek and Magadan or, come to that, Bucha and Mariupol, any talk of “international humanitarian law” is disingenuous prattle.

The most one would be allowed to argue is that Israel hasn’t really broken that sacred covenant, at least not as badly as her opponents did. Specious arguments one way or the other would then fill the air with their miasma, only then to disappear in a puff of smoke – including the kind coming out of the guns fired by Hamas murderers into the heads of Israeli hostages.

It’s impossible to argue the case at the deeper level, that of our retreating civilisation engaged in a desperate rearguard fight, with Israel and the Ukraine doing the fighting. Dig as deep as that, and the whole existential edifice of modernity will begin to totter. Can’t have that, can we now?

Glossocracy is tyranny imposed by language, and it can only be resisted by fighting for every word, the way Israelis and Ukrainians are fighting for every patch of their land. Whenever someone talks about Israeli ‘occupiers’ and their mistreatment of ‘Palestinians’, or about the Ukraine exclusively populated and run by corrupt Nazis, he mustn’t be allowed to get away with it.

His true motives must come into focus, for all to see what they really are. These people don’t support evil because they can’t recognise it. They support it because they approve of it, and will continue to do so for as long as it coincides with their own cravings.

And people who approve of evil are evil themselves. Even if they are democratically elected to run a great country, or employed to write columns for a great paper.

In 1928, the Nazis almost won the local elections in the state of Thuringia. In 1932, they did win them, with 43.4 per cent of the vote.

Such is the historical background to the triumph of the fascisoid AfD party in the same state a few days ago, when it came in first with 32.8 per cent. At the same time, AfD scored 30 per cent in the adjacent Saxony, coming within a whisker of carrying that province too.

This is the first time that AfD has won an election in a major province, or rather the first time since its typological progenitor did so all those years ago. This isn’t to say that AfD is a carbon copy of the NSDAP, far from it.

But its emotional make-up is similar, though the party takes great pains not to come across as a downright heir to you-know-who. That worthy effort doesn’t always succeed, which is why Björn Höcke, AfD leader in Thuringia, boasts two criminal convictions for using Nazi rhetoric. I suppose the party’s rank-and-file see that as a badge of honour.

Also making huge gains in the same provinces is another extremist party, BSW, a splinter group of the communist Die Linke. This parallels a similar tendency in 1928 and 1932, when the communists won 10.6 and 14.3 per cent of the Thuringian vote respectively.

Those two parties are coming in on the rail while the political mainstream is busying itself with climate, social inequality, decolonisation, gender-bender policies and other such matters that are taken more seriously by politicians than by the electorate.

The two extremist parties converge on their anti-immigration stand, which Thuringian voters seem to favour in preference to unisex lavatories. One can understand and share their feelings, but what often matters in politics isn’t just the face value of a policy but also the accent placed on it.

For AfD, as for its British, French and Italian counterparts, opposition to uncontrolled immigration is the axis around which its whole Weltanschauung revolves. While pretending to put forth a rational argument, the party really appeals to visceral xenophobia that’s sometimes dormant at the German grassroots, but never quite dead.

Voters everywhere often respond not to text but to sub-text, not to denotation but to connotation, not to semantics but to semiotics. The essence of political populism is its direct appeal to such deep-lying strata, bypassing reason altogether or racing through it on the way to the subcortex waiting to be tickled.

That’s the nature of my contempt for all populist demagogues, regardless of whether or not I agree with what they are saying. Often I do agree with much of it, but their real appeal lies elsewhere. It’s pointless to take seriously what they say because what really matters to their audience is what they don’t say.

We could discuss the similarities and differences between the Nazis and AfD, or between the communists and BSW, till the migrants go home. But their anti-immigration appeal isn’t all they have in common.

Both parties also act as outposts of Kremlin propaganda in Germany, and I’m sure, though can’t prove, that their affection for Putin isn’t entirely disinterested. AfD and BSW are both unofficial members of Putin’s anti-Western International, the European vanguard of his hybrid war on our civilisation.

The two parties are in favour of cutting all assistance to the Ukraine and forming close ties with Putin’s Russia. While seemingly sitting at the opposite ends of the political spectrum, they have joined forces in criticising the US, Germany and NATO in general for their involvement in the war.

When President Zelensky asked the Bundestag for greater support in June, many MPs from both AfD and BSW walked out in protest. Putin’s invisible hand grabbed them by the scruff of the neck and dragged them out of the hall where a victim of fascist aggression was begging for help.

What I find especially nauseating about Western Putinistas, and not just in Germany, is their abstract anti-war rhetoric. They shed crocodile tears for all those killed and maimed victims, then overcome the spasms in their throats and call for an end to this horrible war. Our own dear Peter Hitchens is a past master of such lachrymose displays, but he isn’t the only one.

Isn’t war just awful? they ask rhetorically. The implication is that any war is awful, and I’m glad those heroic RAF pilots weren’t so pacifistic in 1940.

Yes, wars are awful, but some wars are nonetheless necessary and just, a concept familiar to Western moral thought since Augustine of Hippo. What matters isn’t just that wars end but also how they end.

When those people call for an immediate ceasefire, one wonders whom they see as their target audience. If it’s Zelensky, then for him a stop to fighting is tantamount to capitulation. If it’s NATO countries, then for them a stop to supporting the Ukraine is also tantamount to her capitulation.

The only proper addressee for that message is the man who started this monstrous, unprovoked war: Putin. Yet one doesn’t hear any urgent appeals from Western Putinistas that the Russians lay down their arms and withdraw to their 2014 or even 2022 borders.

One can’t help feeling that the capitulation of the Ukraine is precisely the outcome they desire, which is to say the victory of the only aggressive fascist power in Europe. I almost wish they came out and said so outright, sparing us the gagging effect of pseudo-pacifist waffle.

I just hope more people realise that every victory for a pro-Putin European party, whether fascisoid right or fascisoid left, is a victory for Putin’s Russia – and a crushing defeat for whatever little is still left of Western civilisation. This ought to simplify the moral assessment of Western Putinistas. In my taxonomy, they sit next to skunks.

P.S. Hitchens keeps challenging Boris Johnson to a debate on the war in every piece he writes. I’d be happy to act as an outlet for his verbal pugnacity, but he wouldn’t stoop to taking on such a lowly opponent – especially one likely to wipe the floor with him.  

Anyone who writes regularly is bound to repeat himself now and then. After all, few people have enough new and original thoughts to fill thousands of articles and the odd book.

Some writers repeat other writers, which is called homage if attributed and plagiarism if not. And all fecund writers repeat themselves, but, and here’s the rub, sometimes they do so unwittingly.

I found yet another proof of this observation this morning, when sitting down to write a follow-up to my yesterday‘s reflections on language. Having collected my thoughts, I began to jot them down, but every statement looked oddly familiar.

A quick search confirmed that impression: I was writing a piece I had already written almost seven years ago. Now, I seldom look at my old work, and, when I do, I usually hate it. This stands to reason.

A mind is always work in progress, with old thoughts sharpened, modified, qualified or – as often as not – discarded. That old piece, however, is different. I could change it here and there, paraphrase a thought or two, but I couldn’t improve it. Pre-empting an accusation of conceit, I’m not suggesting that it can’t be improved, only that I can’t do it.

However, that old article complements my yesterday’s piece so naturally that the only sensible thing to do is re-run it, even at the risk of boring my regular readers blessed with retentive memory. So here it is, slightly shortened: Nobody in Europe Speaks English.

This statement is probably an exaggeration. But not nearly as much as its oft-used opposite, starting with ‘Everybody’.

Britons who say it mean that it’s now possible to exchange basic Anglophone units of information with French waiters, Italian shopkeepers and Spanish museum guides. Language is just a communication tool, isn’t it? So that’s it: a communication occurred, job done.

Yet I question the premise. Yes, language is a means of communication. But it’s not just that.

If we bring down to earth the Biblical statement about the Word that was in the beginning, perhaps language is what creates and defines a nation. And if we believe the Babel story, then language is definitely what separates one nation from another – and not just linguistically.

English and Russian, for example, are different in exactly the same ways as the English and the Russians are different. One example: an English sentence is based on the verb, the action word, whereas the centre of a Russian sentence is the noun, surrounded by numerous modifiers.

A Russian sentence can function without a verb – possibly because a Russian man can function without doing anything much.

Hence classical Russian literature, from Pushkin to Goncharov, from Gogol to Tolstoy, abounds in indolent layabouts who talk much and do little. On the other hand, Russian boasts a vast variety of affixation, ideally suited to conveying the shades of emotions in which the layabouts endlessly indulge.

English grammar is formally rigorous, which reflects (creates?) a propensity for sequential logic and rational thought, just as its reliance on the verb reflects action-oriented pragmatism. The set word order of an English sentence can only be violated for stylistic effect, while Russian word order follows no rules whatsoever and is entirely stylistic.

That stands to reason. For the Russians despise rigid forms into which their much-vaunted spirituality can be squeezed. Hence they’ve so far been unable to come up with stable statehood or reasonable legality.

Characteristically, Nikolai Lossky’s History of Russian Philosophy devotes 57 pages to the mystical thinker Soloviov and only two to all the Russian philosophers of law combined. Justice – defined as a set of codified laws, not arbitrary feelings – has never interested the Russians much.

According to Lossky (d. 1965), this disdain for form even penetrated the Russians’ gene pool, producing ill-defined facial features so different, say, from the chiselled North European profile. It’s as if, having drawn a sketch of a Russian face, God then went over it, smudging every line with his thumb.

Lossky’s observation may be too sweeping, but it’s certainly evident that the Russians’ amorphousness extends to the way they treat every public institution, political, legal or religious.

Fr. Pavel Florensky, the polymath thinker murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1937, commented on the Russian character in essentially the same way: “There is no sun in the Slavs, no transparency, no definition! Clarity and serenity are lacking… It seems to me that this is meaningfully related to their failure… to find the sublime in the here and now and not strain to seek it in the nonexistent or the far-away.”

All this explains why the genre of the rigorously argued philosophical essay is as alien to the Russians as it’s natural to the English. The English vocabulary is three times the size of Russian, which makes the language more precise: a concept can be fractured into many fragments, each conveying its own nuance.

Russian, on the other hand, is ideally suited to poetic expression. Poetry imposes discipline on the Russians willy-nilly, while the loose grammar and practically endless morphology of their language open up infinite poetic possibilities.

The morphology of Russian words is so rich phonetically that Russian poets don’t have to rely on consonant endings to produce rhymes: they can find them in the words’ roots themselves. That’s why rhyming patterns are more interesting and less obvious in Russian, and vers libre, though not nonexistent, is rare there. By contrast, rhymed English poetry can easily sound like doggerel.

To be sure, the English have produced more than their fair share of great poets (including the greatest of all, Shakespeare), but one almost has to be that to write superb verse in English. By contrast, Russian poets of even modest talents can often produce excellent poems – their language does much of the work by itself.

Because their language and therefore their mentality don’t encourage philosophical self-expression, Russian thinkers often seek refuge in literature, either poetry or prose.

Dostoyevsky’s novels, for example, are basically philosophy minus the intellectual discipline of the essay. And Tolstoy, possibly the greatest artist among world novelists, often indulged in tedious philosophical asides of the kind that would have destroyed the prose of a lesser artist.

The Russians welcome that sort of mongrelisation – it capitalises on their strength, poetic language, while downplaying their weakness, intellectual amorphousness. But Tolstoy’s Western contemporaries reacted differently. For example, Flaubert, having read the first French translation of War and Peace, exclaimed indignantly, “Il se répète! Il philosophise!”

So yes, an increasing number of Europeans are now able to communicate in English, after a fashion. But to speak English for real one has to have the mental, emotional and spiritual makeup the language reflects or even, arguably, creates.

Some – I’d like to suggest self-servingly – may perhaps be able to achieve this without being raised in an English-speaking country. A certain intellectual and emotional predisposition developed by lifelong study and decades of using English almost exclusively may see to that.

But such cases apart, I stand by the title above. If you juxtapose two sentences, “Everybody in Europe speaks English” and “Nobody in Europe speaks English”, neither is quite true, but the second is closer to the truth.