[The following essays, written like Burke’s Reflections in an individual and private

capacity, were published on the Lockdown Sceptics website, later The Daily Sceptic, from
December 2020 onwards.

1. ‘Covid-19/Polis-20’ (11 December 2020).

2. ‘Reflections on Conspiracy’ (29 December 2020).
3. ‘Ruled, Britannia’ (15 May 2021).
4. ‘The Political Theory of Covid-19, or, Hobbes’s Coviathan’ (3 July 2021).
5. ‘The Decline and Fall of Conservatism’ (18 August 2021).
6. ‘Bullshit-19’ (3 October 2021).
7. ‘Nice Totalitarianism’ (7 November 2021).
8. ‘Narcissistic Gnosticism’ (21 November 2021).
9. ‘A Periodic Fit of Morality’ (22 January 2022).
10. ‘Reflections on the War in Ukraine’ (7 March 2022).

They can be found at: https://lockdownsceptics.org or https://dailysceptic.org/. I

would like to thank the editor, Toby Young, for publishing them.]

The Coronation of a Virus:

Ten Essays on the Politics of Covid-19

JAMES ALEXANDER

1
 1

Covid-19/Polis-20,
or,
Some Sceptical Theses on the Crisis

‘Influenza symptoms seem only a slight intensification

of one’s ordinary attitudes to life: disinclination to get up, etc.’
Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks: A Selection
eds. J.A. Gere and John Sparrow
(Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 78

I think we have to distinguish Covid-19 from Polis-20. Covid-19 is a

disease caused by a novel coronavirus, which emerged in 2019. Polis-20
is the universal political response by governments, aided and abetted by
the information, opinion and speculation establishments of various
media, medical and scientific institutions in the year 2020 to perpetuate a
triple policy which deliberately seeks to dehumanise and desocialise us
through the use of masks, distancing and lockdown and has the unintended
but certainly well understood triple consequence of damaging the economy
as a whole, ruining our lived lives by constraining our economic and social activities
and causing us to suffer more from deaths for other reasons (whether the reasons
are economic, social or indeed medical). Polis-20 is also novel: indeed,
entirely unprecedented. It is also foolish and evil: foolish because of its
triple unintended consequence, and evil because of the nature of the
triple policy itself.
Let me try to summarise everything that has been said on the
sceptical side since March 2020. I take my views from a variety of
sources: Peter Hitchens, Lockdown Sceptics, some but not all of the writing
in The Spectator, along with Mike Graham, James Delingpole, Toby
Young and Laura Perrins on the one hand and Carl Heneghan, Mike
Yeadon and Richard Hodkinson on the other hand. These are, at the
moment, respected but marginalised figures in the media and in science.
There is also, eminently, Jonathan Sumption, the lawyer. There are
others, though I personally owe less to them.
I am saying nothing particularly new here. All I want to do is
emphatically contrast the apparent cause of the crisis, Covid-19, and the
actual cause of the crisis, Polis-20. Others have used terms like
‘casedemic’ and ‘panicdemic’, which are certainly amusing and
instructive terms. But I think ‘Polis-20’ attributes blame where it should
be blamed, to human action, and in particular to coercive political

2
action, and, in so doing, makes it clear that we should not attribute
much—except some death and some suffering (which is of course, does
it need to be said?, regrettable)—to Covid-19.
Let me present my summary of the sceptical position in
numbered theses.
1. There is a virus; there is a disease caused by the virus: it was,
as they say, ‘unknown to science’ before early 2020.
2. We are continually hearing things about the spread of the
virus: this usually, significantly, takes two forms: one is ‘information’
about what has happened and the other is ‘speculation’ about what
might happen.
3. Both information and speculation have been used carelessly in
the formation of opinion.
4. Information has been continually presented without context.
5. Speculation has been continually a matter of worst case
scenarios.
6. Opinion has therefore generally been that something must be
done.
7. Since something can only be done by the state, the massed
armies of information, speculation and opinion have forced the state to
act.
8. The action of the state is what I call Polis-20.
9. Polis-20 was precipitate, disproportionate, often incompetent,
and certainly responsible for imposing the expectation that something
would have to continue to be done in the future.
10. Polis-20 was also universal. With a few notable exceptions—
and only Sweden amongst democratic countries—all states, whether
democratic or despotic, adopted what can only be termed the triple
policy of distancing, masks and lockdown—in effect, what have amounted
to imposition of various forms of coercion and constraint.
11. Polis-20, as something precipitate, disproportionate,
incompetent, universal, coercive and constraining, was, in effect, also
despotic.
12. Since Polis-20 was a king attended by the three loyal lords of
information, speculation and opinion, any attempt to criticise or be
sceptical about this triple policy was met with universal condemnation
from the media, medical, scientific and political establishments and also
by other sectors who found some reason—whether personal or
political—to approve of the measures.

3
 13. Information has been presented without context. We have
been told how many cases there and how many deaths, daily or in
total—we are shown quantities—but these are presented without
context, without reference to the total number of deaths, or the number
of deaths from other causes, or comparative deaths from other
respiratory illness in other years, or whether these amount to excess
deaths.
14. In addition, information has been presented as if what are
called ‘cases’ are significant cases and as if what are called ‘deaths’ are
significant deaths. It is now well known that testing, firstly, has varied in
how far it was carried out at different times (so that more testing
naturally resulted in more cases being found, incidentally suggesting to
some that the virus was spreading) and, secondly, is dubious in what it
actually shows (because of ‘false positives’ and ‘false negatives’). Cases,
anyhow, cover anything from asymptomless reception of the virus,
through mild symptoms, to severe cases requiring intensive care,
oxygenation and intubation. It is also well known that records of deaths
are ambiguous since, from the start, care was not taken to distinguish
‘death from Covid-19’ from ‘death with Covid-19’.
15. Speculation was influential at the outset of the crisis.
Speculation took the form of models manufactured by mathematicians
and statisticians, not by virologists or immunologists. They were
certainly not attended by common sense or, what is the same thing, a sense of
proportion. They were dominated by an enthusiasm for the ‘worst-case
scenario’. The worst-case scenario is not what is expected or what is
predicted but what is ‘projected’ if the worst case is to happen. This is a
study of nemesis, so I am tempted to call the science of the worst-case
scenario nemesitology. We could also call it scientia pessimi (if the Latin is
correct), or, bluntly, ‘the dismal science’.
16. There seems to be a law whereby modellers tend to
exaggerate the dangers of anything unknown, whether it be AIDS, swine
flu, Sars, oil shortages, or even climate change. Modellers are susceptible
to the pressure to exaggerate danger, since they reduce their liability: if
they are right, they are justified, but, significantly, if they are wrong (and
there are fewer deaths), then not only is everyone relieved but they can
claim that preventive policies were effective. By contrast, if the
modellers minimise the danger, their reputations will be destroyed, since
they will be blamed for the inaction of the state. This law is as yet
unnamed. I shall call it the Law of Fearsome Modelling.

4
 17. The virus originated in China, where the response was
secretive and eventually despotic. The World Health Organisation was
not critical of China. Next emergencies were reported, for instance, in
Italy. Then early scientific models were published, and since they were
designed according to the Law of Fearsome Modelling, they caused
much fear. The information, speculation and opinion establishments
forced states to avoid the fate of Italy by imitating China. In addition,
many states adopted the same policies at the same time despite being at
different stages of the spread of the virus.
18. Thus we entered a world of exaggerated predictions followed by
extreme policies.
19. This created a precedent—cemented by the information,
speculation, opinion and action establishments—which created the
inevitability that from now on something similar would always have to be done
which in turn meant that it was almost impossible for the state to ever
change direction or admit a mistake.
20. The media exaggerated and continues to exaggerate the
dangers of the virus, by selectively using statistics (out of context,
without adequate comparison) and by selectively referring to sad stories.
All statistics are unreliable, all interpretations unreliable.
21. Standard protocols and understandings about the nature of a
virus were turned by a hysterical media into policies: for instance,
especially, ‘herd immunity’, which is a scientific phenomenon, and
inevitable, was turned into a policy (of not doing anything) and contrasted
with an alternative policy (of doing something). For obvious reasons, and in
association with the media exaggeration of death, many wanted
something to be done: hence the triple policy of lockdown, masks and
distancing.
22. These policies have only slowed down the inevitable spread
of the virus, and the inevitable emergence of what until recently was
called herd immunity: since they only work, and to some extent (and
even this is doubtful given the rise in cases despite masks, distancing,
lockdown etc), in the short term. There is no or little evidence that any
of the preventive measures—lockdown, masks, distancing—work. It has
become a matter of propaganda, that is, of politics, that they do work. So
Polis-20 has come to insist on the imposition of its policy by insisting
that this policy is scientifically correct.
23. Masks are a particular impertinence because of the claim that
masks serve others not oneself, an argument which is coercive. Masks are

5
also of obvious symbolic significance, and are obviously political—
indicating agreement and obedience—in effect, subjugation to Polis-20.
24. Governments have got into debt, colossal debt, in order to
serve the doing something policies. They have imposed controls on medical
care which have damaged general health, and offered benefits to the
medical establishment which encourage that establishment to exaggerate
the incidence and significance of Covid-19.
25. A pandemic can be survived without stringent restrictions if
an epidemic is allowed—with some care and caution—to turn into an
endemic condition: and Covid-19, in the long run, seems to be no more
significant than bad influenza. There were excess deaths, compared to
previous years, in March, April and May 2020, but there is little sign of
excess deaths since. Only the very old and those with significant
morbidities are usually threatened with death. Though no one really
knows how many cases there have been, and how many deaths of Covid-
19 there have been.
26. The adoption of dismal science has required us to believe in
deliverance from our situation by a miracle cure, a silver bullet, a holy
grail. This is ‘a vaccine’. Vaccines may or may not be something to be
found through scientific procedures, and may be safe, or even sensible
to use. (However, influenza vaccines work half of the time.) But they are
a political hope, thrown out in the desperate imaginative situation created
by Polis-20.
27. A sceptical or correct science of observation, explanation,
evidence, that is, of establishing what it is sensible to consider facts and
of establishing what it is sensible to consider a sensible response to
those facts has generally been ignored or sent out to the margins.
Assumptions have been made which exaggerate the danger: there has
been almost no discussion of prior immunity to the virus, and much
discussion of asymptomless transmission of the virus and of reinfection
after originally suffering from the disease. A reasonable low-keyed policy
was avoided: proper testing of the sick, amassing sensible medical
supplies, protecting the vulnerable. Plus the wise recognition and
consolation that everyone dies inevitably.
28. The response from the beginning was disproportionate, and now
is not only disproportionate but insane.
29. We have reified the physical avoidance of death into a fetish,
and the imposition of political protocols in order to avoid death into a
cult.

6
 30. The state response to Covid-19 is the stupidest collective
political act ever seen in history.
I will end with a few more general comments. The economy is
being slain. The public sector has retreated within its defences. The
private sector is dying, indeed, being murdered by the state. The state, or
the public side of the state, is murdering society, or the private side of the
state. In the Middle Ages in England all law was private law. There was
no clear public interest. Public interest emerged from the time of the
beginning of the absolutist state in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries—and was extended in Foucault’s era of the eighteenth century
so it became what he called ‘governmental’. Now the information,
speculation, opinion and action establishments are collaborating—for a
thousand contingent reasons—in maintaining a government mentality
which was wrong at the outset and could have been corrected at any
point and could be corrected now at any point.
There are two gross explanations for why the state has engaged
in the policy I am calling Polis-20. The first is cock-up and the second is
conspiracy. Cock-up is a universal finding of fault and a universal
concession. Reliance on cock-up as an explanation demands that we
ascribe no fault to any deliberate human action. This is unacceptable at
any time, but particularly unacceptable in a modern rational state where
there is, as there is obviously now, much reliance on statistics, modelling
and so on. So we cannot use cock-up except for particular unintended
consequences.
Conspiracy is the opposite of cock-up. Whereas cock-up ascribes
everything to the comic or tragic fates, and dissolves everything in
keystone coppery, conspiracy focuses out attention on not only a cause
but an intended cause with an intended consequence. It overfocuses, of
course, since in human activity there is little correlation of cause and
consequence, and almost no correlation between intention and
consequence. Conspiracy is as rhetorical, and as exaggerated an
explanation, as cock-up.
The alternative explanation, subtler, is that there has been a
cockupspiracy. A ‘cockupspiracy’ is something which several
commentators have identified, though they have different names for it.
Yeadon called it ‘convergent opportunism’. The idea here is that errors
are made at the same time as intentions are formed and that as things
continue errors, continually made, are continually adapted to by actors
who seek to turn the situation—the erroring situation—to their
advantage. These actors we may consider ‘bad actors’ for the reason

7
that, in this case, they are turning a crisis to their advantage and are
thereby perpetuating, indeed, one could almost say creating the crisis. These
bad actors include politicians, the medical and scientific lackeys who
have created models which infect policy, and the media lickspittles who
seem still unable to criticise what is going on. All of these are
responsible for Polis-20. The crisis has benefited those who have done
most to perpetuate the crisis. If the crisis had not benefited them—or,
more accurately, if they had not been able to act with the intention of
benefiting themselves—it would not have been perpetuated. What we
have is a culture in crisis because there is no sphere or forum in which
there is any resistance to what has become a totalising discourse. The
academics have failed, since they, as pensionaries of the state or of more
or less public institutions have a vested interest in collusion and anyhow
sit in situations of comfort, like Georgian bishops, and find it
convenient to withdraw to the safety of Zoom, Netflix and Salary.
(‘Zoom, Netflix and Salary’ should be a technical term for the
convenient lives of modern state pensionaries in the era of Polis-20.)
And the churches have failed, since they—as commentators anticipated
in the nineteenth century—now simply fall in with the ‘values’ of the
state.
In addition, other ‘bad actors’ meaning marginal political actors
on the left have used the rise of Covid-19 and Polis-20 to try to justify
something we might as well, for the moment, call Revolution-21. Some
of these bad actors are already part of Polis-20: here we have Big Tech,
Big Pharma (in effect, Big Brother) and the ‘Great Reset’. But others are
genuinely marginal, though often found sympathetic by the academic,
media and political elites complicit in Polis-20: these are the agitators of
Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter, who are operating with a
Late Marxist expectation of overthrowing capitalism through a compact
between intellect and proletariat.
This is the most serious political event since the French
Revolution. There should be a Burke, writing some equivalent of
Reflections on the Revolution in France. Something has happened; it should
not have happened. How we return to the ancien régime is unclear. But
reaction should be immediate and total. The exception should not be
the norm. The triple policy should stop. Modest medical precautions
should be continued. Research should continue with more light than
heat. We should revert to our lives before the deluge. This should never
happen again.
1-2 December 2020

8
 2

The Great Preset:

Reflections on Conspiracy

In 1858 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote to a friend about un virus d’une espèce

nouvelle et inconnue, ‘a virus of a new and unknown species’. Despite what
you might think, he was not referring to anything biological, but to
something political—the French Revolution. And it should be obvious
to all of us at the end of the year 2020 that the significant ‘virus of a new
and unknown species’ this year has not been the coronavirus but the
political response to the coronavirus.
In trying to make sense of the extremity of what has happened,
we have heard talk of a ‘Great Reset’: which is the name for the
supposed conspiracy by which the global rich will use the current crisis
to control and pacify the human population by taking property,
regulating finance, monitoring us through the panopticon of modern
technology, controlling our movement with health passports, continuing
the flow of luxuries, signalling to us our subjugation by the use of
masks, vaccinations and implants, and imposing on us a single
technocratic world government.
There are several obvious things to be said about any conspiracy.
The first is that conspiracy is an exaggeration, the equal and opposite
exaggeration to cock-up. The first wants to believe that everything is a
consequence of control. The second wants us to believe that everything is
a consequence of chaos. But behind the apparent distinction between
control and chaos we have a more important one, the distinction
between competence and incompetence. To believe in a conspiracy we not
only have to believe that everything is a consequence of control: we also
have to believe that control is competent. A conspiracy theory is actually
a belief in the competence of the conspirators. On the other side, a
cock-up theory supposes that all controllers and conspirators are
incompetent.
In an earlier piece, I suggested as an alternative, a third
possibility, cockupspiracy. This is obviously a compromise theory:
suggesting that we live in a world of partial competency in which rival
partial competencies are continually at war. In this piece I use this as the
launching point for further reflections on conspiracy.
There is something which has to be said immediately about
conspiracy in relation to the current crisis. The current crisis is the

9
twisting of an apparent crisis caused by the disease Covid-19 into a real
crisis by the political response which I have called Polis-20. The crisis is
a consequence of an unusually intense attempt to combine scientific and
political imperatives, as mediated by an agitated press. It is difficult to
know how to frame a causal explanation: whether to blame scientists or
politicians or those who mediate scientific and political claims and hence
sanction them and harden them into public opinion. But we can avoid
ascribing exact blame by saying that policy has infected scientific claims just as
scientific models have infected political claims. The word ‘infected’ is of course a
metaphor, derived from viruses. It should be obvious why it comes to
mind.
At every point it is possible to ascribe blame to conspiracy or cock-
up, though I prefer cockupspiracy, the view that in any human activity
there is no simple competence or incompetence but a thousand
combinations of competence and incompetence. In this case, what I
think we have seen, since politicians and scientists and the media have
been so eager to form an alliance against the people, is that the
incompetence of the handling of matters has at every point ratcheted up
the despotic tendency of the policies initially supposed to have been
legitimated by the competent handling of matters.
Though I suggest that it is wiser to allege cockupspiracy than either
conspiracy or cock-up, I think that it is important to say the following. What
has happened in 2020 all over the world, in terms of the imposition of a
deliberately despotic policy of masks, distancing and lockdown, is so
significant that even if it is not a conspiracy (and I am saying it is not) it is on
such a scale that we are certainly not wrong to consider it AS IF it is a conspiracy.
The scale of the imposition of controls by states over citizens is so
unparalleled outside of conditions of war or revolution that finding of
fault is an inevitability, ascription of blame a necessity, resentment a
duty. This is because even if through thoughtlessness or local self-
interest someone perpetuates the current policies they are guilty of
perpetuating one of the most dangerous tendencies of policy I have ever
seen in all my years of reading history.
Even if we do not believe in the conspiracy of the World
Economic Forum or the Trilateral Commission, I think we should be as
vigilant as if there is a conspiracy. One way of being vigilant is to pay
some attention to history. Politicians and scientists rarely know much
about the great traditions of politics in the West. And I think we can
discern in that history some useful suggestions for making sense of our

10
current situation. In particular, I think attention ought to be drawn to
what I am going to call the Great Preset.
The Great Reset seeks a world government of extreme
competence. If not a conspiracy, it certainly is the desire to have one.
The Great Preset is not an aspiration. It is the world we live in.
It is not yet a world of world government. It is a world of states.
The Great Preset was the emergence of a civilisation committed
to absolute sovereign states which firstly sought to subjugate the churches to
themselves and secondly subscribed to increasingly rational and systematic uses of
the population to increase the wealth of the state. This second thing could not
be done without persuading the population that it was worth doing. The
way this was done was, thirdly, by offering the people a formal equality and a
certain prosperity. By ‘a certain prosperity’ I mean to signal that the
prosperity offered was not necessary an equal prosperity. The brilliance
of Marx was to see very clearly that the French Revolution and the later
English Reforms had offered the populations of France and English
equality of a sort without equality of prosperity. The offered the people,
in effect, a formal right to prosper, along with some consolations for not
prospering. What they offered limitedly in the nineteenth century in the
form of the Poor Law, for instance, they offered less limitedly in the
twentieth century in the form of Old Age Pensions, Unemployment
Benefit, Free Education and Free Healthcare.
Under the influence of Jordan Peterson and some others, much
in our contemporary culture, especially in higher education, is blamed
on ‘cultural Marxism’. This is polemically useful, no doubt, but is wide
of the mark. We are still in search of a good vocabulary for describing
the noisy and petulant parasites in but not of liberal culture: sometimes
we call them ‘politically correct’, sometimes ‘woke’, and we associate
them with ‘identity politics’, ‘intersectionality’ and ‘virtue-signalling’.
They are not liberal, not classically liberal, though they benefit from the
indulgence shown them by liberals, and their own concerns are an active
assertion of the sort of things which liberals like to be concerned with in
terms of their passivity: matters of oppression of sexual, racial, cultural,
religious minorities by supposed majorities. This is not Marxism in any
meaningful sense. Language should not be twisted that far. I think we
use the word ‘Marxism’ because Marxists were the enemy of the West
for a century, and because certain academics for either justified or
unjustified reasons have found it useful to perpetuate a minority
intellectual culture of Marxism in the universities. They hold a liberal
culture to a sort of ransom by adding revolt to criticism. They are

11
sometimes revolting in the pejorative sense. The recent ‘cultural
Marxists’ are always revolting, but they are not Marxist.
I say this because what Marx perceived as a necessity—to
complete the revolution—was what some other commentators
perceived as a possibility. This possibility was that the state would be
more despotic than any ruling order had ever been before. This
possibility is what I am calling the Great Preset. And what happened in
2020 was that it was finally became a reality rather than a mere
possibility. I shall offer a short characterisation of the Great Preset here.
In characterising it I think four or five factors are particularly important.
The first factor is the imposition of public belief over private
belief. Three hundred and fifty years ago Hobbes suggested that the
sovereign—in effect, the government, and also, in effect, the state—
should impose certain beliefs on us for the purposes of public
protestation. Any other beliefs could be held, but only privately, that is,
never disclosed. Orwell’s Thought Police was just the breaking down of
the privacy barrier at the bone of the skull. Though it is likely that
Hobbes expected most of us to be able to express ourselves privately to
others, because, in those times, the private sphere was much more
extensive than the rather limited public sphere. It was the rise of the
press, Media Stage 1, that changed everything, since private opinions
could achieve their own publicity, though even these opinions were
issued by the members of certain elites. Later with the rise of modern
technological devices we had the rise of what we could call Media Stage
2, when everyone was suddenly able to make some sort of publicity out
of their life, using the internet and various forums making use of the
internet such as Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram,
Tiktok and so on. As everyone now says these are increasingly no longer
‘platforms’ but ‘publishers’, meaning that they are increasingly coming to
censor ‘content’ which does not accord with the ideological beliefs of
the political classes. As many now find, these publishers have become
very strange permanent repositories of our opinions, those formerly
private now public opinions: hence a sort of immortal panopticon,
which not only can see everything but cannot forget.
The second factor is the establishment of equality as the
principle of solidarity within a modern political order. Here we may turn
to Tocqueville, whose famous book Democracy in America may be taken
to be the great study of the Great Preset. Tocqueville observed that the
arrival of equality as the basis of social order involved a threat to liberty.
This was the emergence of a new thing in human experience, the

12
‘tyranny of the majority’. He thought that modern society might achieve
a level of stability and prosperity that would blunt the willingness of
anyone to incur the disapproval of the other members of society. He
saw liberty in tension with comfort. This was a classic old distinction,
famous in the line from Benjamin Franklin which many have quoted
during the Covid-19 crisis: which is, more or less, ‘Anyone who
sacrifices liberty for security, deserves neither’. Tocqueville feared that
the modern egalitarian state might be so good at achieving security or
comfort or prosperity for its people that liberty might be lost. He was
careful to distinguish the new despotism implied by this from the old
despotism of the emperors and khans. The new despotism was a
consequence of trust in the state, and the absence of any other source of
authority to challenge it. The success of the state in eliminating the
church, and in imposing its own state ideology (which we may now call
‘political correctness’), has been such that as the state has increased in
effective power it has counterposed to itself a society which can offer no
resistance to the state. The life of individuals in society, commented
Tocqueville, is ‘more insecure, subordinate and precarious’ than ever
before. Uniformity prevails, the state meddles with every institution,
turning every institution into a perpetuator of state ideology—and this
is, two hundred years after Tocqueville, why the police forces have
become, as Orwell also saw, enforcers of state ideology in preference to
dealing with antique things like crime and punishment. In all this, the
state pursues its activities ‘with greater speed, force and freedom of
action than ever before’. But this state is kind and caring: its despotism
is one of inhibiting, repressing, dullening the population, through the
imposition of rules and the maintenance of modern equivalents of bread
and circuses. Tocqueville called this ‘peaceful enslavement’. And I think
we should be able to agree that Polis-20 is the greatest peaceful
enslavement ever seen in the history of the world.
The third factor, already signalled by Tocqueville, is the rise and
fall of liberalism. Liberalism is now looking like a transition stage, and a
transition stage which has only affected the West. Though it was
necessary in the West for achieving modernity, modernity has been
achieved elsewhere—in Eastern Europe, Turkey, China and Russia, for
instance—without it. And it is in decline in the West. Liberalism was the
suggestion that belief did not matter. It was an answer to Hobbes. If
Hobbes had thought belief did matter, and should be publicly imposed
by the state, Liberals from an abstracted Locke to an actual Mill and
right through to John Rawls and Jordan Peterson, all said that belief did

13
not matter: or, rather, it was not so much which particular belief was
believed as that a variety of beliefs could be allowed to be believed and
even publicly protested as long as they did not form the basis of our
constitution. Our constitutions should be liberal—that is, distinguished
from any belief held by anyone within that constitution. This would, the
theory went, enable people with different beliefs to co-exist. As
Tocqueville saw, there were always pull and push factors, so that while it
might have seemed as if liberalism encouraged the preservation of
diversity, there was a rival tendency for certain monopolies of belief to
exploit the openness of the arena to subordinate that arena to itself. Not
Christianity, since Christianity was the foundation of the establishment
which Liberals sought to replace: but, interestingly, Islam (about which
our political classes have almost nothing to say except ‘Capitulate!’) and
varieties of Political Correctness.
The fourth is something I have seen increasingly discussed by
cultural commentators but which has not yet—as far as I have seen—
been related to the current political crisis of Polis-20. This is the fact,
observed by Michael Young in The Rise of the Meritocracy, Ferdinand
Mount in Mind the Gap, and David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere,
that both the aristocratic aspiration to have a liberally diverse and
variegated society and the democratic aspiration to have an egalitarian if
uniform society have been shunted aside by a third vision, whereby the
population is divided in half, into the educated and the uneducated, the
elite and the deplorables, those who have benefitted from the
established constitutional order (let us call them ‘constitutionalists’) and
those who are now appealing within that order to those figures who
seem to offer something to those who are not benefitting from it—
usually called ‘populists’. Goodhart calls them somewheres and anywheres.
Americans sometimes call them conservatives and liberals, as we would
have done in England in the nineteenth century—though not with this
particular signification. The particular modern signification is to do with
the fact that universities expanded after the Second World War almost
everywhere, and the expansion of higher education, almost everywhere,
now means that where formerly a small minority were educated at
university, now around half of any population is educated at university.
Not only has this been a crisis for the university, in considering its
function and its status as an elite institution, but has been an
opportunity, since the social status of the university has risen even while
its intellectual status has fallen, now that the state has entered the

14
university and now uses the university to perpetuate its own ruling class
ideology of political correctness, despotism, material prosperity and care.
The relevance of this now is that half the population supports the
ideology of the ruling class. In the last decade or two we have seen this
ruling class challenged by fundamentalism, by financial crisis, and, in
particular—what sent them over the edge in the English-speaking
world—by Brexit and Trump. ‘Brexit and Trump’ is a shorthand for the
political attempt to resist the educated class by the uneducated and
therefore excluded and alienated and demoralised class. It may be hard
to recall now just what unanimity there was amongst the educated in
favour of ‘Remain’ as opposed to ‘Leave’. In America Hillary Clinton
called the other half of the population ‘deplorables’. Trump succeeded
in establishing a deplorable claim to the centre of power. This was a
‘country’ revolt against the ‘court’, though it seems as if, with Biden, the
‘court’ has restored itself. The most important political distinction in the
West now is the distinction between constitutionalists and populists—those
of the university and those not of it—those who subscribe to the
received ideology of the political classes and those who don’t.
Constitutionalist agitators like the BBC, the Guardian, American late
night television hosts and the political scientists who study ‘populism’
(but are actually opposed to it) like Jan-Werner Müller, Cas Mudde and
so on fear that populism might lead to fascism. But they do not
recognise that if there is a possible fascism of the populists, there is also
a possible fascism of the constitutionalists, a liberal facism, which Jonah
Goldberg has described neatly in a book of that name.
Specifically, what I want to claim about this new class divide
between constitutionalists and populists, that is, those who benefit from the
current political order and those who do not, which is about half and
half at the moment, is that the constitutionalists have seized the apparent
crisis of Covid-19 as an opportunity to instigate the real crisis of Polis-
20: seized, I say, because they have seen it as an opportunity to distract
the populists from their war against the established order. It is an
opportunity because the constitutionalists have been able to pose as the
protectors, the carers, the shepherds of society, and especially the
protectors of those who need care, those who are most vulnerable, who
are usually, when not the aged or children, members of the poorer, less
educated classes, i.e. the populists. And here is an issue involving science,
in which the educated constitutionalists can continually appeal to technical
knowledge in order to support their subjugation of the uneducated
populists. What has happened is that the old Ciceronian tag salus populi

15
suprema lex, ‘The Safety of the People is the Supreme Law’ has been
extended by means of a concern about public health, or, let us state it
plainly, that is Biblically, a fear of pestilence, in order to blunt the
populists’ ability to resist the political dominance of the constitutionalists.
There are doubtless other factors to be mentioned in addition to
these four. The rise of technology, and rationalism, or the influence of
technical discourse rather than deliberative discourse in politics—all
noticed by figures like Heidegger, Oakeshott and Habermas—all of
these are important. The modern state, that possibly transitional entity,
found it convenient to embrace the rationalism of Bacon and Descartes,
a rationalism which was sanctioned by Locke and Newton, which
dominated the Age of Enlightenment, was extended to society in order
to justify a science of politics which was actually a science of economics:
so that by the time of Thatcher and Reagan politicians found it hard to
appeal to any other standard than that of statistical prosperity. There
might also be something to say about the rise of science as a profession
in the nineteenth century, along with its shadow subjects of the social
sciences, in which the model of the individual genius like Bohr or
Einstein or, earlier, Galileo, Newton or Gauss, was replaced by the
collaborative and collectivised professional work of laboratories funded
by states or other great entities like the European Union. Scientists, for
the time being, as a class, have a vested interest in perpetuating the
established order that enables them to engage in their work: and so they
serve the political system ideologically at the same time as they carry out
what continues to be known as ‘science’. It is hard to know what
attitude to take to fashionable monopolies such as the scientific view of
climate change and Covid-19. No doubt there is such a thing as
certainty, somewhere, and there is also doubt: but when there is so
much evidence of the scientists acting politically then it is no wonder
that certain populists are inclined to oppose the possible conspiracy by
simply denying that what the scientists claim is so is so. This may be
objectionable to the scientists, but they only have themselves to blame,
since they have depended on the funding provided by the political class
of the modern state which is willing to pay for ‘big science’ when it is in
the interest of the state.
There is a conspiracy of sorts, and we have all been part of it,
and we continue to be part of it—especially those of us who are
university educated. (I say this as someone shaped by, and committed
to, the university.) There is nothing inevitable about it: it has come out
of a thousand contingencies; and it is in those contingencies that we

16
have to find the hope that all this can be reversed. There was a Great
Preset. It made Polis-20 possible. But, as Tocqueville saw, it threw up
tendencies which pulled in different directions, and gave us a certain
freedom of action against the state. Now there is a Great Reset which is
designed to get rid of the state and establish something higher, purer,
more caring, more dullening. But there are forces ranged against it, in
populism, and in what we might call proper science, which is a sceptical
science, conscious at all times of the possibility of its own corruption,
and even in the residual stubbornness of the individual who will not
agree just because everyone else is agreeing: all those lackeys and
lickspittles, all those scribes and hypocrites.
A final thought on conspiracy.
If you examine the etymology of ‘conspiracy’ you will discover
that it derives from con-spirare, the Latin for ‘to breathe together’ hence,
by extension, ‘to plot together’. This is a good Shakespearian image, of
Macbeth conferring with the Murderers, standing close, so they cannot
be heard. To breathe—and together. Is it not amusing that the word
‘conspiracy’ has something to do with breath? But it means that the
conspiracy here and now, the conspiracy of masks, distancing and
lockdown, is, ironically, actually an anticonspiracy.
They want us to stop breathing together.

21 December 2020

17
 3

Ruled, Britannia

Britons are slaves and if they are not yet fully enslaved then there is
certainly every sign that they wish to be slaves, and this is what all the
taking the knee and taking the jab is about. If we do not want to be
slaves, then we need beliefs which will enable us to confound the
politics of others. And we also need to maintain a politics of justified
opposition—something which collapsed during the pandemic.
The BBC was right, by its own standards, to try to erase the
words from the performance of Rule, Britannia at the Last Night of the
Proms last year: because these words are no longer part of the official
ideology of the United Kingdom. Let us consider its most famous lines,
and some of the best lines from ‘God Save the Queen’:

Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves!

Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks…

In recent times we have rewritten these words so they have become:

Ruled, Britannia! Britannia take the knee!

Britons never, never, never shall be free!

Adopt their politics,

Applaud their knavish tricks…

Any opposition in this country will have to begin by declaring firmly

that even if Britons no longer rule the waves, they never, never, never
shall be slaves. We need, as the words of ‘God Save the Queen’ suggest,
beliefs that will enable us to confound the politics of others; and, in
particular to confound the politics of those who are against the politics
of justified opposition.
Boris Johnson has turned Britannia into an inverted pyramid of
piffle: a very Johnsonian phrase, involving three elements which are very
characteristic of him: inverted, in that no one can say what they mean or
mean what they say (or, rather, that he, of course, can say whatever he

18
likes, since he always has two versions of a script to hand); pyramid, in
the sense of something remarkably strange and unfamiliar and massive,
a project requiring a mass of slaves run by an oriental despotism; and
piffle, meaning sheer nonsense, blurring, bluffing, inadvertence, absence
of mind, incapacity, vanity, shirt untucked, knees buckling, thumbs up,
English sense of humour (mostly a distraction). Johnson’s chief
impertinence in using this characteristic phrase was to invert its meaning
by ascribing it to what others were saying, whereas the only thing we
need to know about Johnson is that he himself is an inverted pyramid of
piffle. I have always thought that modern politics is satirised too much,
and, indeed, is satirised to the point of inanity—consider Private Eye’s
effect on the media—(perhaps I should say satirised so effectively that it
is also sanitised) but if anyone requires us to bring back the bold satire
of the eighteenth century it is Johnson, and not the Johnson of 2016,
who had something to be said for him, but the Johnson of 2020, who has
nothing to be said for him, and whose fatuity and incapacity and
unintended sanctioning of tyranny, despotism and totalitarianism is
unparalleled in British history. Johnson is not actually so much to blame:
what is to blame is the moralising, sententious, second-rate culture
which has allowed him to have his say and, after putting power in his
hands has had nothing to say in response to his ineptitude but things
even more inept.
Britain is apparently opening up. But there is no opposition.
Opposition has been destroyed. The only apparent opposition which
exists appears to be criticising Johnson for not doing more of what he
has done. This is not opposition. It is just the resentment of the
impatient winger who thinks the striker wasted a ball. Starmer, in effect:
‘Johnson was right to become Prime Minister. But he should have got
into 10 Downing Street sooner.’ Labour is not an opposition, but a
pious chorus. Hartlepool has spoken. We are in a one-party state, under
a government a bit tainted by Brexit, but happily redeemed by Covid.
We need an opposition. There has never been a greater need for
a Bolingbroke to theorise a ‘Country’ opposition to this highly
globalised Walpolean ‘Court’ regime, or for a Burke to polemicise
against this revolution. Everyone of any intellectual calibre needs to come
out and call out the crimes of logic, meaning and possibility which have
been perpetuated by the variously corrupt, colluding and compliant—
and this is a long way before we get to conspiring—mediocrities of no
moral compass who have strutted, fretted, lectured and fiddled while

19
Rome has burned. Someone with the requisite Machiavellian or
Mazarinic abilities should cajole and coerce all the Talents into a party.
If I were not defending opposition, I would even suggest that in
the recent crisis the Queen should have used the Royal Prerogative—
though, alas, it was not even used to resist encasing her face inside a
mask for the funeral of her husband, as if she were the Leper Queen—
used the Royal Prerogative, I say, to dismiss the government and
appoint a dictatorial government with Lord Sumption as High Lord of
Emergency, and with Noel Malcolm, Robert Tombs, John Gray,
Richard Tuck, Niall Ferguson, Peter Hitchens, Toby Young and James
Delingpole as Lords of Varying but Sound Counsel. All should have
been ennobled at once, on a hereditary basis. Sumption should have had
dictatorial powers for a year, or ten, or become dictator in perpetuum if
necessary. No scientists or economists should have been allowed into
counsel, though they should occasionally have been asked for written
answers: otherwise the most conspicuous of the government scientists,
including the Goebbelsian characters called ‘behavioural scientists’,
should have been imprisoned in the Tower of London to await trial for
treason. Guy Fawkes Day should have been replaced by Neil Ferguson
Day. After we had sent Boris Johnson to St Helena we should have
appointed a state ‘Boris’—to be the head of a new Office of National
Endangerment: an office designed to remind us of just what is possible
in politics. This Boris should have been let on Question Time to say stupid
things and repeat slogans to encourage everyone else in politics and in
public life to avoid saying such things. He or she should have been the
national scapegoat. John Bercow or Diane Abbott could have applied
for the position.
In that last paragraph I have engaged in my own dictatorial
imagining, for the sake of good policy. But that was imagination; so let
us return to the alas all too actual dictatorial situation of our recent
politics in the face of which, let me repeat, we require opposition. In the
Big Tech Great Reset Climate Crisis Woke World we now live in,
everyone’s politics are meant to be the same. We value diversity, but the
diversity we value is social, cultural, racial, sexual. We do not value
political diversity. There is no political diversity in the Houses of
Parliament; there is no political diversity in the BBC; there is no political
diversity in Oxford and Cambridge and other universities. The
pandemic, with its tying together of education, medicine and politics in a
single affluent ethic of correctness, has issued in that now famous triple
policy of lockdown, distancing and masking, a policy which was both

20
foolish and evil: foolish because of its consequences, evil because of its
causes. Both its causes and its consequences were malign. Its causes
have to be a matter of lament, speculation, coruscation and, later, if there
is a later, hard and brutal and unforgiving analysis; while its
consequences, obviously, to anyone capable of clear thought,
spectacularly outweigh the supposed benefits. Masks were or are, I
think, worse than the other policies: worse, even than mandating
vaccines, or perpetual lockdown. They indicate submission. They are
political. They encourage us into a perpetual fear of other human beings—so
that every friend or neighbour becomes at every moment an other, an
alien, an enemy. This is sublime (in the sense of awesome, terrible,
astounding, cataclysmic). Masks are an attempt to enforce party
membership. And the sort of party that this policy is meant to incorporate
is a single party, the party of a one-party state. There is not meant to be
any argument. There is not meant to be any other party.
This is a revolution in our politics, because all of this is an
assault on what I like to call the politics of justified opposition. For a few
hundred years our politics has been predicated on the view that
opposition is justified: and so should not be exiled, imprisoned,
executed or ‘cancelled’—or, for that matter, masked. Ever since Whigs
and Tories squared off and called each other insulting names (Whigs =
Scottish rogues, Tories = Irish rogues), names they called each other for
a hundred years, until more sophisticated post-1789 names were
adopted (Liberal, Conservative, Socialist etc), we have had a politics of
justified opposition. Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse jokingly coined
the phrase ‘His Majesty’s Opposition’ in 1826 and it immediately stuck.
This habit of name-calling, of seeing some value in confounding the
politics of others (while accepting that their politics is justified) was the
beginning of what we have come to call the politics of government and
opposition, where there is an official elite which composes a government
and also some part of an official elite which voluntarily composes an
opposition—and is not punished for composing such an opposition. We
still have this, apparently but not actually: for, currently, in both western
and non-western democracies, that is, in democracies and non-
democracies, we have a convergence of contented despotism. Rulers of
historically despotic orders are content to use Covid-19; but they are
now, for the first time in history, on the same side as rulers of historically
democratic, republican, liberal, constitutional regimes—call them what
you will. Recall, if you please, that the United Kingdom (and most other
states) copied China. Recall that astonishing interview Neil Ferguson

21
gave to The Times in December 2020 in which he almost laughed at the
discovery that we could copy China. Recall the fact that it was Michael
Gove who, once upon a time, said we had put too much trust in experts.
We need to have a politics which identifies our enemies; and the
only politics which has any capacity, given our traditions, to do that is a
politics of justified opposition. It must be obvious to anyone who is
reading this that there were no official debates about any aspect of the
sudden government response to Covid-19 after March 2020. There have
been unofficial debates, such as the ones arranged by Mike Graham on
Talk Radio. But the truth is that those who are for lockdown are against
debate, and have been against debate from the beginning. Even Neil
Ferguson, apparently a rationalist, has fallen back on sneer and smear
when considering the proposition that anything like an opposite point of
view is a possibility. I believe in argument, actually: I am a bit innocent. I
even occasionally tolerate statistics. So I approve of Peter Hitchens,
Lockdown Sceptics, Lord Sumption etc, but I also think our side needs to
use sneer and smear too, the entire repertoire of scorn and
condescension and disparagement and calumny and slander and libel.
Our enemies are knaves, and their tricks should be confounded by all
and any means. One should not always be polite.
So let me say it again. Britons are slaves and if they are not yet fully
enslaved then there is certainly every sign that they wish to be slaves,
and this is what all the taking the knee and taking the jab is about. If we
do not want to be slaves, then we need beliefs which will enable us to
confound the politics of others. And we also need to maintain a politics
of justified opposition.

May 2021

22
 4

The Political Theory of Covid-19

(Hobbes’s Coviathan)

Political theorists have been mostly silent about Covid-19, as far as I

have seen. There was Georgio Agamben, who, early on in 2020,
suggested that what was going on bore out his view that the exception was
now the norm. For thirty years or more Agamben has gone on, to great
applause from admirers and publishers—he is one of those writers for
whom every lecture in Italian becomes a handsomely bound book in
English—in a paranoiac metaphorical erudite leftist manner. But now
events have borne him out. And since he was willing to say that
something bad was going on, we have to give him credit, not only for
that—saying so—but also for having worked on a theory which, no
matter how irrelevant it seemed in the old days (except, perhaps, to
Guantanamo), now had something to say to everyone.
Apart from him there is no one I know of. Academic political
theorists continue in conference and on twitter while the world burns.
So I asked myself which of the great political philosophers would have approved of
the government-corporation-media response to this novel coronavirus (and the
apparently necessary consequence that all discussion, debate or disagreement be
suppressed, avoided, deplatformed)? And the answer was bare, to say the least.
Plato might come to mind, because he advocated rule by the wise, and
because he mentioned ‘the noble lie’: but the lies told this time around
have been ignoble; and, anyhow, it is far from obvious that our
philosopher-kings (Whitty, Vallance, Cummings, Hancock etc) know
what the good is. In addition, Plato was not in favour of extending life by
the use of medicine. He might not even have granted citizenship to
modellers and behavioural scientists.
Other political theorists could not have approved of the
rigmarole of distancing, masks, lockdown and vaccination. Not
Aristotle, who was moderate in almost every respect, including in seeing
both sides of every question. The polis for him had good reason to be
aristocratic, but was also, emphatically, a place in which citizens were
equals, so that they ruled and were ruled in turn. Not Augustine, who
said that Rome had originated in injustice, and that one should opt out
of it and think of oneself as a member of a societas perfecta, a city not of
this world, the civitas Dei. Not Aquinas. Not even Machiavelli, despite all
the force and fraud, because he was, in the end, a good republican, a

23
believer in vivere civile e politico, civil and political life. Not Locke, of
course, the father of liberalism. Not Rousseau, not Kant, not Hegel—
not without distortion. Not Burke. Not Paine. Not Bentham. Not J.S.
Mill. Not John Rawls. No. They all valued something which would have
disqualified them, whether it was truth, tradition, reason, utility, liberty,
or justice. Not Marx, of course, since he was concerned with
emancipation, and was against alienation. Most modern thinkers, from
Heidegger, through Adorno, Schmitt and Foucault to Habermas, have
been opposed to technical or instrumental rationality. So it is actually
quite hard to think of a theorist of this brave new world.
The only obvious candidate is Hobbes, if interpreted in a
particular way. Nowadays, Hobbes is much admired, and has been since
the mid-twentieth century. After a few centuries of dismissal or
forgetting, Hobbes returned to the top ten in the era of Collingwood,
Strauss and Oakeshott, and has since been much studied since by some
of the most intelligent historians in England, including Quentin Skinner
and Noel Malcolm, as well as by many Americans. Hobbes was born in
1588: in fear, he joked—since the Armada was coming. And the most
important word in his political thought is fear. Oakeshott said it was
pride; but Oakeshott’s interpretation was capricious: his Hobbes was a
sort of Montaigne-cum-Nietzsche, an aristocrat of the soul. In fact his
Hobbes was a sort of Oakeshott, and Oakeshott, famously, thought we
should pay as little attention to politics as possible. (Paying as little
attention to politics as possible has become difficult, to say the least, since
March 2020.) Everyone else has agreed that Hobbes’s theory was about
fear, came out of fear and was intended to deal with fear, just as his own
behaviour was, his enemies suggested, fairly fearful. He told one of his
friends that he wrote Leviathan, written in France where he was sharing
exile with Charles II, because he had a mind to go home.
Hobbes’s theory is a theory of the absolute necessity of being
ruled. There is the state, on the one hand, and the state of nature on the
other. The state of nature is a supposed original state of all humans. He
memorably called it the place where man is a wolf to man, and—in one
of the most often quoted lines in our literature—where life is ‘nasty,
brutish and short’. But this state of nature was not just an original state:
it was also the state to which we might return at any point. It was, in
short, the world of exit: the world of chaos, anarchy, distemper, civil
war: a picture of what the world would be without the state.
His political theory has generally been celebrated by recent
commentators because it emphasises the need for politics in the most

24
extreme or fundamental manner. He does not say that the state is the
living embodiment of justice on earth, or the manifestation of the
natural law, or the safeguard of our liberties and rights, or anything like
that. It is simply an artifice whereby scared men and women agree to
surrender their powers to a sovereign. How is this done? The most
important novelty of Hobbes’s detailed argument is that it is done by
representation.
In the state, the civil state, we do not have power. We have
surrendered it. We are not ruling and ruled in turn. Instead we have
security. And our security is entrusted to an entity which stands for us,
and guarantees our security. Forget about liberty—a slight matter. In the
endless problem of how to balance liberty and security Hobbes is, alas,
on the side of security. Hence his invention, the security state. And—given
the historical shifts which have followed since the eighteenth century, in
terms of the increased power of this state, not only in terms of taxation,
but also regulation, education and eventually inoculation—this security
state has been behind the emergence of the thing which Foucault and
others since the 1970s have called biopolitics and the biosecurity state.
Hobbes was not very interested in politics as such: the usual cut and
thrust of argument, the theatre of conniving, the business of ‘who loses
and who wins, who’s in, who’s out’ (as Lear put it in King Lear, Act V,
scene 3). He had no interest in party politics, which was barely glimpsed
at the time: and he would have considered most of the Whig-Tory,
Conservative-Liberal-Labour fuss of the last three hundred years a
charade of fraudulent and dangerous flirting with civil war: or, at most, a
bit of theatre designed to conceal from the Hobbesian public the real
nature of the state he had most carefully exposed in Leviathan.
Hobbes’s state was for security. He was against anything which
was a threat to the body politic. An important metaphor, the body politic.
The state was a body, threatened by various mortal enemies. Hobbes
warned of the danger of intestine worms to the body politic, and anything
cancerous. He would have been opposed to political viruses, had he known
about them: it is almost certain that he would have used the word ‘virus’
as a metaphor for something dark and dangerous had he known of it.
His state, we may now say in 2021, was antiviral. It was for integrity,
unity, order and safety. It sought a political vaccine. It was distanced from
empire, church and other states. And it was masked.
Consider the astonishing lines in chapter 16 of Leviathan in
which Hobbes explains how the sovereign is a person, something which
represents or personates us. The word ‘person’ of course does not refer

25
to an actual human being. It means the legal thing, or the theatrical
thing: the thing which stands for an absent thing, a thing like an attorney
or an actor. Hobbes says that the word ‘person’ derives from

the disguise or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage; and

sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a
Mask or Visard.

The modern state, the Hobbesian antiviral state, is a state which has
managed what we might until now have supposed impossible—certainly
in the West where there is the long tradition of basing our politics on
liberty or law or justice or proportion or discussion. For it has succeeded
in imposing its own hidden image on the face of its citizens. Man,
according to the Bible, was made in God’s image. But the state has
defeated this. Man is now made in the image of the state. The state is a
person, a counterfeit of us, masked, visarded so it looks like us. It is not
a real person, but a fiction, a crown without a head, a king without scalp
or oil or ritual or corpse, a rickety framework of straw and scaffolding
which we have to believe in somehow.
And now, in a final stroke, thanks to the scare caused by the
over-reactions of a rising biosecurity apparatus and its now almost
entirely socially mediated civil society, the state has disguised the faces
of its citizens—who now, in praise of the state, turn, take the knee, and
publish photographs of themselves masked and visarded to indicate how
they have complied with the order to inoculate themselves with an
experimental nanotechnology. These citizens are no longer free. They
have turned themselves into miniature reflections of the state behind its
mask. The state stares at them, cold and pitiless, behind a mask. The
mask of the state looks like them, looks human (like a vast Leviathan
frontispiece), looks caring, and assures them, in fraudulent words and
with forceful injunction, that they are safe. And now the citizens stare
back at the state wearing masks of their own: but these masks are cold
and pitiless in appearance, since they imitate the pitilessness of the actual
state, the state behind its mask, that reality of straw and scaffolding.
They signify nothing except submission to the state. The citizens are in
every other sense dehumanised. They are alienated from everyone else.
But beneath the mask they enjoy a warm (and moist) sense of having
been saved by the state.
I have exaggerated here, and have no doubt that Hobbes could
be exonerated. Like many, I find him sympathetic. He had a twinkle in

26
his eye, and probably would have looked good on the BBC, a
seventeenth-century David Attenborough or Brian Cox. But, like many
modern scientific modellers, he thought he had squared the circle. He
thought order could be deduced. He thought that the safeguards of
experience or religion or law or moderation could go to the devil. He is
not responsible for pharmaceutical corporations, for monopoly
capitalism, for biopolitics, for modern state propaganda, for social
media, or for our own corruption, collusion and compliance. But he is
responsible for a vision of a state in which we will mask ourselves in
order to be safe.

1-2 July 2021

27
 5

The History of the Decline

and Fall of Conservatism

The Covid-19 crisis is of great political significance. It may in fact mark

the end of the Conservative party.
The history of conservatism is usually told in terms of
politicians—from Peel, Disraeli and Salisbury through Churchill to
Thatcher, Major, Cameron, May and Johnson; or in terms of shifts in
economic policy: from protection to free trade in the mid nineteenth
century, from free trade to tariff reform in the early twentieth century,
from Keynesian consensus to monetarism in the late twentieth century;
or in terms of thinkers like Burke, Oakeshott, Scruton etc. But I want to
propose something a bit different, not only for the sake of history itself,
but in order to understand the contemporary crisis of the Conservative
party.
The history of conservatism, when seen from sufficient distance,
falls into four, perhaps now five, stages. Conservatism was named in the
1830s for the politics of Peel. But it was not a happy politics. It was a
reactionary, even late, politics, a politics of a belated and reluctant
concession to the events of 1828 to 1832 in which the old order of
church and state and of mixed government (King, Lords and
Commons) was replaced by the English version of a revolutionary,
enlightened order in which the sorts of ideas which had been espoused
by oddities like Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Paine and Bentham would now
be taken seriously. The origin of a named Conservative party was the
acceptance by certain figures of a revolution which they could never have
accepted before it happened. This was also the origin of that famous
pragmatism of the Conservative party. It had to sell its soul in order to
exist: no wonder it has continued to sell its soul since.
The first stage, therefore, of the history of conservatism is its
prehistory. This is the world before 1832, when English politics was
dominated by the binary of Whig and Tory. This was the era of king and
church and country. The meaning of ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ varied across
time—as even Bolingbroke noticed in the 1730s—but by and large a
Whig was a descendant of Cromwell, a believer in constitution, progress
and freedom, while a Tory was a descendant of Charles I, a believer in
divine right, stability and order. This politics of ‘right and repulsive’
opposed to ‘wrong and romantic’ survived the revolution of 1832, but

28
was restructured in far more explicitly ideological terms as the politics of
‘Liberal’ versus ‘Conservative’. For a great Victorian historian like J.R.
Seeley what this meant was that, in effect, everyone before 1832 had
been ‘conservative’, even if they had not used the name. After 1832
there was now a new political world of conscientious opposition in
which conservatism could only take one side, the reluctant or resistant
side.
The second stage is the era between 1832 and 1924 when, by
and large, every Liberal government had a Conservative opposition and
vice versa: this was established very clearly after the adjustments to
politics in the 1850s made necessary by the decisions and death of Peel.
Both sides accepted the original revolution, but the Liberals stood for
the extension and advance of this revolutionary order (and in a more
ambitious way than ever envisioned by their ancestors, the Whigs), and
the Conservatives stood for the restriction and perhaps at least ideally
reversal of that order. That was in theory: practice was different; and
figures like Disraeli flourished by exploiting what were even then the
accepted terms of combat, by outflanking Gladstone on the left in 1867.
What was really going on during the nineteenth century was the advance
march of a militant Liberalism, set on establishing a truly liberal order in
Britain. Arguably, this was achieved by the end of the century: and so,
though of course for contingent historical reasons, it is apt that the
historic Liberal party faded out in the 1920s at the very height of its
success. Liberalism was fully established: so the Liberal party died. Now
the Conservatives had a new task, which was to defend the historic
Liberalism of the nineteenth century against a new opposition.
The third stage, running from 1924 to 1997, was the era when
the Conservatives were not opposed by Liberals but by another party,
Labour, which was just as liberal as the Conservative party, but liberal in
a different sense. Original liberalism was, in a word, about self-help;
whereas the newer liberalism was the extension of the supposed benefits
of liberalism to those who could not help themselves, but needed the
help of the state. One of the most important intellectual events of the
nineteenth century was the emergence of this new type of liberalism in
the writings of J.S. Mill, T.H. Green and others. Unlike the old
liberalism which had feared the state, the new liberalism advocated state
intervention: supposing that the state would not obstruct individual
flourishing but encourage it. This liberalism was of course allied to the
rising socialism of the late nineteenth century, and played into the
thinking of the Labour party. So what we had after 1924 was a new

29
politics in which the Labour party stood for an egalitarian liberalism while
the Conservative party stood for an inegalitarian liberalism. The
Conservatives could still pretend to be on the side of king and country,
like the old-fashioned Tories, but now the debate had shifted, and
become general: it was now a debate about the extent of state
involvement in ordering economic, educational, industrial, medical
matters, and thus in extending the rule of the ideal of equality. As
before, one side was in general on the side of advance, the other on the
side of restraint. Thatcher, seen in this light, is not the unusual figure she
used to seem: she merely reminded Conservatives who were drifting
(after the chaos of the encounter of pomp and pyschedelia in the 1960s)
that their true function in the 1970s was to defend the old nineteenth
century liberal ideals in twentieth century conditions.
The fourth stage—and it should be obvious now that the history
of Conservatism is nothing but a history of reactions—begins in 1997
with the advent of the adjusted Labour politics of Blair. What New
Labour espoused was no longer the extensive social and economic
egalitarian aspiration of old Labour, but an adjusted cultural and
international and therefore far more openly hypocritical politics which
focused on perpetuating inequalities while offering benefits to the
people who did not benefit from those inequalities. This confused the
Conservatives again. What the Labour party was adopting was the
politics we have come to see more and more clearly since the 1990s: the
politics associated with political correctness, identity politics and
eventually complete wokery. This is liberal, but it is the liberalism of the
recipient. It is a big-spending, big-borrowing politics: a slave-moralised
politics, the politics of ‘our NHS’. So the Conservative party continued
to have a role, which was to defend the liberalism of the bestower: that
is to say, the liberalism of the person who would want to defend a liberal
order against those who were happy to receive something from it but
would not make any attempt to defend it—or pay for it. So after 1997,
as Cameron seems to have glimpsed, the Conservative party was not the
defender of one type of liberalism against another, but the only defender
of liberalism—against those who were notionally but not actually willing
to defend liberalism any more (or who could only defend it in terms of
its results). To its enemies Conservative politics was condemned as
‘austerity’. It was a genuine politics, though, as some commentators saw,
only very dubiously conservative. But then Cameron fell from his horse
in 2016, much as Peel had fallen from his in 1850.

30
 The fifth stage is the crisis which has resulted not so much from
Brexit as from Covid-19. What Brexit was was a revolt of a new Country
party against the Court party of almost all assembled authorities,
including both Labour and Conservative authorities. After some
dithering, Johnson choose to side with Country. Hence 2016. But
Covid-19 has broken all of the traditions of opposition I have sketched
thus far. For it is the Conservative party—no matter how reluctantly—
which stands at the head of a unified Court party which has done more
than anyone since Walpole has done to ignore the Country, and not only
ignore it, but oppress it. Johnson has presided over the establishment of
an entirely technocratic politics of problem-and-solution which is, alas,
not a politics at all, but the substitution of technique for politics. In this
situation the government appears to be as committed as the opposition
is to a unified politics of Universal Lockdown and Universal Vaccination
and Universal Carbon Elimination in which no one is defending any
aspect of the old order (including the church or universities) or even
liberalism itself. The Conservatives have no longer got anything to
defend. They have capitulated to their enemies and done it with a
grotesque hyper-Disraelian-Bismarckian-Maoist-Malthusian flourish by
way of forcing us to take the knee, take the mask and take the jab. They
are not Tory, not liberal, certainly not even ‘austere’. They have found a
magic money tree. They are presumably waiting for the seas to turn into
lemonade. They are locking us into a magnificently communist-
corporate hybrid order which will make the public-private partnerships
of Blair and Brown look extremely pallid. If this continues then the only
conservative thing about the Conservatives will be their inclination to
hold on to their name.

21 June 2021

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 6

Bullshit-19

Pardon my American, but it is finally necessary to write about bullshit.

In 2005 the American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt wrote a book
entitled On Bullshit. He characterised bullshit by saying that it is not
simply telling lies, or misrepresenting the truth, but having a lack of
interest in the truth. The bullshitter may tell the truth, or may lie, but,
either way, who cares, that is not his primary concern. His primary
concern is to say something which will achieve some other thing which
not obviously evident from the words themselves—amusing everyone,
perhaps, or scaring everyone, or simply getting on, climbing the greasy
pole, or securing a contract.
Of course, every utterance has some other significance or
importance to us besides its propositional content. The English
philosopher J.L. Austin in the 1960s noticed that statements have
‘illocutionary’ content as well as ‘locutionary’ content: that is to say, each
statement has something which is intended to be done in saying it as well as
something which is actually expressed in the thing said. If I am to explain bullshit
in these terms, then the bullshitter is someone who is only concerned
with the illocutionary content. In fact, the bullshitter lives in an
illocutionary world. Yet when the bullshitter speaks, his words obviously
also, alas, have locutionary content, posit truth and falsity, and we all—if
this bullshitter has any authority over us—have to speak as if certain
locutions are true and others false. In other words, we are caught up in a
bullshit world: and the one thing we are not allowed to do is say that the
emperor has no clothes. As long as we perpetuate the bullshit of the
bullshitter we can live in this world; if we have any concern with truth
and falsity it becomes harder to live.
Is this not a clue to what has happened in the Covid-19
pandemic?
Frankfurt commented that bullshit is ‘closer to bluffing, surely,
than to telling a lie’. When one bluffs one does not engage in ‘falsity’ but
in ‘fakery’. He wrote: ‘Although it is produced without concern with the
truth, it need not be false’, and, perhaps I should add, for Frankfurt did
not quite say this, bullshit apes the truth. What I mean is that bullshit
comes into a world of propositions which are generally true or false, and

32
so operates in amongst them: and so seems to offer truths. Frankfurt
wrote: ‘The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean he
necessarily gets them wrong.’ This makes arguing with a bullshitter
much harder than arguing with a liar. With a liar, one argues against the
locution, one argues against the proposition, one argues for truth. But
with a bullshitter, one may find oneself, if one is incautious, arguing
against someone who is right, who is speaking the truth. (This is the
snare which ‘conspiracy theorists’ fall into, or are supposed to fall into.)
When one argues against someone who has lied, one can condemn the
lie without condemning the liar. But when one argues against a
bullshitter—and, again, Frankfurt did not say anything about this—one
has to argue ad hominem. The proposition may be true, it may be false;
but it is the proposer who is the bullshitter. He or she is the fake. One
has to make it personal.
Bullshit is obviously essential to politics. Consider the following
description, in effect, of a politician: ‘The bullshitter may not deceive us,
or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes
the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is
his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristics is that in
a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.’ The consequence of
the existence of bullshit, of this trading in truth or perhaps untruth in a
careless but extremely purposeful manner, is that it creates a bullshit
world. Truth has never mattered much in politics. Much is symbol, or
magic, or illusion. Consider ‘representation’ for instance: it is nothing
but symbol, magic and illusion. Consider crown, unction, sceptre,
sword, wig, robe, and the ultimate English bullshit of the phrase ‘My
right honourable friend’. Voltaire famously said that the Holy Roman
Empire was not holy, not Roman and not an empire. In the same way,
our ‘right honourable friend’ is not right, not honourable and not our
friend. I jest, so let us quote Frankfurt again: ‘Bullshit is unavoidable
whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what
he is talking about.’ Again, and in the spirit of being generous to
politicians, this is eminently political. For politics, certainly parliamentary
and deliberative and consultative and counselling politics, involves
everyone talking about what they know nothing about: the future, or the
facts. Bertrand de Jouvenel brilliantly defined politics as being whatever
is left over when the engineers, technocrats and experts have solved all
our problems. He defined politics as being composed of problems
which cannot be solved but only settled, through compromise and

33
accommodation, and, we might add, in a less decorous age than
Jouvenel’s, by bluster, balderdash and bullshit.
Frankfurt thought the bullshitter is worse than the liar. ‘It is
impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth.
Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is
thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it.’
Telling lies does not mean one loses one’s grasp of the truth; but
bullshitting does. Therefore, ‘bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than
lies are’. Frankfurt was a philosopher and so perhaps understandably
grim about this. Philosophers are concerned with truth. But we can
reflect more calmly that since there has always been politics there has
always been bullshit.
This is not the problem. The problem is the scale of the bullshit.

II

In 2018 the American anthropologist David Graeber wrote a book

entitled Bullshit Jobs. A ‘bullshit job’ is a job which has no content, no
point, makes no contribution to anything: jobs like consultant, advisor,
manager, administrator. O tempora, O mores! Graeber suggested that such
jobs have three characteristics. First, they are pointless. Second, part of
the job is to pretend that they are not pointless, unnecessary or
pernicious. And third, the people carrying out the jobs know that they
are pointless. Graeber’s definition of a bullshit job is amusing. It is ‘a
form of paid employment that is so completely pointless that even the
employee cannot justify its existence, even though they feel obliged to
pretend this is not the case’. There is a problem with this definition
though. For a start, though what Graeber called a bullshit job is a
pointless job, it is a job which appears to ask the employee to lie about it.
So, strictly speaking, is not a job which involves bullshit in Frankfurt’s
sense.
This is because bullshit, as Frankfurt showed, is not lying and is
not pointless talk. Rather bullshit is talk which misdirects the listener as to what
the actual point is. It is apparently pointed talk (where the apparent point is
about some objective situation, x) concealing the actual point (which is
about some subjective interest, y). Bullshit is natural for politicians,
therefore, since most politicians have to continually engage in
misdirection. (For example, take the favoured phrase of recent times,
‘Policy, not politics’: repeated by politicians continually even though
their interest is always more likely to be the politics than policy.)

34
 Another American philosopher, Raymond Geuss, in his recent
book A Philosopher Looks at Work (2021), has adjusted Graeber’s
definition, probably because he, Geuss, is more philosophically sensitive
than Graeber, less concerned with publishing a best-selling work, and
also more aware of Graeber’s problematic use of the term bullshit.
Geuss drops Graeber’s third characteristic of a bullshit job—
that the person doing the job knows the job is pointless. As far as Geuss
is concerned, a bullshit job is pointless, but it is likely that the person
doing it does not think this, or does not think it for very long. By taking
this step, Geuss brings Graeber’s concept of a bullshit job closer to
bullshit in Frankfurt’s sense. The adjusted definition of a bullshit job
‘includes even pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious jobs that people
who perform think are highly useful, which they might actually enjoy
doing, and with which they might even strongly identify’. Geuss adds:
‘This immediately raises the issue, which for Graeber doesn’t arise at all:
how I can justify claiming that something which some people enjoy
doing—those who like their bullshit jobs—and other people are willing
to pay to have done—the employers who create and fund the bullshit
jobs—is actually or objectively pointless and useless?’
Geuss’s correction to Graeber is of course a loss to the clarity of
Graeber’s picture. Graeber has a picture of people doing emphatically
pointless things while claiming to be doing things with a point, even
though they know this is not the case. They are liars, not bullshitters,
because they know their jobs are pointless. Geuss prefers to see people
with bullshit jobs as being involved not in a lie but in bullshit. With
Geuss’s adjustment, any complacency that we have that we do not have
bullshit jobs is thoroughly and alarmingly exploded. Beware, dear reader:
you too may have a bullshit job. It is possible for us to read Graeber’s
book, and say, ‘I believe in the point of my job, ergo I do not have a
bullshit job’. (Consider all the encomiums from Owen Jones and the
like, secure in the sense that they do not have a bullshit job—and why?
because they know they are not liars. To which the response is: ‘No,
Owen Jones, you are not a liar, but you may be a bullshitter.’) But it is not
possible to read Geuss’s book this way. No doubt this is one reason why
far fewer people will read, or even like, Geuss’s book. For what he is
saying is that believing that your job is not a bullshit job does not prevent it from
being a bullshit job.
What is Graeber’s definition of a bullshit job as adjusted by
Geuss? Graeber’s original definition was that a bullshit job is a form of
paid employment that is so completely pointless that even the employee cannot justify

35
its existence, even though they feel obliged to pretend this is not the case. With the
Geuss adjustment, the second and third clauses cancel each other out.
The employee probably can justify the job, and so does not feel obliged
to pretend anything. The employee has overcome any cognitive
dissonance and so may go on to enjoy their bullshit job which is,
therefore, not bullshit at all (in Graeber’s sense), though it is very
evidently still a bullshit job (in Geuss’s sense), and emphatically so
because it is involves bullshit (in Frankfurt’s sense). The adjusted
definition of a bullshit job is therefore a form of paid employment that is so
completely pointless that the employee has to bullshit in order to justify not only the
job but also him- or herself.

III

With all this literature parsed, let us consider the current situation. The
emergence of a novel virus and its attendant disease in humans, Covid-
19, has been a black comedy of vast proportions. For the first time in
world history, bullshit is universal. We are all—at last—speaking one
language. It is not the language of law, or rights, or justice, or religion.
Nay, it is the language of survival. But it is not real survival. It is apparent
survival. And because it is not real, it is beyond truth and lies. The whole
crisis has taken place in a beyond, a world of bullshit, in which people who
do not care about the truth speak as if they are even more concerned with the truth
than everyone else for a whole set of reasons of their own.
Let me be clear, and repeat what Frankfurt says. Bullshitters may
tell the truth. They often do tell the truth. The virus does something. Vaccines
certainly do something. But lockdown is basically bullshit. Masks are, by
and large, bullshit: a consequence of it, a cause of it. Mandating vaccines
is certainly bullshit. ‘Fact-checking’ is a clever way of avoiding admitting
that bullshit is ubiquitous by drawing ostentatious attention to the truths
uttered by bullshitters. We all know, for instance, that a truth out of
context is bullshit. Statistics are often an important element of bullshit.
Models are one form of academic bullshit. Behavioural science is
another. We all know that when the Guardian says ‘Ivermectin is horse
de-wormer’, it is not lying. Certainly not. But what the Guardian is doing
is engaging in an amusing and alarming form of redescription which
implies a lack of concern with the truth—the truth that ivermectin may
be a highly beneficial treatment—and hence that it is bullshitting. (One
wonders whether anyone will ever pay for ‘bullshit-checking’ websites.)

36
 It is in this context that I think that it is important to offer a
further definition, on top of Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit and Geuss’s
improved definition of a bullshit job. The current crisis has only come to
be what it is because of the number of people who have what we should
call bullshitting jobs. A bullshitting job may or may not be a bullshit job. A
bullshit job is only bullshit in so far as the person with the job has to
bullshit in order to justify the job. A bullshitting job, by contrast, may be
a worthy one—for instance, the job of Prime Minister—but is one
which involves, in modern times, and especially in our exact times, the
spewing out of vast streams of bullshit. And this bullshit is worse than
the bullshit of a person with a bullshit job, because this bullshit covers
everyone. It repaints the world. Some of the most important people in
society have bullshitting jobs: politicians, journalists, modellers, advisors,
administrators, and academics. Experts. Some initiate the flow of
bullshit, the formers of opinion, and others maintain and perpetuate it,
the repeaters of opinion: and they maintain it by not caring about the truth
while all too ostentatiously caring about something which is apeing the
truth—for which our current word, laughably, is science.
The coincidence of everyone in bullshitting jobs spewing out the
same bullshit means we have lived for eighteen months in a world of
bullshit. This is unique in world history. We have had religions and
ideologies with ambitions to conquer the world. But nothing ever united
everyone everywhere from Communist China to Capitalist United States
of America until we arrived at the spectacular, beguiling, frustrating, all-
encompassing world of bullshit which is the world entirely conjugated
and declined, entirely constrained and mandated, by an innocent virus.

23-24 September 2021

37
 7

Nice Totalitarianism

Last week I wrote a passage simply in order to get my thoughts in order

on the way the world is turning. Here it is:

Our modern state ideology, our political correctness, appears to

be three-pronged, like the devil’s fork or trident.
The first prong is climate change, its inevitability: carbon
emission, global warming, rising sea levels and the need to do
something about them.
The second prong is the pandemic, the necessity of
dealing with a virus by the negative measures of lockdown,
masks, distancing and the positive measures of vaccines and
other, somewhat belated, treatments.
The third prong is wokery, or the requirement that we
adopt the set of miscellaneous views about ‘Gay’, ‘Women’,
‘Race’ and ‘Trans’ which Douglas Murray has itemised in The
Madness of Crowds.

Evidently, great minds think alike, and some great minds organise their
thoughts more quickly than other great minds. For after writing the
above I saw that Will Jones in an excellent article for The Daily Sceptic
entitled ‘The Unholy Trinity of Social Control’ had been the first to see
that these three forces have to be assembled into a triad. He called them
Covid, Climate Change and CRT (or Critical Race Theory). I admire the
alliteration, though I think we might have to sacrifice some it so as not
to emphasise the issue of race too much. Here I will call them CLIMATE,
COVID and WOKERY. However, the three, whatever one calls them, must
be so obvious to all of us that we should applaud Jones for having not
only named them but put them together.
Let me try to take the thought a bit further.
We need to recognise that these are three elements of what we
should probably call NICE TOTALITARIANISM. The words ‘social control’
do not quite capture the total significance of what is being put forward
by our governments. Every government ever in the history of the world
has believed in some measure of social control. To some extent, we
define government in terms of its achievement of social control—
though this, of course, may be minimally or maximally interpreted. The

38
reason I prefer the phrase ‘nice totalitarianism’ is that it captures the fact
that the control now, if not maximal, is a lot closer to maximal than
anyone would have expected a few years ago. But there is another
reason I prefer it: and this is because it captures the distinctively
Western, or specifically, in our case, British, tonality of this
totalitarianism: the fact that it is nice.
We are being nice, through ‘saving the planet’ (by sitting down on
a busy road or sightseeing wind turbines), ‘making oppressed people feel
included and secure’ (by tossing a statue into the sea or signing a
petition) and ‘preventing Covid deaths’ (by wearing a mask or getting
vaccinated). Who would not want to do those things?
But Jones is right. These are being used as instruments by our
governments. Our own government is like a boxer with three fists,
getting us punch drunk by hitting us first one way and then the other,
and, if we are still standing, knocking us out with the third. This is a
spectacular combination because each of the problems exists on a
wholly different scale.
COVID is on a microscopic scale.
CLIMATE is on a planetary scale.
WOKERY is on a social scale.
Notice that each of these three deals with an invisible enemy: a
virus, an entire change to our ultimate physical situation, and, well,
words. (Perhaps another way of characterising our current politics
would be to say that it is ‘invisible stick and stones—and words’.) But
each of the enemies poses a different sort of threat.
COVID is the name of the threat: it threatens us as individuals,
threatening us with suffering and an early death, though our response to
it has been interestingly not only collective but coercive. Let us call the
response to this threat FAUCISM. (We need a name for the response, to
cover the myriad of non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical
interventions. Anthony Fauci’s name may stand for the whole
enterprise, as he is more internationally famous than our own Chris
Whitty or Patrick Vallance, as well as more determined and more
obviously compromised: and he has become the object of a cult in the
United States at least.)
CLIMATE is the name of another threat: it threatens us as a
collective, again threatening us with suffering and possibly the death of an
entire species or set of species; and so a collective response is urged. Let
us call this response GRETAISM. (Again, we need a name for the
response, and Greta Thunberg is the perfect embodiment of the

39
righteous innocence which we are meant to emulate and expect to attain
in agreeing to do something about this problem. Al Gore was only ever
an inconvenient exponent of his inconvenient truth.)
WOKERY is somewhat different, as it is not the name of a threat
but a name, a somewhat scornful but useful name, for the response to a
supposed threat. This threat is not physical, but ideological. Let us call
the threat PRIVILEGISM, for want of a better word: it certainly captures
the fact that what wokeists want to achieve is that everyone who is
privileged for some reason, whether biological, cultural or historical,
should acknowledge their privilege, express remorse for it, and pay for
it, most obviously by ritually abasing themselves in front of the less
privileged.
This third theme is different from the other two themes, as it is
much more tentative. FAUCISM and GRETAISM are attempts to harness
science for the sake of sentiment and social control, for the sake of nice
totalitarianism; whereas WOKERY refuses to bother with science at all—
even comes into conflict with science (as, for the moment, only stand-
up comedians are willing to point out). So the language of the first two
prongs of the trident is supposedly objective, whereas the language of
the last prong is subjective: even though it is a subjectivity which is
being imposed on everyone by force or shame or pillory. It should also
be said that WOKERY is a lot less focused than the other two, because
the enemy is not a fate but a condition, and this condition—of
perpetuating stereotypes, exclusion and privilege, of being mired in
individually unconscious and collectively institutional bias—is so
evidently a matter of interpretation, and, more than that, takes so many
different forms, that it is hard to associate it with one particular figure. It
lacks a Fauci or a Greta, despite the occasional brief meteor-like
efflorescence of a Caitlin Jenner or Meghan Markle.
What I am saying is that these are the three leading elements of
our current state ideology. Politicians in Britain now routinely genuflect
to all three. In reaction to COVID the success of FAUCISM has been
unheralded (consider for the hundredth time the famous comment to
The Times by Neil Ferguson that he could hardly believe that the British
would fall for Chinese methods), and now the administrative class is
exploring how to use FAUCISM to push the GRETAIST agenda. Again,
WOKERY is more subtle, and attritional, as it advances on many fronts,
not just one. Curriculums are ‘decolonised’; institutions like the National
Trust and Cambridge University strike moral attitudes; comedians and
journalists and the occasional head of state are ‘cancelled’ for hate

40
speech; academics identify themselves with slash-marked ‘pronouns’;
Don Quixote is still out there fighting windmills.
This state ideology is our own version of the sort of totalitarian
ideology we associate with China and some older regimes. It is
totalitarian; yet it is nice.
In form it is TOTALITARIAN. That is to say, it is a secular religion:
it is flowing into the fissures in the rock of our civilisation as Christianity
has receded. One could even say that it is the sand and water which is
finally fracking out the last residues of Christianity. Our civilisation is
increasingly coming to resemble historic Chinese civilisation. In the
press, China is the geopolitical enemy. But now chinoiserie is the enemy
within. This is no exaggeration. I think the last century and a half has
seen a great change in the structure of society. We have seen the rise of
an elite which is not clerical—Oxford and Cambridge were highly
clerical until the late nineteenth century—but secular. Moreover, we
have seen a system of secular education emerge that is far more
extensive than anyone could have imagined in the nineteenth century. In
the 1880s a few thousand men went to Oxford and Cambridge every
year. Now, since 2020 or so, half of those who leave school—boys and
girls—go to university. Half of the population has a higher education. But since
most of this half of the population is actually unsuited to academic
education (which is no fault of theirs), we do not have a nation of
Aristotles and Einsteins. The old liberal distinction between education
and indoctrination has been obliterated. So we have instead a nation of
Stakhanovs and Pecksniffs. Bartleby the scrivener now says, ‘I would
prefer to’, because he knows why—he’s had a higher education, you see.
The sense of entitlement this creates in this half of the population is
only matched by the instinct of compliance it creates. What we have
seen emerge in the last sixty years is a vast Mandarin class. Half the
population is now willing to join an entitled and likely very inefficient
guild of administratively-minded, state-ideologised and corporately-
smoothed functionaries and professionals.
But there is a twist, and the twist is that even though this is the
case—and though it is very Chinese in form—the content is not what we
are familiar with from our studies of totalitarianism at GCSE and A
Level. The classic totalitarian regimes were, of course, fascist or communist:
they had a singular, monolithic ideology, one which emphasised
uniformity. This is the opposite of our totalitarianism. Our
totalitarianism is liberal: it is not singular, not monolithic, because it

41
does not emphasise uniformity, but diversity: indeed, it celebrates
diversity.
It celebrates diversity in every respect but one. Every sort of
diversity—of preference, of association, of lifestyle, of utterance, of
fashion, of taste, of belief, of sexuality—is permitted except diversity of
opinion about the sacred causes of COVID, CLIMATE and WOKERY. The
first two have special status, despite being uniformitarian, because they
are matters of ‘science’ and are sanctified by statistical visions of the
coming secular apocalypse. One cannot disagree about those. If one
disagrees with the first then one is a ‘covidiot’ or part of the ‘pandemic
of the unvaccinated’ or ‘ignorant’. If one disagrees with the second then
one is a ‘climate denier’, a ‘conspiracy theorist’ or ‘complacent’. Either
way, one is a cause of death. If one disagrees with WOKERY then one
is—and this is the most toxic and the most feared (even though, George
Floyd apart, it does not usually involve actual death)—‘deplorable’,
‘racist’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘transphobic’ and so on. When I say that we cannot
have diversity of opinion about diversity, what I mean is that there is a
monotonous singularity operating within the system which requires
everyone to approve of diversity. It is not possible to express a diverse
point of view about this. As is often said, all forms of diversity are
acceptable except diversity of political opinion. This is because there is
an overwhelming need to make it impossible for traditional
uniformitarian ideologies to proselytise: there has to be what we could
call a ‘single lock’ which prevents anyone defending anything like a
traditional religious position on anything—unless, of course, it is a
minority position and thus tolerated under the extension of indulgence
to the marginal and oppressed (no matter what contradictions result
from this—contradictions such as wokeists defending religious
fanaticism).
The twist means that what we have here is NICE
TOTALITARIANISM. We have totalitarianism in our state ideology of
political correctness which was first glimpsed in the innocent 1990s but
has become intensified since around 2010: as mass higher education has
coincided with post-industrial work practices and the rise of social
mediation by technological means. But this totalitarianism is nice exactly
because it has taken the form in the West of the ‘unholy trinity’ or
‘devil’s fork’ of the three great progressive themes of COVID, CLIMATE
and WOKERY.
Nice totalitarianism is actually, of course, nasty. It is
interventionist, insolent, insinuating, invasive. One of its superheroes is

42
the now famous Captain Hindsight; but he has been joined by his
colleagues in the Build Back Better Universe: Modelling-Man, Nurse
Prevention and General Censorship. Politicians talk about Zero Covid and
Zero Carbon and are likely soon to be talking about Zero Bias (if that is a
sufficiently strong term for the combination of zero prejudice, zero privilege
and zero hate). Such rhetoric is, as Will Jones has already observed, a
rhetoric of absolute justification for an endless, infinite and
miscellaneous set of projects. Such rhetoric is sustainable (which means
indestructible), alas, because the causes to which it is devoted are
unachievable: yet it is imperative that we adopt these causes because they
are opposed to hate and death. They enable our rulers to perpetuate a
wholly novel form of totalitarian rule, which is armoured by the fact it is
for so many reasons nice and is thus hard to argue with in our current
abject moral state. We are being outfoxed by the latest Machiavellians.
Things do not look good. The only short term hope is that a
culture of secrecy—especially of expressing opinions by secret ballot—
survives to allow us to defend traditional and common sense and pagan
opinions, including what are now old-fashioned classical liberal
opinions. The only long term hope is a revival of Christianity. Either
way, given the current condition of state and church and university, it
looks as if we are moving into an era in which we will live or die in
relation to whether a black market in ideas manages to survive or not.

27 October 2021

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 8

Narcissistic Gnosticism:
A Twenty-First Century Political Religion

Those of us on the side of truth, right, justice and common sense are
extremely puzzled by the beliefs which enable those who have changed
the world for the worse—even if only for a year or two—to claim that
everything is normal.
The sharpest insights about our contemporary crisis have not
come from academic philosophers but from marginal figures like
Georgio Agamben, Bret Weinstein, Jonathan Sumption and the benign
Reverends of Irreverend. Anyone who doubts this should consider the
anodyne observations about ‘Neoliberalism’ made by academics in
Theory and Event or the abject capitulation by figures like Slavoj Zizek to
pandemic protocols. (Nothing exceeds in preposterousness the defence
of masks put out by Zizek. Who needs the face? he asked. One of his
arguments was that Freud had said that seeing someone’s face was
inadvisable when being psychoanalysed. As if our relation to all other
humans is that of subject to shrink! Another was that the face lies—but
that eyes tell the truth.)
On the other hand, C.J. Hopkins has contributed something
significant to Covid Studies with his reflections on ‘The Covidian Cult’.
Will Jones has taken everything further by harnessed COVID together
with CLIMATE and WOKERY (all of the politically correcting, identity
politicking, social justice warrioring, critical race theorising, virtue
signalling, grievance studying bag of tricks) as one of three elements of
an ‘unholy trinity’ of a new totalitarianism, which I have called Nice
Totalitarianism.
We are clearly—those of us who are critical, sceptical,
reasonable, what you will—in search of a language to express our
incredulity at the massed forces of conspiracy, corruption, collusion and
compliance. We often hear it said that anyone who espouses any aspect
of Nice Totalitarianism is a believer in a ‘religion’. The particular point
of C.J. Hopkins was that what makes COVID unique is that it is a cult:
and its exponents exhibit the sort of conviction and anger we would
expect to find if we encountered a cult. He argued that the oddity of this
cult is that it is not a minority cult, but a majority cult. In the terms laid
down by Ernst Troeltsch in his great volumes on the history of

44
Christianity, it is not a sect but a church. And, alas, we critics, sceptics,
reasonables, we are now, against our inclination, the sectarians.
If the current ideology is a church, then it looks as if it has been
built as rapidly as the temporary hospitals which the Chinese could erect
in less than a week; but of course things have been brewing for a long
time. There were many who offered warnings, pre-eminently
Christopher Booker, not to mention older figures like Julien Benda or
Joseph de Maistre. But here I want to consider some of the thoughts,
and terms, of two figures, the American diagnostician of what had gone
wrong in America since the 1960s, Christopher Lasch, and the German
émigré who admired the American culture of before the 1960s, Eric
Voegelin. In short:
Lasch alleged that modern culture is narcissistic.
Voegelin alleged that modern ideology is gnostic.
I want to put these together and explore the thought that not
only COVID but also the other two elements of this new political religion
exhibit common traits which can be made sense of by calling them
narcissistic gnosticism.
Narcissism concerns our fear of death, our desire to live, our
awkwardness about body, our fear of commitment, our preoccupation
with appearing to be what we want ourselves to be, and our veneration
of celebrity: and it finds its symbolic poles in the objective surface world
of television and the subjective inner world requiring therapy. Lasch
observed its rise in the 1960s. The narcissist oscillates between the
possibility of objective fame and the certainty of inner emptiness: an
oscillation which has only swung wider and wider as social media and
smart phones—and Facebook and Youtube and Instagram and Twitter
and Tiktok—have encouraged everyone to externalise their own
narcissism so that they ape celebrity status and publicise their own
continual attempts at therapy. When academics post pictures of
themselves with slogans like ‘I am against authority but I took the
vaccine’ or write blogs about Heidegger and Long Covid we know we
are in greater trouble than even Lasch could have anticipated.
Gnosticism is older. It is necessary to briefly refer to the antique
gnosticism of the second century, which was a doctrine opposed to, and
sometimes confused with, Christianity: it postulated that the world had
suffered a catastrophe, that matter was corruption, that the body was
corrupt, and that salvation took the form of a secret doctrine, an
esoteric truth which was accessible only to an elite. This was an antique
doctrine. But Voegelin used the word gnosticism to explain a medley of

45
modern ideologies, including communism and fascism. By modern
gnosticism he meant the view that the world is flawed, that some sort of
obscure absolute truth exists which can enable us to remove the flaw,
and that if we hold this truth then we can be spared responsibility for
the flaw, that we can blame others for it, and that we can save ourselves
through own efforts. Spirit can be renewed if we liberate it from
material constraints. Reason is no part of this picture. Voegelin spoke of
‘a purported direct, immediate apprehension or vision of truth without
the need for critical reflection; the special gift of a spiritual or cognitive
elite’. Most of our activist politics is now based on such a vision. And
this vision is necessarily an elite vision.
We are all, most of us, many of us, narcissists. Only some of us
are gnostics. But the gnostic elite has managed to convert a significant
part of the narcissistic mass to its politics.
We should be able to see the contemporary affinity between
narcissism as cause and gnosticism as consequence. The thin notes of
the narcissist echo in the depth of the refusal of the gnostic to submit
his or her doctrine to ‘critical reflection’.
Let us consider the three forms of our current ideology in terms
of narcissistic gnosticism. We should note that each involves a
narcissistic preoccupation with the appearance of the self and hatred of
the reality of the self, but does not involve a Christian desire to repent
and seek forgiveness for sin: each involves a gnostic desire to blame
someone or something else for an evil.
Of these three forms, COVID sets the ‘gold standard’. If you ever
ask yourself why Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion have
formed sideshows to the glory that was Lockdown, consider the fact
that the evil for the covidian is a virus.
The other two evils are in some way caused by us. The evil for
the climatist is carbon emission. The evil for the wokeist is privilege. We
have to blame ourselves, as humanity, for them: even though, after we
have got that generalised guilt out of the way, we can then turn on one
half of the population and find it guilty of not understanding its guilt in
the right way, guilty of not expiating it, guilty of perpetuating it.
However, matters are different with COVID. The virus was not caused
by us. As you may remember, any suggestion that it was caused by
human activity was quickly suppressed. This is an explanation of why it
was so important for everyone to deny that the virus emerged out of
human activity: all the laboratory leak gain-of-function stuff was quickly
called ‘conspiracy’. The reason was that the virus had to be pristine. We

46
needed the innocent pangolin. The pangolin whitewashed the human
race, made us all victims, granted us a collective original innocence
which enabled us to claim a collective solidarity which was always
lacking elsewhere. We were all noble savages, for a moment, assailed in
our innocence by the same spiky beelzebub.
COVID took over the world in 2020 in a way that CLIMATE and
WOKERY could not have done, and have not yet done—though both
came before and both are following COVID quick behind—because
COVID dramatised the world in terms of a battle between a sanctified
and purified humanity and a pestilence. Later on, those who were dirty
and allowed the pestilence to spread and refused to take part in attempts
to mitigate its spread—those ‘sceptics’ and ‘deniers’ who disliked masks,
distancing, lockdown and vaccines—they were guilty. But this was
rather different from the logic of CLIMATE and WOKERY where, no
matter how hard one strains to assert one’s own purity one feels that,
even while one is protesting at COP-26 or taking the knee at a football
match, one is guilty by association. We have all benefited from slavery,
and we have all benefited from the factories, refineries, power stations
which enabled us to put an end to slavery, or, at least, explicit slavery.
We are all tarred by the brush of exploiting others and exploiting nature.
COVID lacks any taint of this. This is why politicians, many of them, like
COVID. It can be used without any hesitation, as it does not involve
them in any obvious hypocrisy, unlike CLIMATE or WOKERY.
Be that as it may, each of the branches of narcissistic gnosticism
finds a certain class guilty, and the logic of narcissistic gnostic politics is
that you—and my finger is pointing at you, now, as you read, much as
Lord Kitchener’s did during the First World War—had better avow
your guilt in relation to CLIMATE and WOKERY, apologise for factories,
slaves, institutional racism, unconscious bias, exploitation of any old-
fashioned sort, and you had better avoid any possible guilt in relation to
COVID, by continuing to wear the mask.
Narcissism makes us focus on the self. Gnosticism offers us an
escape from the self. If the body is corrupt, and if modern gnosticism
adds to the corruption of the body the corruption of the historic body
politic, then salvation comes in the form of purifying not only one’s
own body—by identifying as being whatever one pleases—but also
purifying the historic body politic by closing coal power stations,
building wind turbines, returning artefacts to the successor states of
those they were taken from, removing statues or memorials associated
with the slave trade or any other objectionable form of exploitation. The

47
purification will take whatever form the gnostic elites suggest, since they
are in charge of the obscure scientific models and harsh visionary
moralities.
Gnosticism also made much of esoteric rituals. Again we have to
notice the superiority of COVID to CLIMATE and WOKERY in this
regard. All have their representatives, Fauci, Greta, Meghan, and so on.
But as a symbol the mask outdoes anything the other branches of Nice
Totalitarianism have achieved. CLIMATE has nothing, no signifier, no
way of marking us out. We may lie down on the M25, but there is no
other useful ritual: no way of ‘acting out’ our extinction rebelliousness
(no way of breathing in carbon dioxide). Meanwhile, WOKERY has
‘taking the knee’. But the problem with this is that it is momentary,
despite its heavy supplicatory symbolism. One cannot walk home from a
football match while taking the knee. Until, perhaps, the day when we
have all had transitioning surgery, the mask will remain the most
powerful signifier of narcissistic gnosticism because it is a ritual form of
dress which is directly related to the guilt and to the salvation: and it can
be seen at all times. It has to be worn everywhere. It is a continual
emblem of ritual purity. And, fascinatingly, is it not remarkable that it
covers the face, thus ostentatiously overcoming our own obvious
narcissism, while expressing a dislike of our actual bodies?
The unifying doctrine of narcissistic gnosticism is as follows.
There are great flaws in the world. They are not my fault. I
know, because I have been told by the elite, the truth about how to
remove these flaws. I know how to act in such a way that I indicate that
I know this. Knowing this is more or less my entire politics.
The flaws vary in their origin and status.
The flaw of CLIMATE is historic and collective. We are all, as
humanity, ultimately responsible. But some are more guilty than others.
Our ancestors. We shall distance ourselves from our ancestors by
abandoning all their practices, including industrial and economic
practices.
The flaw of WOKERY is historic but not collective. We are not
all responsible for slavery and exploitation and heteronormativity. We
shall distance ourselves from those in the past who engaged in slavery
and exploitation by disavowing any inheritance from them and urging
on each other our rejection of the sorts of privilege we associate with
those old forms of slavery and exploitation. We shall disavow
heteronormativity, perhaps in word alone, perhaps also in deed.

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 The flaw of COVID is not historic but it is collective. No one is
to blame for the origin of this flaw. But since this fact unites humanity
more simply in a battle of ultimate good against evil than is evident even
in those relatively clearly morally closed questions of CLIMATE and
WOKERY, we can turn upon the ‘deniers’ of our salvational rituals and
practices with extreme violence and condemnation. We shall literally and
figuratively distance ourselves from them. As for the virus itself, it is the
purest enemy that humanity has ever had. Condemning this enemy has
so far not involved humanity in any self-hatred. This is absolutely
important because to the narcissist self-hatred is difficult to bear.
These are the three grand forms taken by narcissistic gnosticism.
Each has its own doctrine of what is the problem, who is the enemy, who is
the victim, what is the solution, and where is the elite which possesses the
scientific and moral truth about all of this.
(As a pleasant nuance, if COVID and CLIMATE appear to be
excessively draconian, they appear to be modified by the pleasantly
diversified self-identifications permitted by WOKERY. This is why
Western totalitarians are generally in favour of it, and why it is included
in the triad. In the West there is still the need to placate liberals and
make concessions to ‘civil society’.)
The West is now being run by a narcissistic gnostic elite, which
is being supported by a vast church of those who have been appealed to
by narcissistic gnostic beliefs. These beliefs all enable the members of
this religion to identify an enemy, to adopt a politics, and to sanction the
miscellaneous and likely unrelated purposes of the elite. The beliefs are
beyond critical reflection. Believers want to live forever in a world without
material corruption, without material destruction, without material suffering caused to
anyone. They want a world without individual death, without mass death
by apocalypse, and without social death by stigmatisation: but the strait
gate through which these souls have to pass involves continual
meditation on and ritual abasement about individual deaths by virus, the
possibility of mass death by human-caused climate change, and the
ubiquity of social death by stigmatisation including historic and
unconscious stigmatisation.
For the first time in history, common sense has been ostracised.
The irony is that to the followers of this narcissistic gnostic religion,
those of us who remain critical, sceptical or simply reasonable are the
ones who appear to be members of a cult.

18 November 2021

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 9

A Periodic Fit of Morality

As Peter Hitchens observed in a recent Mail on Sunday article there is

something rather absurd about everyone in December 2021 and January
2022 morally condemning the Johnson regime for holding a few parties
at a time when that regime was instructing the people not to hold such
parties. It is absurd because everyone should have condemned the
Johnson regime for perpetuating an initially awkward but eventually
brilliant and completely overwhelming coup by ‘nudge’ and ‘fudge’
whereby ordinary protocols (including established emergency protocols
for a respiratory disorder) were overturned for a dystopian, despotic and
wholly anti-English policy. (Nudge was the work of SAGE and
NERVTAG; fudge was the work of No. 10.)
In our time we can condemn only some things. But we cannot
condemn the worst things, and we cannot condemn them directly. What
we have is a political culture in which moral condemnation is extremely
difficult. I have an explanation for this. But before I explain it, I want to
draw attention to two exceptions: that is to say, to two ways in which
moral condemnation is possible.
On the one hand moral condemnation is easy if one detects an
affront to the officially sanctioned state morality. For instance, one way
of doing this is to pose as an excluded minority (good) and morally
condemn the supposedly included majority for being intolerant,
exclusive, biased, prejudiced, privileged (bad). This is the system aptly
dubbed ‘D.I.E.’—diversity, inclusion, equity—by Jordan Peterson.
Another way is to pose as someone concerned about the ‘state of the
planet’ (good) and morally condemn anyone else whose behaviour could
possibly be explained in terms of their not being so concerned (bad).
Another way is to pose as someone concerned about the virus (good)
and morally condemn anyone who rejects or criticises any
pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical attempts to combat the virus
and its supposed effects (bad).
This sort of moral condemnation is absolute, but such absolute
moral condemnation is only possible if the affronted cause is a
politically correct one (and there are only three: those ‘unholy trinity’
ones of COVID, WOKERY, and CLIMATE). The logic here is: ‘People are
dying (actually or figuratively). Something, or maybe someone, is to
blame. And something can be done.’ The logic is often poor; the

50
evidence justifying each of the steps is usually worse. Consider, for
instance, if I may digress, the logic behind the mandating of vaccines,
which I can put in a syllogism. Let everyone intone in the reediest
Bertrand Russell (or Pathé News) voice they are capable of:

Vaccines work!
Vaccines don’t work!
Therefore, take a booster shot!
QED.

Hence, since everyone seems convinced by such petty illogic, all the
absolute moral condemnation of ‘Novax’ Djokovic by compliant tennis
pundits and players. Hence also the adoption by Austria and Quebec of
extreme, morally absolute, policies: indeed, in the case of Quebec, what
we could call a policy of ‘taccination’ = taxation-for-the-unvaccinated.
On the other hand, to turn to the second exception, moral
condemnation—and this is where we come back to Hitchens’s point—is
easy if one can discover a contradiction or evidence of hypocrisy. If
‘someone says x but does y’ then one has all the ammunition one needs
for complete moral defenestration. Johnson’s word was ‘Isolate’, but his
deed was ‘Party’. QED. The riled populace, led from behind by its
Joshua, Keir Starmer, tweets its media trumpets, walks around our
Jericho government seven times in protest, and the walls fall down.
Hurrah. The British suffer one of their periodic fits of morality, as
Macaulay once put it. Macaulay chose the word fits extremely carefully.
The problem for us is the impossibility of using the first type of
moral condemnation and the fatuity of using the second.
In relation to the first, if we can only absolutely condemn
someone on the basis of the ‘unholy trinity’ then, alas, it is impossible
for us to morally condemn the ‘unholy trinity’ itself. We cannot easily
morally condemn Neil Ferguson. We cannot easily morally condemn
Greta Thunberg. We cannot easily morally condemn the Colston Four.
(Unless they are caught in a contradiction, and are guilty of being
hypocritical—as Neil Ferguson conveniently was. But, then, so were
Dominic Cummings, Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson…) This means
that we cannot easily condemn the politics of our inflated, hysterical
state, especially if salaried members of a compliant elite decide to
collude in that politics, and create what is called ‘the narrative’.
In relation to the second, what we have to say is that the robust
mass of British pagans—and their mouthpieces in the media, The Sun,

51
The Daily Mail etc—can only morally condemn something if it is
hypocritical, that is, a wrong relative to what someone said and not an absolute
wrong. So those of us who think that most modern British politics, and
especially the politics since early 2020, should be condemned out of
hand, that is, absolutely condemned, as absolute folly and absolute evil,
have had almost no way of registering this, apart from agreeing with the
Sunday columns of Peter Hitchens, listening to London Calling, following
certain limited outlets and writers, and carefully reading the original
Lockdown Sceptics, now The Daily Sceptic.
What is the explanation for this? Well, I want to go back a few
centuries to talk about two old Englishmen, William Warburton and
John Neville Figgis.
Warburton was an old eighteenth century bishop. He wrote a
volume entitled The Alliance Between Church and State, published in 1736.
No one reads it nowadays except a few eighteenth-century historians. In
it he argued that the state was responsible for ‘punishments’, while the
church was responsible for ‘rewards’. The state had a negative morality,
limited to the law; but the church had a positive morality, which was
ultimately the morality of the Sermon of the Mount, as modified and
mediated for the children of pride who happened to be walking around
in England at the time. The ‘rewards’ were partly temporal, no doubt,
but otherwise moral, in offering a positive vision of common life, and of
course eschatological, in offering eternal life. Warburton claimed that
there was an ‘alliance’ between the two institutions of church and state.
They were not the same, as far as he was concerned, but they were
necessarily related. (I mention this only because the classic English
doctrine, found in Hooker in the 1590s and Burke in the 1790s, was that
church and state were one and the same.) The relevance of Warburton
to our time is that his doctrine of ‘alliance’ enables us to see (more
clearly than Hooker and Burke could have done) what the consequences
of the separation of church and state were. These consequences were
later on explained by Figgis.
Figgis was a monk and historian whose book Churches in the
Modern State came out in 1913. In it he recalled Warburton, and, perhaps
with Warburton in mind, pointed out that with the separation of church
and state it was now almost inevitable that the morality of the people
would no longer be the morality of the historic church but the morality
of the state. In 1913 this was a prediction. After more than a century we
should admit that Figgis has been proved right. Part of what happened
was the state did what Hegel thought it should do: it began to take over

52
some of the functions of the church. It offered rewards: at first
reluctantly (consider the Poor Law), but then enthusiastically (consider
‘our’ NHS). It had no interest in eternity. So its morality was not
absolute, but related to Utility, Happiness, Pleasure, Benevolence,
Altruism, Betterment, Progress—all those keywords of the eighteenth
and nineteenth century Condorcets, Godwins, Comtes and Mills. The
state exists, in sum, as Bentham might have put it, to minimise pain and
maximise pleasure. Hence, after a century or two (to speak less
abstractly) of Railways, Anaesthesia, the Mid-Victorian Novel,
Antiseptics, the New Drama, Vaccines, Cinema, Dentistry, Jazz,
Antibiotics, the Motor Car, Cannabis, Pop, Yoga, Punk, Therapy,
Aeroplanes, Pacman, Heavy Metal, Anti-Depressants, Plastic Surgery,
Emojis and Hashtags, here we are, minimising pain, maximising pleasure
24/7. Woe betide anyone who interrupts my pleasure, or ignores my pain.
The result is that political correctness is our state religion.
(Note: I say a state religion, not necessarily a governmental religion;
since it can be wielded by its proponents against the government. But,
by and large, it is promoted by the government.)
I should perhaps add that the worst thing of all, as far as Figgis
was concerned, was that he thought that eventually the church would
have to take up the morality of the state. (Welby, anyone? Again, QED.)
It is the decline of Christian certainties which has made all this
possible. The modern state, stripped of the church, has established its
own morality. This morality is an almost wonderfully historically self-
defeating morality—our enemies laugh at it—whereby we absolutely
condemn almost everything our ancestors ever did to establish us where
we are, and we relatively condemn the minor hypocrisies of those who
now rule us. This is the morality of theoretically marginalised class.
Since, ironically, this morality has been adopted by the ruling class, and
certainly by the higher educated class, it is also the morality of the
actually privileged. Almost all of our elites are therefore hypocrites, to a
man—and woman. We are in a state which has a morality that owes
nothing to the church, which has had to invent its own moral absolutes,
and which has done so in self-condemnation. It is what Nietzsche called
a slave-morality. It is the morality of slaves. But it is not a very stable
morality of slaves, since those who until now almost always formed the
slave class don’t believe it while those who are the master class do believe it
and, even worse, impose it condescendingly on everyone else.
This is upside-down morality. Expect to be lectured about your
privilege by a university teacher. Expect to bow and scrape a bit if you

53
are wealthy or privileged. Expect no consideration at all if you are a
member of the honourable old religious working class. And not much if
you are a member of the dishonourable old secular working class: unless
you can pose as somehow victimised and ask for some sort of stipend or
sympathy from the professionally guilt-stricken classes. Expect to be
told to wear a mask. Expect to be told to take a vaccine. Expect to be
pilloried if you object.
For our enemies the mask is a moral argument. The vaccine is a
moral argument. Object to masks and vaccines and you will find
yourself morally condemned before you even state your case. Wear a
mask or exhibit vaccinated status and a gold circlet appears around your
head. This is all very odd; and, even if it is true in early 2022 that we are
seeing the beginnings of a change in ‘the narrative’, the fact that any of
this could have happened at all should make us all gravely reflect on
what sort of society we now live in.

17-19 January 2022

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 10

Reflections on the War in Ukraine

In order to be sceptical about war we need both philosophy and history.

In relation to politics, history is the study of the world in terms of an
imperative to recognise fluctuations in power through time, and philosophy is the
study of the world in terms of an imperative now to think, speak and act well.
Philosophy wants us to be ruled by law, and history suggests that we will
always be ruled by power. History indicates to the sceptic, therefore,
that war is always with us, while philosophy indicates that it should be
with us as little as possible. Peace is an ironic matter for the historian,
and an earnest matter for the philosopher.
To be sceptical is to occupy a balanced position between these
two extremes. No one should have a policy of eliminating war; for the
only way to eliminate it would be by another form of war. There is no
such thing as perpetual peace. And yet no one should have a policy of
accepting war. There should be no such thing as perpetual war.
What is war? War is a consequence of the desire to solve a
problem by dissolving it: that is, specifically, by destroying the people
who appear to be responsible for the problem. It divides the world into
us (right) and them (wrong). It is politics in black-and-white.
The history of war comes in two stages, morally speaking.
In ancient times—and here I am referring to a history which
runs from the Sumerians, through the Athenians in Thucydides’s History
of the Peloponnesian War, to the Mongols who asserted that if God had not
wanted them to rule the world they would not have ruled it—war was
unobjectionable. Everyone had a right to exert power where they could,
and to the death if necessary. This view has never been eliminated
though it is now always limited or chastened or challenged by a second
view.
In the world which has come round more and more to the
position that Karl Jaspers called ‘Axial’—that is, the world of religions
like Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and of course the
wisdom of philosophers from Socrates to Confucius—a different
attitude to war has emerged. This attitude is not a simple one, not a
simple condemnation of war, though it has a simple condemnation of
war in it. This is the view that the identification of power and right is

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unacceptable. Might is not right. Having the power to take something
does not mean one has a right to take it. But as an objection to war this
is complicated in every instance by the fact that it is quite difficult to say
what is right.
In this second stage, what we have to notice is that an objection
to war can also be a politics in black-and-white, where we divide the
world into the makers of war, them (bad) and the critics of war, us
(good). Since Axial religions emphasise ‘sin’ and ‘suffering’ we have
come to take the side of the less powerful: the Boers, the Uighurs, the
Ukrainians, since they seem to be less guilty of perpetuating sin and
suffering. So we condemn the aggressors. It is not easy to wage war in
modernity unless everyone is involved.

II

The war in Ukraine is a strange war, because it is old-fashioned. It is the

classic European form of war, whereby one sovereign state clashes with
another sovereign state over some disputed territory—as adjusted by the
Napoleon-Bismarck-Hitler intensifications whereby a European
sovereign state engages totally with its adversaries: now enabled by
military technology, on the sudden and sharp side, to engage in blitzkrieg
type assaults at high speed on the central citadel to effect some sort of
‘regime change’, and enabled, on the blunt and brutal side, to wage a
complete war grindingly against the entirety of the civilian population.
The reason I say that this war of 2022 is old-fashioned is that
since 1945 we in the West have generally fought only colonial or post-
colonial wars or pseudo-wars: Korea, Suez, Vietnam, the Falklands, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Libya. (Serbia is the sole exception.) These have involved
extremely distant engagements where there is no risk to European or
American civilians. (Even the Second World War, was, by and large, of
this nature for Americans.) These wars were not always liked, and were
not always successes—consider Suez and Vietnam or, latterly,
Afghanistan—but they were, as far as the Western states were
concerned, colonial, that is disengaged, and, for us, completely military.
But even such colonial or post-colonial wars are considered by
our elites to be passé. The very latest type of war—the one we prefer, we
educated elites in the West—is the war against carbon emissions, the
war against Covid-19, the culture war. In each case, humanity (pronouns
we/us)—humanity, I say, has some responsibility for the enemy we are
fighting, but the enemy is, emphatically, not composed of any mass of

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humans as such. The enemy (sometimes a foe, sometimes a fate) is a
change in our earthly condition, or a virus and sickness, or prejudice and
bias. This is the sort of war we moderns like to fight: with wind turbines,
masks and seminars on institutional racism. And we like to fight them to
the death: which explains all the talk of ‘zero’. We want to dissolve the
enemy, destroy it completely, and we console ourselves that since this
enemy is not human: that we are justified in this sort of war, if not in
any other sort of war.
Let us call the three types of war I have described, first,
IMPERIAL WAR, second, COLONIAL WAR, and third, METAPHORICAL WAR.
Imperial war is direct, an extension of power across land. Colonial war is
indirect and distant. It need never involve civilians. It is bracketed: it is
war by report. Metaphorical war brings war back home again, since the
war is now fought on our behalf by states and sometimes involves those
sacrificing its own citizens as a form of collateral damage, for the greater
good.
Covid-19 was the instantiation of this in such a clear form that
even the most innocent could see it clearly.

III

What is a sceptical position about the present war?

As a sceptic, and as someone accustomed to thinking about
politics in relation to the rule of law, I dislike war. After I abandoned my
youthful Augustinianism (which alleged that the whole world was
corrupt and unjust, and so peace was not to be expected), I adjusted
myself to a higher-educated Cantabrigianism (since, in Cambridge, we
believed that the thousand qualifications we made to it could not defeat
the truth of the Whiggish precept that the modern state had bracketed
war and perhaps even eliminated it: and that even if this proved not to be
the case, then it certainly should have been the case): so I began to
assume, perhaps without being too conscious of it, that we had reached
the end of war.
The end of war is a myth, but one might say it became a necessary
myth after the horrors of the First World War, ‘the war to end all wars’.
The standard histories of the twentieth century generally claim that the
attempts to end all war after the First World War—Versailles, the
League of Nations—had flaws and therefore failed (arguable, obviously)—
but that the model was perfected by the adjusted remedies which
followed the Second World War—Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan,

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Nuremberg, the Cold War, the United Nations, the European
Economic Community.
One of the reason why the elites in the United Kingdom were so
horrified by the vote to leave the European Union was that the Union
had been credited with the peace that followed 1945. A vote for ‘Leave’,
subconsciously, as far as Remainers were concerned, was therefore a
vote for war; while a vote for ‘Remain’, was obviously a vote for peace.
(But note: ‘peace’ meant ‘peace in Europe’.)
Carl Schmitt once suggested that every state depends in the first
instance, or even at all times, on a claim about who the enemy is. States
need enemies; kings need them. Consider the concept of ‘the hereditary
enemy’. Consider Scotland’s attitude to England. Consider England’s
attitude to France. The point about modern European life is that since
1945 it has been a presupposition that the enemy should not be ‘one of us’: that
is, not European, not Christian, not Western, and not anyone else who can be
persuaded to wear a tie, shake hands at international conferences, and speak the
language of international monopoly capitalism. Again, this is why the present
war is a surprise.
The modern enemy, if human, has to be a tinpot dictator or a
medieval theocrat: for instance, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, or
Colonel Gaddafi. Nowadays, of course, we even feel a bit reluctant to
hang, shoot or witness the mutilation of such enemies. We like our
enemies to be inhuman, but we love it if they are unhuman. (Inhuman =
a human who is somehow, metaphorically, not human. Unhuman =
literally, not human.) I have no doubt that those were in favour of
Covid-19 restrictions were glad to have a war which was clearly not one
of those bloody, bogged-down, body-bagged wars associated in our
minds with the Somme or Dresden or All Quiet on the Western Front or
Apocalypse Now. There was no human enemy. No deaths needed to cause
us any guilt. Every death was collateral damage: it was justified because
we were fighting death.
The war in Ukraine is odd, for us, because it is so very old-
fashioned. It can be depicted on maps, like the old maraudings of
Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Attila, Timur, Marlborough, Napoleon and
Hitler. Old land empires—of which Russia was the very last to be
established (in the eighteenth century)—were push-and-shove entities,
trying to expand outwards: not through trade and factory and bribery
and slavery and intervention (all those perfidious tricks of Albion), but
through simple expansion of borders by force. I suspect that Russia, at
some atavistic level, still thinks imperially—in terms of lands adjacent—

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whereas England, at some atavistic level, still thinks colonially—in terms
of lands overseas, that is, very much not adjacent. So even when we British
were good imperialists we had a certain disdain for the Roman-
Ottoman-Russian trope of land empire. It lacked the sophistication of
our imperialism of bank and bond, of insurance and investment and of
plantation and protestantism.
Now, if we felt contempt for land empire even a hundred or
more years ago, then it is a certainty that now, while we are engaged in
cultural harakiri over our former colonial activities, we simply cannot
understand why anyone would fight anyone else over some adjacent land. It seems
atavistic in the extreme. And, moreover, this should not happen in Europe.
Why, has Putin not read the protocols of the elders of Europe, where it
is asserted, as clearly as it can be asserted, that European states only engage in
violent activity a long way away from their own borders and, certainly, a long way
away from Europe?

IV

The Russians do present us with at least the appearance of a dilemma.

This is: if we object to the modern sort of war (against carbon, coronavirus and
established culture) then, given what might be some sort of inevitable inclination in
humans to fight wars, is the only alternative a return to the antique sort of war in
which humans all too visibly cause the violent death of other humans?
The antique type of war, the one that Putin is prosecuting, is
murderous, actually murderous. We dislike it because the death is too
simple: too conscious, almost vulgar. But we sceptics have a duty to
remind the enthusiasts, even the enthusiasts for peace in Ukraine, that
the war they would prefer to fight, the metaphorical war, is just as
murderous. Indeed, it is quite possibly more penetrating, more
insinuating, more permanent, and more devilish, than anything going on
in Ukraine. This is because everyone knows that what is going on in Ukraine is
a war. Whereas it seems to me that, somehow or other, most of the
population of the world has refused to consider the possibility that most of the
pandemic policies were part of a war carried out by rulers against those they rule.
Our very concepts and expectations were twisted through metaphoricity
and indirection. That was part of the war. Outwardly, in old-fashioned
terms, the world was peaceful during the pandemic; and this has sadly
ended with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But I’d say the world was at
war, a wholly new type of war, from 2020 to 2022.
The sceptic has to stand apart from both.

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 Events in 2020 disabused us of any fond views we had of the
Chinese state, and now events in 2022 are disabusing us of any fond
views we had of the Russian state. We are not exactly back to the
twentieth century, but, certainly, we are now less likely to trust Chinese
technology or Russian resources: and this, in the latter case, might seem
to be the beginning of a way back to the common sense which would
make us seek independent sources of energy and therefore abandon the
absurd zero carbon policies which have had somewhat unexpected but
now fairly clear consequences for our security—and hence civilisation.
British politicians are not stupid and seem to have seen this necessity
extremely quickly. But more than this is required. The desperate
possibility is that the metaphorical and indirect war cannot hold our
attention for long, and might even increase the pressures that will
unleash more of this old-fashioned form of war on us.
If we can find a way to edge away from the METAPHORICAL
WARS against all of the ‘unholy trinity’ of carbon, covid and culture
without falling over the edge into a completely Russian politics of
renewed IMPERIAL WAR, then that would be a great success. But I
wonder whether we can do it: whether we can extirpate the human habit
of war. If we cannot, then, given that we all seem to dislike actual war so
much, we are doomed to fighting METAPHORICAL WARS for as long as
our civilisation can survive.

5-6 March 2022

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